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…

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…