11 December 1993
Dear Friends and Family,
This has been
a pretty exciting year for us, with one major trip and quite a number of
shorter trips, plus the usual weekends of camping. Our job and home situations
are much the same. Kodak has not been doing especially well, but we have a new
CEO (George Fisher from Motorola) who is probably the best CEO the company has
had in decades. I expect the next two years to bring a lot of changes, but I am
uncertain whether on balance they will have a positive or negative effect on
research.
In the
beginning of the year, we took several short vacations that were built off my
business trips. In January we spent a week in Orlando, where Kodak introduced a new product
that I invented, KODAK EKTACHROME Underwater Film, at the DEMA (Diving
Equipment Manufacturers' Association) convention. The design and production of
this film was very exciting and challenging for me, especially as there was no
budget, no management sanction, and no official personnel. About half a dozen
of us worked on this for a year in our spare time, and it was thrilling to have
the product make it to market. There is no other film like it, and I hope that
it will change the way that underwater photography is done.
After the
convention, we took a couple of days to look for manatees on the Gulf Coast,
an endeavor in which we were quite successful. An ancillary victory for us was
our first sighting of wild snook, a game fish
regarding which we read a number of very vague and mysterious references while
in Baja (... it was here, in 1926, that Sir Reginald Hopkins encountered the
infamous snook, in a battle from which legends would
spring ... that sort of thing).
In February,
underwater film took us south again to Atlanta,
for the PMA (Photo Marketing Association) trade show. Eileen managed to visit several
civil war battle sites (Chickamauga, Picket's
Mill, Kennesaw Mt.) while I was in the convention. On
the way, we stopped in South Carolina
to visit my Dad and his wife Dotty. We had a fun day on the coast, seeing and
hearing the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker very well. This species may
never have been especially common, but fragmentation and lumbering of southern
pine forests, especially those of longleaf pine, has reduced the population
into the low thousands. Recently, serious hurricane damage to its last
strongholds has further disrupted breeding. This species may become extinct in
the next century.
In March, we
bought Eileen a new car, replacing her 11-year old Ford escort with a cute 4WD
(four-wheel drive) Subaru sedan. A blizzard right after this (occasionally, we
get a truly wicked storm in March) gave Eileen a chance to try out the 4WD, and
she was pretty thrilled when she was able to get in and out of the driveway
without getting stuck! We've taken a number of short, non-camping trips in her
car, to try to control the mileage buildup on the van (which nonetheless had
reached 112,000 miles on its fouth birthday). Also in
March, after a weekend with some friends in Toronto
to see a performance of "Phantom of the Opera," Eileen flew home to Texas for her parents'
fortieth wedding anniversary. With all the kids (seven
of them) home, it was quite a celebration! Finally, we made our traditional
trip to the Bruce
Peninsula for snowshoe
hares and, as tradition dictates, did not see any well, but saw lots of tracks.
A beautiful snowy owl was some compensation, and as
usual, we hand-fed reams of bold black-capped chickadees, which is quite an
addictive pasttime.
Starting in
April, for two months, I spent two mornings a week censusing
neotropical migrants (birds
that breed here but winter in Central and South America) along the Lake Ontario
shoreline for the Nature Conservancy. I saw some lovely habitat on private
lands, and had some nice sightings (many mourning warblers, willow and alder
flycatchers singing together, and acadian
flycatcher unusually far north). Also in April we saw one of our best birds of
the year, a beautiful male garganey, which is a rare
Eurasian duck; it turned up at a national wildlife refuge an hour to the west
of us, and provided only my second sighting ever.
In May we took
a 9-day trip to the deep south, inspired by another
business trip, this one to Biloxi,
Miss. to judge entries in the
International Science and Engineering Fair. This extravaganza features about a thousand
winners of country, state and local high school science fairs around the world
(though certainly concentrated in the US). About a dozen of us from Kodak
attend each year to award prizes for creative use of photography in the
projects. Before the fair, Eileen and I camped in the Florida panhandle,
locating some very rare conifers, the Florida Torreya
and Florida Yew, the former of which is essentially extirpated from the wild
(there are only a handful remaining, and no mature specimens are extant). After
this trip, there were only two remaining conifers in eastern North
America that I had not seen, Pond Pine and Carolina Hemlock. After
the fair, we visited a petrified forest and the Vicksburg
battlefield in Mississippi.
