Ed Kanze, Naturalist and Adirondack Guide

Ed Kanze, Naturalist and Adirondack Guide I'm a naturalist, licensed guide, and nature writer who lives and works in NY's Adirondack Park, three times the size of Yellowstone. Come walk with me!

In October, I'm guessing all of us who run around shooting landscapes in the Adirondacks enjoy the challenge of creating...
10/26/2024

In October, I'm guessing all of us who run around shooting landscapes in the Adirondacks enjoy the challenge of creating images that combine snow and snowstorms with fall color. Opportunities come only occasionally. It's not unusual for hardwood leaves in the valleys to be largely gone when significant snow appears in the high country. To have brilliant color and dazzling snow at the same time requires the obvious: an early snowstorm. Good light helps, too.

One afternoon last week, after finishing my morning and early afternoon work at the wonderful Lake Placid Lodge, I hit the road armed with camera, lenses, and tripod. Of the hundred or so photos I shot that afternoon, I'm not sure which I like best. Maybe this one.

From Keene Valley, I was aiming my camera and long lens toward the twin peaks often referred to collectively as the Wolf Jaws. Unless I'm mistaken (please correct me if correction is needed), the mountain on the left is Lower Wolf Jaw, and to the right rises Upper Wolf Jaw. As I pulled over, snow was falling on the heights of these peaks. White-out obscured the summits. So I waited, thinking the clouds might lift. They did. I like this picture better than a similar, slightly clearer one taken a few seconds later. This image catches a final bit of snow squall touching down on the higher summit.

P.S. And here's the mink, just before it took its plunge.
10/23/2024

P.S. And here's the mink, just before it took its plunge.

As we all know, reputations, like appearances, can be deceiving.Yesterday morning, Debbie and I watched a mink hunting f...
10/23/2024

As we all know, reputations, like appearances, can be deceiving.

Yesterday morning, Debbie and I watched a mink hunting from a rock on a bank of the Saranac River. Along came a muskrat, swimming upstream, moving ever closer to the mink, frozen in place like a statue and peering into the water.

The mink is a kind of weasel. Like weasels in general, minks tend to be fierce predators. They prey on a variety of animals, muskrats included.

The muskrat, a rodent, is best known as a herbivore, although it consumes freshwater mussels and a variety of other animal matter, especially in winter when botanicals are hard to come by.

In recent days, we'd been watching a family of muskrats come and go and feed and groom each other along our stretch of the river. We were not looking forward to watching the mink kill the muskrat. Predation is part of nature, and we take pleasure in having minks for neighbors, but seeing what I'm pretty sure was Mother Muskrat succumb to the powerful bite of a mink was not going to be pleasant.

Here's what happened. The mink slipped into the water. Then kaboom! The muskrat leapt up and came hammering down. Amidst an enormous splash, the rodent appeared on top. The weasel briefly vanished, then rocketed downriver. Apparently the predator got over its disappointment. Within a minute we watched the mink bound from the river carrying a fish.

What's a nature writer to do when the words won't flow? Go outside and find a distraction. Maybe the distraction will ge...
10/15/2024

What's a nature writer to do when the words won't flow? Go outside and find a distraction. Maybe the distraction will get subjects and verbs moving again, and maybe it won't. But the diversion of the distraction is sure to be more pleasant and productive than sitting in a chair feeling woebegone at the sight of a blank page.

Here's my distraction of the morning. Squeezing several warm layers under a raincoat and slipping into high rubber boots, I set off into a light, freezing rain punctuated by a smattering of snowflakes. Almost immediately upon tiptoeing into a marshy fringe of one of the Saranac River's stranded oxbows, I glimpsed a few square inches of great blue heron. Most of the bird was hidden by shrubs and sedges. I could barely make out the bird's head. Peering intently, not unlike the bird, I could see a sharp eye studying me.

I looked away. Staring is confrontational. I also stood still. The heron decided I was worth the risk and went back to earning its living. Step by cautious step, it made its way across the marsh, looking for fish and other small creatures.

