Michael Durham Photography - www.DurmPhoto.com

Silver-haired bat (Lasionycteris noctivagans)

2008-07-02T16:16:00.000-07:00

I have worked with many different species of bats through the years and there are some species that can be challenging to distinguish from one another. Primarily, the small myotis species can look very similar - however, as I spend more time with bats it becomes clear that most are uniquely interesting (such as my favorite the spotted bat). One such bat is the silver-haired bat:

Their name is derived from the frosty patch of pelage that runs along their back. There can be considerable variation in adult fur color and the "silver hair" is most visible in the darker individuals.

I have come across these bats on many occasions, but have found it frustrating to try and get good images of them. Mostly, I think, its their contrarian personality. When I try to get portraits they fly away. When I try to get flight shots, they decide to remain on their perch. No other bat has ever given me such a difficult challenge when trying to get images.

Yet they have a lot of personality - and an expressive face.

I finally found a silver-haired bat that was a willing subject - thanks to Barb Ogaard, a bat specialist and rehabilitator. This little bat was a fat, happy, and just getting out of rehab. And she was more than willing to exercise her wings in preparation for her upcoming release back into the wild.

Rock Art Of The First People

2008-06-21T21:59:00.000-07:00

My grandfather was a member of the Confederated Tribes and Bands Of The Yakama Nation, but strangely we did not discuss my native american heritage much. He was half Cherokee and abandoned by his father at a young age. He grew up in a time when a native american man would struggle to find a good job and I think he learned not to mention it. He had the olive/tanned skin of the tribe, but his blue eyes were enough to throw off suspicion of his lineage.

It was later in life that he began to celebrate the pride of his bloodline, and he would occasionally tell me stories of the 'First People'. These were the fables that often explained the geology of the landscape, or the behavior of animals with a rich mixture wit and character.

I'm not sure if this is the origin of my fascination with the scattered bits of rock art that survive in the West, or it just an appreciation for the deep history of they represent. Nonetheless, when I see a gallery of ancient rock art I feel instantly connected to the past, and I try to imagine the man or woman that worked the surface of a rock to imbue it with meaning. Perhaps the meanings are practical (such as a warning or a marker indicating the direction of good fishing) or magical (a prayer for good hunting) but time has removed our understanding.

The work seen here are all from the Columbia River Gorge. Some are from well hidden galleries that have mostly survived by their difficult locations.

Others are famously accessible, and have survived attempts at vandalism and defacement.

I was guided to this (below) remarkable pictograph/petroglyph by a geologist who asked that I never reveal the location. It has the most striking and preserved color that I have seen in Columbia River Gorge rock art.

Much of the rock art is believed to have been etched into the rock between 1000 and 3000 years ago. Some places have whole galleries of work that were probably worked on for generations.

There was a famously rich collection of indigenous rock art in "Petroglyph Canyon" along the shores of the Columbia River. The entire canyon was flooded by the construction of The Dalles Dam in 1957. However, in the months before the water was to rise, the Army Corps Of Engineers removed some of the most interesting and complex pieces and placed them in storage until 2004 when the "Temani Pesh-wa" trail (also "written on rock" trail) was created in Columbia Hills State Park on the Washington side of the Gorge. Below are a three examples from the trail.

Then there is the legend of "She Who Watches" or "Tsagaglalal". The trail that leads to this remarkable example of rock art is now closed except to guided tours because of problems with vandals. I heard about this famous petroglyph as a child when my grandfather told me of it. I have hiked in to see it several times, but a few weeks ago I brought my wife and daughter along on a guided trek. One woman who joined the group had been wanting to see Tsagaglalal for years and she had traveled from the mid-west just to do so.

