Origins

This male Red-Winged Blackbird, Agelaius phoeniceus, pendulum-sways atop a cattail reed. 500mm, 1/2000s, f/8.0, iso 800

I’m a bit of a collector. There’s something about creating a place to gather ideas, memories, crafted things (like photographs), and the like. Every now and then I drive by some scene during vacation or daily life, moments later regretting not pulling over to capture at least a quick snapshot. I rue the days (well, not quite) I didn’t write down a song that would be great for a particular dinner club theme and now can’t remember, or a favorite word I cannot now think of - telemetry is one I did. As Al Harris once said, it feels good in the mouth. Memories and even ideas can be fleeting, so to collect is to remember and, in the case of a website, hopefully, share with others and contribute to something bigger.

I’ve contemplated a photocentric website for many years. Today there are so many channels for all sorts of information and the avenues are fairly vast. Blogs can marry the visual with written word without necessarily selling something tangible. For me it’s partly an opportunity for discipline - following through on a commitment to visit, record, contemplate, challenge and synthesize ideas into coherent thought - something I often regret not having done better. So at long last, moving past an idea, beyond a day or two’s time invested creating before stopping short for feeling something was not ready, or some technical limitation I let get in the way. A first blog post.

A Great Blue Heron, Ardea herodias, takes a brief fishing spot adjustment-flight. 500mm, 1/1600s, f/7.1, iso 800

This spring I spent time at several local wetlands looking for birds and other animals: from two old farm ponds in the neighborhood, at Huntley Meadows Park, to my drinking water source at Beaverdam Reservoir, and my first visit to the recently completed 3/4-mile Neabsco Creek Boardwalk which is part of Potomac Heritage National Scenic Trail. One of my strongest memories as a boy scout was canoeing through the duckweed and black waters of Merchants Mill Pond State Park in North Carolina, and now I want to plan a trip back there. I occasionally hike around freshwater wetlands, but don’t usually stop to immerse in these places: listening, hearing, smelling. I was struck suddenly during the most recent visit to Huntley Meadows, while in the center of hundreds of acres of emergent marsh, by a strong and pleasing smell. I think it was Grandma’s basement; it was musty but with an undeniable freshness. Back in the parking lot, I saw three guys who had just arrived taking dramatically deep inhalations of air as they wafted with their hands towards their faces. Their looks to each other said, “Smell that fresh air?”, even though the park is in the most populous jurisdiction in Virginia and the Washington, DC metro area, Fairfax County.

My olfactory moment back on the wetland was equally exciting as when a green heron took off 20 feet from me shortly before, and flew almost in arm’s reach. Earlier at Neabsco, I watched for over 20 minutes as a red-winged blackbird relentlessly harassed a blue heron who seemed to be trying to fish in peace. The sight of a blackbird chasing a heron, crow, hawk, or osprey is as ubiquitous as seeing one stake out his territory alone atop a swaying cattail reed, but this one’s boldness was a degree higher. All of these moments keep me wanting to return to these wetlands for more.

This Green Heron, Butorides virescens, momentarily showed off his or her crown feathers for the camera. 500mm, 1/1250s, f/7.1, iso 1600

Wetlands are symbolic of birth and rebirth, productivity and richness. They provide valuable ecosystem services by storing sediment, pollutants, and excess nutrients. They ameliorate flooding in the watershed. They have helped to inspire first blog posts. Most interestingly perhaps, they support a disproportionately diverse range of plant and animal species.

Birds, turtles, amphibians, and mammals that I’ve watched stalk, sun, fly, grow and swim in Northern Virginia’s freshwaters during April and May include Pickerelweed, Swamp-rose Mallow, Common Rush, Silky Dogwood, and Elderberry. Muskrat, Beaver, White-tailed Deer. Eastern Painted Turtle, Red-eared Slider, Snapping Turtle; even an anomalous adult American Bullfrog with a very long tail. Northern Cardinal, Tree Swallow, Great Egret, Spotted Sandpiper, Osprey. Common Grackle, Fish Crow, Wood Duck, and Eastern Bluebird. Since wetlands are federally protected resources, these sites are often among the most popular public parks. This level of interest can be a blessing and a curse, necessitating additional needs and resources for management for people and the wildlife there alike.

