One of the traditions I so thoroughly enjoyed in my long ago newspaper years came near the end of December when we were asked to sort through and submit our favorite image, or images, of the year just before New Year’s Day. This gave layout editors fodder for a traditionally slow news week between Christmas and January 1.

For us this was a chance to review the stories and our photographs. For me, that review was crucial to my growth as a photojournalist. Did the imagery seem to hold up to previous years, or was there a lag? Was there a sense of growth? Had my “eye” for composition, working with natural lighting, choosing an appropriate focal length worked with the news event or photographic moment?

My concern nowadays is if my “eye” has held true since my retirement as I’ve moved to more closely document our last one percent of the glacially-blessed native prairie and wetland ecosystem that has been systematically and throughly destroyed by mankind since the 1860s. This destruction and my care for recording the remnants photographically has been stated repeatedly in my artist’s statements that have accompanied my exhibits and art shows.

Since moving more into a creative arts community this tradition of reviewing my past year of imagery to choose 12 of my favorite images has continued over the past 11 years. My choice and intent is not to choose just one but a dozen, initially to pick one for each month. It didn’t take long to realize that better images were being left out, and since this is my choice on what to show, that concept died a quick death.

While the annual review is fun, the intent remains the same — seeking a measure of growth, of how my “eye” might have evolved over time. So, here we go, along with a few comments for each of the images are my dozen for 2025. If you wish for a closer look simply “click” on the picture to enlarge it. Meanwhile, thanks for your kind comments and support of my work through this and for all these years.

Just outside of Big Stone Lake State Park this piece of the glacial moraine that separates the River Warren river bed, now Big Stone Lake, and a huge, miles long ravine that is home to Meadowbrook Creek. This interesting afterglow was one of those “you had to be there” moments giving the native prairie the appearance of a staged play.

Moments before this was captured, I was pulling out of the fisherman’s lower parking lot below the Marsh Lake Dam when a pod of pelicans flew over. There was no chance for a picture, and I left the area disappointed. At the “T” at the end of the dam road, I took a left hopeful of getting closer to my road home and ended up at Curt Vacek’s machine shed. A dead end. As I headed back another pod flew over. Both times dozens of pelicans seemed to be heading toward their island refuge. Hopeful, I sped back to the dam, backed onto the dike and just as I rolled down my window and grabbed my camera, this pod flew over exhibiting grace and aerial choreography. Pelican flights often seem to offer such grace to our prairie skies. That the birds stood out against the subtle grayness of a cloudy sky makes the picture. One of my favorites from over the years.

Ever since moving here I’ve had an eye on this lone tree on the bank of a long drained prairie pothole lake that before being ditched and drained stretched for miles and over what is now many commodity grain fields. From the bottom of the old lake bed the tree looked to be in line with the sun of the Summer Solstice, and once again I was blessed by nature when a lone bird flew into the sunset.

Between my boyhood hometown of Macon, MO, and neighboring Atlanta, the Missouri Department of Conservation damed a channel of the Chariton River to create a multi-mile lake and eventual state park. After driving through the park we exited through the far north gate and turned toward the major highway when we crossed a high bridge at the last “finger” at the head of the lake. This wasn’t my initial view, yet the swallows flying from beneath the bridge and silhouetted against a distant brewing storm caught my eye back in mid-July, and again in review.

Although we had a cabin on Lake One on the lip of the BWCA, we did more exploring around the area because my favorite woman lacked comfort in a canoe, and in those adventures we stopped at Bear Head Lake State Park, which after years of being in and around Ely I had never noticed. We took a hike on a wooded trail that ended up at Norberg Lake. The calm waters of this small lake surrounded by age-old timber offered an incredibly soothing moment, especially in our distanced escape from the political chaos of the summer. This scene was a reflection of my calmness and comfort.

Just a few miles from home a lone pelican and the ambient afterglow reflected in a wetland. More of what I call poetic photography. Often I leave home just before sunset to drive around the area wetlands, and unlike most of the counties around us, it is estimated that 15 percent of the original wetlands still exist in Big Stone County compared to less than a percent elsewhere in Western Minnesota and Northwest Iowa. And it seems that every year I’ll come across a lone pelican in a prairie water wetland. This was my moment in 2025, a moment of peaceful bliss.