There are several stories behind She Who Watches. The most widely told is as follows: A woman had a house where the village of Nixluidix was later built. She was chief of all who lived in the region. That was a long time before Coyote came up the river and changed things and people were not yet real people. After a time Coyote in his travels came to this place and asked the inhabitants if they were living well or ill. They sent him to their chief who lived up on the rocks, where she could look down on the village and know what was going on.
Coyote climbed up to the house on the rocks and asked "What kind of living do you give these people? Do you treat them well or are you one of those evil women?" "I am teaching them to live well and build good houses," she said.
"Soon the world will change," said Coyote, "and women will no longer be chiefs." Then he changed her into a rock with the command, "You shall stay here and watch over the people who live here."
All the people know that Tsagaglalae sees all things, for whenever they are looking at her those large eyes are watching them.
-"Stone Age on the Columbia River" by Emory Strong, 1959

Oregon Spotted Frogs

2008-05-25T17:38:00.001-07:00

I am sick of the rain. I grew up in Oregon and can revel in the wet weather, but this late winter and spring have been wetter than most, and I'm tired of the gloom.

In one of the few lucky breaks of sun that we have experienced lately, I made my way up to Mount Adams for a survey of oregon spotted frog egg clusters. Spotted frogs have declined in recent years due to a variety of reasons – some obvious (non-native frogs like bull frogs, wetland development) and some mysterious. They are not that easy to spot, but they are usually just under the surface so polarized sunglasses can help a lot.

Below, biologist Howard Browers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service looks for egg masses

I had a chance to use my home-made underwater robot camera to grab a shot of the eggs just below the surface.

The the embryos develop faster in warm temperatures and on a sunny day the eggs nearest the top will grow faster than those at the bottom.

A gelatinous sticky mass holds the eggs together, and the embryos within the egg appear black.

Occasionally you will even see an actual frog such as the juvenile being held by research scientist Mark Hayes.

The population of oregon spotted frogs in this lake refuge has declined precipitously in the last few years for reasons that are still unclear.

Finding Bats

2008-03-27T21:48:00.000-07:00

Bats are not easy to find. They spend their nights in the air hunting for insects, and as day approaches they will find the most inaccessible places to wedge themselves into. For many species, this day time roost might be in a new spot every day. This is a problem if you want to study bats, and biologists are finding a variety of creative ways to locate bats.

Enter the Bat Dog.

CJ, a chocolate lab working as a trained wildlife detector dog, tries to find bat roosting sites along with his handler, wildlife technician Elisabeth Mering in the Coconino National Forest in Arizona. Note the gps unit that will track CJ's evey move.

Once CJ detects the sent of bat guano, he will alert.

Here, tucked under the bark of a dead ponderosa tree is a maternity colony of allen's lappet-browed bats. It looks like chaos, but there are about 17 bats crammed together in this tiny spot.

As night falls, they slowly pop out from under the bark and head out into the night.

Little is known about this rare species.

Photomerge and the Forest

2008-03-11T19:13:00.000-07:00

Photoshop has been a trusty piece of software for me since the 90's, and through it s various incarnations I have diligently learned its new features and workflow improvements. One thing I have always struggled with, however, is the "photomerge" feature. Even when I would carefully shoot a scene for stitching together later, I often found that "photomerge" would not quite line up edges correctly and I would end up doing the work by hand using layers.

Not anymore. Photoshop CS3 has made a startling improvement in the algorythm that combines mutliple images into one, large final scene. One of the great challenges for "photomerge" was any busy, complex scene that had complicated tones, textures and color - like a forest scene.

I dug around in my archive for images I had shot for "photomerge" but had never actually combined successfully - nor had I taken the time to do so by hand.

An example: The History Channel sent me to Malaysia last year. The rainforests on the peninsula are hot, steamy and ancient places with asian elephants and tigers hidden in the thickets. Like any forest, it can be quite challenging to make interesting compositions. Add three or four leeches that unavoidably find their way onto your body, and you have even more distractions. I never could get these images to stitch together until CS3.

More recently I ventured into the Columbia River Gorge during an ice storm.

The contrast between the frozen forest and the tropical jungle is interesting.

While the "panorama" is the traditional method for composing stitched images, I often will also make four or more exposures into a larger square. These become impressively detailed image files.

Again CS3 made the process painless and gave very satisfying results.

Learning By Failure

2008-02-12T17:31:00.000-08:00

I have been doing this kind of work long enough to know better. It seems like a sure-fire, can't miss photo opportunity. And then, It doesn't work out quite like I imagined.

