January – Prairie Ribbon, a canvas that was chosen in three juried shows in 2015.

On the evening of the Winter Solstice, a dear friend was photographing people at the party with an ancient 35 mm Leica. When I was studying photojournalism at the University of Missouri, the purists (with money) used Leicas because they were incredibly quiet when compared with the Nikons of the day. A “purist” would suggest that the Leica was much less intrusive, allowing them to photograph life more covertly.

My friend is a fine photographer, and his photographs from the party were well done. At one point as we sat around a campfire we talked about Leicas, of photography, and of photojournalism. He asked specifically if I still photographed people. “Not so much,” I answered. “After 50 some years of people journalism as a career, I’m enjoying my freedom.”

February – at the Chippewa Prairie.

March – at a wetland over the hill from our home prairie.

When I look back at my career, especially this time of year, there is one aspect I do miss from those years working for newspapers: choosing your favorite photograph of the year. The main reason for the assignment was to fill the news hole in the time between Christmas and New Years when life typically slows for a week. While it was fun to look over a body of work to see if there was professional growth, it was equally fun to see if a particular story or photograph stood the test of time.

April – pasque flowers.

May – the white pelicans have returned.

So now, in my second “career,” I’ve assigned myself to review my latest body of work — capturing that last one percent of the remaining remnants of prairie in the pothole region of Minnesota. Making this an interesting year for me was in trying to emulate a couple of very talented artists who embraced personal assignments of creating a meaningful image one day at a time. The idea came to me about this time a year ago as I watched an artist friend who lives near Duluth complete painting a day for an entire year. Many of us, including that artist, Karen Savage, was inspired by the work of nature photographer Jim Brandenburg, who has now published two books of photographs comprised of shooting one frame a day for 90 straight days. If Brandenburg and Savage could commit to such discipline, then I could as well.

June – redwing blackbird in nearby wetland.

July – foggy morning on Amy’s Prairie.

Although it sounds simple in concept, the reality isn’t as simple as it sounds. There were days when I took only a single frame. Other days I had a variety to choose from. The challenge is to avoid falling into a subject and lighting rut. You should be aware of subject variance, a mix of focus, varying the light and natural color — and there were those gray, dull winter-ish days when getting an image with any kind of light was a challenge.

August – the western wild fires gave us some interesting sunsets. This sunflower was in our home prairie.

September – “Universe” of a full moon in a bluestem prairie.

Starting almost a year ago on January 1, 2015, Rebecca and I took a walk on our home prairie and I captured my first image. On the second, I took another. And so on for all of January into February, which included a trip to Norway for two weeks where I was able to keep the string going. Upon returning home I kept up the effort until a day when I was actually too sick from the flu to climb from bed. By then I was up to 71 days. Though the chain of days was broken, over the course of the year I still made it into the prairie several times a week to continue the quest. Needless to say, I have a huge body of work from 2015.

October – yellow gives color late in the month in an oak savanna.

November – “Prairie Chandalier” was caught in our prairie after a early morning rain.

Yes, it was a very good year. It was both fun and successful. My Prairie Impressions collection was exhibited in two galleries as single artist hangings , and some of my images were chosen in three juried exhibits —  the <5000 at the Center For Small Towns at the University of Minnesota-Morris; the annual Horizontal Grandeur in Morris; and Artscape 2015 in New Ulm. I also compiled a completely separate exhibit titled the Art of Erosion with sponsorship from CURE (Clean Up the River Environment). That show had three hangings in 2015, and is scheduled for at least two for this coming year, including a regional Smithsonian Institute exhibit at Prairie Wood Environmental Learning Center starting in July. This was also my second year on the Upper Minnesota River Arts Meander. Selected canvases were also on exhibit at the Art House in Ortonville, and in the lobby of Big Stone State Park.

December – a doe and yearling fawn in prairie grass coated with hoarfrost.

In addition, my Prairie Impressions work is scheduled for shows in Montevideo in February and in Willmar next July and August.

