New Englanders had Paul Revere to warn them of the coming British forces, but on May 19, 1780, there was no early morning ride with the cry, “The Darkness is coming! The Darkness is coming!” The dawn was cloudy with a reddish tinge, but by noon, it was dark as night from New Jersey to Maine. Night birds started to sing. Flowers closed their petals. A record number of people said, “What the — ?!” Within a day or so, the light returned, but it would be 228 years before any was shed on the mystery of the New England Dark Day, although the evidence was there all along. Finally, in 2008, scientists found the culprit: smoke from widespread forest fires, particularly in the Algonquin Highlands of Ontario, had blocked the sun. And the smoking gun? Tree rings.

Dendro-chron-ology (tree — time — study of) would seem, at face value, to be a tiny field hardly deserving an –ology at all. You just take a cross-section and count the rings to see how old the tree is, right? Well, apparently, that’s like saying a musician just plays scales. Although the field is less than a century old, there are now scientists who study dendroclimatology, dendrovolcanology, dendropyrochronology, dendrochemistry, dendroarchaeology, dendrotempestology, dendro — well, you get the idea.

In more familiar terms, these scientists use tree rings to study the history of climate, geology, ecology, and our ancestors. Dendrochronologists have documented the fall of Rome, recorded the eruption of volcanoes no one witnessed, settled a boundary dispute between Oklahoma and Texas, established the year of death of a murder victim (by the age of a root that grew over the body), indicated the strength of the 1908 Tunguska meteoroid impact that knocked over 80 million trees in Russia, dated the Stradivari Messiah violin, and provided a calibration for radiocarbon dating that literally changed history. Who knew?

It all started when a gargantuan asteroid collided with Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. That singular event gave Earth its tilt, which gave us the seasons, which cause the familiar growth rings in trees. It’s appropriate, then, albeit surprising, that the field of dendrochronology was founded by an astronomer.

In 1901, Andrew Ellicott Douglass was interested in establishing a long-term record of sunspot activity. Reasoning that sunspots affect the sun’s output, which affects our climate, he got the eyebrow-raising idea to look at growth patterns in tree rings for evidence of past sunspot activity. Soon, Douglass noticed that a pattern of small rings in the years 1899, 1902, and 1904 was consistent among ponderosa pines near Flagstaff, Arizona. Eventually, he documented the pattern, now called the Flagstaff Signature, in trees throughout the southwestern states. He went on to show that tree rings recorded rainfall and climatic cycles, but he was never able to convince most scientists that tree rings could record sunspot activity.

Douglass’ problem with the sunspot record is but one example of why dendrochronology is far more than a child’s science project. Tree rings are like life-and-times autobiographies; they record the history of an individual tree as well as the ecological history of that tree’s surroundings. Examining the sawn end of an old log, you and I might notice that some rings are thicker than others, indicating good growing years. But dendrochronologists have deciphered a far more complex language that conveys stories, not just dates, otherwise hidden by the ravages of time.

Small rings can indicate slow growth due to an insect outbreak, pollution, or the tree putting most of its resources into a large fruit crop. Large rings may signal a burst of growth after the end of a drought, the fall of nearby canopy trees that had been hoarding the light, or the fertilizing action of a recent fire or volcanic ash fall. Rings that are large on only one side of the tree indicate reaction wood growth to reinforce the tree’s strength against gravity after a hurricane or landslide gave it the old gangster lean.

A dendrochronologist must be able to read microrings just two cells wide, false rings embedded in a single annual ring, fuzzy ring boundaries in tropical trees, missing rings, pinched rings that are missing part of their circumference, frost rings formed from freezing temperatures during the growing season, and fire scars that lack telltale charcoal. Embedded in the text of annual rings are subtle motifs that are the signatures of events that occur regularly, like El Niño, or randomly, like major volcanic eruptions.

As with historians, some trees are better than others at recording past events. Many tropical trees that grow in areas without distinctive wet and dry seasons do not have rings. The vast majority of tree species do not live more than a couple hundred years. Still, dendrochronologists have found use for nearly 700 different species of trees and shrubs. Like any good handyman, they look for the right tool for the job. Often, that means whatever is growing in the place of interest. But for those interested in ancient history and long-term patterns, it is often the ancient trees that are read. Douglass himself established a giant sequoia tree-ring record going back more than 3,000 years, but it was one of his students, Edmund Schulman, who discovered the oldest trees in the world, the now famous bristlecone pines.

Great Basin bristlecone pines live at the timberline in their namesake region, where, in the words of Schulman, they achieve “longevity under adversity.” The cold and dry windswept environment, thinness of the groves, and lack of vegetative cover keep insects, fungi, disease, and fire at bay, while the short growing season may pack 140 rings into an inch of wood. Many of the older trees are reduced to a few living twigs sustained by a narrow strip of bark and living cambium clinging to a weathered skeleton of twisted wood. The oldest living tree Schulman found, which he called Methuselah, still thrives two miles high in the White Mountains of California and just celebrated its 4,842nd germination day. It sprouted just a century or so after the invention of writing, was more than 200 years old when the Great Pyramid was built, and was already 3,000 years old at the height of the Roman Empire. And scientists have found that 4,700-year-old bristlecone pines have the health, vitality, and seed-making ability of 200-year-old youngsters. On the harshest growing sites, bristlecone pines are practically immortal and will likely survive until the climate changes on the scale of an ice age, or the very ground beneath them wears away.

