Posts in Category: Sunday
He is Risen! He is Risen Indeed! Happy Easter.
Back Creek and Mousam River, Sunrise, Easter 2015
As the dawn sweeps over the globe today, Christians are gathering on mountain tops, hilltops, roofs of buildings, and beaches to witness the sunrise. It is Easter Sunday for most Christians, and the sunrise this day symbolizes the resurrection of Jesus Christ two thousand years ago, and celebrates his ongoing life through the spirit in each of us. And whatever you think of Christianity, the promise of new life, of being better at loving and giving and living, is one that speaks to us all. In the dawn, as the sun rises yet again on a new day, surely we can all believe a little more deeply that forgiveness is possible, that love is all that matters, and that joy is not only within reach, but our birthright. Surely this day, we can all believe that peace on earth begins with us, with each of us, facing the dawn with hope and open hearts. He is Risen! He is Risen Indeed! Happy Easter Sunday!
The Land of Enchantment. Happy Sunday!
Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks, NM
We are back in Maine, “The Pine Tree State”, from New Mexico, “The Land Of Enchantment.” On the whole I have to say that whoever came up with the New Mexico nickname did a better job of capturing the essence of the state than whoever came up with Maine’s. I mean, you can market “enchantment”…”pine trees” just does not have the same effect. Don’t get me wrong, Maine is home and I am happy to be home…but New Mexico was home for 12 years, and I can still appreciate the enchantment of the landscape, the culture, and the history. This is certainly an enchanted landscape from an enchanted place. We are back at Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument and here we see two of the three land forms that meet at the Monument. The eroded tuff cliffs in the foreground, and ancient volcanic mountains in the back. The third would be the open valley of the Rio Grande River which is out of the frame well to the left. And storm clouds…life-givers…moving in over all. Enchantment!
Sony WX220 at 25mm equivalent field of view. In-camera HDR. Nominal exposure: 1/320th @ ISO 100 @ f8. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Of course, enchantment is a state of mind. All around you in New Mexico is the evidence of how fragile and wonderful life can be. For thousands of years…from pit dwellers to pueblos, to Navajo and Apache hunters, to the Spanish invaders, to the hunters turned shepherds and silversmiths, to the trading post merchants, cowboys, miners, farmers, and outlaws, to the atom chasers at Los Alamos and the artists of Santa Fe…humans have tried to make a life in this fantastic, wonderfully weathered, landscape…always poised on the edge…boom followed by bust…never quite waking from the dream. And the landscape weathers on, patient, ever changing and yet unchanged, rolling over and engulfing every change made by man. It is much the same everywhere, if you look behind the current facade, but some landscapes have almost been tamed. New Mexico, despite every effort of humanity, has not. The struggle and delicate balance…and the beauty of life on the edge…of the waking dream…is still very evident. Enchantment.
My spiritual forefathers lived in just such a landscape. The tribes of Israel herded sheep between the farming towns along the rivers. Jesus was born and lived his life among us in a place that shares this particular enchantment. For me, part of the magic of New Mexico is that I can feel something of the mindset that shaped the scriptures, that gave the words and images in which my spiritual reality was first expressed. Being there, in places like Tent Rocks, puts me into a spiritual perspective, and makes it easier to believe. This is good. Happy Sunday!
Bathing Beauties. Happy Sunday!
Sea Lions, La Jolla CA
I am preparing this early as we (Carol and I) are catching a plane at 6 am tomorrow for Santa Fe to visit our daughter Anna. Anna started grad school in Art Therapy this semester.
As I have mentioned before, I really enjoy the cove at La Jolla, between the Harbor Seal pupping beach at one end, and the Sea Lion colony at the other. The Sea Lions, in particular, seem apt to pose. I assume they are sunning themselves, with stretched necks and heads in the air.
Sony HX400V at 588mm equivalent field of view. 1/320th @ ISO 80 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom.
In my rounds as the ZEISS Birding Specialist I get to visit places like San Diego once a year, always the same month, and often the same weeks each year. I get attached to places like the Cove at La Jolla. I can get there without a GPS if I have to…and I even know the better routes depending on the time of day. I don’t rank as a native…though I doubt very much there are many native La Jollians…but I am certainly familiar with the place, and I miss it those years when my San Diego trip somehow does not leave me a few hours for the drive from Mission Bay and Marina Village Conference Center where the San Diego Birding Festival is held each year, up the coast to the cove. I could watch and photograph the families of seals and Sea Lions every year, for untold years…and I always look forward to the breeding plumaged Cormorants and Pelicans. I feel incredibly privileged…blessed outright…to be able to claim such far flung places as La Jolla as part of my home country…of the country where I feel at home. The spirit knows no physical boundaries of course, and wherever there is beauty and vivid life to nurture it…it is there we can call home. I look forward to being at home in La Jolla next year…and at home in Sante Fe this coming week. Home is way of seeing, a way of extending the spirit to the place…of drawing comfort and nourishment from the the place. Wherever we are. Happy Sunday! And welcome home.