I chuckled at the thought that the heron and I were playing the same game. As it stalked, I stalked. When it paused to assess, I paused to assess. Eventually the bird got close enough to a little bullhead, a kind of catfish, to take a stab. At the same moment, I got close enough to the heron to shoot photos without major obstructions. It grabbed the fish, and I grabbed a picture.

Half the world is going crazy for the aurora borealis, and for all I know, the other half is nuts for the aurora austral...
10/13/2024

Half the world is going crazy for the aurora borealis, and for all I know, the other half is nuts for the aurora australis. Thank you, Sun! Thanks, too, to the home planet's magnetic field, which---well, I'd better stop there. The physics sail over my head.

Here's another shot from the same session that produced the one I shared a few days ago. Again, this is an iPhone shot, hand-held for 10 seconds. Through sorcery or alchemy or algorithmic something-or-other, the phone takes the product of unsteady hands, clarifies it, and intensifies the colors. The sky was amazing to the naked eye, but the images generated this way improve on things. Again, it was fun trying to catch the otherworldly glow reflecting in the Saranac River.

I'm told the lights fantastic were even more dramatic a night or two later, but alas, we were socked in with clouds and fog. Our son, Ned, at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, and our daughter Tas, at St. Lawrence University in Canton, each ventured out and caught a bit of the show. We hope for better luck next time.

Having seen dozens of excellent northern lights photos posted in recent days, I hesitate to offer one of my own. Then ag...
10/09/2024

Having seen dozens of excellent northern lights photos posted in recent days, I hesitate to offer one of my own. Then again, why not? This one was taken last night about 2:30 a.m.. I would rather have been sound asleep in a warm bed, not outside in the freezing cold standing alone on a riverbank with only a tail-slapping beaver and distant howling coyotes and hooting barred owls for company, but because photo ops like this don't come my way every day, there I was.

I arranged this shot to catch some of the green glow of the aurora reflected in the Saranac River.

Many of the images I brought home offer brighter reds and greens, but this is my favorite. I like the scene set by the passing clouds and the brushy tops of white pines and the stars glittering in the sky. This image seems to capture the feel of being there.

Quite a place, what a show, quite a night!

When you wander around in the woods, certain things catch your eye. Pink islands, for example.You don't see one of these...
10/02/2024

When you wander around in the woods, certain things catch your eye.

Pink islands, for example.

You don't see one of these every day. When you do see a pink island, it's usually not theatrically lit by a sunbeam while the woods beyond it loom dark and brooding.

I could call this tiny island in a marshy pond pink and leave it at that. As a naturalist, however, one who loves to teach people about stuff, I can't hold back. The pink is the fall foliage of black huckleberry bushes. OK, maybe the leaves are red. But when I looked at them from far away, my eyes saw pink. I hurried to shoot a few photos before the sun and clouds ended the drama.

While I launch nature posts a couple of times a week with the aim of nurturing relationships with friends, old and new, ...
09/25/2024

While I launch nature posts a couple of times a week with the aim of nurturing relationships with friends, old and new, and with keeping up with my extended family, I confess to harboring ulterior motives. One is promoting sanity, which in my estimation includes an appreciation for wild things. Another is to help bring people together when all too many things seem bent on driving us apart. Shakespeare wrote, "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." I like to think he was right.

I do not see my posts as a marketing tool, but I can't resist sharing a bit of good news, news I'm thrilled about. In April 2025, Globe Pequot will publish The Nature of the Place, a new book of my Adirondack nature pieces. The great majority originally appeared in two places: in a column I write for the excellent regional newsmagazine Adirondack Explorer, and in a column I wrote for more than thirty years for weekly newspapers in Connecticut and southern New York. Because writers tend to react with equal measures of pride and horror when we read our own vintage material, I drove away the horror by rewriting each piece collected here. Every sentence has had a fresh look. New material has been tucked in, and occasional bits of verbal clutter have been removed. My fine editor and the rest of the congenial crew at Globe Pequot have helped make it all happen. I am delighted with the result.

