Finding and Photographing Cavity Nesters

Threading my old Land Rover down a long-forgotten scratch of dirt that once passed as a road in this forest, the smell of terpenes was overwhelming as the sweet and pungent aroma of pine resin filled the air and my lungs. Light and shadow danced like two lovers across the forest floor as the sun bobbed and weaved in and out from behind the trees. The whole of the place felt more Africa than North Carolina, and it’s likely that the beauty I find in this landscape is baked into my genes, a ghost in the machine if you will, an epigenetic memory of the savannas from which we all evolved.  

It’s moments like these where I find myself lost in thought about us and the natural world, given that most people in western civilization now spend an average of 93% of their day indoors. Thoreau said that in wilderness is the perseveration of the world. When he set around growing beans and waxing poetically about life and nature at his pond-side cabin, chemists had yet to discover the benefits of something as simple as the smell of a pine forest. Produced as a sort of chemical weapon by the trees themselves, this cocktail of aromas is known to have powerful anti-inflammatory benefits to us. Nor did anyone know that the natural bacteria and fungi in the humus of the forest floor had a measurable impact on boosting our immune system or that it lowered our blood pressure. And as I sit here now bouncing along through this national forest, I can’t shake the feeling that all of this is just the tip of the iceberg.