WildSuburbia!

Wow. And then one day you find, ten years have got behind… Ok, two months, but still… I married my long time girlfriend, make that best friend, Maureen, a couple of weeks ago. It’s pretty cool that many of you know & love her as much as I do (as a fellow nature photographer, she has as many tick/mosquito bites as I do right now, but she still cleans up pretty nice ..). Suffice it to say that the months leading up to that event were an, um, “busy time”. I got to photograph very little. process images even less, and did nothing on the website. What little room was left on the plate has been occupied trying to find a conservation buyer for my childhood home, 60 Acres in Jackson, very close to the Pine Barrens. The process has been going terribly, the organizations who would preserve the land will offer us virtually nothing for it. This is precisely why so much land winds up sold to developers.

Here are “private” links to some images, you won’t find these albums by browsing the gallery.

Where I Grew Up…Then

will take you to the old pictures in the gallery itself, with titles & descriptions whereas

Early Days- Slideshow

should run an automatic, repeating slideshow of the same, with no text. The following two links accomplish the same for the recent images:

My Childhood Home…Today

How it looks today- slideshow

If you love wild places, please have a look. The photography is nothing special, the old stuff isn’t even mine, well maybe a couple of 1969 B&W Polaroids, but I hope it does justice to how magical & beloved the place remains in my heart, and if you view the images, I hope they touch you. I will probably not leave these links for long, but who knows…

As my friends will tell you, I anthropormorphize worse than anyone you’ve ever seen. And so it is in that vein that I like to think that I see some of the same faces year after year. For example, today I found this young Garter Snake right where I last saw him before “bedtime” last fall. Do I have any scientific basis for this assumption? Of course not. But I’d swear he’s giving me that, “Oh no, you again?” look…

Had an opportunity to accompany biologist & friend Blaine Rothhauser of BR Environmental on a nighttime trip to a “secret” vernal pool. While these State-Endangered Blue-Spotted Salamanders were not active in the pool, Blaine found this little guy under the first dead log he turned over. I, on the other hand, turned over a lot of logs, and found a Red-Backed Salamander (amphibian equivalent of a Robin…), and a lot of Carpenter Ants… That’s why he gets the big bucks… Click the thumbnail photo for more info.

Each Winter, I become lulled into this false sense that by the time Spring arrives, I will have used the extra “dark time” to catch up on all the things I don’t get done when it’s nice out. I imagine that one day it is Winter, and suddenly, it’s Spring, as if by the crossing of some invisible line on the calendar. Of course, each year the first hints of Spring catch me off guard, unprepared, with my indoor work unfinished. This year is no different. I was intent on finishing the website by Spring Migration, so that I could begin to populate the galleries & blog with fresh photos & experiences as they occur. Nope. The courtship ritual of the Woodcocks, and the arrival of Fox Sparrows are Mother Nature’s “Test Over, Pencils Down…” for this would-be webmaster. I’ll be posting photos & stories for sure, but the website will, for the most part, remain duct-taped together in places, since the call of the wild is just too great for me…

I finally finished the first “mini-photo essay”, which you can find in the Stories area, the left-most egret in the roost.  Hope you enjoy it.  There’ll be more to come…

Haven’t posted here in a while.  But I’ve been very busy under the hood. Many modifications, tweaks, and improvements to the underlying software that runs this site.  It’s a slow process, because decisions need to be made re: functionality/features that will not be easy to change later.  My goal has always been to have a “dual-purpose” site.  By that, I mean the standard “by species” image gallery that, well, everyone has.  But I want a way to allow you to sit back in your chair, relax & be entertained with content that is not necessarily “taxonomic”.  Content along the lines of the introduction.  I needed a way to easily showcase, for example “The Creatures of the Pine Barrens”, etc., etc., and integrate that content in a sensible way into the flow of the site.  It has been a 3 steps forward/2 back exercise, but I’m a lot closer.  The challenge is to provide rich functionality with an intuitive interface.  I’m hoping it will be all that I strive for it to be.  In the end, you will decide.  I haven’t posted many new images, I’m holding off until I can freeze the feature set/layout.  In the meantime, feel free to look around.  I’ll try to post here as I enable other parts of the site that are currently “under construction”.  As before, SHIFT-Refresh is not a bad idea if you want to be sure you’re seeing updated pages & links.  Thanks for being patient.

____

Neil

If anyone has been here previously, you may have noticed a major change in the blog appearance.  I’ve had to change from b2evolution to WordPress due to my inability to get the blog/gallery integration working properly.  I still have a great deal to do on the interface details, but the integration seems to be working well at this point.  I have a _lot_ of links to update…

Well, back up, for the time being.  A lot of changes under the hood last few days, necessitating taking some parts of the site offline, breaking a few others, but we’ll get it sorted out!

If anyone would like to register in order to leave comments, contact me, etc., at least for the time being, you’ll need to register in both the News/Blog area (here…), as well as the Image Gallery area.  It’s OK to use the same username & password for each, in fact that’s preferable. Ultimately, I want to have one login for the whole site. I’m workin’ on it…  Other than that, slowly populating the image galleries w/ categories & images.  Eventually, I’ll try to get a “new stuff since your last visit” thing going, but none of the software I’m using does that without some heavy tweaking.  Hopefully soon…