In making this selection, my goal was to select a single image from each month. Some months were simple, where one photograph simply stood out from the rest. Some months were more difficult. Actually, from April through December as many as seven photographs were on the board before a final selection was made. Yet, it was all in fun. And, I also chose one photograph as my favorite of the year  for a “baker’s dozen.” Hopefully you will find my exercise entertaining and will enjoy the photography.

Favorite of the year, a country road near us after a sunset.

So, Happy New Year, everyone! May we all be healthy and happy as we move through the coming days, weeks and months of the new year.

Often I feel haunted by what might have been, or perhaps more accurately, how it used to be — while realizing it will never be. I write of the prairie, or again more accurately, of what was formerly the prairie.

This haunting came back to me one recent foggy morning while standing on a rise overlooking a frozen wetland near our farm. With the low morning sun and the fog, it was nearly impossible to make out the rows of untilled corn stalks adjacent to the native grasses. We are fortunate that our neighbors in Minnesota’s Big Stone County have retained many of their wetlands, so once again my mind played the what-might-have-been card. On mornings like these you can almost see back to yesteryear without even closing your eyes. There in front of me was the “ghost” of a prairie horizon, ghosts of which I’ve been seeking to photograph for a few years now.

After years of capturing intimate images of pieces of the fractured prairie, one late afternoon I pulled off the gravel road that divides the Bonanza Area of Big Stone State Park and gazed up at the native prairie grasses and burr oaks that grace the hills above the lake. As I watched the winds caress the spindly spines of bluestem and Indian grass, I realized I was viewing a rare scene — an actual, almost pure prairie horizon. Of course, just out of sight and over the cusp was a woven wire fence, and there was the road, so this was at best a narrow ribbon tease of the distant past. That was when I began to wonder if could I pull away from my close up style of prairie imagery that has gained me a fair audience over time and make photographs of horizons? Was it possible to do both effectively?

Prairie grasses and burr oaks give visitors to the Bonanza area of Big Stone State Park a glimpse of an original prairie landscape.

In those “artist statements” required of the juried shows, I use a basic personal “boiler plate” where I describe my goal of portraying this last one percent of (a previous landscape, environmental ecology and/or biome) prairie potholes that was once a signature of most of Western Minnesota and the East River region of the Dakotas. Nowhere on earth has man so altered a natural biome. Yes, 99 percent of the native prairie and a like percentage of the wetlands (potholes, sloughs or shallow lakes) has been ditched, tiled and drained and replaced by what in the last 70 plus years has “evolved” into industrialized agriculture. Truthfully, no one alive today can recall the pre-settler landscape. It’s long gone.

Are the cottonwoods along Lost Creek a look into the past?

As I tried to change my viewing away from details to vistas, I was in for a mild surprise: the nearly impossibility to shoot a picture of a horizon, or landscape, without showing some affect of mankind. Power lines. Jet contrails in the sky. Row crops. A house or abandoned farm grove. Or, if you’re a rigid prairie fanatic, and yes, there are some around, who find non-native trees that have taken root just as invasive as the roads and power lines. In the olden days before settlement, native tree species on the uplands were basically burr oaks. In the wetlands you could supposedly find willows rising from the cattails, and along the rivers, tall and commanding cottonwoods. Most of the rest of the tree species were introduced. Cores pulled from the few remaining wetlands provide clues to what was alive since the last glacier 12,000 years ago.

So, in short, my work to capture a series I had intended to call “Horizons” has not worked out, although that doesn’t stop me from dreaming as I did on this recent foggy morning.

This isn’t to say I advocate returning the prairie to pre-settlement days as some of my critics have suggested as my goal. Not only is that unrealistic, neither is it a goal. Can’t we strive for a balance the forefathers ignored? Many years ago I interviewed a county commissioner whose political career began when as a young dairy farmer he became a community organizer in an effort to create a favorable vote to channelize Hawk Creek and have it permanently reclassified as a “federal ditch.” He mistrusted my intent with the story and said more than once: “We don’t want to go back to those days of fighting mud and mosquitoes. This is a vast improvement over those days.”

