ecophoto krüger

After a very harsh winter, spring started with a, for the season, very warm period and all the snow melted away at a surprising speed. In mid May the weather changed between heavy rainy days with days of plus twenty degree C. The leafless trees turned green in just a couple of days in this natural greenhouse. But due to cold days and nights, some snow and ice could be found in shaded terrain still at the end of May.

When you experience these extremes between warmth and cold, it is hard to make up your mind if this is due to global warning or just an ordinary happening. Some experts mean that extreme weather like this, is a sign, an evidence of the phenomenon global warming.

Nevertheless, nature is alive at the moment!

This photo shows a hen capercallie. Sorry to say, but her beauty far excels her male partner. I think, it is remarkable that this bird succeed to combine such beauty with a camouflage that is far better than most to be seen in the woods.

The hens definitely deserve a better status in the nature photographers world!

The mouse population thrives and so do the owls. There are more nesting owls than for many years. One of the most elusive and magically attractive is the great grey owl (strix nebulosa), or as it is named in Swedish, "Lappugglan".  

Four years ago I had a close encounter with nesting great grey owl.  After this, I have walked miles and miles to find another one (in my "home-area"). I was obsessed and almost hypnotized with finding one. I have tried to make the area more attractive by putting up big nesting boxes and platforms, so if the "grey one" shows up another time, there will be potential nesting places in the area, as nesting places in most places are a limiting factor for these magical birds.

And then, on the 9th of May, it happened again. I was on the way to the black grouse moor to see if there still was lek there, when a very big bird flew over a clearing and stopped on a high stump. A great grey! I took a long distance unclear shot just for documentation before it disappeared into a nearby swampy copse of trees. I started to walk in his direction and continued up to the big moor, where, the black grouse lek. The great grey could not be seen anywhere.

On my way back I passed this area again. Suddenly I got a strange feeling of someone observing me. I stopped. I put down my tripod and had a look around me. And there, just a breath away in a small dwarfed pine, someone is observing me. Two very intense yellow eyes stare at me. He sits totally calm and his eyes try to tell me something, -"stand still!". I freeze and he turns his head back and locks his eyes onto something. What will happen now? Then, before I had a chance to react, he spread out his impressive 25-30 cm wide and 150 cm long wings and soundlessly landed in the moss. A couple of seconds later he flew up in a nearby tree with his catch. A vole!

Everything went fast now. I changed my position a little to find a free opening. No time for finding a perfect line of sight, but I can manoeuvre into a position a couple of meters away for a decent sight-hole. Not everything is in free sight, but the main parts of the owl are. The camera focuses on target and I let the shutter go. Voilà! 

Not the perfect photo perhaps, but the memories around it are.

How would the spring and summer be without the black birds?

It would certainly not be the same chorus in the gardens. Its commonness and beauty combined with its famousness among ordinary people makes this bird particularly special. I could not think of a spring without its sometimes little sad songs comming from its position high up in a tree.

Look close! Isn't this bird as beautiful as its relatives, the paradise birds in the rainforest? I think they are. If we open our eyes, we would see how much we could be proud of in Scandinavia. Our land needs as much protection as the rain forest of unrestricted logging. It is depressing to see how ruthless our forest companies are in their logging.  With another attitude and approach, there wouldn't be any protest and both interest groups would gain on it.

The first spring grass that come up on the fields, seems to be very tempting for the bears as they come out from the shadow to forage on it when still some light outside. Especially on fields close to the forest.

This is a young bear that during a fourteen day period routinly came out for grassing a couple of hours before sunset.

"Time is out of joint"!  No year is like before! 

The last winter 2009/2010, in Sweden, was very different and extra ordinary in many ways. It was literally a "wolf winter". The snow came with the cold at ordinary time. But this year the snowing did not stopped as usual after a few occasions. It just snowed and snowed. Almost every week we had another decimeter of snow. And the cold continued for days, for weeks and for month. Even more snow came down during our normally very dry month February and March.

But what a pleasant feeling with a real winter. A winter with unlimited skiing and untuched areas everywhere.

Winter seems to be and are a colorless time. But if we intruduce bright colors into it, the whole scene really lift in appearance. The vibrance and intense in the colors really are extraordinary in this season.

Here a drinking pause on the trail between the mountains Helags and Sylarna, in the middle of Sweden, during a return day trip from Helags to "Ekorrpasset." With dogs and "skeijt" skies, this 32 km trip was a fast and easy pleasure. 

Here part of the ridge above "Helags" glacier shows through a an opening in the clouds, framed by surrounding mountains. The light was bright, intense and diffuse in a very special way, with shapes and lines. Unfortunately, could not the real magic be caught on photo. The light condition was too extreme.

So, live view and brain recording is still the best equipment to experience our world with!

Winter time is also a time to go abstract with the photography. Formations and shapes, especially those that can be found close to icy waters, are nice subjects that easily turn into art. To chang to black and white can increase this feeling even more.

Good close work and macro need time in front of the object, which means you really have to slow down and release your stresses to get a good result. So not just your pictures would be good, you will also find this pleasing for your mind.

Winter is a fantastic time!

Inspired of Hans Strand, I experimented with introducing camera shake into the picture. As seen in Hans' very interesting photo of birches, a slight camera shake can give some enormously attractive pictures. They get a "ghosty" feeling!

In this Christmas-time photo I used a fairly long shutter time and moved the camera slightly up and down during the exposure. Ghosty?

