Back to the Everglades

 Been so busy have not had time to shoot or even update this blog which has been left to stand solo in the pool of social media.  Spent 2/24/13 in Everglades National Park for a really foggy morning. Perfect conditions for photography.  I made a short two minute video of the experience.  The stillness and tranquility of the Everglades at Sunrise is second to none.




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The Florida Scrub Jay - Nemesis Bird No More

It's got to be close to 8 years since I got hooked on photographing birds.  For many years I had what I called my three nemesis birds: bald eagles, roseate spoonbills, and scrub jays.  I photographed my first scrub jays this year after trying to find them for nearly six years.  It seems that everytime I went to the scrubs, they weren't there.  Well they finally cooperated.  I now have my fill of images of these friendly and rare bird endemic to our state.

I wish they would change the Florida state bird from the Northern Mockingbird to the Scrub Jay. The mockers are all over the place, but this guy is truly a native Floridian, found only in a few scrub areas in Florida such as Brevard County, where I found this guy and his buddies.

So do I have any new nemesis birds to photograph? Hell yeah!  Need to find me some wild screech owls, or any other owls (other than Burrowing Owls, Horned Owls, and Barred Owls) .... but I'll likely have to leave the state for some of them ...

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Landscape Poetry

Image © 2009 Michael Pancier Photography, All Rights Reserved
Images and Prints Available at MichaelPancierPhotography.com

This T.S. Eliot poem came to mind as I took this photo in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

T.S. Eliot - East Coker

It's Time for Me to Go

Photo Courtesy of Mr. Craw Photography

Yes Infidels, the American Southwest is an amazing place. But after a week, it's time for me to go back to Florida. This is a shot at Horseshoe Bend, Page, Arizona. As you can see, the drop here is pretty big, say 1000 feet...anything for a photo.

While the City Slept I Was Greeted to the Beauty of an Everglades Sunrise

Most infidels I know are asleep in their beds at 6:15 a.m. and not in the heart of the swamp like I was last Saturday. Usually 7:00 a.m. is my time of arrival in the Glades for nature work. But it is amazing what getting there one hour earlier will bring. This usually mundane landscape during the day takes on a life of its own at dawn and especially in the minutes before sunrise. As here, even the typically ugly Turkey Buzzard looks majestic perched above the waters of Taylor Slough in Everglades National Park. The shot was taken from the easternmost boardwalk of the Anhinga Trail. I saw, but did not get the shot in time a bunch of river otters that morning. Man they were big. The mist added a sense of eerieness over the landscape that morning and I am now determined to get up at 4:30 a.m. more often to make it there for the light show. As Marjorie Stoneman Douglas remarked, "There are no other Everglades in the world. They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth; remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them...." Until you see the Glades in the light of an early dawn, you've truly never seen it. The birds must take sights like this for granted each morning, but then again, perhaps they know the secret to the universe and laugh at our perpetual quest fto achieve deliverance from our lack of understanding the unknown.

In closing friends, I came upon a new song on Itunes by the great Country singer, Martina McBride and as I've stated previously, once again shows that if one really wants to hear quality music and quality lyrics, they should look towards the Country charts. Rather than the inane lyrics of Fergie and Nelly and Beyonce, here are some lyrics that make you think for a change:

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Anyway

You can spend your whole life building something from nothing
One storm can come and blow it all away
Build it anyway
You can chase a dream that seems so out of reach and you know it might not ever come your way
Dream it anyway

God is great, but sometimes life ain't good
And when I pray it doesn't always turn out like I think it should
But I do it anyway, I do it anyway

This world's gone crazy and it's hard to believe that tomorrow will be better than today
Believe it anyway
You can love someone with all your heart, for all the right reasons, and in a moment they can choose to walk away
Love 'em anyway

You can pour your soul out singing a song you believe in that tomorrow they'll forget you ever sang
Sing it anyway, sing it anyway
I sing, I dream, I love, anyway

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See you in the swamp infidels