In this particular instance, I was primarily defeated by weather. The elk carcass mentioned in the previous post was certainly attracting predators, as this wet and bedraggled red-tailed hawk can attest to.

However, the buckets of water falling from the sky combined with high winds meant that water was finding its way into bits of equipment that it normally doesn't. Nothing was damaged, and these camera systems have survived pretty harsh weather before - but several connecting cords were shorted out by water, and a flash sync cable was disconnected by the swaying of tree limbs during high gusts of wind.

Is too bad because there were several nocturnal visitors to the elk, but the cameras recorded black frames. bummer.

I need to re-think my cord and connector arrangement.

When the system failed, it made a last gasp by recording an image in the middle of a nocturnal rain shower.

Please forgive the morbidity of the subject.

Winter Kill

2008-01-31T19:31:00.000-08:00

It has been a stormy and cold winter along the coast. I can't be sure if it was the hard time of year, or disease that killed this juvenile, bull elk – but it does not appear that a predator killed it.

Now it is time for the scavengers. When I arrived, it was obvious that they had already started to feast on the carcass. Probably coyotes and raccoons at night, and hawks and eagles by day. In between hail storms, I set-up three, motion-sensing cameras in the muck and mud around the elk to photograph the scavengers.

It will be interesting to see what the cameras record.

Stay tuned.

Coho Run

2008-01-13T12:23:00.000-08:00

Coho Salmon have just ended their run to spawn in the various streams and tributaries along the Pacific Coast. Neal Maine and Katie Voelke from The North Coast Land Conservancy were kind enough to give me access, and guide me, to a stream on their property where the Coho spend the last few days of their life breeding and building redds for their eggs.

The stream flowed through a dark patch of forest, where the fish chose to spawn. It is surprising to see such large fish in such small water.

Once they return to fresh water from the ocean their bodies change rapidly. First they turn red, and then very quickly they begin to deteriorate. Males battle for access to eggs while females vigorously fan oxygen over the egg beds. All the while they get more scraped and torn up.

Despite constant rain and gloomy light, I spent hours watching the coho before I could figure out how to take photographs. This was an interesting opportunity to use my remote underwater camera. I controlled the camera position from the stream bank, and could observe the camera's viewfinder using a video monitor. I overpowered the darkness of the forest by using a radio remote (submerged with the camera) to trigger flash units stationed above stream. High water and storm debris made the water slightly cloudy.

But still, I'm pretty happy with resulting images.

The eggs will hatch in Spring - long after the adults have given their lives for the cause.

Cute Little Long-Eared Mouse

2007-12-11T17:41:00.000-08:00

My friend BPaul over at the Institute Of Jurassic Technology blog pointed out this little story on the BBC about an An "extraordinary" desert creature has been caught on camera for what scientists believe is the first time. The long-eared jerboa from the Gobi Desert

Well its not as quite as cute, but Oregon has the Pinyon Mouse - a long-eared mouse that likes to eat juniper berries and requires rocky habitat to survive. I photographed this little fellow near Clarno, not far from OMSI's Hancock Field Station.

Incidentally, this is one of the last photographs I took using film.

Tree Farm Color

2007-12-03T22:09:00.000-08:00

The storms currently pounding Oregon and Washington have blasted off the remaining fall leaves giving trees the bare look of Winter. Just a few weeks ago however, I was captivated by the fall leaves at a hybrid poplar tree farm.

These are fast growing trees that are ideal for paper production. If they are processed quickly, the produce a brilliant paper with minimal bleaching.

A Rare And Extraordinary Creature

2007-11-05T20:03:00.000-08:00

Years ago I heard a biologist describe an encounter they had with a spotted bat, and I remember how impressed I was by the sense of wonder and awe that I heard in that description. Perhaps it is necessary to spend one's professional life in the study of bats to get a sense of the mythical status surrounding these creatures, but I was immediately impressed with the description, and how unique and rare the spotted bat is among bats.

Spotted bats were once considered to be the rarest of North American mammals. Up until the 1990's very few had ever been collected, and most of these were dead or mummified remains. A few live spotted bats were seen, one at the entrance to a cave. However, it turns out that spotted bats are one of the few bats who's echolocation call can be easily heard by the human ear. Once this fact was discovered, biologists eventually found that, while they are still not a common species, they can be detected in many habitats where their presence was completely unknown before.