In my exhibit this image carries a simple title: “The Leaf.” Yes, this singular leaf caught my eye within the midst of the “forest” in the high Minnesota River backwaters of mid-summer at the Big Stone National Wildlife Refuge. I love the angular tree and its reflection, yet the “individualism” of the stark leaf is what caught my eye. I guess I’ve always been sort of a “loner,” like “The Leaf,” feeling a bit out of step with the society that seems to surround me.

November, and the “super” moon at Crex Meadows just across the Wisconsin border with Minnesota. Sandhill Cranes are my favorite bird and this image is one I’ve visualized for several years. An unfulfilled dream, if you will. With the promise of a full moon along with prayers we would have a cloudless sky, we drove nearly five hours across the state to Crex and got a motel room. We then found a vista that might offer a gigantic full moon rising along the horizon, along with hope that the cranes returning from the nearby stalk fields would offer a blessing. This was among several images of cranes flying through that incredible moon, and this was my favorite of the bunch. Once again nature provided a special blessing!

Then, the following morning in the “nautical” twilight … again, Sandhill Cranes. Have I said I love them? Even after a half dozen trips to Central Nebraska each March, along with various outings to both Crex Meadows and the nearby Sherburne NWR between St. Cloud and the Twin Cities, I can’t seem to get enough “crane time.” My first viewing of Sandhills was on a organic farm near Monte Vista, CO, when my now late friend, Greg Gosar, whose farm I helped feature in a Money Magazine story, came running into the house to ask if I wanted to sneak up on a feeding flock of cranes in his wheat field. We sauntered as quietly as possible up a sandy draw before leaning against the bank to see the birds. A highlight was a lone Whooping Crane back when their number was in the low 70s, along with what Aldo Leopold called the “trumpets in the orchestra of evolution.” This was in the late 1970s, and I’ve “chased” those beautiful songs and flights ever since.

Northern Lights, the auroras of the heavens …. a Cinderella-like moment for the normally muddy Eli Lake in nearby Clinton. I love this view of this disregarded lake on the edge of town along US 75 and a county road. Certainly I’ve witnessed more spectacular Aurora displays, yet what attracts me to this image is both the natural composition along with the reflection highlighting the colors even as “subdued” as they appear. Despite the shallow waters, seldom seen as blue, the Aurora awakened the waters from its normally placid blandness — an Aurora that provides a glimpse of normally unrealized beauty.

While we’re on Northern Lights, this was captured with my cell phone when the settings on my camera got messed up. This was a spectacular display in all directions, and taken over a prairie wetland at the lip of our prairie looking toward the Northwest. While the October 10th display was considered the highlight of the year’s displays among us Aurora geeks, this display might have been an equal, offering both vivid colors and that hum from the heavens … something you don’t always hear, with colors you seldom see this far south.

Another moment from a nearby wetland, a Great White Egret lifting from a vista featuring a setting sun. Once again when I look through my couple thousand images of wetlands, I feel such a sense of loss. Besides the benefits of recharging the underground aquifers and cleansing agricultural chemicals from the runoff, they benefit wildlife and provide incredible beauty to the prairie for many of us. The 99 percent of destruction of the wetlands is such an incredible loss, and a loss that keeps me in constant search for poetic imagery. And in this instance, I was once again blessed by Mother Nature.

Initially I was rather discouraged, and perhaps “rather” isn’t quite strong enough to convey my feelings. You see, I had visualized an image for a week or so after we discovered that the beautiful meadow of cone flowers in the Big Stone National Wildlife Refuge had bloomed, long enough ago that many blossoms were already showing their age. Crinkled petals, some showing brownness on the edges of the delightful pink. In short, there wasn’t much time left to capture my idea.

My intentions were rather simple, for I’ve envisioned a simple softness of fog with the defusing warmth of a rising sun providing a bit of hazy backlight to this expansive meadow of pink. Summer fog, which happens frequently in the lowlands of the prairie, isn’t uncommon over the wetlands and prairie around dawn much like it does in the Boundary Waters, rivers and lakes. This meadow is just up the rise from the broad waters of the West Pool, which is a flooded basin managed for protection of waterfowl and other aquatic avians.

Then, there’s this: It has been awhile since I’ve ventured out for pictures before dawn, somehow losing the habit of being up to greet what the late naturalist and photographer Edwin Way Teale called “nature’s finest balm.” Yes, dawn. Perhaps it’s an “age thing.” 