Brunch! Happy Sunday.
Little Blue Heron. San Diego River NWR.
I gave myself a morning off from intensive birding yesterday…only going out for a few hours to the easy birding along the San Diego River above the Sports Arena bridge. I went to find Burrowing Owls reported there…or I thought reported there. It turns out I had my directions wrong. Still, the channel above the bridge was full of birds…especially Little Blue Herons…and there were even two white-phase Little Blues. The Little Blues were relatively close by anything but Florida standards and I enjoyed watching and photographing them. This one made a complete three course meal. It caught the crab and ate it, then it ate seaweed for a while, and then it stepped out into the water had a few delicate drinks.
Sony HX400V at 1200mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. 1/320th @ ISO 100 @ f6.3. Processed and cropped slightly for scale in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Brunch, of course, is a particularly human take on this scene. The Little Blue Herons, like most birds, feeds continuously, from before sun-up until it is too dark to see. “Feeds”, though we use the word for what birds do, might give the wrong impression as well. It is not like birds sit down to a laden table and or a full trough and feed. “Hunts” might be more accurate. Sun-up to sun-down the Little Blue Heron hunts. Occasionally during the course of its day it finds something to eat and eats it. And then it right back to the hunt. And, of course, during nesting season, the adult herons hunt for their whole brood. And yet Jesus, when he spoke of God’s care for us, used birds as an example. If God provides for the birds of the birds of the air, then certainly we can have confidence in God’s provision for our lives. Don’t worry, he says, about what we will eat, but live with thanksgiving. Take a lesson from the Little Blue.
Blue-crowned Motmot. Happy Sunday!
Blue-crowned Motmot, Lodge at Pico Bonito, Honduras
The Motmots of Central America are among the most colorful of birds in a region renowned for colorful birds. There are several species to add interest. They are, according to WiKi, relatives of the Kingfishers, Bee-eaters, and Rollers, all colorful birds in their own right, and like their kin, nest in holes and tunnels in steep banks. They perch low in the canopy, and except for the Turquoise-browed, which apparently favors more open country, are difficult to photograph in the perpetual half-light under the dense foliage. This shot was digiscoped…taken through the 30x wide-field eyepiece on a ZEISS DiaScope 65FL spotting scope, with a small Canon s120 advanced Point and Shoot camera. The combination gave me the equivalent of about an 850mm lens on a full-frame digital camera. The low light levels pushed the camera to its limits, but I am happy to have a record of this amazing bird.
While the ZEISS VICTORY SF Experience hiked through the rainforest looking for birds like the Motmot, the subject of how such spectacuarly strange birds “evolved” came up. Looking at Motmot’s for instance, there are many features of structure and plumage that are difficult to explain from a “survival of the fittest” stand point. If you assume that every feature of the creature has to have provided evolutionary advantage, then you soon get lost in rambling speculation, since there is often no obvious advantage to such intricate design. At one point I simply laughed and said, ” I am not looking for evolutionary advantage. I take each feature as evidence of design.” You can believe that caused a dead silence in the group. In truth they might have felt pity for me…since I was obviously one of those backward fork who what to see intelligent design in nature…a creative intelligence responsible for the creatures we see. Imagine if I had gotten as far as saying a “loving intelligence” who “loves” the Motmot and all creatures into existence. Because of course that is what I believe. It makes me the odd-man-out in the birding circles that I frequent, but that is okay. Every bird I see is another reason to give thanks to the Creator…to celebrate both creation and love. It makes birding, like every aspect of a life lived in the spirit, an act of worship…both the joyful, song-filled, revitalizing kind of Sunday worship, and the deep meditative worship of reflection. I only wish I could share more of that worship with my fellow birders. And of course, I am secretly attributing the joy they feel in the presence of birds to the movement of the spirit in them. It costs them nothing and it increases my pleasure in what we are doing together. Happy Sunday. And may something as wonderful as a Motmot in the rainforest enrich your day.