This area of Chippewa County is called the “black desert” because it is basically exposed black dirt between plow down and protective crop canopy … sometimes eight months between the two.

A few years back CREP helped restore some acres that should have never been plowed, yet was only a “drop in the bucket.” Adding to my concern is that we simply aren’t taking adequate care of what we have altered. We see very little use of cover crops, and one young farmer told me that it is likely a waste of money because by the time harvest is completed there isn’t enough growing season to establish a cover crop. My argument is that there are forward thinking farmers who are successfully using cover crops to protect their soils. No till is another tactic, and perhaps the least expensive of all is to simply quit fall tillage. Meanwhile we see ample evidence of soils blowing and washing away without any real protection for the eight months between harvest and adequate crop canopy. Stubborn wetlands resist efficient drainage, and farmers insist on planting corn, soybeans and sugarbeets both there and on the hillside blowouts that glow a bright tan where the topsoil has eroded away.

An image from a foggy sunrise on a nearby WMA where the bluestem florishes.

Multiple studies have shown that today’s agriculture has basically ruined our lakes and rivers in the southern half of the state. The lakes around Albert Lea, for example, are so polluted that I’ve never seen a boat in nearly 35 years of travel over the I-35 bridge. a trip I’ve made numerous times. Former community celebrations honoring the two lakes there have reportedly died because those lakes are lifeless from the runoff of industrialized farm chemicals. This is a familiar story in many of the sparse, undrained lakes below I-94 and into northern Iowa and more recently into the Eastern Dakotas.

My most recent horizon image shows a frozen wetland surrounded by prairie. Many farmers in Big Stone County have retained their wetlands.

My apologies for climbing upon the soapbox since this began as a statement about a severe lack of unblemished prairie horizons and became a conservation policy rant. Yet, it is what it is. In reality, the prairie no longer exists. If you look hard enough, and long enough, you’ll find remnants of restored native grasslands, and even fewer rare instances of actual virgin prairie. As long as we maintain and adhere to the policies promoted by the USDA’s Farm Bill, industrialized agriculture will remain king. And you will know that by looking across the landscape searching for a human-free horizon … unless you’re blessed by heavy fog.

My new barn doors are securely in place, and a passerby might take note of them for a second or two in passing. They might remember the original doors, weathered and worn as they were, or perhaps that we now have color coordinated doors hanging in their place. Like a book cover, there is bit more there than meets the eye. And, I can blame that on my dear mother. Here is why:

As a college graduation gift, my mother and a handful of her women friends climbed into a sedan and motored off toward the Carolinas  on the first leg of a cross country, two-country car trip. They ventured north along the coast to New York City, then north into Canada, eventually making it back safely to Missouri. In our family this was known as the “Trip of ‘39” and was a defining experience for more than my mother.

The original doors were in rough shape, and were too short to keep the chickens at bay.

That spirit of adventure, that doing something even if you don’t know the eventual outcome, was a defining characteristic she passed along to her children. Women just didn’t do these things back in 1939. Besides being “unladylike” and dangerous, cars, and the tires they rode on, were quite inferior to what we now have, and there was certainly no interstate highway system. Blue highways and back roads. Little did these hurdles matter. That, as many have said, was my mother. Why let a little thing like not knowing you can do something stand in your way? “You won’t know unless you try,” she was fond of saying. If there is a problem, then figure it out.

She also insisted on constantly having a “hand hobby” … for if you work with your brain, use your hands for relaxation. So we grew up with hundreds of hobbies, various puzzles, and a growing checklist of odd skills. She cautioned against worrying about what others might think because you had to be true to yourself. Oh, and always be curious.

The components were sawn and pre-painted before being put together.

As I sturdily stride into my 70s, I still find much blame to place on my mother. And, I should add, my blame comes not from one of those soul searching therapy sessions but rather from another jump into something I have not done before. This time it was building that set of barn doors.