They fly high and fast in the darkest hours of the night, and they have an uncanny ability to avoid being captured using specialized techniques commonly employed by biologists who study bats. To this day, capturing one is still a rare event, and there are bat biologists who, despite years in the field, have never seen one.

I am still slightly stunned that I was along when a graduate student, working near the rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, caught four spotted bats over the course of two nights - even though he was trying to capture an entirely different species. This gave me a unique opportunity to get some detailed photographs of the the bat.

Below you can see the pattern of three distinctive spots that give the bat its name.

A photograph cannot really show the amazing amount of character these bats have.

Bats are still largely mysterious creatures - many of their habits and roosting sites remain completely unknown. However, technology is just now giving biologists the ability to use miniature transmitters to track these tiny mammals. The female bat, seen in these images, was lactating - meaning that she had a pup hidden away somewhere. Because this capture presented a rare opportunity to track a mother spotted bat, she was outfitted with a transmitter and set free (the transmitter will fall off after a few days).

The next day a plane was chartered, and Grand Canyon National Park gave special permission to fly into the Canyon with radio telemetry gear to see if the day roost of this bat could be located. After many hours of searching, the bat's location was detected, 17 miles from the capture site the night before, in a crevice in one of the sheer cliff walls of the Grand Canyon. Presumably, she returned to nurse her young pup after a night of hunting insects in the warm Arizona night.

Unexpected - A Flash Of Virescent Color

2007-10-14T06:48:00.000-07:00

For nearly three years I have been on a quest to photograph the virescent green metallic bee. They are not particularly uncommon, but they are small and quick - and despite my unusual attention to the small denizens of the insect world, I have only caught glimpses of them.

I had hoped to catch a photo of the tiny creature with my high-speed camera system - which requires considerable planning and time. Good fortune smiled upon me, however, in the middle of an assignment to photograph honey bees.

So I had all of the complex equipment that I use to take high-speed images set-up and ready to go when I spied the magnificent emerald flash of a green metallic bee among a field of flowers buzzing with insects.

I continue to find it remarkable how life on such a small scale can be so vibrant and intense.

This bee also reminds me of an even smaller insect that I photographed last year - the cuckoo wasp. This little insect has an intensely green exoskeleton that is also extremely thick and tough. It must be durable because part of its life cycle requires it to sneak into the heart of a bee hive and hijack a larval cell for its own use. If it is discovered, it will need a thick hide to survive the attacking bees.

Fire Escape

2007-09-03T18:25:00.000-07:00

I decided to actually take a vacation with the family for a week at Black Butte Ranch. Photography was not my primary objective - instead my goal is to have fun and relax.

However a large forest fire managed to take "relax" out of our vacation, and we had to pack-up and be prepared to evacuate "at a moments notice". Smoke blocked out the sun and scattered ash everywhere.

We left before the official evacuation began. Of course, I took a photo.

Bats in the old mine

2007-08-25T18:47:00.000-07:00

I have spent most of the Summer photographing bats - including a trip through the Southwest in July. Along the way I met some wonderful people, and managed to also get some pretty cool images of bats. Some of the bats were extraordinarily rare and beautiful, and I hope to post some of these images after I have had the opportunity to do some editing.

However I just returned from Prineville, where an unexpected opportunity presented itself. I had traveled to the Maury mountain area of the Ochoco National Forest to photograph bats drinking from an old water trough. Unfortunately, this was a fruitless effort, but it turns out that an old, abandoned mercury sulfide mine was nearby with hundreds townsend's big-eared bats roosting in the interior.

The mine looked like a set piece from Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom. There were little rail trackways, buckets full of cinnabar, 55 gallon oil drums, and old timbers shoring up the walls and the roof. All of this was mostly untouched since abandoned in the 1950's. I could not really get many of these elements into the photographs along with the bats, but I did try to capture some of the ambience of the place with the lighting and composition.