Flight! Happy Sunday.
Common Tern, Merritt Island NWR
Birds in flight hold a fascination for most of us. Photographs of birds in flight…photographs that capture the dynamic of wing, feather, and air…the miracle of wing, feather, and air…are particularly fascinating. Such photographs are a wonder and a challenge. Photographically they are among the most difficult to capture…especially with anything short of a full blown DSLR and a medium to long telephoto lens…equipment costing many thousands of dollars and encompassing a daunting weight when carried into the field where the flying birds are.
All of which is why I feel so blessed to have an effective Sports Mode on my cameras of choice…the inexpensive, compact, versatile superzoom Point and Shoots that I carry. Sports Mode makes birds in flight a possibility…and a pleasure. I spent a delighted 45 minutes at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge photographing a small group of Common Terns as they fed. Such fun.
Flight is a spiritual dream for most of us…we picture angels with wings for good reason. The freedom and miracle of flight suits our spirits…represents a state of grace we can aspire to…because, of course, we feel like we should be able to fly, like we were born to fly. We dream of flying. Our spirits soar when we are in contact with the divine. We know that one day…one eternity…by grace in faith…we will indeed fly. Free. Happy Sunday!
Snowy Dawn. Happy Sunday!
Snowy Egret at dawn. Merritt Island NWR, FL
Yeah…not that kind of snow 🙂 Still in Florida. First light on Blackpoint Wildlife Drive at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in January, when the birds are in close to the road, is often spectacular. The birds are between you and the rising sun, and if you catch the light just right, the images glow. This Snowy Egret was feeding about as close to the road as a bird can get, and the light was right! 🙂
And there is something about being out when the day is young, catching the birds at their breakfast, that lends zest to day, and to life. We begin again, all over again, with the adventure! I think that is the key to living a life of the spirit in the flesh…every day is a new adventure…and no matter what comes, it will be, before it is over, good. Some days are a trial and some days are just full of blessing. Or maybe I should say: Some days we are blessed with trials, and some days we are just blessed. Most days, these days, I am simply blessed…enjoying the adventure. I look forward from the dawn of each day with hope, with expectation, with joy, and with thanksgiving…I may not always show it…but I do. In a little over an hour I will leave for maybe my last early morning circuit of Blackpoint Drive for this trip. What good thing does God in the spirit have in store for today? Happy Sunday!
Western Tanager: long way from home! Happy Sunday.
Western Tanager in Kennebunk ME on Jan 3rd.
I posted briefly about my adventures finding and photographing a Western Tanager that has been hanging out with a flock of Robins in a neighborhood a little less than a mile from my home in Kennebunk Maine. Actually, “refinding” is better…it was seen twice on the Kennebunk Christmas Bird Count on December 27th, but I did not hear about it until the day before yesterday. A Western Tanager in Maine is news anytime, but you would think that late December and early January would be among the most unlikely times. You would think…but, in fact, the last record of Western Tanager in Maine that I can find was also on a Christmas Bird Count in Bangor in 2006. Western Tanagers breed all along the backbone of the Rocky Mountains, on both sides, west to the coast and east to the great plains, and are supposed to migrate to extreme southern Baha California, and from northern Mexico south as far as Costa Rica in the winter. They are not supposed to be in Maine. There are always a few birds in any migrating species that get their internal compass turned around and head the wrong way. The Tanager in Maine undoubtedly started out for Mexico. There is a remote chance that if the food holds out it could actually survive winter in Maine…or, when food gets scarce, that it will follow the flock of Robins to better foraging not far from us, or even higher in the mountains. Robins, despite the “first Robin of Spring” thing are not long distance migrants…in fact they are year-round residents of coastal Maine and most of the US. They are just less visible, and certainly less vocal, in winter. Only time will tell the fate of the Western Tanager foraging with them.
The most critical time for the Tanager, if it survives the Maine winter, will be next spring, when it is time to go home. Chances of its clearly defective guidance system getting it all the way back across the full width of the continent to its breeding areas in the mountains of the west are, realistically, pretty slim.
Although they are no more slim, come right down to it, than the chances of its being in Maine in January in the first place. 🙂
As strange and wonderful as the presence of the bird is, I have to wonder what the good folks who happen to live in the quiet little back street neighborhood in Kennebunk must think about the sudden influx of people with binoculars and cameras. People who stand in the middle of the street looking up into the trees and poke their binos and lenses into back yards…serious expectant people most of the time…but also excited, highly animated…obviously joyful people from time to time. They must look out their windows and wonder what in the world they are missing. Even if they see the Robin flock, which is pretty hard to miss, they are unlikely to pick out the one odd bird among them. And I am sure not a few of them are already tired of strangers, and strange behavior, on their streets.