Over my many years there are numerous things I’ve done that started simply as a whim if not a necessity. Because either I didn’t have the money to buy something, or to have someone else build it, or that I just wanted to see if I could do it. Rarely did I know what I was getting myself into, or even if I had the skills to do a passable job. Take remodeling houses, each with unique projects and jobs that needed to be accomplished. Hanging and mudding drywall, for example. Laying tile, or putting down a hardwood floor. What about building of my own fly rods, and wood strip canoes? Or, to be highly specific, even becoming a writer and photographer simply because I wanted to.

And now, building barn doors.

To be frank, this wasn’t a task I was either anticipating or yearning to do. When we bought Listening Stones Farm, the previous owner told us that if we ever replaced the old barn doors on the “goat barn,” that they wanted their doors back as keepsakes. They’re in rough shape, actually. And, they were too short to keep chickens out of the barn, so we have kept a large cattle fence panel across the front of the opening to discourage their attempts to get inside.

It was not my intention to build them. Initially I meant to simply install an ordinary overhead garage door in the space. I just happened to mention that idea to Rebecca moments before calling our local lumber dealer for a quote. Apparently our ideas for filling that opening were quite different. Since there didn’t appear to be much room for compromise, I ended up with the task of building them myself.

On a morning when our internet was actually working, a search secured a simple concept of a plan, and before you could start and finish a marathon I was outside with my trusty tape measure and a blank sheet of paper writing down measurements to go along with my scribbled sketchings. Yes, I did call the lumber man, and a few days later their muscular “grip”, Lyle, arrived with a pickup load of one by fours and two exterior wall panels. Paint and screws were fetched and off I stepped into the blissful tape measured abyss.

Finally painted and pieced together, the doors are about ready to be placed on the barn.

Among the oddest aspects of any of my new projects are the visualizations, particularly those that come sneaking into my consciousness in the darkness of night! This happened once again, and I actually confidently began sawing the pieces that would become the framework over the wall panels thanks to those sleep distractions.

Some of those midnight visualizations was in making a secure framework. Long impact screws might work, although even my longest ones were too short. A builder buddy told me when we were remodeling the house that the strongest ties using the screws was to put them in at an angle. The first corner was perfect coming in from an angle. Strong and secure. The second, though, caused the pine to split so much that the cross piece had to be replaced. Longer screws that would cover the width and secure the distant boards came in the next midnight awakening. My hardware people over in Milbank had five inch impact screws which would get through the 3 1/2 in. width with enough length to pull the two boards securely together. Great in theory, wrong in practice, for each of the long screws would ricochet somewhere in the drilling and come blasting through the wood somewhere. So much for midnight visualizations.

In the end, the panel pieces were simply scrunched together and screwed onto, and partially through, the panels from both front and back. It seemed to work, as did pre-painting all the wood components prior to piecing them together. Finally the framed doors came  together, and my friend Rick came over to help hinge them onto the support beams of the little barn.

The new doors are now up, and “good enough for chickens.”

I can look at them in pride, and note the mistakes without knowing exactly how to cure them. Several years ago back in rural Hastings, I was shadowed constantly by a neighborhood girl before she was stricken by puberty, who had a saying I’ve used numerous times since: “Hey, John,” she’d say. “It’s good enough for chickens!”

From the vantage point of the deck I think my mother would be proud of how those new barn doors look, and of the various puzzling challenges that were overcome in the building. It wasn’t as adventuresome nor as dramatic as her  Trip of ‘39, but … as little Naomi would say … they’re “good enough for chickens!”

After considering posting a grouping of seasonal images since late last winter, I’ve finally bowed to doing so. A grouping from this past fall …

Milkweed seeds stretched by a prairie wind.

After sitting in the prairie grasses for nearly an hour waiting for another one of those glowing red sunsets, I came away feeling pleased with the soft, muted beauty of the cone flower heads.

An autumn portrayal of Ardie’s Pond … where Rebecca and other friends of Ardie’s come to swim.

Mixing the colors of roadside prairie grasses with the reds of sumac in the background.

A whitetail buck peeking through the timber at Bonanza … Big Stone State Park.