Great Basin bristlecone pines are not the only trees that count their rings by the thousands. A Patagonian cypress in Chile that was logged in 1975 germinated 3,613 years earlier, around the time the cat was first domesticated, the woolly mammoth became extinct, and alphabetic writing was invented. The oldest-recorded giant sequoia sprouted about 350 years later. Only five other tree species have exceeded 2,000 years: western juniper, coast redwood, and foxtail pine in California; Colorado bristlecone pine in Colorado; and sacred fig in Sri Lanka. Eight conifers from North America, and one from Tasmania, have lived more than 1,000 years.

Early in the development of dendrochronology, Douglass realized there was a way to extend the tree-ring record back before the oldest living trees laid down their first ring. Douglass called it crossdating. He matched patterns of tree rings, like the Flagstaff Signature, from trees that have overlapping lifespans. Let’s say that you use a Swedish increment borer, a tool that removes a pencil-like section that cuts across the tree rings, to take a bore sample from a living ponderosa pine in Arizona. You find that it sprouted in 1890, so its inner rings include the Flagstaff Signature of small rings in 1899, 1902, and 1904. Next, you take a bore sample from a nearby fallen Rocky Mountain juniper that obviously died many years ago, but you find the Flagstaff Signature among the outer rings. Now, you can count the rings of the living ponderosa pine back to the 1899 ring of the Flagstaff Signature, cross over to the same ring on the fallen juniper, and continue counting rings until you know the year the juniper sprouted. As long as you can keep finding logs with overlapping lifespans and matching signatures, you can keep extending the timeline. In this way, Douglass established a timeline of ponderosa pine tree rings going back to the year 1,286 CE (Common Era).

Meanwhile, archaeologists studying the Anasazi Indian culture of the Southwest asked Douglass to apply his crossdating method to the wooden beams in ruins well preserved under overhanging cliffs in the dry desert air. Douglass quickly determined that the Pueblo Bonito ruin predated the Aztec Ruins (both in New Mexico) by 40-45 years. Eventually, he established a “floating” chronology of some 500 years that gave the order of construction for Anasazi structures, but no dates. “Floating” because it was not connected to the present; there was a gap in the timeline between the chronology for the ruins and the ponderosa pine tree-ring sequence. Finally, in 1929, Douglass sampled a beam from the Show Low site in Arizona that bridged the gap. He called the beam HH-39, but compared it to the Rosetta Stone because it allowed exact dating for all Southwestern ruins constructed since 700 CE.

With crossdating, dendrochronologists can extend the timelines for different trees or locations far beyond the oldest living trees. Based on pieces of wood that have been lying on the ground for thousands of years, the bristlecone pine chronology goes back to 6716 BCE, around the time the first cattle were domesticated. Combining subfossil pine and oak logs from river deposits in Germany, we now have an unbroken record that goes back to 12,460 years ago, when all humans were Stone Age hunter-gatherers, the dog was man’s only domesticated friend, and most of Canada was still a giant hockey rink.

For wood artifacts that are older, or do not contain enough rings for confident crossdating, archaeologists often turn to radiocarbon dating. But even that is now based on calibration with tree rings because the level of carbon-14 in the atmosphere has not been constant over time. Bristlecone pine tree rings showed that many earlier, uncorrected carbon-14 dates were centuries too old. Among other historical corrections, bristlecones proved that some European artifacts were actually older than their supposed Mediterranean progenitors.

The history recorded in tree rings is interesting in its own right, but it also helps us understand the present and prepare for the future. Scientific records of how the world works go back only a relatively short time. We didn’t even recognize El Niño events until the 1970s, but tree rings record them at least back to 1699. Using tree-ring signals that correlated with the North Atlantic Oscillation, we now have a record of sea-surface temperature for the North Atlantic back to 1713. We understand the risk of extreme floods better because flood debris has left scars on the upriver side of bur oak tree rings back to 1648. Reaction wood caused by high winds has been used to establish a record of typhoons back to 473 CE using Japanese cedar. Giant sequoias have recorded fires for the last 3,000 years. Bristlecone and foxtail pines show the frequency of volcanic eruptions big enough to affect climate for the last 5,000 years. Tree-ring chronologies have revealed past snow avalanches, landslides, changes in the water table, flood heights, earthquakes, and insect outbreaks.

Reading between the rings, dendrochronologists can take advantage of a tree’s excellent chemical memory because chemicals rarely move across the rings. Fancy techniques, like X-ray fluorescence or laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, can measure elements or stable isotopes in any given year of the tree’s life. This can give a record of past tropical cyclones (which produce less oxygen-18 than regular thunderstorms), air temperature, pollution levels, soil composition, and the intensity of interstellar cosmic rays, which affect solar activity and the earth’s magnetic field. Recent radiocarbon analysis of 11,000 years of tree rings has even confirmed that trees have recorded the history of sunspot activity. Finally, Douglass, the astronomer who studied trees to find answers about the sun but instead found answers about human history, was proven right.

We now know that the people of New England had nothing to fear on that Dark Day in 1780, but the unknown was enough to send them cowering. With vulnerability to floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes, global climate change, and other impacts of our own activities, we too face an unknown future. But with dendrochronology as our guide, we are far better equipped to understand and deal with it. All we have to do is read the history written by trees.

Whit Brounaugh writes from Eugene, Oregon

For more information on tree rings, visit the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research, founded by A.E. Douglass himself, at the University of Arizona at http://ltrr.arizona.edu/ and The Ultimate Tree-Ring Web Pages at http://web.utk.edu/~grissino/index.htm

The post History in the Heartwood appeared first on American Forests.

