Stay Curious
Spring. The time of rebirth and renewal; when Persephone emerges from the underworld and Demeter breathes life back into planet Earth in celebration of the return of her daughter; when flowers bloom, birds nest, babies are born; when serotonin production ticks up once again as hibernating humans emerge from their technological caves to feel the life giving warmth of the sun’s rays after months of physiological depravity. At least that’s what’s beginning to occur in other latitudes, I imagine. Here above 60 degrees north, several feet of snow continues to blanket the ground as I watch more fall amidst the paper birch and white spruce of the boreal forest that my office window peers out into.
I woke to a fresh set of moose tracks outside my window this morning. Bits of hair litter each step. Blackcap and boreal chickadees scoop in to collect in preparation for things to come. And while aesthetically this landscape still moans winter, an entire hemisphere’s worth of birds are heading this way.
As I sit here pondering what’s next, looking at the assortment of lenses and camera bags sitting on the floor in preparation for another trip to Panama next month, I’m filled with anticipation. Yet I can’t help but to feel as though I am missing out on the infinite stories of life and rebirth that are beginning to play out that I have spent so many years documenting, writing about, and photographing. While I have been to Alaska in March before, I have never lived in Alaska in March before. For so many years, if I wasn’t in places like Honduras or Belize right now, I was working my way toward the great biodiversity hotspot of North America that is the southeastern United States.
To paraphrase the Greek philosopher Plutarch, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled. I suffer from an unending thirst for understanding. Call it curiosity if you wish, the quality of inquisitive thinking and exploration. This is what drives my incessant wanderings, the intellectual rabbit holes I tumble down for weeks on end, the obscenely large collection of non-fiction books that pile up all around me. From the outside looking in, it likely borders on a pathology; just ask my partners past and present. For me, however, it’s the fire that I kindle and keeps me passionate about life.
The southeastern United States doesn’t receive a lot of love when it comes to wildlife photography. The West, always capitalized, is the great Mecca for photographers. Florida certainly gets a nod of consideration thanks to its wading birds, but by and large few wildlife photographers dream of visiting Alabama or South Carolina one day. Yet, from Virginia to Louisiana, this region plays home to the vast majority of species found from the Mexican border to the Arctic Ocean. It’s just that, those species tend to not fall into the category of charismatic megafauna.
It's true that Yellowstone National Park holds the greatest diversity of large mammals in North America, if not the Northern Hemisphere as a whole. And us wildlife photographers do love our large mammals. But there is so much more to life on Earth than bison and bears.
For me, I think it’s the interconnectedness of life that sparks my curiosity the most. The halls of academia celebrated the creation of a new frame of understanding called the Autocatalytic Biodiversity Hypothesis in 2017. It suggests that the diversity of life as we know it actively works toward the creation of new ecological niches that are then filled by yet more diversity. It sounds heady. But let’s distill this down like a good bourbon. In other words, life begets life; diversity begets diversity.
I couldn’t help but laugh when this came across my desk at the time, compliments of Eureka Alerts - that news source for journalists and science writers that sends alerts about upcoming scientific papers in advance so we have time to pitch stories to editors, research, and write about new discoveries to be published in concert with their announcements. Life begets life. I felt like this is something all of us already knew. And yet, maybe it’s not.
Unless one has the insatiable thirst for knowledge of the natural world around them, then how do they ever come to understand the intricacy of how tangled life really is?
Take the pinewoods treefrog, for instance. This is a species that has evolved within a forested habitat that experiences both severe drought and regularly scheduled fires. In fact, the dominant players in the ecosystem all work toward the goal of setting their own world ablaze. From the wiregrass to the longleaf pines, everything about the natural history of these species work to promote fast and furious fires that regularly sweep through the forest. For those whose evolution works toward this goal and the survival of the same, they live in a world in which their very presence helps to prune the forest of would-be competitors. But a forest is more than just trees. It’s a great multicultural metropolis of life. And for amphibians, such as the pinewoods treefrog, nothing about their evolution seems to benefit from fire ecology, let alone be able to survive it.
Within these forests, however, are the wetter recesses that play home to a savage garden that has evolved to thrive in a landscape devoid of nutrient dense soils thanks to the scorched earth policy of the trees that surround them. Here in what’s known as the poccosin swamps, plants have developed novel ways to obtain what they need from the world. And we call them carnivorous plants for their script flipping habit of eating animals to do so.
