Readers’s wildlife photos

November 12, 2024 • 8:15 am

Today’s photos come from reader Rik Gern of Austin, Texas. Rik’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Earlier this year I sent you a few batches of pictures of fungi taken in Wisconsin’s Northwoods in September of last year, mostly from Copper Falls State Park. These pictures are from the same trip, but with the camera pulled back to reveal larger growth and let the region show off its fall colors. Unfortunately I was not using the Seek by iNaturalist app with these shots, so I’ve had to try to identify species by comparing my pictures to images found using a search engine. Consider all species identification tentative!

The trip began near Eagle River, an area full of small lakes. Fortunately, the fall colors were in full force!:

Along the way we stopped by the Smith Rapids covered bridge in Fifield.  The bridge is not the rustic relic of the past one might expect; it was built in 1991! Here it is, next to a nice looking balsam fir (Abies balsamea):

Copper Falls State Park has eight hiking trails, totaling seventeen miles. With limited time and accompanied by my 89 year old mother, we opted for the shortest trail, Doughboys Nature Trail, which is is a little less than two miles long. As you enter the trail, the woods are heavily populated by white pine (Pinus strobus), though maple trees are also in abundance, as can be seen by their leaves along the path.

Here is a lot of young growth, mostly white pine, birch and maple:

Paper birch   (Betula papyrifera) gives a light touch to the woods:

The mushrooms sprouting from this recently fallen tree show how quickly the forest recycles itself. Maple saplings are all over, ready to replace the falling trees:

Here is a white pine that didn’t even bother to fall down before rotting away!

A stairway leads to an observation tower where you can get a more elevated perspective of the trees.

I’m not sure if these are red maple (Acer rubrum) or sugar maple (Acer saccharum).  I don’t know botany, but I know what I like!:

Here are some smaller maples. The picture wouldn’t cooperate with me, so I played around to give it sort of an impressionistic look:

For all the wide-eyed gazing I did, I’m sure I missed more than I saw. Though I didn’t observe any animal life, I was no doubt observed by many woodland critters who remained hidden to me. That thought inspired this image (taken from the same stand of young maples as the previous picture) and an accompanying haiku:

Predator and prey
Blending with nature’s patterns
Playing hide and seek

21 thoughts on “Readers’s wildlife photos”

  1. Love the forest photos – brought back memories of my upbringing in Minnesota many years ago.

    1. This is off-topic but I think it will help Jerry. I wanted to send in some wildlife photos. So I looked at the instructions for doing so. They said to look for the About the Author spot in the upper right corner, but I couldn’t find it in the upper right corner of any page. I wonder whether the lack of the About the Author button is a big reason people are not sending in wildlife photos. If you could send me Jerry’s email address, i would be grateful. My email is amyperryindy@yahoo.com.

      1. I answered this, but to clarify: click “about the author” under the book photos at the top right of the site, and then click “contact information” at the bottom after that. This will give you my email address.

  2. Love it!

    I know the aroma in these – ahhh, so refreshing.

    And I have a hard time knowing my maple species too.

  3. That last picture is amazing! I’m so impressed. How did manipulate the photo to get such an effect?

    1. It’s hard to explain, but I’ll try. I don’t apply a formula in advance, so this is an attempt to reconstruct the process after the fact. While I’m doing it, it’s more like an extended daydream.

      I had a larger picture and made some adjustments for satisfying contrasts and colors and then made several crops that seemed to give interesting textures and patterns. Then I’d take the crops, create reverse images and splice them together to get some symmetry, which provides the basis for finding faces. After creating a few of those I’d use photosop’s masking and “paint” parts of them into whichever large image had the nicest feel. Then I’d mask in different hues, saturations, etc., and also make judicious use of the liquefy function to bring out details in the faces. I also cloned in some leaves in the corners, flipping them horizontally and vertically to give some symmetry, but I played around with the blending so as not to make them TOO symmetrical. After that, there was endless tweaking of small details.

      I hope that makes sense…

      1. Thanks for the explanation. But no matter how you did it, I seriously think you should make posters out of the picture. I bet it would be a big seller!

  4. Though I didn’t observe any animal life….sure I was observed! Yep when asked about snakes on a local hiking trail, i always reply that I have seen maybe ten over my 40 years of running and hiking. But I have no idea of how many have seen me!

  5. Very cool!
    Since you are into doing some artsy photography tricks, I can recommend that you look into photography involving Intentional Camera Movement, and also a neat trick popularized by a photographer named Pep Ventosa. Tons of videos on YouTube about this stuff, and it’s interesting!

  8. Fall is definitely my favorite season (with spring in second place). Alas, so far here in Georgia we’ve barely HAD fall this year–it’s still been quite warm, pretty deep into November. I think it may finally be cooling off, but it’s still more short sleeve shirt weather rather than jacket weather, at least during the middle of the day. All of which is definitely unnerving.

    But–beautiful pictures! I love the woods during autumn!

  12. “Wow, these wildlife photos are incredible! The detail captured here reminds me of the clarity I’ve seen in edited images using apps like Remini APK. Nature’s beauty definitely shines through, and these shots are a testament to both the photographer’s skill and the stunning subjects in the wild.

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