For most of my childhood my address was “the house with the biggest tree on Cardinal Lane.” That big black cherry tree, a remnant of the farm from which our little subdivision was carved, dominated our front yard and arched protectively over my bedroom.

It defined my seasons, taught me biology, featured in my outdoor games, and conveyed the potential of tree growth, the relative permanence of big trees, and the feeling that there are bigger, older, and wiser things in this world that we should heed. Perhaps it’s no wonder that, when I became a nature photojournalist, I soon turned my camera toward big trees.

Near midnight on May 12, 1989, I pulled into a parking lot, walked down a short trail, and, for the first time, paid a visit to a national champion tree. The next morning, I returned and photographed my first national champion tree, ole General Sherman him/herself. Since then, I have had the honor and privilege of photographing 200 champion trees in 30 states, but the real rewards come from just spending time with them, appreciating them, and seeing the world from their perspective. I hope these images will give you a window to some of my experiences with big trees and inspire you to go out and have your own.

Enter Gallery

The post A Journey Through Champion Trees appeared first on American Forests.

Steve Nelson was waiting for eight women. He planned to outfit them, put them in four canoes, and send them paddling into the wilderness. Nelson runs Spirit of the Wilderness Outfitters in Ely, Minnesota, one of many outfitters that cater to people visiting Superior National Forest (SNF) and its Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA). The women would be coming from as far away as Arizona and New England to spend four days paddling and three nights camping. They would paddle to a remote island that one of the women, Linda Keith, had visited as a sixth-grader, where she met the legendary Root Beer Lady.

Canoe trips in the Boundary Waters may be the first thing most Americans think of when they conjure up Superior National Forest, which President Theodore Roosevelt established in 1909. Today, three million acres are within the forest’s boundary, including almost 500,000 acres of lakes and rivers. The forest’s Roadless Primitive Areas were renamed Boundary Waters Canoe Areas in 1958 and officially classified as wilderness in 1978. There are more than 2,000 miles of rivers and streams in the forest, which abuts Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario.

Canoe and camping trips attract thousands of visitors each year and boost the economies of towns such as Grand Marais and Ely, which is home to a museum dedicated to the late Dorothy Molter, the Root Beer Lady of Knife Lake. Kristina Reichenbach, public affairs officer for Superior National Forest, says that the Boundary Waters Canoe Area draws about 250,000 visitors a year and that overall the forest is estimated to have 4.5 million visitors a year. Hiking, not canoeing, she says, is the most frequently cited reason for visiting SNF and experiencing the solitude and grandeur of the North Woods.

That grandeur has come under attack in recent years. In 1999, Superior Forest experienced a “blowdown” when straight-line winds destroyed or damaged trees across 1,000 square miles. More trees were lost in 2007 when a fire that started near Ham Lake, northeast of Ely, burned almost 37,000 acres on the U.S. side of the border and almost as much in Canada. The fire so denuded the landscape that evidence of the Sudbury meteor (a 10-mile-diameter meteor that two billion years ago struck what is now Sudbury, Ontario, 500 miles away) was discovered after the blaze. Designated wilderness areas were left to regrow naturally; other areas got a little help. American Forests has worked with Superior National Forest since 2007 to plant more than 350,000 trees to speed the forest’s recovery.

Many of those trees have been planted along or near the Gunflint Trail, a 57-mile-long paved road that connects Grand Marais with Seagull Lake. In May 2008, on the first anniversary of the Ham Lake Fire, Gunflint Trail Association organized the Gunflint Green Up, in which more than 400 volunteers planted trees. It has since become an annual spring event. Suzanne Weber, a former administrator of the association, says that in 2009 and each year since it has drawn about 200 volunteers. More than 110,000 red and white pine, jack pine, spruce, white cedar, and tamarack seedlings have been planted.

“Seagull Lake, where I own a cabin, was devastated by the Ham Lake Fire,” says Weber, who lives in Grand Marais. “Planting trees with friends, neighbors, and visitors to the area has helped heal both the forest and the emotional wounds from that fire.” The new trees are one to 10 feet tall, she says. “Some visitors don’t notice this as a forest fire area. It’s very green even though there are still many standing burned tree trunks.” Weber says that all the hiking trails are open, including one new trail. An old railway bed, rediscovered after the fire, has been turned into the 3.3-mile Centennial Trail, and named for the 100th anniversary of Superior National Forest.

About 30 miles to the west and closer to the Canadian border, Linda Keith and her friends were paddling in an area untouched by the Ham Lake Fire, although fallen trees can still be seen from the 1999 blowdown. Within Boundary Waters, the U.S. Forest Service did little more than restore campsites after the blowdown. In other parts of Superior, it has worked to restore the environment that visitors expect.

The Trails

Beth Gauper of Minneapolis is among the many city dwellers who visit the national forest for its outdoor recreational opportunities, especially hiking. She and her husband, Torsten Müller, operate MidwestWeekends.com, a guide to travel in the Upper Midwest. “We specialize in the silent sports,” she says: hiking, paddling, bicycling, snowshoeing, and skiing.

“We love the North Woods. I go there for the wildflowers in spring, the lakes in summer, the hiking in fall, and the skiing and snowshoeing in winter.”