We had lots of good plants, including yellow trumpets (a carnivorous pitcher
plant), and a nice assortment of southern birds, including 4 new species for
Eileen: Swainson's and Kentucky
warblers, Bachman's sparrow, and Mississippi
kite.
We finally had
a deck built, which was finished on our 7th anniversary on 14 June. The deck,
which I designed, is octagonal, 1 - 1½ feet off the ground, with no railings to
block the view of the back yard; we even found an octagonal cedar table to
match it. We stained it gray like the house and we think it turned out well. We
enjoyed eating out there almost every evening that we were at home for the rest
of the summer. A family of downy woodpeckers afforded us almost continuous
entertainment at the suet feeder a short distance from the edge of the deck.
We started
June by censusing the rare small white lady's slipper
(found only two places in New York
state, where it is at the eastern extent of its
range). The next weekend we took two friends to the Adirondacks for a weekend
of birding, and had very good luck, finding three species of birds at the very
southern edge of their range in eastern North America
(black-backed woodpecker, boreal chickadee, and gray jay). At the end of the
month we took a very successful botanizing (plant-finding) trip to the Bruce Peninsula
on Lake Huron; exciting finds included two
rare ferns, wall rue and moonwort, the latter a first for us.
One of our
major goals this year, starting in early May, was to track down and photograph
a variety of native wildflowers in the northeast to bring our total above 300
species. You may recall that about 4 years ago we tried to photograph as many
native flowers as possible in a single year, and just barely broke 200. Since
then we had added about 15 species a year, and were near 270 at the start of
1993. By making several specific trips to different locations at different
times of year, and concentrating on obscurer species in the areas we visit more
frequently, we were able to bring our overall list to 333 species, a gain of
over 60 species in one year!
Fourth of July
week we took an 8-day botanizing trip to the Pine Barrens in New Jersey, by way of the Catskills and Poconos, and looping back via the coast. The Pine Barrens would have been great camping except for a
dreadful heat wave that made it difficult to function. While there we
photographed our 300th native wildflower of northeastern North
America, the thread-leaved sundew, a beautiful carnivore. Other
favorite flowers of the trip included orange milkwort, meadow beauty, and golden
crest. We next drove up the coast, stopping very briefly on Long
Island so Eileen could see roseate terns at a nesting colony. Rhode Island was my 49th state (I have still only landed,
but not travelled in, Washington
state) and Eileen's 46th state (she has yet to visit Delaware, Washington, or
Oregon). From
there we continued on to Cape Cod, where a
rare black-tailed godwit had been seen recently. Although we did not locate this bird, we did
have a very successful whale-watching trip out of Provincetown,
which yielded superb views of one of the 300 remaining right whales in the
world, as well as minke and finback whales, and Wilson's storm-petrels.
July was
rounded out with trips to the Bruce Peninsula and the southwest Adirondacks,
during which our good luck with ferns continued. The former trip featured
hart's-tongue fern, the distribution of which is very unusual (apparently, on
this continent, originally found only in very small portions of Tennessee, New York, Ontario, and New Brunswick);
on the latter trip we discovered dissected grape, Massachusetts, and Boott's
ferns (this last one a hybrid). We had seen each of these ferns except the
grape fern only once before. In the Adirondacks,
a short canoe trip resulted in a fine selection of sightings, such as a family
of 6 rusty blackbirds (at the southern extreme of their breeding range there),
a beaver at close range, and 4 species of carnivorous plants, which are quite
common in sphagnum bogs in this region.
