Posts in Category: prairie
Somewhere high plains Kansas
Somewhere in southwest Kansas.
My daughter picked me up at the Airport car rental counter in Pittsburgh on Thursday morning. We drove into the City to pack the van, and then headed out across country on her move to Santa Fe NM. She drove the interstates until just after mid-night to just short of Topeka Kansas, then we tried, without much success, to get a couple of hours of sleep at a rest stop. By 4 I was driving, and dawn found us out on the back roads of Kansas cutting down across the southwest corner headed for the narrow slice of Oklahoma and then on into New Mexico to hit the Interstate again about 200 miles from Santa Fe. Since we were on a tight schedule (having to do with the rented van), we did not stop very often, and I developed my technique of rolling down the window and shooting off an in-camera HDR of the passing prairie. It should not have worked, since were generally traveling over 60mph when I did it…but the Sony managed to make sense of the three exposures and, most of the time, pull them together into an acceptable image. Amazing technology.
And the prairie sky put on an irresistible show for us…with huge clouds in the morning and then something of interest all the way across Kansas and Oklahoma. I saw this cluster of trees on the horizon and the plume of cloud above it just in time to get the window down and grab the shot. In Lightroom processing, I cropped out the motion blurred foreground, which left me with, I think, a very satisfying image. (We did stop several times for more studied photography. I will post a link to my trip album when I get home.)
Northern Blazing Star: Happy Sunday!
I scootered out to the Kennebunk Plains yesterday, since it was an amazing summer day in Southern Maine, to see if, by any chance, the Northern Blazing Star was coming on to full bloom. I saw a few plants blooming on the south side of the highway a week ago, but only just a few. The main mass of Blazing Star is on the north side of the road, in the bigger section of the plains, but the plants on the south side always bloom earlier. I am not sure why. Alas, even on the south side, the Blazing Star is far from full bloom. And it looks to be a good year for Blazing Star. The plants are full of flower heads and the stands are particularly lush compared to last year. As it happens, I will probably miss the best bloom this year. i have only one more Saturday before I am off for several weeks of travel. This time next week I will be doing my final packing for a trip to Virginia for meetings, and then, as soon as I get back, I will be packing for two weeks of Bird Fairs, product testing, and birding in England, Germany, and Holland. And the Blazing Star will be going on without me 🙁
There is nothing quite like the Blazing Star show on the Kennebunk Plains in a good year. The intense purple of the thistle like flower heads crowds out the greens and browns of the grasses and fills the foreground of any view. Bees and butterflies feed on the pollen and nectar, and dragonflies hunt the smaller insects attracted to the Blazing Star. It is a lovely and lively show. Not to mention intensely beautiful! You can get at least a hit of it in these early shots.
Samsung Smart Camera WB250F. Macro and Rich Tone Mode. Processed in PicSay Pro on the Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone.
And for the Sunday Thought. The Blazing Star show is all the more precious for being brief, rare, and endangered. The stands on the Kennebunk Plains are one of the last strongholds of the plant in New England. It is one of fire dependent plants of open grasslands…grasslands kept open by regular wildfire…or in the case of the Kennebunk Plains…by carefully controlled burns that simulate the wildfire cycle. There is not much of that habitat left in New England. And the flowers bloom only a few weeks in August, when there isn’t, in fact, much else in bloom.
In a way the Blazing Star bloom is like a moment of true spiritual awareness. Such moments are precious partially because they too are brief, rare, and in this very material world, always endangered. Blazing Star needs wildfire to sweep the plains clear of the thatch of dead grasses, stubble, and aging blueberry plants, and the invasive saplings of pine and birch, poplar and maple. What do you suppose is the spiritual equivalent…the spiritual wildfire? Perhaps we all need something to clear the thatch and stubble and invasive saplings that would choke out the Blazing Stars of our spiritual awareness.
Might this be a spark?
Vesper Sparrow: North Dakota
My last field trip at the Potholes and Prairies Birding Festival in Carrington North Dakota was a small van trip with just a few of us on Sunday. It provided some of the best bird photo ops of the trip. It was, as I say, a small van, and the driver was the leader of the trip and an avid and skilled birder, so we tended to stop for birds that a bus would have whipped right on buy on its way to presumed greener pastures and scheduled stops. It was all very relaxed, but it the course of the day we pulled up beside a lot of birds, and stopped long enough for some pics. Even if we could not get out of the van, I was often able to shoot across and out the open window of the driver’s side. For this Vesper Sparrow, when the van was not well placed for a driver’s side shot, I opened my door and stood up, hanging out, clinging somewhat precariously, and shot over the roof. Whatever works!
Canon SX50HS at 1800mm equivalent field of view. My usual modifications to Program. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity and sharpness.