Cloud “leaks” and a lone cottonwood …

Cottonwoods along Lost Creek … Yellow Medicine County.

Forestal etchings of autumn ….

A pre-dawn flight of geese through the shadows of Big Bluestem on our home prairie …

Rich, early morning light on the grasses and trees at Bonanza …

A pastoral early autumn hillside …

Layering of sumac and prairie grasses at Bonanza …

Layering of colors of Big Bluestem at the Big Stone Wildlife Refuge …

Oak and prairie grasses …

I love the strength of the burr oaks … with the accent of yellow poking through.

Outcrops in red … sumac and granite

The morning after a huge prairie wind had taken all the leaves from poplar trees along the Minnesota River near Granite Falls … leaving on the few on the treetops.

The morning after the corn was harvest adjacent to our prairie … our first vista since early July was a sunrise celebration.

Delicate … sunflowers in our prairie stand stark against pre-dawn pinkish clouds.

Technicolor Autumn at Bonanza …

Staghorn sumac delicately poking through Bonanza’s prairie grasses.

A tern fights harsh winds at the Minnesota headwaters …

Source: Maxed Out

“Give to the Max” is an annual ritual where folks voluntarily provide tax deductible donations to non-profits deemed worthy of our true, deep-seated investments. Each year we choose among the many available options, then divide our $200 between them in various chunks. Certainly our contributions are not sustaining by their small stature, and are intended more of a monetary vote of confidence for a job well done.

In the past years our choices haven’t been difficult. We made donations to the organizations we were either linked with, or felt quite strongly about, and divvied up the cash.

This year more thought and discussion actually went into our donations. For example, we support both Land Stewardship Project and Minnesota Public Radio with “sustaining” monthly contributions. We balked, though, with a couple of organizations we’ve had long associations we feel have let us down. One, initially an advocacy group, has seemingly veered far off course from its initial purpose, and the other has taken a stance on an water quality issue we simply cannot back.

A well planned buffer strip near Montevideo.

This is one of the two major farm organizations, and the smaller of the two national agricultural policy umbrellas. On a sunny and windy day last spring the area field woman and county president came to the door seeking a membership. As they stood in the kitchen I offered my objections to their organization’s public stance on the buffer strip controversy in Minnesota, which surrounded a stance by our governor, Mark Dayton, who was suggesting that the state legislate mandatory buffer strips on its waterways. If you’ve canoed the southwestern Minnesota rivers, or even stood on the bridge in Prescott, WI, to see the difference in siltation loads between contributions from the upriver Minnesota River contrasted with that of the clear water St. Croix, one could safely suggest there are issues with drainage and ditching over the breadth of the farmed prairie.

A winter blow … what will become “snirt.”

At the annual county meeting of the farm organization the previous fall, buffers and water quality issues were raised. One of organization’s stateside lobbyists noted that the organization was working with the other major farm organization to address what it considered an “unfair” legislative package. This raised some momentary hackles, and we left realizing that the only farm organization that was directly addressing soil and water conservation issues was Land Stewardship Project. When Dayton came forth with his announcement, both of the large, mainstream farm organizations sang in concert about how the proposed legislation was unfair and too costly for their farmer members despite cost-share funds through the federal USDA farm program.

Along a roadside after the snow melted last spring … a huge contribution of dirt from the adjacent field.

When this was mentioned to the two in our kitchen, both said the “one size fits all” approach … meaning the publicized 50 ft. buffer on either side of a ditch … wasn’t a proven methodology and was unfair to farmers in terms of cost and lost production acres. I argued that the bill, as written, provided plenty of leeway that took into account soil types and terrain, and that the “one size fits all” was a gross misrepresentation of Dayton’s bill. In the end a check was written for the annual membership fee, with the caveat that if the organization didn’t back off their stance and cooperate with the passage of buffer legislation, the organization had received our last membership donation.

