Akebono flowering cherry (Prunus x yedoensis ‘Akebono’) line the waterfront at Tom McCall Waterfront Park. The Steel Bridge is visible to the right. Portland, Oregon, USA, 1 April 2017.
The cherry blossoms at Portland’s Tom McCall Waterfront Park are one of the much-anticipated spring events in the city. The Akebono flowering cherry trees (Prunus x yedoensis ‘Akebono’) lining the waterfront and the Japanese American Historical Plaza were given to the city of Portland by the Japanese Grain Importers Association of Tokyo in 1990. To beat the crowds, a handful of intrepid photographers head out there before dawn.
There’s a great view across the Willamette of the distinctive glass towers of the Oregon Convention Center in East Portland.
Early morning looking across the Willamette to the Oregon Convention Center. Portland, Oregon, USA, 1 April 2017.
Before the sun rises, the park is lit by street lamps.
Akebono flowering cherry (Prunus x yedoensis ‘Akebono’). Tom McCall Waterfront Park, Portland, Oregon, USA, 1 April 2017.Akebono flowering cherry (Prunus x yedoensis ‘Akebono’). Tom McCall Waterfront Park, Portland, Oregon, USA, 1 April 2017.
No sunrise that day, but still some good views.
Cherry blossoms at Tom McCall Waterfront Park frame the glass towers of the Oregon Convention Center across the river. Portland, Oregon, USA, 1 April 2017.
My strategy for overcast days is often to overexpose and blow out the sky for a high-key look.
Akebono flowering cherry (Prunus x yedoensis ‘Akebono’). Tom McCall Waterfront Park, Portland, Oregon, USA, 1 April 2017.Akebono flowering cherry (Prunus x yedoensis ‘Akebono’). Tom McCall Waterfront Park, Portland, Oregon, USA, 1 April 2017.
You can walk over the Steel Bridge to get a view of the whole park from the east side of the river.
A distant view across the Willamette of Waterfront Park’s cherry blossoms in full bloom. Portland, Oregon, USA, 1 April 2017.
Detail of common raven wing feathers. Audubon Society of Portland, Portland, Oregon, 12 February 2017.
I’m back in Oregon for now, and last weekend I went to the Audubon Society of Portland‘s annual wildlife care center open house, which I also attended in 2014. Since 2014, Hazel the spotted owl passed away, sadly, but most of their other education birds were out to say hello, including my personal favorites, Ruby the turkey vulture and Aristophanes the common raven.
The Wildlife Care Center is the oldest and busiest wildlife rehabilitation facility in Oregon, taking in about 3,000 orphaned or injured native animals a year. The annual open house and auction provide much of their operating funds. If you’d like to bid on some great wildlife-related items and experiences and support their efforts, the 2017 Call of the Wild Auction runs online until March 6.
Finnegan is a male peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) hatched in 2000. He has a deformed foot that would prevent him from surviving in the wild.Lillie is a female American kestrel (Falco sparverius) who hatched in 2009 and was illegally raised in captivity. Due to being fed a poor diet, she has rickets and other health problems. Unfortunately, her male sibling was too sick to be rehabilitated and had to be euthanized.Jack is a male American kestrel (Falco sparverius) who hatched in 2006. He was found on the ground in an industrial area with part of his wing missing and thus cannot fly. Kestrels are one of the few raptor species that exhibit sexual dimorphism in coloration as well as size – in most raptors, the female is simply larger than the male. Jack has less striping and different colors than Lillie.Aristophanes is a male common raven (Corvus corax), hatched in 2008. He was illegally hand-raised and imprinted on humans, and several attempts to release him failed. I have been told he has wild raven friends who visit and exchange presents with him.Ruby is a female turkey vulture (Cathartes aura), hatched in 2007. She was brought in by a woman who Ruby was following around, and although her history is unknown, she was probably illegally taken from the wild and imprinted on humans. Ruby is very charming and loves to bask in the sun.Julio is a female great horned owl (Bubo virginianus), hatched in 2000. She was raised by humans and imprinted, and due to her small size, Audubon first assumed she was a male – female great horned owls are normally much bigger.
Spring crocuses at the Budai Arborétum, Budapest, Hungary. March 8, 2015.
I’ve been thinking lately about why nature photography is important to me, and I decided there’s good value in putting together illustrated narratives even if the individual photos aren’t all portfolio-worthy and the writing isn’t elegant. I often find I enjoy other people’s nature-documentary narratives more than I do technically and artistically stunning individual images. Context and story are import, and I’d like to be able to look back in a few years and remember what I saw.
The last few weeks, I’ve managed to take a few study breaks to enjoy spring a little—last Sunday I went to the Budai Arborétum, a botanic garden and arboretum attached to Corvinus University’s horticultural department. I had tried visiting last fall and got rained out, but last weekend the spring weather was lovely, although unfortunately only the lower part of the garden is open on weekends.
As always, I was hoping for some birds other than the great tits which have been the most entertaining common resident bird life all winter, but other than some very uncooperative crows, all I saw were some nearly as uncooperative Common Blackbirds (Turdus merula), a type of thrush not to be confused with North American blackbirds:
Crocuses and irises were abundantly planted in many areas, and heather was in bloom as well—a very purple effect overall.
Spring is bringing the re-emergence of insects, which makes me very happy! Firebugs (Pyrrhocoris apterus) are one of my favorites—a common but striking species, albeit extremely uncooperative photography subjects. Looking them up just now, I realized that they are also the species used in a famous (in entomological circles) accidental discovery about hormone regulation and insect life cycles.
There were also a lot of small bugs swarming in the crevices of tree bark, which at first I thought were firebug nymphs, but on a closer look, they’re not similar at all. I saw a few of these last summer, but not in these quantities, and my Google skills are failing me. If anyone knows what these are, please leave a comment and let me know!