Hikers often have the trails to themselves, occasionally spotting wildlife if they’re lucky. “Hardly anyone sees a wolf,” she says. “Bears are quite the deal around Ely, but hikers don’t generally see them. There are lots of deer, and people are most likely to see moose around the Gunflint Trail.” She says there are short, flat trails for people looking for easy strolls, but the shorter trails along the North Shore are likely to have a lot of people, especially on summer and autumn weekends.

She mentions three trails as favorites: the Cascade River Loop for hiking, the Split Rock River Loop for snowshoeing, and the North Flour Lake Loop for cross-country skiing.

“The mouth of the Cascade River is one of the best places to find wildflowers at the end of May and early June,” she says. “There are fiddlehead ferns, some stretched up and some with their heads still tightly coiled like a shepherd’s crook. Big patches of northern bluebells grow in sunnier spots.” The Cascade River Loop is an eight-mile trail accessed from Minnesota Route 61 between Lutsen and Grand Marais. The Split Rock River Loop is a five-mile section of the Superior Hiking Trail, near Beaver Bay and off Minnesota Route 61. “One January, I snowshoed the loop in minus-10-degree temperatures,” Gauper says. “Plump little cedar waxwings flitted around like Cinderella’s helpers as I followed the packed trail high above the mouth of the Split Rock River.” There was plenty to see: a frozen waterfall, chewed-up pinecones left by a squirrel, deer tracks, coyote scat, and eventually the tracks of other snowshoers.

The North Flour Lake Loop is one of many trails that are accessed from the Gunflint Trail. Starting from the Golden Eagle Lodge, a year-round resort on Flour Lake, the loop is a little less than four-and-a-half miles long. Another mile and a half takes you to Bearskin Lodge, another year-round resort off the Gunflint Trail. The resorts groom trails and even offer lighted loops for nighttime excursions.

The Birds

The Gunflint Trail area is “really good” for birding, says Jan Green of Duluth, a conservationist, ornithologist, and the author of, among other books, Birds and Forests: A Management and Conservation Guide, published by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources in 1995. With pine and spruce reforestation, she says, “You’ve got the chance of seeing more boreal northern birds, like the bay-breasted warbler, the Cape May warbler, the gray jay, the boreal chickadee, and the northern hawk owl.”

Green, who has 565 species of birds on her life list, says that Superior — with 225 species that can be seen each year and another 45 species that occasionally show up — has advantages over other birding destinations. “I have birdwatched in the White Mountain National Forest in New England and other forests in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, but Superior is larger and wilder. It has fewer people, too.”

Another avid birder is Sparky Stensaas of Wrenshall, Minnesota, and he agrees that Superior is, well, a superior place for birding. “The Chippewa National Forest is just to the west of Superior, but it doesn’t have all the boreal

species like the owls that we get in Superior,” he says. “Superior is a neat mix of lowland bog and rocky pine uplands. It’s the North Woods on steroids. Horseflies are gigantic and mosquitoes are fierce, but the birds and beauty make up for that.” The bug season is late May to late July. Stensaas has 640 species on his life list, and his company, Kollath+Stensaas, publishes natural history field guides for the North Woods. He says Superior is in the right spot for birding. “The biggest number of breeding species are in a belt from Wisconsin through eastern Minnesota and up to Manitoba. Superior is right in the middle.”

Stensaas says his favorite places for birding are Stony River Forest Road (“good for boreal chickadees, maybe a great gray owl”) and Lake County Road 2 in the Sand Lake area (“You can sometimes find spruce grouse there.”). He adds that black-throated blue warblers can be found in the eastern part of the forest near Lima Mountain Road, an area with “big old quaking aspen with an understory of mountain maple or moose maple.”

Birding is almost entirely a land-based activity, though Green says that she and a friend once walked on water to make the only confirmed Minnesota sighting of an American dipper, a stocky but small bird usually found much closer to the Pacific. “We were on the frozen ice of the river in a canyon, so there was no walking on the shore,” she says. “My friend almost fell into the river, which would have been life threatening.”

Although Superior National Forest is a destination for many birders, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area generally is not. “You can’t get anywhere but the portages or the lakes,” Stensaas says. “The birding there is incidental. The things people see are common loons, American black ducks, common mergansers, common goldeneyes, and ring-necked ducks. The sexy ones are the osprey and the bald eagles.”

The Waters

The attraction may be limited for birders, but paddlers of all stripes flock to the Boundary Waters to spend days in a wilderness with few, if any, signs of civilization or encounters with other humans.

Steve Nelson outfits groups for both Superior National Forest and Quetico. Linda Keith and her friends would be on a self-guided trip in BWCA. They would be paddling 45-pound, two-person Kevlar canoes; the weight is important because the canoes have to be carried on trails as long as a quarter-mile to get around waterfalls and rapids or to go from one lake to another. The canoes would also be carrying enough food for three meals a day plus snacks, cooking equipment, sleeping bags, tents, and other gear. The paddlers would be spending three nights at established but primitive campsites with permanent fire grates and, short walks away, pit toilets.

Nelson doesn’t just outfit the canoe crowd; he’s part of it. He says one of his favorite paddles in the Boundary Waters has a series of rapids and waterfalls. He begins in Fall Lake, then carries the canoe or portages around Newton Falls to reach Newton Lake. Next is another portage around Pipestone Falls and into Pipestone Bay, a finger of Basswood Lake that leads to Basswood Falls and the start of the Basswood River.

“By the time you get there, you’re 12 miles away from your entry point, so it’s a long walk home if you wreck your canoe,” he say. “We encourage people not to shoot the rapids.” Just a one-way trip takes a day or a day and a half.