We started
August with a fine canoe camping trip in the Adirondacks, with lavendar bladderwort (a tiny and apparently very uncommon
carnivorous plant), water lobelia, and floating heart (an aquatic gentian)
being highlights of the trip. We frequently see the leaves of the latter, which
are very cute heart shapes that float on the surface of sluggish rivers, but
have had trouble intersecting with their blooming period. The next weekend we
visited my Dad and friends in northern Vermont,
which was a lot of fun. Our last trip of the month was our third assault on the
Bruce Peninsula, where we found late-blooming
species such as smaller fringed gentian, rattlesnake plantain, asters, and
goldenrods.
Our major trip
of the year was the third in a series of four covering the mountain west. Our
earlier trips were to the Canadian Rockies/Glacier and Yellowstone/Tetons/Colorado. This three-week trip concentrated on
photographing the scenery of southern Utah and
the Arizona strip (that part of Arizona north of the Grand Canyon).
This was our first major trip ever in the fall. The weather was generally
pleasant; the high was 103° in Zion,
the low slightly below freezing in Bryce. Although we avoided the tourist
season for families with children, some of the parks (Zion and Bryce, especially) were unfortunately
fairly crowded, primarily with foreign visitors. However, we visited a lot of
out-of-the-way places and sometimes would go half a day without seeing anyone.
Our itinerary, with a few highlights, follows. We drove 3½ days to reach Cedar
Breaks NP, UT, where we camped at over 11,000 feet elevation (our highest
camping ever). This eroded amphitheater resembles Bryce but is much higher,
with subalpine fir/Engelmann spruce forests, At one overlook, we had a golden eagle pass by at close
range, at eye level. From there, we visited the majestic Kolob Canyon
area in northwest Zion NP, and then camped at remote Lava Pt. in northern Zion. Next on the agenda
was Coral Pink Sand Dunes SP, with its salmon-colored sands and ponderosa
pines.
That evening,
after a 2-hour drive on confusing dirt roads, we reached a rarely visited
viewpoint of the Grand Canyon at Toroweap Pt. Here the canyon is only a mile wide and the
sides are almost vertical, so if you climb out onto the rocks at the edge, as
we did to photgraph at sunset, you can look straight
down into the river. This is considered one of the scariest views around, and
more than one author has written of being unable to ever again approach the
viewpoint after seeing it once. Eileen was pretty much unwilling to approach
the viewpoint before seeing it at all!
After a
morning of photographing and enjoying the many white-tailed antelope squirrels
and pinyon jays in the area, we headed back north and
met Eileen's parents at Zion,
where we spent two days. At 04:30 the first morning, Eileen and I crawled out
of bed and went searching for ringtails. These very nocturnal, raccoon-like
mammals have long, magnificent, black-and-white banded tails. I have been
trying at every opportunity to see them for 11 years now, and Eileen and I had
come to regard them as being mythical (like lynx and fisher). Consequently, we
were amazed when Eileen, after many minutes of searching for an animal that had
disappeared down a steep, grassy bank into a grove of trees, put the light on a
ringtail halfway up one of the trees! Before dawn, we found two more elsewhere
in the park, but we will never forget the thrill of that first view.
Next we spent
two days in Bryce NP, where a blue grouse joined us for a picnic lunch one day.
The first day was cold, reaching a high of only 55°, 48° cooler than the high
the previous day in Zion!
The following two days were spent at the North Rim. When we arrived, Eileen and
I took the 4WD road to Pt. Sublime, which we had entirely to ourselves; the
viewpoint was lovely. Eileen's parents started touring the other parts of the
park (we could not all fit in our 2-seat 4WD van), and had the audacity to get
good views of Kaibab squirrel. Although later in the
trip Eileen saw one briefly, I have still not ever seen one, even after 3 trips
to the North Rim. The following morning, we went out to Bright Angel
Point to see the sunrise;
photography was hampered by the high winds (later in the day we had a glass
camera filter blow away over the edge!).