By the way, I did obtain permission to photograph this site from the local biologist and had a bat survey team along to collect data at the same time.

Close-up

These bats are really cool looking with their big ears and large wing span. While you can't see great numbers in the images, there were actually over one hundred bats flying about the interior once the sun set.

Chasing Bats In The Ochocos

2007-06-23T12:21:00.000-07:00

All last week I was out working with the Forest Service and BLM bat survey teams in the Ochoco National Forest.

The bat crew at work.

Bats are very fast, nocturnal flyers that can be seen all around the northwest at dusk, but determining species can be very, very challenging. The biologists that specialize in bats will typically catch a few bats, measure ears and wing arm length, record their vocalizations and do their best to determine species. The bat is released a few minutes later. They will collect this information for years to try and identify population trends, and measure how healthy bat colonies are.

Photographing bats can be quite challenging as well, but between the capture and the recording of data, I will spend a few minutes to try and photograph the bat, and if I am lucky - I can get a cool photo or two. The detail I am able to record of the bats in flight can actually help researchers identify the bat species, and the biologists use the images as part of their reports and published literature.

A western long-eared bat (Myotis evotis)

Yuma myotis

In the time exposure image below, a light is temporarily placed on the bat so that researchers can record the high-frequency calls of the bat. The light will fall off in a few minutes.

A Near Miss

2007-05-27T12:54:00.000-07:00

I made a trek into the Wind River area in Washington to do some scouting for an idea that has been percolating for a while. I am specifically looking for large, old logs that have fallen across streams to become natural bridges. Wouldn't it be interesting to see what kind of animals use these crossings, especially when the water is tumultuous? For this purpose I brought along a remote camera that would photograph any creature that made the crossing, and I left in place for 22 days to see what kind of activity I could photograph.

These images are not particularly good, but they give me some interesting ideas about how I might approach the project. I was surprised at the number of small creatures that used the log. I have combined two separate images, to show this rabbit and bushy-tailed woodrat in transit. I also have numerous images of tiny deer mice running along the log as well.

I was especially surprised by the appearance of a mountain lion on these frames. Again, these are not great photos by any means, but I love the idea of a wild mountain lion, also called a cougar, puma and panther – crossing a stream called 'Panther Creek'. The cat jumped onto the log from the stream bank, and I assume he just sauntered across in search of deer. I am always thrilled when I photograph a wild mountain lion because they are so secretive, and so rarely photographed in the wild

Too bad I got the back-end, otherwise it might have been an interesting shot!

Remote underwater camera

2007-05-01T14:54:00.000-07:00

I had an idea recently, while observing steelhead trout jump up a waterfall, that it would be cool to put a camera in the water and capture some images from a unique perspective. Usually in this situation, one simply puts a camera in a marine housing and gets in the water to snap a few shots.

However, the water was too swift and too shallow for this to work, and the presence of a person in the water would likely scare the fish off for a quite a while.

My idea was to put a camera in a water proof box on an extension arm with a video feed from the viewfinder of the camera and a remote hand control to trigger the camera. In this manner I could observe the video screen and snap the camera whenever a fish came into view. Sounds like a solid idea to me. Does anyone make such a contraption? No.

So I built my own. And it works!

A local fish hatchery let me test it out in a pool with rainbow trout fry. Easy targets for sure, but I simply wanted to test the function of the camera and see if everything worked. I could clearly observe the fish in the camera viewfinder, and easily trigger the shutter when a good shot happened. Cool!

I am excited to have this interesting tool in my bag of tricks.

Fun With Chickens

2007-03-31T09:37:00.000-07:00

The freshly hatched chicks arrived home with my wife and daughter on Thursday. We had been toying with the idea of having urban chickens for some time, and this last weekend we got the chicken coop and chicken yard built, and set up a brooder in the lower bathroom. My daughter loves them, and spends a fair bit of the day hovering over the brooder or holding them. Each has been given a name - mumble, gidget and sylvia.

I could not pass on the opportunity to have a bit of photo fun with the little darlings, and set about creating a few images that would be fun and marketable.