The forest along the Basswood River is boreal. “The reasons I like that area include lots of bald eagles and really good fishing,” he says. “Walleyes, northern pike, smallmouth bass — those are the primary fish in this area.”

Keith, a professional photographer who lives in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, had asked her friends to accompany her to the Boundary Waters to celebrate her 50th birthday. They put into Moose Lake on a Tuesday morning, went through to Birch Lake, and found a campsite. “We picked a site where we could get beautiful sunsets,” Keith says. “We had the kind of sunsets where you say ‘Thank you, God.’”

The next day they paddled and portaged along the Canadian border from Birch Lake to Carp Lake to Seed Lake to Knife Lake. Knife Lake is home to the Isle of Pines, the island where Dorothy Molter lived from 1934 until her death in 1986. When the area was declared a wilderness in the 1970s, most residents were forced to move out, but she was given a life tenancy. She’s remembered as the Root Beer Lady because she brewed thousands of bottles of homemade root beer each year, chilled it with ice cut from the lake in winter, and sold it to paddlers who visited her island home or rented her cabins. Among those paddlers, almost 40 years ago, were a young Linda Keith and other Girl Scouts from Wisconsin.

After visiting the island where Molter lived (her house, now the Dorothy Molter Museum, was moved to Ely), the women paddled back to the campsite for their second night in tents. “We saw some people at the portages,” Keith says, but they felt like they had the North Woods to themselves.

The next day they spent quietly on Birch Lake, using their campfire to cook two angel food cakes and two walleyes they’d caught. “We also caught a northern pike, which we were afraid to touch,” she says. “We screamed like girls.” The pike was successfully returned to the lake.

After their third night in tents, the women paddled back to Moose Lake, where Nelson picked them up. Everything they had taken into the wilderness had to come back with them, including trash.

Speaking at the Spirit of the Wilderness office upon their return, Keith said they were still “processing the experience. Just being out in the wilderness is sacred. There’s something special about the Boundary Waters; my friends will go home different people. We’re walking away full.”

Steve Bailey, a former New York Times editor, teaches journalism at Salisbury University and can be reached at bailey@stevebailey.us.

Read More: Mining Rights in Superior National Forest

Read More: After Steve Bailey completed this story, a massive fire broke out within these renowned woods. In an American Forests web exclusive, we take a look at where the fire erupted and how it has impacted the region.

The post The Boundary Waters: A Place Apart appeared first on American Forests.

When Ernest Oberholtzer was 25 years old, the Quetico-Superior country saved his life. The year was 1909. Oberholtzer, who had grown up in Davenport, Iowa, and been educated at Harvard, had heart damage caused by rheumatic fever. He’d been told he might die within a year. So that spring he headed for International Falls, Minnesota, and started canoeing.

“I felt better with every stroke of the paddle,” he later said. In fact, he felt so much better that he decided “to traverse all the major canoe routes in the Rainy Lake watershed.” And thus, as he later wrote in American Forests magazine, he and a guide “cruised the whole boundary from Pigeon River to Rainy Lake.” They also paddled the major routes in what are now Quetico and White Otter- Turtle River Provincial Parks in Ontario and several other routes just west and north of Quetico.

“I am supposed to have paddled some 3,000 miles that summer,” he later said.

And so Oberholtzer did not die that summer, nor did he for 68 more years. Instead, as American Forests put it in 1944, he went on to “ more than any other single person” to preserve the Boundary Waters/Quetico wilderness canoe region of northern Minnesota and southern Ontario.

Oberholtzer had a variety of gifts. He played classical violin, explored remote Canadian wilderness, took beautiful photographs under difficult conditions, had a noteworthy book collection, and made an exhaustive study of the Ojibwe culture.

But his greatest gift may have been this: he thought in terms of watersheds and forest ecosystems. “The whole lakeland,” he wrote, “is tilted toward the northwest and discharges its clear waters out of the north end of Lake of the Woods to Winnipeg River, Winnipeg Lake, Nelson River, and Hudson Bay.”

The landscape, moreover, had been formed by glaciers, which had “left no extensive tillable soils. The forest grows, in large part, out of the crevices of the rock. The rock is everywhere close under the moss and the leaf-mold. Destroy the all-pervading forest and every value goes with it — timber, game, recreation, beauty.”

This perspective came in handy in 1925, when an industrialist named Edward Backus revealed plans to build seven large dams in the heart of the Quetico-Superior country for hydroelectric and lumber milling purposes. Water would be backed up across an area of nearly 15,000 square miles.

Oberholtzer soon became Backus’ nemesis. Oberholtzer was hired by a newly formed group called the Quetico-Superior Council to direct their operation at a salary of $5,000 a year. He then went to work on a detailed counterproposal to Backus’ scheme.

Applying his detailed knowledge of the region, he came up with a remarkably forward-looking management plan whose single underlying purpose was to protect a 14,500-square-mile forest. The plan was based on four principles. The first was the protection of visible shorelines from “logging, flooding, or other forms of exploitation.” The second was that the outlying areas away from main waterways be used for “practical forestry” — selective, sustained-yield timber harvesting. The third was the protection of native fish and game. And the fourth was that the region be managed by a joint Canadian-U.S. commission.

