Daily Archives: April 28, 2025
Nature through new eyes.
One of the things I always hope for when I am out with my camera is an experience of the other. Especially in wildlife, from chipmunks to wolves to bison, and bears and elk and pika I am never more aware of the other than when eye to eye with some wild thing. And I never feel that they are in my world. I am always aware of being in their world, at least for that moment, and it is totally alien to me…totally other. I am aware that behind those eyes there is world that I will never see and never know. A world in which I am just a creature…hopefully neither food nor threat…just something different in the day. And yet it is God that looks back at me in those eyes. I see the creator in all creation…the abundance and variety of ways of being that I will never know…and I am in awe. Our natural response to the other is either fear or worship. I just confident enough of the overwhelming love of God to lean always toward worship, even when a wolf walks up on me and pops over the ridge 25 feet way. That experience of the worshipful other, the awe-full other is just a taste of the experience we encounter in God. Seeing the other in nature, I believe, conditions our hearts, our eyes, to be able to see the otherness of God, and not to fear…to lean always toward worship. But then, maybe it is the other way around. However it works, I look forward to every encounter with the other.
White Honduran Tent-making Bats
White Honduran Tent-making Bats: Frog Heaven, Sarapiqui, Costa Rica, March 2025 — There are two species of Tent-making Bats in Costa Rica. White and Brown. The Whites are called “Honduran” from where they were first studied, but they are common throughout Central America. Tent-making bats, as the name might suggest, eat away at the spines of broad leaved plants so that the leaves collapse into a tent, where the bats roost while not hunting. It was just beginning to get dark when our guide at Frog Heaven took us to see them, so they would have been out and away any time. Generally you have to get way down low to see up under the leaf, but these had found a leaf well above our heads…the easiest Tent-making Bats I have ever photographed. Sony a6700. Tamron 50-400 at 127mm equivalent. Aperture Preferred at f5.6. By the light of the guide’s flashlight. Processed in Photomator and PictureQuality.