In one small area of southeastern North Carolina, there are more species of carnivorous plants than anywhere else in the world. But it’s one particularly ubiquitous species here known as the yellow-pitcher plant that plays a big role in the little pinewood treefrogs ability to survive.
Pitcher plants, like other carnivorous plants, have developed a unique way to lure in animals such as insects. As the name suggests, these plants are pitcher-like in shape. They contain something of a lid that hovers above the pitcher and keeps rain for coming in. And in the bottom of the pitcher is a concoction of digestive juices that has a scent that is apparently irresistible to the smaller majority that lives in the region. Lured in by the intoxicating smell, a hapless fly, ant, or mosquito becomes trapped in the liquid at the bottom of the pitcher plant and is then slowly digested and consumed. And it’s this means of obtaining nutrients in a nutrient poor world coupled with the soggy nature of the peatmoss laden recess in the forest that allows the pitcher plant to survive the conflagrations around it.
Nothing goes unnoticed in the forest, however. When some plants survive the fires while others do not, when what appears to be a slow but steady parade of insects to those plants march forward day in and day out, other denizens of the ecosystem take note. As a result, the diminutive pinewoods treefrog is typically found inside of these yellow pitcher plants, exploiting the evolutionary jackpot this plant has stumbled upon.
The pitcher plant gives the frog protection from the heat of the day, drought of the season, and the inevitable fires that will come. Thanks to the allure of the digestive juices inside of the pitcher plant, enough insects are also stopping by to check in on the intoxicating smells from within where they are promptly met with the sticky tongue of the pinewoods treefrog.
At first glance, all of this would seem one sided; perhaps what we call a parasitic relationship. However, the pitcher plant is only looking for the nutrients it cannot find in the soil. Whether that comes from digested insects, or the uric acid expelled by the treefrog, it cares not. As the insects fatten the frog, the frog excretes its waist into the digestive liquid below providing the plant with great quantities of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, all in a liquid form that doesn’t take a week or more to break down. With a frog stuffed snuggly inside, the pitcher plant receives more than it can produce on its own. With a pitcher plant as safe harbor, the frog receives more than it could find on its own.
The presence of the pitcher plant benefits the frog. The presence of the frog benefits the pitcher plant. And it’s possible that from a long-term perspective, one may not be able to survive without the other – or at least thrive. Life begets life. Diversity begets diversity.
But all of this is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. The presence of the fire loving longleaf pine tree that so regularly helps to scorch the earth of the forest creates hearth and home for any other species that can endure the fire ecology of the place. If you can handle a little baptism by fire, then you can exist within a world of little to no competition for limited resources by others. This is what has led to the evolution of species like the Venus flytrap, which lives nowhere else in the world except for an 80-mile radius around Wilmington, North Carolina. And this is also what has given rise to one of the most diverse assemblages of orchids and orchid spiders.
As for the fire loving trees themselves, they are capable of enduring the fire ecology they promote thanks to incredibly thick scales of bark along with monumental amounts of sap. This sap, plays double duty. Not only does it protect the longleaf pine from fires, it also keeps animals from attempting to make a home inside of them as well.
Yet, one small species of bird who coevolved with the longleaf pine has learned how to handle themselves in the presence of all that sap: the red-cockaded woodpecker. As a result, nearly every species of bird in the forest is dependent on the presence of the red-cockaded woodpecker for their own survival. From screech owls to eastern bluebirds, if not for the red-cockaded woodpeckers abandoned cavities, these birds would be completely absent from the forest. In fact, over thirty different vertebrate species depend on the red-cockaded woodpecker for house and home here.
Once again, life begets life.
All of this is just one forest. Just one place. Similar dramas with different casts of characters play out in every habitat and every ecosystem across the planet. Missing from this story are elephants and eagles, bison and bears. When we peal back the layer of life that encompasses the big, impressive, and charismatic, we are left with an intricate web of life and stories that can set fire to the inquisitive and curious mind.
As wildlife photographers, this is the secret sauce; it’s the stuff that fuels my heart and mind; it’s what gets me out of the bed in the morning; it’s what keeps me exploring and thirsting for more.
As spring approaches, as the breath of life fills the world once again, I want to challenge you to find the esoteric beauty in the little stories all around you that only a wildlife photographer can understand.
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