Month: November 2020

Spectrum of sunset

The clouds couldn’t agree on what color to wear, or even on their floating altitude, and so they went their separate ways. Sort of. They were still loosely connected by drafts, breezes and shifting wavelengths.

The clouds wore varying soft hues, backlit by November’s setting sun. There were clouds in cream to deep blue. Some in shades of pink, yellow and gold. Amber and mauve were in the mix, and so were rose and olive. Gray clouds soared higher, as if a curtain pulled up to reveal the show below.

These weren’t the billowing, puffy clouds against the blue sky of a summer’s afternoon, or those I once looked down on in amazement from a jet plane, an endless row of pillows illuminated by a full moon.

No, these clouds had little body, like tie-dyed shirts softly swaying in the breeze. The horizon, however, was jagged, with leafless treetops and bare branches poking into the swirl of color. Crows added another contrast, that of motion.

Clouds swapped colors and partners as the sun, though out of my sight, was surely slithering further below the horizon. Then the sun gave up on this November day. But I watched until the clouds melted together in grayness, until the corn stubble faded into the neighboring alfalfa field, until the gathering darkness absorbed the branches.

I walked through the field. There was silence as dusk put away its colors, except for a whisper in the cool air, a whisper saying good night.

A hardy half-ouncer

Weighing heavy on my mind these days is a bird that weighs next to nothing. Over the next week, the black-capped chickadee will help perk up slow hours on the deer stand as small flocks of the small bird suddenly come incredibly close, pick at buds on twigs and then move on. Once a chickadee even landed on my nocked arrow. Indeed, keeping matters interesting.

The well-dressed bundle of feathered nervousness, in black, white and gray, with pale chestnut flanks, doesn’t even weigh half an ounce. I would show some nervous energy too if Mother Nature sent me into Ol’ Man Winter weighing about the same as that quarter in your pocket.

But Mother Nature provided the chickadee with feathers full of insulation. That, and its ability to shut down its body temperature at night makes the lightweight bird a heavyweight in matters of survival.

I used to think that chickadees were too high-strung, too cautious, to loiter at the platform feeder. Cardinals and finches settle in for a meal. Chickadees grab and scurry away. But I’ve learned that chickadees often hide seeds, each one in a different spot, and can remember thousands of hiding places. So they flit about in the tree limbs and bushes—their storage units—as much as they visit the feeder.

On a winter’s night the little bird is in a tree cavity, notching down its body temperature and fluffing up its feathers. A half-ounce bird with a half-ton heater. And a mighty good memory.

A shutter flush

I tried this for fun. A camera, not a gun. It was mid-September, before the leaves got deep into painting by species. I went looking for ruffed grouse.

I have hunted grouse for years with a camera slung over my back, the telephoto lens precariously swinging into branches and bumping against my back as I crossed uneven ground. On my back the camera is of no use for taking photos of grouse on the fly. The flush happens in an instant, without notice. The camera was for the occasional deer that appears or bittersweet burning orange against autumn’s blue sky.

So I went hunting with a camera to get that first ever—which I find hard to believe—photo of a grouse in flight. If you think targeting a grouse on the fly with a shotgun is hard, try it with a camera. Autofocus is sometimes too slow, or for the person behind the camera it’s too hard to get the focus dots on the rapidly fleeing target as the lens line swings across branches and brush.

I have only a handful of live ruffed grouse photos over many years of pursuing the woods chicken. They are wary, hiding before whirling away in an unnerving racket of pounding wings. Every now and then you can sneak up on one, perhaps on its drumming log, or see a young one on the road. But photographing one in flight? That’s hard.

I wanted to “shoot” the grouse by raising my camera just as I would my shotgun. So I held the camera ready and stepped into the woods. I soon flushed a grouse, but the bird was immediately into too much brush. I moved forward for the reflush, now on high alert, my eyes darting back and forth, my finger on the shutter. I kept walking slowly to avoid the pause that will send the bird into nervous flight too far ahead.

Suddenly the bird burst from the ground. It was close but immediately put a tree trunk between me and my camera. Gone again. And then the scene repeated throughout the afternoon with other birds in other places.

I had given up, but had to walk down a narrow road back to my truck. Suddenly, in the ditch with scattered low bushes and tall, tan grass stems bending with the breeze, I saw movement. My camera came up just as the grouse did, curving away over the field. Click, click, click, click. One of those clicks captured the bird in focus. Finally, I had the photo.