To accomplish this feat, Oberholtzer proposed that three zones be established. The first and largest would be a core wilderness zone. It would include what today are known as Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) and Voyageurs National Park on the Minnesota side; Quetico and White Otter-Turtle River Provincial Parks in Ontario; and several adjacent water routes in Ontario. The second zone would be a thin strip around the wilderness core in which summer camps and cabins would be leased and would be accessible only by water and foot trail. The third zone, farthest removed from the core, would allow private home ownership, sustained-yield forestry, and other economic uses deemed consistent with the four underlying principles. It was, in effect, a plan for an eco-region, presaging — by many years — such work as is now being done by the Coalition for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. As R. Newell Searle puts it in Saving Quetico-Superior, it “was a truly prophetic vision, a plan with few known precedents.”

But unless this great plan could be put into effect, it was an academic exercise. So Oberholtzer spent several more years, with help from his competent supporters, doing the tedious legwork necessary to get state and federal legislation passed. He contacted senators and representatives, helped write bills, commented on amendments, testified at legislative hearings, met with citizens groups, appeared on radio shows, and wrote hundreds of persuasive letters. This work came to fruition in 1930 with the passage of the landmark Shipstead-Nolan Act, one of the first federal laws to recognize wilderness as a value to be protected in the public interest. Specifically, it prohibited logging within 400 feet of shorelines in Superior National Forest. And — perhaps most important at the time — it prohibited the use of dams to manipulate water levels there.

With that start, Oberholtzer was all-in as a full-time wilderness advocate. For three-and-a-half more decades, he led the conservationists’ side in a seemingly endless succession of intense debates over proposed roads, logging, mining, and tourist development along the Minnesota-Ontario border. His work contributed directly to the inclusion of BWCA in the National Wilderness Preservation System in 1964 and its expansion by 68,000 acres in 1978; Ontario’s granting of full wilderness protection to Quetico Provincial Park in 1972; and the establishment of Voyageurs National Park in 1975.

Today, those three contiguous units — BWCA, Quetico Park, and Voyageurs — combine to form a fully protected 2.4-million-acre forest, among the largest in North America. That forest, a mixture of Great Lakes hardwoods and northern conifers, is Oberholtzer’s legacy. Thanks to him it remains, as he once observed, “one of the rarest of all regions of the continent, if not the world.”

Jim Glover writes from Carbondale, Illinois, and can be reached at gonecat@yahoo.com.

The post A Man Saved by Wilderness appeared first on American Forests.

Forever Wild — those two words have long governed New York’s approach to protecting its forested lands in Adirondack Park. That phrase, written into the state’s constitution, is more than just a simple guideline to forestry; it is a barrier to prevent anyone from removing even a single tree from state-owned land in the park. The Adirondacks, a six-million-acre park made up of public and private lands, is as big as the state of Vermont, and the protections given to its woods are some of the most stringent in the world. Yet some believe the time has come to tweak those rules.

In the ongoing push and pull between the protection of wilderness and the need to create a sustainable economy in the park, some are looking to logging to help propel future growth. A New York State senator has proposed a bill to open up logging on a tract of land in Adirondack Park that the state plans to purchase from The Nature Conservancy; land that the nonprofit acquired from a large paper manufacturer.

New York already allows logging in state forests outside of the Adirondack and Catskill Parks. The bill, introduced by Senator Elizabeth Little of the 45th District, would also allow logging on future state land purchases. It would not apply to the state’s current 2.5-million-acre landholdings in Adirondack Park.

Senator Little, a Republican who represents much of the Adirondack area, does not want the state to buy any more private land within the Adirondack boundary, believing New York’s landholdings are large enough. Adding more land to state control, she says, would hurt the timber industry at a time when communities in the region need good, paying jobs.

However, should the state acquire any more land, Little said she wants to make sure that logging is allowed in every purchase. She believes that a better philosophy for New York to follow is to obtain conservation easements from private property owners; under such easements, timber harvesting would still be allowed, and land would remain in private control.

According to Little, communities in the region are graying, with census numbers showing that the concentration of seniors within the Adirondacks is comparable to some communities in Florida. What the Adirondacks need are family-sustaining jobs, and logging has been a base of employment for generations, Little argues: “What we are seeing is the inability to sustain a grocery store, to continue having volunteer firefighters, and we are seeing declining enrollment in our schools.”

Bringing logging to new state forest lands will be no small task. Two sessions of the New York State Legislature must approve the change, and then voters must approve amending the state constitution, according to John Sheehan, spokesman with the Adirondack Council, an environmental group that opposes the legislation. “Its chances of passage are unrealistic,” he says.

STRONG HISTORY

New York’s stringent approach to forest protection did not happen by accident. It was the culmination of a pressing need to defend a rapidly declining forest resource that protects the water supply for downstream cities. In the late 1800s, the Adirondacks were a hefty source of lumber for growing American cities. At times, lumber companies were clear-cutting vast reserves of forest and then letting the land go back for tax sale, costing communities valuable revenue, Sheehan notes. Plus, the Adirondacks are the headwaters for a number of rivers, including the Hudson, and more than a dozen cities use Adirondack water as their drinking source.

In 1892, the state created Adirondack Park, a bold move that predated the creation of many national parks. It was not a park in the traditional sense. State officials drew a blue line on a map encircling the region and set about on a course to buy properties within that boundary. Since then, there has been a mixture of public and private lands within Adirondack Park.

During the park’s early days, clear-cutting was rampant. “They were leaving behind a devastated landscape,” Sheehan says. That led to the creation of a state constitutional amendment in 1895 that banned logging outright on state lands, requiring that they remain “forever wild.”

“It is still the strongest and strictest forest protection in the world,” Sheehan claims, adding that many New Yorkers do not want to see it tampered with. “We believe there is a lot of support for the ‘forever wild’ clause.”