Prairie Grasses
Somewhere out towards Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge from Carrington North Dakota, we stopped here in the early light to look for Upland Sandpipers and whatever else we could find. This is not native prairie grasses…it is a mixture of timothy and blue, but that does not diminish the beauty of the prairie morning.
Samsung Galaxy S4 in Rich Tone / HDR mode. Processed in PicSay Pro on the phone.
Prairie Wildflowers
Spring on the Prairies of North Dakota, like spring all across the US, was late this year. Flowers that were in full bloom when I was in North Dakota last year, were not even in bud this year. The season is 10 days to two weeks behind. Even so there were many flowers blooming on the prairie.
This is White Onion. It only grows a few inches tall and is easy to miss in the much taller grasses around it. It is an actual onion, with a small swelling on the root that has a delicate onion odor and taste… more like chives that actual onion.
Then you have the Puccoons. Hoary followed by Fringed.
And to finish off the yellows, this is Wallflower, with a Hover Fly in attendance.
And of course, no post on Prairie wildflowers would be complete without Prairie Smoke. First the actual flowers (which really shows how late the spring is) and then the seed hears from which the plant takes its name.
All with the Canon SX50HS with my usual modifications to Program. Macro at either 215mm or 25mm plus 1.5x tel-converter. Processed in Lightroom.
Wide on the Prairie
The folks at Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge are justly proud to have been chosen for one of 20 NEON sites spread across the country. NEON is the National Ecological Observatory Network which has ambitious plans to collect ecological data across a broad spectrum, and across the whole continent to help with future policy decisions. See the informative article on Wiki.
This was taken on a stormy North Dakota day from the newly built installation on a ridge overlooking the native and reseeded prairies of Chase Lake. The raised metal boardwalk is to avoid human contact with the soil, which might effect some of their measurements. The image itself is a sweep panorama with the Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone camera. Processed on the phone with PicSay Pro.
Prairie Ramble. Potholes and Prairies.
There is no where like the high drift prairies of North Dakota. Yesterday we took a ramble on the prairie. The Prairie Ramble field trip at the Potholes and Prairies Birding Festival. This is the School Sections at Chase National Wildlife Refuge…a square mile of unbroken prairie which has been grazed regularly (a good thing as we learned from the Chase NWR Manager during the trip…grazing is needed for the health of native prairie plants and wildlife, especially in the absence of regular prairie fires).
Samsung Galaxy S4 in Rich Tone/HDR mode. Processed in PicSayPro, and then finally in Lightroom.
Yellow-headed Blackbird: Potholes and Prairies
There are probably a lot more exciting birds on the high drift prairies of North Dakota than the Yellow-headed Blackbird, but the fact is that North Dakota is about the only place I see them anymore…and there is no bird more striking than the YHBB. Males were defending territory at our last stop on the Drift Prairie Field Trip at the Potholes and Prairies Birding Festival yesterday, and I got my fill of them (for this year).
Canon SX50HS. My usual adjustments to straight program. 2400mm equivalent field of view (1200 plus 2x digital tel-extenter). f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 250. Processed in Lightroom.
Fall Weather on the Kennebunk Plains
As I mentioned yesterday, we have been having a rainy fall so far. On my Sunday, unbrella-packing, photoprowl, I swung by the Kennebunk Plains to see if there was any drama in the sky or any color in the maples. You can probably see a very little bit of color in the far tree-line, but at least the sky did not disappoint. The view over the plains and into the clouds, side on, so to speak, revealed a lot more character than the solid grey blanket overhead.
I exposed for the sky, mostly, by metering high and recomposing…and then brought the foreground up in Lightroom. This is a technique that works well with the Canon sensors, which hold a lot of detail in underexposed areas. Besides my usual Lightroom processing (see the page link above), I used a Graduated Filter Effect from the bottom to add brightness and clarity to the grasses, and visually balance the exposure against the sky.
I really like the layered in light clouds and the foreground provides just enough texture for balance. The tallish stalks are what is left of the Northern Blazing Star.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/640th @ ISO 125. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness, and as above.
Tiny Flowers on the Kennebunk Plains
This might not look like a macro, but it is. The flowers are presented at close to twice life size (unless you are viewing this on a phone). They were growing in clumps of low leafless branches the last week in September down among the taller grasses and left-over Blazing Star stems on the Kennebunk Plains (a sand plain prairie or heath remnant in Southern Maine). They have woody stems, so I am thinking some kind of very small shrub rather than a wildflower. As you may have noticed, they have resisted identification so far. The second shot shows more of the stem and growth pattern, and the 3rd and 4th show the massed effect of the clumps.
It is not any of the common heath berries: blue (low or high-bush), bear, cran, or huckle, and it is not a heather, as they all have bell like flowers which do not open to show five distinct petals like these. I would guess this a member of the rose family, but I can’t get any closer than that. Any help would be appreciated.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. The macro shot is 24mm macro plus 1.5x digital tel-converter function. f4 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 160.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.