Each and Every Day of Fall …

… one or more of my cameras are used to make photographs of the natural world. Photographs that illustrate the mammals, birds, insects, plants or landscapes that are increasingly imperiled in the modern human-dominated world. 

This is the beginning of a new project to present one photograph taken each day for a year. In this project, as in earlier similar projects, the photos will be presented by seasonal quarters – fall, winter, spring and summer. These are the meteorological seasons (fall being the months of September, October and November) since they are more attuned to the natural world than the astronomical seasons that are in common use. 

Apparently due to the changing climate late summer and much of the fall were extremely dry. Leaf change was late and the colors were muted, seemingly due to the dry weather. Insects were extremely scarce and birds were hard to find as a result of the dry weather, habitat loss, pesticide use and the changing climate.

The natural world portrayed in these photographs is at risk from human activities both deliberate and incidental. Even common species can be put at risk, three examples: the introduced chestnut blight fungus killed up to four billion American chestnut trees throughout eastern North America in the last 100 years; the extinction of the passenger pigeon that was said to have numbered in the billions, lost to market hunters and habitat loss; and, more recently, the incipient elimination of all species of ash trees from the eastern part of the continent by the introduced emerald ash borer. 

Chestnut is now functionally extinct and the ash trees soon will be, only a handful of scattered living individual chestnut trees remain and the ashes are dying rapidly. The passenger pigeon is totally extinct – gone forever. These and many more species doomed at the hand of humans.  

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed viewing the photos and that they may inspire you to do whatever you can to protect the natural world on which we all depend whether we, or those in power, realize it or not.

From the camera traps: 9/12, 9/26