Not many people would guess that as a photographer doing work in the field of natural history, that I would necessarily possess the skills of a studio photographer. The truth is, however, that I made my living in commercial photography for many years, and the techniques I learned in studio photography have served me well, very well, in the transition to nature photography.

My goal was to do something that my daughter would enjoy doing with me, and create images that would communicate a simple idea in a fun way.

For each of the images below, I actually photographed the chicks first and then separately photographed the egg shells arranged just the way I wanted. The elements were combined digitally for the final composition. The overlap of wispy feathers into the eggshell in the photo with the blue background was especially challenging to get right.

I have about fifty other ideas to try, but I will never get to all of them before the chicks are grown!

The Evolution Of A Photo Blog

2007-03-18T16:57:00.000-07:00

When I initially began writing in blog form, it was an exercise to see if I could write with any discipline on a regular basis about the work I was doing concurrently. My schedule of late, has been demanding, and I have spent a fair bit of time on the road and not much time writing about the work. But I have also decided that in its current form, that the blog is actually kind of boring. What to do?

For starters, I plan to write more about the business side of nature photography, as well as the production side. But more importantly, I hope to write about the ideas surrounding the photos and give some context as to why I have pursued certain images.

Over the past few days I have been going to Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge in Washington for an assignment. A local corporation needed a photo, and I was hired to get it. While I won't divulge the specifics of the assignment, (It is still a work in progress) it is rare that I actually have reason to go into a wildlife refuge. Don't get me wrong, refuges are cool and can provide great photo opportunities, it is just that so many other photographers shoot in them that the resulting images don't typically have great market value.

But this equation changes when I am actually getting paid to be there in the first place. I spent three mornings, A Thur, Fri and Saturday driving the auto route with various telephoto lenses at the ready. On Saturday morning I was expecting to see a lot more visitors driving the loop, but I was expecting birders, families, and of course, a few photographers. I was surprised to see however, that photographers outnumbered other visitors by considerable numbers. Not just casual shooters either – a number of very expensive telephoto lenses were visible jutting out car windows.

Which brings to mind the sheer volume of images created in the nature photography field every day. There is an endless supply for a photo buyer – so how does a professional stay in business in the face of so much competition? The answer for this has changed over the years. The old model, for stock photography, was to get into a big agency like Corbis and Getty, be well positioned within your agency, and reap the royalties from sales. Of course, the photography had to be top drawer, and the business was still cut throat, but a good living could be made. For many, that living has disappeared.

The internet has changed all of this. The way I see it, regardless of how many companies the major stock agencies like Getty and Corbis gobble up, they are working in a fading business model. There is no larger source of images than the internet and these companies will never be able to get into the right place, in the direction they are currently going, to actually compete against the future juggernaut of social photo sites like Flickr, and Google image search. The pace of evolution in this market has been something to behold, and it will continue to evolve quickly. The question for me is how do I take advantage of this opportunity? I have found that for myself at least, having my own on-line presence and having representation in a smaller specialized (and smart) agency is key.

A case in point, I just sold an image from an earlier blog entry to a British Company for commercial use. They found the image during a Flickr search, (which I use to host my blog images). It was nice sale. However, at this point it was blind chance. Imagine if I had the proper technique for driving photo buyers to my web site. And then, taking a step further, providing publication-ready, down-loadable files that are automatically downloaded and purchased with a credit card. This is the working goal for my new web site. www.OregonWild.com

While shooting in Ridgefield, getting paid for my knowledge and skill, I found myself wondering, how many of these other shooters were hoping to actually sell their images? How many were shooting as a relaxing pass-time? (who needs a $4000-$8000 lens for a relaxing pass-time?) When I am asked what it takes to be a professional photographer, the questions usually center around cameras, lenses, magazines and stock agencies. These are the wrong questions. I spend about 15% of my working time shooting, and the rest running my business. Without the business side, my images - regardless of how good they might be - are just pretty pictures. Lots of people can take pretty pictures, and no photo buyer has ever asked me what kind of camera and lens I use.

I captured this image Saturday morning at Ridgefield.

After photographing the heron above, I deliberately shot the space immediately to the right in a separate frame. I combined the two images later in a Photoshop to give the final photo an extremely high resolution and a panaoramic composition.