A family of Canada Geese, Branta canadensis, go for a mid-morning swim. Is mom or dad first? 500mm, 1/1600s, f/7.1, iso 1250

As a landscape architect, my daily professional routine is to collect and unify ideas. It’s a complex process that usually and eventually results in drawings and written documents that a contractor will use to physically modify the site and construct something new. During the design process we mix in our understandings of human behavior, site historical activity, choices of materials - frequently including water, earth, stone, and wood - and our analysis of a site’s tactile qualities, both “natural” and human-influenced, among the arrangements of physical space. The resulting creation is capital-L Landscape. Hopefully, these efforts enhance existing or newly achieve a sense of place. One definition of this is a memorable and desirable connection between people and a particular space.

My work tends to have an even balance of urban and suburban contexts, with an occasional rural site for good measure. In 2020, a normal week included detailing for an urban town center redevelopment project, leading a team of consultants developing plans for a large 40-acre park that will have formal athletic fields with a mile-long trail network through a large meadow, and developing entrance gateway renderings for a small wooded campus (and residence) for the owners of a federal contracting business. A smaller proportion of sites are very naturalistic - where the pre-construction amount of forest and unpaved open area greatly exceeds the impervious surfaces and other marks left by people.

But what is natural tends to be deceiving, particularly in a large metropolitan area. Not one but two neighborhood-scale park sites which we will complete design or construction for this year had a public school on them before being given over to the park authority for decades of passive and active recreation. As we planned the renovated designs that will take shape, it was only when borings that must be taken to evaluate the ground’s capacity for infiltrating stormwater, or when earth was started to be shifted to its new elevations, that foundations of concrete block, brick, and asphalt were revealed and we gained new insight of how the land that today feels mostly ‘natural’ was managed. Buildings were flattened and earth was spread across it, creating new geologic strata of sorts.

A Common Yellowthroat, Geothlypis trichas, lingers on a tree near the marsh edge. 500mm, 1/640s, f/7.1, iso 2000

Even the tranquil waters and second-growth woodlands of Huntley Meadows today belie a quite different past. In the 1920s the land which had been owned by George Mason in the 1750s was reassembled by a developer with designs on developing it into the world’s largest airport. After the Great Depression happened, the government acquired the land and used it for testing asphalt road surfacings, as a base for an anti-aircraft battery defending Washington, DC, and later classified naval communications research. Eventually, Gerald Ford conveyed it to the citizens of Fairfax County, and since that time big planning and engineering projects have been conducted to address the impacts caused by watershed development which led to sedimentation and declining biodiversity of the wetlands that had since taken over.

Being there, immersed in the quiet solitude broken by the thudding of woodpeckers, croaking of bullfrogs, and the quiet maneuvering of many photographers along the boardwalk, I would not have known that roughly ten years ago the largest of these projects was finished. Today efforts to continually assess the conditions and results of that work are ongoing in what is Fairfax County’s largest park.

An ambitious Green Heron spears an American Bullfrog, Lithobates catesbeianus, and struggles to consume it. This photo is not of good quality from low light and heavy cropping, but it shows a long tail, usually reabsorbed through apoptosis during adolescence, which I didn’t notice until later that evening. 500mm, 1/200s, f/7.1, iso 2000

As I mentioned before, it’s not very hard to find good examples of storytelling, photography, interesting information about our natural systems, and other allied topics. I appreciate all those who produce quality content and have served as inspiration for me and others. Like DailyVogel. A Bird A Day, The Planthunter, Tony and Chelsea Northrup, and the National Park Service, among others.

The marshy interior of Huntley Meadows Park midday. 12mm, 1/125s, f/9.0, iso 100