Sheehan believes that opening up newly acquired state forest lands could cause a drop in timber prices. Some of the land that New York wants to add to its forest system also contains some of the last old-growth woods in the park, and that habitat should be maintained.

Little believes that logging is essential to the Adirondacks, along with the support it provides to paper mills within or near the park boundary. Although environmental groups believe the state forest systemis healthy, the senator also asserts that the inability to remove downed wood or harvest old timber chokes out new growth. She believes that opening the lands to logging would encourage not only the forest but also the local economy to grow.

“Government is probably the biggest employer in the park,” Little says. “What we need is more private-sector growth. You will not get that when you make more timber lands into state lands.”

Little’s bill proposes that any logging done on state forest lands would be supervised by the Department of Environmental Conservation to ensure that the forest is managed sustainably.

ECONOMIC DRIVER
For the better part of a century, the Finch Pruyn paper company was an economic engine in Glens Falls, a small city on the Hudson River just outside the park boundary. At one time, the timber giant was the second-largest private landowner in the state. But in 2007, Finch Pruyn was looking to divest some of its landholdings.

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) stepped in, purchasing 161,000 acres of lands untouched by development in the heart of the Adirondack wilderness. Those lands contain vast tracts of forest, the highest waterfall in the park, and scenic vistas of gorges along the Hudson River. It was an acquisition heralded by environmentalists and recreation enthusiasts, thrilled that so much previously closed wilderness would be open to the public.

The TNC staff had worked with foresters at Finch Pruyn on a number of forestry conservation issues, says Michael Carr, executive director of the Conservancy’s Adirondack Chapter. That close relationship helped TNC step in on this once-in-alifetime opportunity.

The $110-million purchase gave TNC a landholding the size of 11 Manhattan Islands, spread across six different counties. The properties adjoin state lands in many places and were often devoid of any roads. A large band of marble runs across the center of the landholding, creating a rich soil that grows a number of rare plants.

“When you look at timber data on the Finch lands, it reveals that these lands are very well stocked and well managed,” Carr says. “They connect a lot of water courses and contain the headwaters of many, many rivers.”

After the land acquisition, TNC went through an 18-month process to analyze the property’s ecological value and devise a plan for how to use the resources. Working with local and state government officials, scientists, and other environmental organizations, TNC decided to sell 92,000 acres to a timber investment firm, from which state officials later acquired a conservation easement. That opened up areas for snowmobile trails, a vital economic resource for the park during the long winter months.

Of the remaining land, the consensus among those various groups was to set aside 65,000 acres of forest that represented a rich ecological resource and open up new areas for public recreation. The state has agreed to buy those lands, but the decline in the economy has delayed the purchase, Carr says. Since then, some local government leaders like Senator Little have balked at the plan, arguing the state has too much forest land already.

Since the early 1990s, according to Sheehan, the state has eyed the Finch land as a possible addition to its forest holding because it represents such a diverse habitat and provides public access to some of New York’s most scenic areas. Uneven terrain and sensitive ecological sites also make many of the areas inside those 65,000 acres unsuitable for logging. Carr adds that recreation and tourism are major economic drivers in the park, which will only increase with this land purchase. However, if Little’s bill passes, logging activity would seriously limit recreation opportunities across those 65,000 acres, as well as threaten the ecological stability of sensitive areas and fragment the habitats on which local wildlife depend.

“The Adirondacks are the best example in the world of a temperate deciduous forest,” Carr says. “These lands are critical to protecting that habitat.”

Darrin Youker is an environmental reporter from Reading, Pennsylvania, and can be reached at darrinyouker@yahoo.com.

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Strolling among green giants gives us balance and perspective. That calming quiet we find in forests is one reason we seek out natural areas for restoration and renewal. For those with an affinity for forests, it may come as no surprise that these natural hallows possess the ability to strengthen and heal us. Renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted believed that people need contact with nature to lead a healthy, balanced life. Now, researchers and experts around the world are backing up these notions with facts.

Forests have much to offer in maintaining good health as well as recovery and relief for the unwell. Green tracts have been shown to reduce stress, lower blood pressure, strengthen immune systems, and help those struggling with conditions such as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

“Forests provide enormous possibilities to improve human health conditions,” wrote researcher Eeva Karjalainen of the Finnish Forest Research Institute in a 2010 scientific review. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention promote National Trails Day in part because “the presence of natural settings can have soothing and healthful effects. Some people will feel better and heal faster when they are exposed to landscapes that have a natural character.” It’s no wonder, then, that many rehabilitation and retreat centers border forests and natural lands.

To dig deeper into these healthful possibilities, American Forests looks at some of the science that links forests and well-being.

OPPORTUNITY FOR EXERCISE
Moving around a forest requires us to walk, run, climb, bike, or otherwise propel ourselves. “People in forests are more likely to be standing than sitting and tend to walk more than they would normally walk, and in ways that expend more energy, as opposed to walking on a sidewalk or floor,” says Geoffrey Godbey, professor emeritus of the Department of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management at Penn State University, who has studied and written on the health benefits of forests and parks.

Spending time in a forest also means people are not doing what they would normally do. Many of us spend our days indoors, working at sedentary jobs. When we get home, some of us just want to relax. “Generally, people who are outside expend more calories than people who are inside,” says Godbey, who through the years has planted some 70 trees on his two-acre property near State College, Pennsylvania.