I have thought before this about how much birding is like a religion…a fellowship of the initiated and the aware…a community with a common focus and a common language…a shared source of joy. I first started looking for the Tanager because I observed obvious birder behavior on my drive up my street and stopped to find out what was going on. I knew I was missing something and had to find out what it was.
I would like to have a faith so strong some day that people who saw my obvious excitement and joy in living would wonder what they were missing. Someday. And more than that, I hope that every time I find myself as far from my spiritual home as the Western Tanager is from his physical one, I will find a flock of Robins of the faith who know where the food is. 🙂
Happy Sunday!
Winter Light. Figures in the Foreground. Happy Sunday.
The local beach, Christmas Day. Sarah and Erin.
The rain is back in Southern Maine this morning, but this shot is from our short walk on the beach on Christmas Day.
It is only in winter that I realize how far north we are in Maine. The mid-day shadows are so long. The sun glances off and you have to stand in it for minutes to begin to feel its warmth. Even the waves and footprints on the beach are molded with shadow. And the sea itself is churned to froth and foam, white sea butter on the beach, by the winter storm just past…the storm that stills sits on the horizon to the north. Here, two of my daughters are caught trying to catch the scene. Sarah shields her eyes against the light reflected from the sea. It is so clear you can see Cape Arundel on the horizon ten miles north, past both Great Head and Lords Point. Even without snow there is no mistaking the Maine’s north winter light.
And it was Christmas day, when, if you let the spirit in, we are all family…all family with all that lives…everyone and everything…embraced in the love of the creator made real in flesh. We are all caught, figures in the foreground in winter light, trying to take in the glory of creation, the churning sea of being and meaning…while being touched by it, molded by it, reminded that we are part of it…one with it…included, embraced, cherished, free. Free to enjoy, to rejoice, to celebrate…to walk on the beach in winter light and share the love.
Like these words themselves, it might not quite make sense…but the meaning is unmistakable.
Happy Sunday!
Mighty Hunter: Happy Sunday!
Green Heron. Anhinga Boardwalk, Everglades NP
As I posted before, Roy Halpin and I spent 30 minutes or more, observing and photographing this Green Heron hunting tiny fish (and a few caterpillars) only a few feet from the Anhinga Boardwalk at Royal Palm Visitor Center, Everglades National Park. We were well above the bird’s eyelevel, on the boardwalk above it, and it appeared to be totally unaware of us. With that much time, I was able to frame the bird in just about every imaginable way…including this tight portrait of one very intent bird. The Florida winter light and the long zoom capture such a lot of detail in this image: from the intricate and highly various structure and subtle iridescent colors of the feathers, to the hard textures of the folded leg and the extended beak, to the light refracted in the lens of the eye. So much to see! So much to appreciate. And that is without the tension, the drama, captured in the pose.
It is Sunday, and several more spiritual thoughts inspired by this image and this experience are competing for my attention. None of them are revolutionary :). I, personally, need a creator, working in love, and with great inventiveness, to explain this vision of bird…beyond the aesthetics of the design, which are simply too wonderful not to exclaim, there is the unique and supremely intense and focused life of the hunting bird…the pattern of its being and how it lives. I see no room for chance in any aspect of Green Heron. I see intent. I see intelligence. I see love. I am compelled to give thanks. I am compelled to worship. As someone said, if I had not already met God in the living presence of his Son, I would be forced to invent a God to explain the Green Heron. While I fully accept that there are others who see the universe and life differently than I do, I can not claim to understand it. To me, loving creation is so self-evident that it sweeps all my objections aside…and I do have objections, especially to many of the things that are done in the name of religion and of God…but they are irrelevant in the face of the Creator I encounter in Jesus and in the Green Heron…my objections do not diminish, can not diminish, what is so evidently real and so evidently present.
The heart is a mighty hunter. I believe that in the end, we have to be able to love creation…if for no other reason than that creation so clearly loves us. That is the message of Christmas. In Christ, in the baby born, God enables us to fully love. How can we not bow down before the mighty hunting heart of the Creator God? Such magnificent intent. Such wonderful love. Such a gift. Happy Sunday, and Merry Christmas.