My dream of a foggy image is somewhat different since I’ve photographed these cone flowers religiously since moving to Listening Stones Farm a dozen years ago. After a scorching day the thought of a rising fog had me up and into the pickup about a half hour before sunrise. My intensions and excitement took an immediate hit because a dense cloud bank was covering the eastern sky. Since I was already up and headed to the Refuge, why turn back? 

Despite my disappointment I still eased from the truck with my trusty Nikon and wandered through the grasses and flowers making a few half-hearted images. Hardly anything worth remembering. My files are loaded with cone flowers from this meadow, including a really nice senior picture of the daughter of friends. Which wasn’t the point. My visualization was the point.

Perhaps Teale’s entire quote is worth noting: “For the mind disturbed, the still beauty of dawn is nature’s finest balm.” Taking this to heart would be my new challenge. 

After a deep breath, birds of various species were seen skimming across the still waters of the West Pool while above me Cormorants were scurrying by to their secret potholes, prehistorically shaped fishers silhouetted against the colorful, cloudy canvas of sky. Solitary Great Blue Herons made curved-neck flights across the muted skies. The skies were alive! It was then I remembered catching the gaping mouth and awkward warnings from a female Night Hawk on a distant outcrop. This didn’t have to only be about cone flowers and fog.

At the far bend of the motor trail I caught a Cormorant bounce-splashing across the surface with a small fish firmly captured in its beak. Kingbirds and a Bobolink moved across the grassy prairie trying to hide from the cameraman. Ring-billed Gulls and Black Terns provided nearly an hour of entertainment at the bend of the motor trail, playing in a nice reflected, colorful light. Terns were attempting their athletic poetry of dipping their bills into the waters as they sped across the surface. This alone can capture my attention for time on end.

Of course, being in the refuge meant White Pelicans were around, although far fewer in numbers than the cormorants. The two fishing pals make an interesting contrast in almost all ways … color, shape and beauty of flight. They seems to ply the same spaces in search of nourishment with the Cormorants diving out of sight and the pelicans often teaming up to corner their prey. It was here at the bend of the motor trail where both frequent. Last autumn I caught hundreds of pelicans in military-like formations crossing the West Pool in murderous mayhem. Squadrons of them, numbering several across, all easing eastward across the waters. The next day there wasn’t a pelican in sight. Apparently I’d stumbled upon a last feast before migration.

Eventually it was time to move along so I drove around the last big bend toward the riverside parking lot hopeful of catching perhaps a wood duck. This portion of the Refuge is along the debris choked Minnesota River. I would find a single Pied-Billed Grebe in a limb reflection and a Green Heron that posed beautifully for me. All that remained was that protective Night Hawk.

This was certainly a delicate mission for you don’t want to unnecessarily rile up nature, and particularly such a rare bird. We had initially spied her over the weekend when we had stopped at a flat outcrop to show a former exchange student ball cacti and were confronted by the “hissing” female. While Night Hawks are graceful and incredibly stunning in flight, hovering high in the sky before diving at nearly breakneck speeds, on land their extremely weak legs make it a challenge to move. 

She was still there and immediately flopped across the granite to defend her well hidden nest. Hastily I made about a half dozen images while standing several feet away where I hoped not to be considered a serious threat. Although I tried to be quick and unobtrusive, I had no desire to cause her unnecessary strife and tension. 

Thanks to the various birds, including the awkward Night Hawk, my dawn foray was delightful and successful. Teale’s “balm” had worked wonders. And since my dear mother once gifted me with his “Journey Into Summer” as a teenager, here’s one last Teale passage that perhaps summed up my feelings: “Our minds, as well as our bodies, have need of the out-of-doors. Our spirits, too, need simple things, elemental things, the sun and the wind and the rain, moonlight and starlight, sunrise and mist and mossy forest trails, the perfumes of dawn and the smell of fresh-turned earth and the ancient music of wind among the trees.” 

Amen!

Can someone find joy in the South Dakota mudflats? It was Dutch theologian Henri J.M. Nouwen who suggested that joy doesn’t simply happen, rather that is it is something we must choose. Or, find. This thought surfaced recently and caused me to think of what in nature could give me joy. Nature is where I typically turn when that spark of joy is necessary for soothing the soul. 

This thought happened to occur in the midst of a conversation about American Avocets I was having with our head librarian, Jason Frank, who is a dedicated birder and naturalist when he’s away from the stacks. We were chatting about my inability to find one of my favorite shorebirds when he suggested the mudflats around Sand Lake NWR about two hours west in NE South Dakota. With an empty afternoon ahead of us, we headed west.