One of my favorite people, Ross Whaley, a past Chairman of the Adirondack Park Agency, former President of SUNY-ESF, and longtime friend, kindly agreed to write a foreword.

This book will be illustrated by classic line art, not photographs. With encouragement from many of you, I am giving thought to a photo book to be published down the road. I have two novels to place with publishers, too. After spending a great many days and nights over the last twenty-one years working with my wife, Debbie, to raise two much-loved kids to adulthood, I feel like I'm making a comeback. My last book, my sixth, Adirondack: Life and Wildlife in the Wild, Wild East, was published in 2014, twelve years ago. I've got some catching up to do!

Yesterday morning, I was standing by the Saranac River watching debris float by (something I do from time to time to cle...
09/25/2024

Yesterday morning, I was standing by the Saranac River watching debris float by (something I do from time to time to clear my mind of debris), when it occurred to me that if I waited a few minutes, I might catch a colorful leaf worthy of a photo. I didn't have to linger long. This speckled alder leaf, which must have fallen during its transition from green to red and gold, drifted into view. The water was glassy calm. The sun ducked behind a cloud, turning the sky leaden and the water the same tint, creating a studio-like background for a leaf among leaves.

We photographers generally avoid placing a chief object of interest in the center of an image, but this seemed like a time to break the rule.

A great many of the birds we see in our yard this time of year belong in the category Roger Tory Peterson called "confus...
09/16/2024

A great many of the birds we see in our yard this time of year belong in the category Roger Tory Peterson called "confusing fall warblers." Some look like the glamorous adult males in breeding colors that catch our eyes in field guides, but many are drab, or, as it's a little more fair to say, camouflaged.

Often you catch a mere glimpse of a fall warbler. Then the bird flits away into a tangle somewhere, leaving you wishing you'd taken closer note of its colors and patterns.

Digital photography, with its instant gratification, makes a big difference. It allowed me to say, with double-checking in field guides by Peterson and by Sibley, that this is a female bay-breasted warbler likely entering her first winter.

I thought she was gorgeous and wished her well. With luck, she'll winter where it won't be winter at all in Central America or northern South America.

White baneberry! Seeing this plant in fruit at the end of summer provides a visual treat, but don't be tempted to do any...
09/16/2024

White baneberry! Seeing this plant in fruit at the end of summer provides a visual treat, but don't be tempted to do anything more than ogle those berries. They can be lethal even when consumed in small numbers. Various birds eat them, though, and the fruits quickly disappear, leaving behind the lurid amaranth-red stalks.

The glossy fruits suggest globes of white porcelain, and the black dots make them resemble eyeballs. Another common name for this plant is doll's-eyes.

I shot this photo near the village of Long Lake in the Adirondacks. In my neck of the woods about a ninety minute drive away, I don't see doll's-eyes. Instead I find red baneberry, a very similar looking plant with nearly identical flowers but with glossy red fruits on slender stalks. Botanists place both baneberrries in the buttercup family.

As frosts and near-frosts arrive in our part of the Adirondacks, it's time to say goodbye to a large fraction of our bir...
09/11/2024

As frosts and near-frosts arrive in our part of the Adirondacks, it's time to say goodbye to a large fraction of our birds and so long, too, to monarch butterflies.

Monarch populations are struggling, here and across the continent. After a summer without striped monarch caterpillars (or at least any that we found on our abundant common milkweed plants), I'd begun to fear we'd see no 2024 southbound migrants. In recent days, however, sunshine and cool breezes out of the North have brought five or six handsome monarchs to goldenrods on our lawn-gone-feral.

On the balance, we're pleased to have a semi-wild yard. The profusion of wildflowers that has replaced barbered turf grass yields a feast for the eye, not to mention sustenance for a wide variety of birds, butterflies, fireflies, garter snakes, meadow voles, jumping mice, short-tailed shrews, and more. But there is a downside. Biting insects find our yard in its current state far more rich in moist hiding places than when it was subjected to frequent mowings. Oh well. We curse the mosquitoes and the no-see-ums, but they're a fair price to pay for monarchs and all the rest.

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