Evening light at lake Hyn, Dalarna. This is a rather big lake with a very special shape of a star cross. Its almost like a CAD drawing of this shape.

Nevertheless, this area has been and still are in some places a real wilderness, were you could encounter four of our five big ones. Wolf, lynx, eagle, bear and probably also the fifth, the "forest" wolverine, even though it very rarely patrols this region. But, 200, 300 km away there are breeding couples of forest adapted wolverines, so there is a chance a sighting!

The population of capercallie in this area are well above average in this part of Sweden. Every visit up here, I have at least one encounter especially with the big forest hen birds. 

I really hope it can continue in this way. The demand of timber and the eager of short sighted money, makes it hard to leave enough old grown trees for the capercallie to thrive. Particularly the edge zone to swamps and wet areas that are so extremely important to these birds as well as a lot of other animals and birds. 

The willow tit (parus montanus), one of the characteristic birds you can see at winter feeding places in the wood lands. It may look unpretentious, but at a closer look its soft colors from brownish tan to black are very well balanced and appealing. This is one of my absolute favorite small birds.

Remarkable that these small, just 10 gram heavy, birds survive a winter with minus 10 – 25°C. How can they do it? A modern human barely survive these temperatures one night with a down sleeping bag and tent!

Here in whole-length portrait.

This very whitish owl, a short-eared owl (Asio flammeus, swe: "Jorduggla"), is usually a temporary guest in my area. It just following the "snow-line" on its way up to its nesting places in northern Sweden. It is an owl for the open landscapes and can be found in open moor land, in mountain areas and sometimes on clearings in the forets area. This one I caught on my memory card early spring or late winter you can call it, when hunting at a little creek close to a local golf course. 

One of my photographic goals is to catch an "jorduggla" as we name it, when hunting for lemmeln in the treeless flatlands in our Swedish mountains, surrounded by snowy peaks.

Perhaps I will be lucky this year!

Late September this year, I was on a tour to British Columbia, the western-most of Canada’s provinces. A fantastic place that impresses everybody travelling through it. Specifically the coastal regions, like Vancouver Island, with its abundant wild life and rich waters.

Even though wildlife is plentiful in these waters, a good guide definitely will increase your chance tremendously for good views and photo opportunities.

At first it may seem expensive, but taken into account the optimised experience you get, it is worth every penny!

The basis of our tour was a private guided three-day-two-night Zodiac tour through Broughton Archipelago. The archipelago with its many often step islands is interesting not so much for its water life, as for its very special nature. There is plentiful of cedar, pine and spruce, growing right down to the shore line. In-between these trunks, the space is filled up with a meter and a half of under-vegetation, like a very thick carpet. The bushes are so dense that it is almost impossible to penetrate, that is if you are not a grizzly bear. The whole area is much like the Norwegian fjords, but “painted in green” with trees and bushes.

We slowly went around in this beautiful island world with our guide Angela in her open 2x150 hp Zodiac boat. With its speed and small size, it is a most versatile boat, especially for small groups or families. It can extremly fast move between locations and due to its size its easy to manoeuver into position.

Angela who runs the company “Ocean Rose Coastal Adventures in Port McNeill, is one of the most professional guides you can find in the area, with her proficiency and contact net. Even though she can not rule over nature, I’m sure she will always be able work out some extraordinary viewings for you. Book her!

This year she manoeuvred us toward sea lion colonies, humpback whales, seals, eagles and of course bears. Unfortunately, we could not find any Orcas as they had migrated out on the big ocean a little earlier than usual this year, which was a pity.

In one of the deepest inlets, Thompson sound, there is an area protected from logging. Nearby this wild place Rick lives, who is said to be the “last” real trapper in the area. His small hut is just a stone through from a creek full of salmon. And where salmons are, there are bears. You can say he literally lives on a bear track!

This place has a very, very, big potential for private close-by foot-encounters with grizzlies. An amazingly interesting thought, isn’t it? Unfortunately, our few  hours there were not successful due to unforeseen circumstances.

But, next  morning in the neighbouring inlet at Glendale and its estuary, we had an experience of a lifetime, that well compensated for the other day.

There we had a really close encounter with a mother Grizzly teaching her cub to forage for dying salmon. She showed us how surprisingly skilled and gentle she could be with her potentially lethal mouth and teeth. First she very delicately peeled of and ate the nutrient rich skin before going for the rest. It was just amazing seeing them in their behaviour! Their cuteness blazed, but what really made me excited was their behaviour. To follow them and see how, the eager and very concentrated cub, copied everything mom did. I think this was the final lesson in her survival course.

It was an experience of celestial dimensions and an extraordinary occurrence even for this spot!

With their bellies filled up with salmon they moved up on the surrounding estuary for some more grazing, that provided me with some excellent shots. The soft yellow-brownish coloured grass made a perfect match to the bear’s colours. Less harsh light and fewer bad reflections, also helped to bring out colours and details in a pretty good way.

On Vancouver Island it could very clearly be seen how huge the ongoing deforestation is. There are just fragments left of this genuine old-growth and very unique temperate rainforest, that only can be found here and on some other places along America’s west coast.

One of the few places here, where you can experience true genuine and unspoiled rain-forest is Raft Cove on the western coast close to Port Hardy. There you can walk on bear tracks among old trees, balancing on huge fallen logs full of lichen, before you enter the wild Pacific’s shore line, with its black lava stone pinnacles and a bay full with contrasting white sand. This is wild life division one! I just hope all this can be managed (protected) in a sustainable way.