First came the Avocets, which we found in a flooded field depression not far from Houghton just a few miles from the Sand Lake Refuge. That pair would be the first of a beautiful handful of shorebirds that would occupy our afternoon, and yes, all contributed to blissful joy.

Yet, it was the Avocets that drew us across the prairielands. I’d been missing them. Literally. Earlier this spring there was a brief gathering at the Big Stone NWR where Frank had spotted and photographed a flock he found wading alongside the river. Knowing my love, he had alerted me the following afternoon with his photographs and pinpointed where they were wading. I rushed to the Refuge only to find a locked gate and smoke rising from the thousands of acres of prairie grassland. A spring burn was underway, and continued for the next day or two … just enough time for the flock to fly elsewhere.

Refuge biologist Brandon Semel noted a week or so later that we are actually on the very eastern edge of their natural territories. This was after I had spent a few trips searching the area wetlands where I’d photographed them last summer. Which led me to this more recent conversation with Frank. Like, “Where can I find Avocets?”

My attraction to these beautiful waders is a strange love story. Back when I was in a forgettable career stretch with a Minneapolis-based ad agency, I found a piece of cottonwood at the studio of a wood artist friend, procured a few wood carving tools and went to work whittling away both wood and ad agency aggravation — whittling away the late night hours when I should have been sleeping. It was during this hobby moment I came upon photographs of this brown-headed beauty of a shorebird with the thin, upcurved bill. My carving was of a rather non-nondescript assemblage of a shorebird and nowhere close to an Avocet. One slip of the knife would have quickly made their narrowest of bills another shaving.

It wasn’t until a couple of years ago while on the annual Salt Lake Birder’s Tour that I saw my first real life Avocet, thanks to Lac qui Parle SWCD manager Rhyan Schicker. Just before the annual kickoff breakfast she told me there were several wading in a flooded farm field just east of Marietta, home of the annual birding mecca. I rushed out and there they were, even more beautiful in person than in the guide books and magazines. I returned over the next few days for more photographs. Then, the next couple of summers they hovered around here, particularly near some mudflats up by Barry, MN. Not this year, though. We’ve had no rain so the lowlands are bone dry.

Frank suggested the Sand Lake possibility. Over the years this interesting refuge has yielded some nice images, although many hours of stalking the “teapot” flying Woodcocks went sorely unfulfilled. Although our little afternoon foray started with a bit of disappointment when we discovered a formerly quite active Blue Heron rookery abandoned. Finding the Avocets turned the tide. Fortunately no highway patrol came upon us, and that the motorists who whizzed by were so understanding and kind. We had parked as close to the road ditch as possible with my lens sticking out the window, yet half the car was still in the road.

Our luck and joy would continue. As we came upon the eastern edge of the Sand Lake Refuge we found different flocks of Sandpipers, each being skitterish and prone for quick flights and returns. Then we happened upon a solitary Black-necked Stilt. Far more common to the American Southwest, the guidebook offers only a pencil thin width of territory this far east. We were in it. Joy!

Between the Stilt and the Sandpipers we were enjoying all the offerings as we crept along the shallow waters. When Sandpipers can wade without the water touching their bellies, they’re wading in quite shallow waters. With the taller birds like the Stilt and Avocets it’s difficult to judge the depths. So we merrily wiled away the afternoon before we happened upon pair of White-faced Ibis further down the road. 

With our past years of wet spring weather the Ibis seemed fairly comfortable around our area of Minnesota. On that Salt Lake tour a few years ago numerous Ibis were seen at several sites, their bills, unlike the Avocets curved  downward. They flew in mini-V formations from one standing water site to another. This  year? Not a single sighting until we happened upon them in the Dakota mudflats, where they meandered thoroughly unconcerned with the odd guy with the long bazooka of a lens sticking through the car window. Nor was the solitary Sandpiper keeping them company.

Perhaps it would have made wonderful sense to stick around until sunset. However we decided to move on toward home and leave the birds behind in their shallow mudflats. We had been greeted by an Avocet prelude and given benediction by the Ibis, which might mean very little to many. For us sitting in our car on this roadside nave, there was a thorough sense of joy within the high skies of this prairieland “cathedral.” As Nouwen had suggested in his writing, we had chosen our sense of joy and had gone to find it.