Just a few days prior to “Give to the Max” day their membership magazine arrived with contributions from the  organization’s president and two legislative lobbyists, all providing arguments against buffers. They also joined in the chorus that private, on-farm drainage ditches shouldn’t be part of the buffer legislation. Say what? Private, on-farm drainage ditches are a significant part of the problem. So are the works by some “innovative” farmers who each fall cut shallow depressions in the low areas of their cropping fields for quick spring runoff drainage that are too shallow to qualify as legal drainage ditches that would be required to have grass buffers.

A shallow cut to circumvent drainage laws.

Obviously, no money went their direction on Give to the Max from our meager savings. And, when the county president and the field woman next appear at our doorstep, they will be sent on their way empty handed.

In March, winds whipped up the unprotected soils north of Clara City … you can see the “skyline” in the background.

We are farming the “last frontier” of tillable soils planet-wide. Meanwhile, we watch our soils blow and wash away. Little if any effort nor investment is being made to hold these human-sustaining soils in place. Very little conversion to no-till. Fewer winter cover crops and very few fields with residue left standing post-harvest for protection from wind erosion. A nearly complete, prairie-wide fall plow-down in what is called “the black desert” here in the countryside. More patterned tiling. And little adherence and oversight of current buffer laws  … coupled with a strong stance against common sense legislation that might make a difference in the future. An environmental free pass for industrialized farming continues without any voice of reason from either a water quality advocacy group or one of the two major farm organizations.

At Prescott, WI, where clear water from the St. Croix confluences with the runoff waters of the MIssissippi …. a silt load carried some 30 miles downriver from the Minnesota River, and one that eventually will dump into Lake Pepin.

Amazing, although hardly surprising. While we realize it is unrealistic to expect our meager contributions to have mattered monetarily, or that a such a small contribution would have influenced either organization toward acceptance of our philosophical and soil saving goals, at least we can feel comfort with where we spent our Give to the Max dollars.

Source: Not a Sound of Silence

Moments ago the ol’ ticker about stopped when Joe Pye, our lovable “red” dog of dubious lineage, flushed both a rooster and hen pheasant during our prairie walk. Though expected, since this seems to happen daily, being startled has become an anticipated part of the trek.

This is much the same sensation you have when watching a pop up toaster, or even a jack-in-the box you might actually be winding. You know instinctively that the toast is going to jump from the bread bays, and that the clown is going to pop up from the lid. Same with Joe Pye … somewhere, and you know not where, he will flush a pheasant. And, each time I will jump, startled at the sudden flush and rush of wings.

Otherwise, our walks are usually somewhat quiet.

This is said with a bit of a wink, especially in the spring and fall when the nearby wetlands are seemingly teeming with geese and ducks. Almost any time of the early morning through a near darkness at night, hearing the geese are part of what makes living here so precious.

Yesterday, though, was different. Our walk wasn’t quiet. And, this time the geese weren’t the culprits. This was not a sound of silence, for a horde of thousands of “black birds” made our grove come alive as a temporary home for a murmuration. The murmur was not unlike that of a stadium of people. Back in my journalism days when assigned to cover one of the professional sports teams, it was fun to get to the stadiums early before the crowds arrived. Having that sense of sound that rises from an eerie quietness to a loud murmur of thousands of voices in constant conversation was simply part of the experience. The closer to the start of the game, the louder the murmur. It was a welcomed part of the anticipation and experience.

At some point during the day yesterday, as the indeterminate black birds rose from the nearby harvested corn field and our prairie to the tree tops, always in a huge scrum that never seemed to end, it dawned on me why these events are called murmurations. That definition, or description, was as much a mystery to me as the bird gatherings themselves. Like the voices in a stadium, or even in an empty room that fills during a party, no one voice really stands out … just that steady hum of murmuring conversations. It was the same on our farmstead.

Walking around between the orchard and the yard taking pictures and simply watching in wonder as they flew about, then later watching a small sampling of them in the tree adjacent to my studio, you could sense a feeling of anticipation and excitement within the small groups and individual birds. Never perching for very long, the birds seemed alternately “peep” or strained to watch the flights overhead … before bolting off into the air to become one of the uncountable.