From the North
Rim, Eileen and I headed northeast, and Eileen's parents headed home. We
periodically followed long dirt roads to the Colorado
River, obtaining a number of fine views. Marble Canyon,
viewed from the House Rock area, was especially dramatic. The dirt road simply
barges up to the canyon lip; if you were going fast enough and did not see the
edge I think you could drive right off into the canyon. After a windy night of
camping at Lee's Ferry, we cleaned and reorganized the van (the former with the
help of a friendly canyon wren), and headed for Page, AZ. After picking up
literature to help with planning our final trip of the series, we headed north
back into Utah and reached Kodachrome Basin, an extinct geothermal area, late
in the day. We took the single campsite at Grosvenor
Arch, and enjoyed the beautiful double arch with the wails of coyotes in the
background.
Continuing
northeast we entered Capitol Reef NP from the Burr Trail. This park has lengthy
4WD routes through geologically fascinating areas, each of which we took during
our 2-day visit. Some of the geological highlights included the Waterpocket Fold, huge hills composed of bentonite clay, a 20-foot diameter mass of gypsum at the
surface, and the monoliths of Cathedral
Valley. After efforts
spanning over 20 years, I finally was able to add the cryptic Colorado chipmunk to my mammal list, in the
canyon at the end of the scenic drive (we also saw this species later in Canyonlands NP). In between Capitol Reef and Canyonlands NP, we stayed at Goblin Valley SP, where at
nights the roads abounded with Ord's kangaroo rats
and black-tailed jackrabbits, and we also saw a few poorwills.
Canyonlands NP has three isolated districts, separted by the junction of the Green and Colorado Rivers,
of which we visited two (the Maze and Island
in the Sky) on this trip (the Needles will have to wait for next year). The
Maze is far from anywhere and you cannot even get into the national park
without 4WD. On the dirt road on the way in (a dusty 2-hour drive), I spotted a
badger, one of Eileen's "most wanted" mammals (I had seen one
previously), and we got good looks at it. We drove the 9-mile road to Panorama
Pt. in 1½ hours one-way, excluding stops -- that was one rugged road (average
speed 6 mph!) Our camping spot that night, The Neck, was a thin, almost
knife-edge ridge between two expansive canyons, each with superb views -- quite
a spot!
Next we
visited the Island in the Sky District. Scenic
photography potential was significantly limited by jeep trails near the canyon rims
(we try to have no evidence of man in our scenic photographs, a tremendous
challenge in the east, but usually easier in the west). Nearby Dead Horse Pt.
SP has a famous vista that, unfortunately, is also marred by a jeep trail.
After a pleasant night of remote camping on BLM land outside the park, and
pulling a camper out of a soft sand wash, we headed for the last stop of the
trip, Arches NP. This is a very enjoyable park, and we had a lot of fun hiking
around and photographing a selection of arches. The drive home took 3 days; we
stopped overnight in Manhatten, Kansas
to visit Eileen's sister's family; it was nice to see them! We arrived home
after 23 days, having covered 7200 miles.
We finished up
the year with a few short trips. The weekend after returning from the west, we
spent three days of miserable weather in Algonquin
Provincial Park, Ontario,
pretty much at the peak of fall color. Two weekends later we made our
traditional trip to the Adirondacks to see the
tamaracks in fall color; we were unfortunately a little after peak. Over
Thanksgiving, we went to Cape Ann, Massachussetts, a peninsula near the New
Hampshire border that is excellent for seabirds at
that time of year. There we saw our second right whale; numbers of razorbills,
black guillemots, gannets, and kittiwakes; a pair of harlequin ducks; and one
dovekie. The razorbills were my first in the US
(I saw them on the breeding grounds in Newfoundland
12 years ago), and the dovekie only my third sighting ever.
We are looking
forward to spending Christmas visiting my folks in Virginia. I guess that I wrote last year's
letter early enough that I did not mention last Christmas, which we spent in
west Texas, visiting Eileen's family. While there, we took a 4-day remote
camping trip to Big Bend. The trip was
delightful; at night, we had to watch where we stepped because there were so
many kangaroo rats underfoot -- it sure is hard to beat camping in the desert!
We hope that
all is well with you and your families!