On the way home, I stopped briefly at Feneketlen-tó (Bottomless Lake), a nearby artificial lake which is apparently home to all three introduced North American slider subspecies as well as (somewhat surprisingly) the one native European species of turtles. Alas, the native species is rather shy, and all the turtles taking advantage of the spring sunlight were sliders like this one, which is probably a yellow-bellied slider (Trachemys scripta scripta):
I do feel like my macro photography skills are very rusty after a long break—I need to spend some quality time rebuilding my flash diffuser and get some good practice as it warms up more!
A late autumn day in the Börzsöny Mountains of Hungary. November 23, 2014.
Late last November I finally got outside of Budapest for a weekend hike to the Börzsöny Mountains, led by Gábor Marx, who has been organizing hikes around Hungary (and sometimes outside) for many years. The Börzsöny Mountains are in northern Hungary, near the Slovakian border—only about an hour and a half from Budapest by car, something I confess I’m still not used to.
The end of November was definitely on the cusp between autumn and winter (albeit a very mild one, as it turned out). The trees had lost all their leaves at last, and it was chilly when we stopped moving—but still no snow, and beautiful when the sun broke through the light fog.
Coming from Colorado, Hungary’s mountains are hills, but beautiful ones, with a kind of open-understoried oak-beech forest I haven’t spent much time in. I am hoping to be able to go hiking more once spring arrives, because I am sure the forests which are lovely in winter are gorgeous in spring.
November’s hike was along the Magas-Tax – Nagy Hideg-hegy route, but I couldn’t say more about where we were exactly, as it was a bit of an adventure and dark by the time we returned.
A few photos from the hike…
There wasn’t much wildlife out, at least not that was willing to be seen by a large group (we did spook a deer), but we found a few of these huge galls on dead oak leaves. I assume they’re probably made by wasps, but if anyone knows what species they might be, I’d love to know!
A few details of flora and fungi:
The view from Nagy Hideg-hegy (“Big Cold Mountain”) before we headed back down.
An underwater diorama at the University of Oslo’s Zoological Museum, Oslo, Norway. January 6, 2014.
I spent most of my winter break visiting friends in Sweden and Norway, although due to weather and other factors, I didn’t get to do either as much nature experiencing or photography as I hoped. After visiting a friend in Bergen, I spent a day and a half in Oslo before heading home. Since the weather was gray and drizzly and I was recovering from a cold, I opted for the indoor experience of the University of Oslo’s Natural History Museum (Naturhistorisk Museum) and the greenhouses in the botanical garden. I didn’t feel like dealing with the DSLR, so these are all cell phone photos, as with my review of the Hungarian Natural History Museum last year.
The museum itself is divided into the Zoological Museum (Robert Colletts hus) and Geological Museum (W.C. Brøggers hus), and like many museums, both are a mixture of modern exhibits and more old-fashioned fare like dioramas and cases full of minerals.
The entrance of the Zoological Museum currently has a display of gorgeous white-background studio photographs of insects of Norway by Karsten Sund, some of which you can see in this article (in Norwegian). Unfortunately, while there were English summaries for the photograph captions, the introduction was not translated, so the overall theme of the exhibit was a little mysterious to me. This became a theme throughout—while I very much appreciate that there were English summaries for some exhibits and labels, the decision to translate or not translate seemed haphazard.
The best-translated exhibit was a temporary exhibit on sexual selection and differences in nature. While it contained many interesting objects, it was quite text-heavy, and I’m sorry to say, but after earning a degree in museum studies my patience for reading exhibit labels has gone way down, so I didn’t spend much time there.
I continued on to what their website tells me was the Norwegian Hall, a series of taxidermy dioramas proceeding through various Norwegian habitats from sea level to the mountains. This was definitely my favorite part of the museum—I really love the art of dioramas, and particularly naturalistic dioramas that try to present a scene that could actually occur. These reminded me a great deal of the outstanding dioramas at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, although the backdrop painting was not quite as realistic and as far as I can tell they did not necessarily represent exact physical locations. However, they had some of the best taxidermy I’ve seen in museums and were really beautifully done—definitely a teaser for all the Norwegian nature I’d love to see in better weather!
Eurasian Eagle-owls (Bubo bubo):
I particularly liked the split-level underwater/shoreline dioramas, something I haven’t often seen before.
Many of the dioramas also included insect life, which of course made me very happy, as well as amphibians. The amphibians were probably the weakest part of the dioramas, as they appeared to be taxidermy and amphibians simply don’t taxidermy very well—in this case I think realistic models would have been more engaging.
The second floor opens with one of those glorious and unphotographable cases full of 19th century natural history memorabilia. There wasn’t much interpretation (and it was all in Norwegian), but I always enjoy just looking at these, and I think it’s nice to have a nod to the history of science.
The second floor held the geographic and systematic halls, although I think I managed to miss the systematic hall somehow. The geographic hall’s dioramas seemed to be older, the taxidermy less convincing, and were done in the style of “pick a region and cram all the animals you could possibly see there into one case,” an approach I personally like a lot less. For example, here’s the Galápagos Islands case (although to be fair, the animal density is less unrealistic than for most regions…):
Labeling in the diorama exhibits was haphazard: some dioramas were not labeled at all, others were labeled in Norwegian and English, and others only in Norwegian. Sometimes Latin names were included, but more often they were not. There was little interpretation besides the names of animals, so this wasn’t a huge problem—I think the appeal of this kind of exhibit is more in the immersive feel of it than the text—but I would have appreciated consistent use of scientific names.
And since this post is a bit long, I shall save the Geological Museum and the greenhouses for another post or two.
Nature Odes 