We shared our treetops for a few hours, and no matter where you took refuge, either here in the office, at the kitchen sink behind the huge picture window, standing quietly in the orchard, or hiding in the studio, it seemed that in whatever direction you looked there was a stream of birds in flight. In all directions, at differing heights, coming from various points from the corn field or prairie to any one of the numerous tree “islands” we have here on the farm.

This wasn’t among the largest murmurations I’ve seen, and conversations with people my age or older who lived on the prairie when it had more of its natural prairie pothole beginnings and before mass ditching and tiling, they tell of murmurations so thick with black birds that the sky was blotted out. Sometimes you will see a murmuration that will give you a hint of those days. One was just down the road near the Meadowbrook corner, and the other was on a brutal and cold New Year’s Day when Erlend Langbach, our Norwegian exchange student back in 1998, and I went fly fishing for walleyes in the tail waters of the Churchill dam … when we looked up to see a virtual umbrella of geese in the sky above Lac qui Parle Lake as far as one could see. A hum of honking provided an eerie accompaniment. What an incredible moment in nature.

Later on my afternoon here on the farm, after doing some research, I again ventured outside to add another coat of paint on some barn doors I’ve been building. I was struck by an instant difference, like Richard Bratigan wrote about in his poem, Wind, when lovers looked at one another when facing a sudden silence and one asked, “What was that?” “The wind,” came an answer. Yes, I was stuck by a sudden silence. No murmur. Just the sound of the prairie wind. The birds were gone. This “Hitchcockian moment” had vanished, as suddenly and realistically as it had mysteriously appeared.

We witness murmurations in various parts of our Big Stone Lake neighborhood every fall, with some streams of birds stretching for miles it seems. As you drive down a gravel road, hundreds if not thousands will blanket the gravel far ahead of you … with all rising as if on cue as you near, an avian poem threading as feathered waves, this way and that, away from a hurrying danger, all so close, yet none seem to collide or even come close to touching in choreographed chaos.

That choreographed chaos is just one of many mysteries. How can they fly like that without mass genocide? Yet, where do they all come from? How do they know where to congregate? Are there “generals” in the huge flocks that determine when and where to fly? Why would a flock choose our farm, or our neighbor’s across the section, or the savanna down by the Meadowbrook corner? And, what caused them to suddenly decide to go, to leave behind a farm so suddenly silent?

Source: A Seat in the Woods

Hunters often reminiscence about their seat in the woods. Of simply sitting. Listening. Watching. Waiting. Of how that seat in the woods often supersedes the hunt, even the killing itself.

While driving through the “half and half” Bonanza area of Big Stone State Park, with the wooded half in near full autumn glory even after a leaf-devastating wind blew through earlier in the week, I pulled over, grabbed my camera and sneaked into the woods. Moment before I had noticed a car at the boat landing near the park entrance, and later, peering through the trees a skittish herd of deer seemed uneasy. Quickly I had sped ahead to where a spring dabbles fresh, cool clear water down a rivulet where you can often see deer. Hoof-worn trails meandered through the area. With luck, those walking on the distant trail might push the herd toward the adjacent rise and the rivulet. At least, this was my thinking. My hope.

Peering through the woods, the deer seemed antsy. I was waiting for an antlered buck.

Lowering myself to the ground, I leaned back against one of the beautiful mature burr oaks that grace this lakeside savanna. This was in the wooded half. Across the gravel road dissecting the park is the prairie half, a wide hillside thick with prairie grasses with ravines likewise graced with stately oaks. Rebecca introduced me to Bonanza our first winter together, on a night when a full moon edged over the crest of the hill. As she drove I suddenly asked for her to stop, before jumping out of the car onto the snow packed road to take my first of several hundred photographs in the park.

My first image on a moon lit night in Bonanza.

Since moving to our nearby farm, the park is almost like my private “estate.” Rarely does a week go by when I’m not driving slowly through Bonanza at least two or three times with my camera. Like on this afternoon. Now I was here as a hunter … a photographic hunter. My seat in the woods was filled with more than anticipation. Yes, I was alert for a sudden showing of the does, for it seems the grand entrance of the antler adorned buck happens long after the nearly grown fawns, does and yearlings have entered an area. Patience is as important as stealth.