Her “wuk … wuk” cries of alarm and the flutter of feathers as she crossed the lawn to one of our islands of trees would have been equal an overhead flight of a jet airliner only a few days earlier. Despite their secretive nature, an aroused pileated woodpecker has a way with sudden alarm.

This unexpected visit on our suet feeder brought an end to my concern I’d felt earlier after  my two mile walk on our gravel road late last week when barely a sound was heard beyond the crunch of my footsteps on the gravel and crusted snow. Were we this alone here in the vast horizontal grandeur? Were the sounds of the skeins of geese flying overhead days before nowhere to be seen nor heard? Where was the sudden burst of flight from the flock of snow buntings that have captured the edge of the graveled roadside? Even the cattle at a farm to the north were not lowing to break the silence of a cold, stilled winter morning. Walking in such silence was strange and unsettling. 

My walk seemed a prelude to the polar vortex now settled in over the entire continent. By this past weekend it was considered unsafe at any age to be outside and especially on a two-mile walk. Perhaps the countryside was even more silent in those days since. Nothing much was moving, not even a mouse. Joe Pye would have noticed.

The sudden and unexpected flight of the pileated was certainly an exception, and a wonderful surprise a day or two later. It began after I had decided to brew up a pot of split pea soup for dinner, which necessitated a walk out to the studio/garage to our freezer for a hunk of pork hock. When I stepped through the door a batch of birds lifted from beneath the feeder tree. A junco or two, sparrows, a red bellied woodpecker and a pair of nuthatches. All lifting with as much fashion and form as a well tuned choir collectively standing to sing. 

Above the flutter of the choir, though, was the escape of the lone pileated woodpecker, huge and black, it’s beautiful red head bobbing as it squawked and beat its wings in its telltale undulating bouncy flight away from the feeder tree to fly across the lawn. There is no mistaking a pileated woodpecker.

This prompted the gathering of my camera with the long lens to hoist from the studio along with that hunk of pork. I excitedly told Roberta of the pileated, and we began doing surveillance at the various eastern windows near the feeder while I pulled together the soup. About a half hour later she came rushing into the kitchen with a stage whisper, “It’s here! On the deck feeder!”

Sure enough, and I grabbed the camera with the 600 mm lens. Our octagon window in the bathroom was an excellent “blind” and several images were made before it decided to dip and dive off to the beautiful aged-old elm tree hugging the east side of my studio. There it bounced up and down the trunk, stopping briefly to look around before facing the bark where it seemed to note something of interest.

My first thought was, “Oh, no! Not my elm!” You don’t have to walk too far into the oak savanna at Bonanza to see the damage a pileated can do to a tree. I’ve often considered setting up a blind adjacent to the trail to capture an images at that tree, and the major drawback is there hardly seemed to be any fresh chips being added to the pile.  

All of which brought back a memory from so long ago. While working as a stateside photojournalist with the Denver Post, I had just covered an environmental conference in Crested Butte where one of the presenters was Nina Leopold, daughter of one of my guiding “lights”, Aldo Leopold, author of “A Sand County Almanac.” His writing helped guide me back toward nature and wild things. Nina had a flight back to Milwaukee and I was driving home to Denver, and she had accepted my invitation for a ride to the airport.

Among the topics discussed in that long, wintery drive was pileated woodpeckers, along with my desire to finally see one. Though they were rare in the early 1970s, perhaps they’re more so even now. Nina painted some beautiful mental images for me, perhaps from her years of visiting her father’s sand country farm that is now a historical site near the foundation she helped form. 

Several years later after we had moved to Minnesota for an editorial position with Webb Publishing, I would finally see one along the Mississippi backwaters near where we had moved. Sightings have been nearly non-existent since, and have always been a noted moment in the years that followed.

Other than a brief glimpse while driving down the Lake Road, or at an artist’s home along the lake, I actually spied one in our grove one morning a few years ago through the kitchen window while brewing a cup of tea. A worker once said he had spotted one along the edge of the grove although his comment was met with disbelief. Yet, with our acreage of old trees we might have some prime pileated territory. If so, why have our sightings been so rare?

Perhaps they have already settled in since pleated are noted for their covert shyness. Our feeder bird is quite attentive, flying at the slightest sound. We’ve seen it numerous times since, either on a nearby tree or on the deck feeder where it will grasp and circle itself around the little cage of suet to peck away. Hopefully this is an omen, for according to legend pileated woodpeckers are said to be bearers of good fortune and luck, two wonderful attributes a person can always use.