Coho salmon eggs

2007-02-21T08:44:00.000-08:00

With the generous help of Washington Fish and Wildlife I had a chance to photograph live coho salmon eggs. The eggs are transparent and the developing fish can be seen within. At this stage, 10 weeks along after spawning, most of the egg is taken by the nutrient sac, or yolk, that the young fish feeds upon.

Of course, these eggs are tiny. It is amazing that such a small egg, deposited in the cold water of a northwest river, will grow into a hardy coho salmon that will eventually make it out to the open ocean. And then years later fight its way back up stream to start the process over again. It is an astonishing feat.

New Web Site and More!

2007-01-31T20:30:00.000-08:00

The office has been my primary habitation lately, and while it is exciting to have the image catalog completely up to date, key worded, fully functional - It really isn't a very exciting post subject. However, I managed to get my new web site design up and running, and I like the look much better than the old site. http://www.oregonwild.com/. It is simple but functional. It might be painfully obvious that I built the thing myself with no actual working knowledge of web design, but it will serve for now. The image search function has yet to go online, but it should be completed in a week or so.

It is time to make submissions for 2008 calendars, and for the first time ever, I am proposing a calendar photographed entirely with the high speed camera.

The entire image gallery can be seen here: http://www.oregonwild.com/GardenCalendar/index.html

The Rat Lowdown

2007-01-10T16:32:00.000-08:00

It seems that few people appreciate rats, primarily because we tend to see them in the creepiest places. Like the sewer. Not a lovely spot unless you are pretty low on the totem pole. The sewer rat however, comes from Europe and has followed civilization around the world. They have made an art form out of living off the refuse of humans. It is probably among the least attractive members of this class of rodents. Note the lovely naked, scaly tail.

My wife, daughter and I went to see the new version of Charlotte's Web and I was surprised to see the sympathetic treatment of "Templeton" the rat. Sure he comes across as a self-centered lout, but even he eventually succumbs to the charms of Charlotte and Wilbur and spends time selflessly guarding the spider's egg sac. Templeton appears to be a European brown rat, the same species that haunts Portland's nether regions. However he has the curious habit of collecting trinkets and other curious items. This behavior is more reflective of the pack rat.
Pack rats are native to North America, and I recently photographed one in an abandoned shed in NE Oregon scurrying across a shelf with a rusty old turpentine can.

Please note the furry tail. While I wouldn't want one in my house, I think these little fellows are bit more gifted on the "cute" end of the scale. Feel free to disagree.

Angry Rattler

2007-01-04T15:31:00.000-08:00

I first spotted this rattlesnake in a horse pasture when it startled a horse – the horse then made a brief effort to stomp it to death, but wisely moved away. Then a house cat ran out from garden and began to harrass the thing. The snake went from angry to furious, and began striking at the cat – which was just quick enough to avoid getting tagged.

The snake took refuge under a rock fence brace, and I put the camera on an extension arm which was just able to fit into the hidey hole. I could see nothing, but I could hear the angry snake take offense at the intrusion. I used a remote trigger to quickly crank off a few frames and then left it in peace. Here is one of frames. The camera was outfitted with a superwide lens, so the snake is just inches from the lens.

Blue Spider Wasp

2007-01-02T17:06:00.000-08:00

I'm continuing on the wasp series of images. The wasp below looks black at first glance, but it has a deep blue exoskeleton, and a few other interesting colors on a second look. I'm not sure that this web image does the photo justice, however I did not zip up the saturation to highlight this color.

They are known for feeding live black widow spiders to their young.

Getting Close – Salmon Jump

2006-12-22T17:06:00.000-08:00

My fourth trip to try and photograph salmon jumping up a waterfall. Finally got a shot, but I think I can do better. Looks like a Coho, although this is the tale end of that run. Steelhead should be moving up the Lewis River soon.

Watching the fish I came up with an idea for submerging a digital camera into the rough water with a video feed. I would use the video feed to see where the camera is pointed and trigger it with a remote when I find something cool. It could be an interesting image, or a clever way to destroy an expensive camera. I am working like a mad professor in my workshop. More later.