Fortunately it was warm enough that my hoodie was enough to maintain a decent level of comfort. Initially you become aware that you are the intruder, and you are surrounded by a shyness of nature. If not shyness, then at least caution. Not even the birds show themselves as an eerie quietness envelopes you. By maintaining a sense of calm and motionless, eventually there will be a distant rustling. Then a flash of feather. In time the birds begin to resume perhaps a more normal routine. Those blurs between branches come ever closer. Eventually I was able to capture a quick photo of one peeking toward me partially hidden on a perch behind a patch of leaves. When I called up the image to enlarge it digitally, I realized it was a robin. Really? A robin? In the deep woods? In mid-October? But, yes, a robin. Then came the flash of a nuthatch. Others I couldn’t identify.

The squirrel came down to check out the intruder.

Moments later came my first squirrel sighting. Much like the robin, the squirrel stopped halfway down a tree on a broken limb and surveyed the intruder at length, starring at the stranger like old gentlemen do when someone from out of town walks into a small town cafe. As that intruder, and stranger, I remained as motionless as possible until I seemingly passed the test. Gradually the woods came back to life … at least to a life as I imagined it had I not been there. Which can only be a guess. How would one know? Yet, it had taken nearly an hour before the acceptance of my intrusion was granted.

Leaves shimmering in the lowering sun.

Interesting thoughts come to mind when you take a seat in the quiet woods. Earlier in the morning my new friend, Lee Kanten, and I had shared lunch. Although we’ve known one another less than a year, it seems we can share good, soul-satisfying conversation. Over the years I’ve had few male friends. Many co-workers, teammates, friendly and caring sources and fishing buddies, yet so very few you have comfort in opening up with. My writer friend, Tom Cherveny, is one. Another is now Lee. As I eased into my seat in the woods, ever hopeful of seeing the first of the herd step into my amphitheater, I rehashed our conversations, our thoughts of our individual retirements, and of others we’ve known over the years. I’m finding comfort by settling in to this rural, prairie-based lifestyle with diminishing desires for travel. His views, too, have changed due to some of his recent travels. He has less desire to park a trailer next to dozens of other retirees in a patch of sandy desert, nor to hop-scotch across the country parking overnight in WalMart parking lots, nor even to socialize with people we wouldn’t have at any other time in our respective lives, while devising a schedule of forced social activity just to feel busy and alive.

“We are now at an age where we have come to grips with our immortality,” he had said. “We now know we’re mortal, that our time is limited, and we begin to make decisions on how to best make use of the time we have left.”

Here in my seat in the woods I feel both busy and alive, of making good use of such time.

The view from my seat in the woods.

Thinking of this budding friendship made me recall an earlier conversation with Rebecca, of when she mentioned the trip she’s taking this weekend to visit an old friend who is about to go in for testing at Mayo Clinic. When Rebecca brought up the trip, and of going alone, I was a bit taken back. She then expressed the need and importance of having special and separate friends, and the need and freedom to spend time with them. Perhaps equally important, for getting off the farm for breaks now and then, especially after the long and tedious growing and canning season for her, and my intense preparations for the recent Arts Meander. There in my seat in the woods the realization and weight of what she had said made more sense. Part of that realization came earlier during my lunch with Lee. Yes, you do need to spend quality time with friends, and yes, you do need to get away the farm for breaks. As much as we enjoy our togetherness, we each need our freedom as individuals. In part, this is how we grow, and how a relationship can mature.

Nearby, a pastoral scene of autumn.

There in my seat in the woods I found myself taking occasional deep sighs, and feeling certain weights ease from my shoulders. A few clouds drifted in the blue sky as the sun shimmered through the colorful canopy of leaves. A lowering sun. Shadows had lengthened, and one from a distant tree now crossed my outstretched legs. Time had eased by, easily and perhaps too quickly. It was time to go, leaving behind the mashed grasses and leaves of my seat in the woods.