Forests offer endless opportunities to stretch, move, and train our muscles and other bodily systems, all of which help us fight disease, prevent injuries, and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

“But forests offer more than just the potential for exercise,” says Linda Kruger, a research social scientist at the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station in Juneau, Alaska. Researchers around the world have found that natural areas offer a unique setting that can lighten our mood, improve our physical wellness, boost our ability to fight disease, and refresh our harried minds.

COMBATING STRESS
It’s widely known that stress leaves us more vulnerable to illness. High stress factors into heart attacks, illnesses, and, some people believe, cancer. “You get a cold when you inhale a virus, but your ability to fight off the virus is minimized by high stress levels, and your auto-immune systemdoesn’t work as well,” says Godbey.

Strolling through — or even gazing at — forests can lower stress levels, says Godbey, who points to a 1984 study conducted by Roger Ulrich at Texas A&M University. Ulrich observed patients recovering from gallbladder surgery. One group’s hospitalroom windows looked out onto a brick wall; another group’s had a natural, green vista. The patients who were able to view nature recovered faster and had fewer complications than the patients who had a view of a building.

Similarly, a 2007 study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Forest Research compared job satisfaction and job stress for 931 Seoul office workers, about half with window views of trees and half without. Those workers with views of trees reported significantly less job stress and significantly more job satisfaction, no matter their age, gender, or job category.

“People with less access to nature are more prone to stress and anxiety, as reflected not only individuals’ self-report but also measures of pulse rate, blood pressure, and stress-related patterns of nervous system and endocrine system anxiety, as well as physician-diagnosed anxiety disorders,” wrote Frances Kuo, director of the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in a research report for the National Association of Parks and Recreation.

One study by Kuo even showed that greenery has enough of a calming effect to reduce crime. At one Chicago public housing development, there were significantly fewer crime incidents in and around buildings surrounded by trees and greenery than in a nearby identical building surrounded by barren land.

Some researchers are exploring how to make forests even more healthful. Researchers at the Finnish Forest Research Institute created a well-being-themed forest trail. To help hikers get the most from their walk, signposts offer suggestions such as: “Listen to one of the voices of nature, the changes in the soundscape or the silence. … Youmay squat down and feel a plant, a rock, or the surface of a tree. Feel yourmood improve.”

“According to our questionnaire, a majority of the visitors felt that the trail enhanced their restorative experience and improved their mood,” says Tytti Sarjala, senior researcher at the institute.

Though the potential for preventive medicine is huge, the relationship between health and forests is often downplayed or ignored. Godbey suggests that since healthcare is among the largest expenditures by Americans, there’s an untapped health asset in forests that has tangible economic value, “but the case hasn’t been made yet.”

SOMETHING IN THE AIR
In Japan, researchers are finding strongmedical connections between being in a forest and having a healthy immune system. In one Japanese tradition — shinrinyoku, or forest bathing — individuals spend time in a forest to relieve stress and strengthen their immune system.

According to Yoshifumi Miyazaki, a professor at the Center for Environment, Health, and Field Sciences at Chiba National University in Japan, forest bathing has “preventive medical effects” such as relieving stress and recovering an immune system that has declined due to stress. He adds, “Artificialization is taking place at such a rapid rate that we now find ourselves in stressful situations in our daily lives and are forced to deal with the resultant pressure.” Proponents of forest bathing assert that a short trip to a forest offers relaxation as well as natural aromatherapy in the form of antimicrobial organic compounds derived from trees: woodessential oils called phytoncides.

In 2009, Qing Li from Nippon Medical School in Tokyo published a paper highlighting a series of studies that followed groups who took a threeday/ two-night trip to forested areas. Researchers took blood and urine samples at various intervals. Li found that an individual’s levels of natural killer cells — a type of white blood cell that releases anticancer proteins to attack tumors and cells infected by viruses — were significantly higher on the forest bathing days. Moreover, natural killer-cell levels stayed elevated for 30 days after the trip. In addition, Li found that levels of urine adrenaline, which the body releases in response to anxiety, had dropped after forest bathing trips — a sign that forests lower stress.

Li’s findings suggest a monthly “forest bathing trip” would help people maintain a higher level of natural killer-cell activity. “Forest bathing trips have become a popular and recognized relaxation and stress management activity in Japan,” says Li.

Though the forests in Li’s research held Japanese cypress, Japanese cedar, and Japanese beech, he said that other types of forests should have similar effects, though researchers haven’t yet studied other tree species’ phytoncides.

In a similar 2005 study in Japan, Miyazaki and colleagues conducted week-long studies in 44 different forest sites throughout Japan. In one study, groups took a seat in the forest to absorb natural surroundings, while an urban-based control group viewed city life. Researchers found the forest group to have decreases in cortisol (stress hormone) levels, sympathetic nervous activity, blood pressure, and heart rate; parasympathetic nervous activity was enhanced by 55 percent, indicating a relaxed biological system.

“This proves that stressful states can be relieved by forest therapy,” Miyazaki says.

A RENEWED MIND
“Just being around living green things has an effect mentally and emotionally,” says Linda Kruger, who takes advantage of the numerous trails near Juneau.

A number of studies have examined the effects of natural settings on children with attention deficit disorders and found that spending time in green areas helps calm their symptoms. In one, seven- to 11-year-olds with ADHD showed improved concentration after taking a 20-minute guided walk in a park, as opposed to 20-minute walks in a downtown area or an urban park. “A lot of times, kids will respond to being out in nature and will do better in school if they have ‘green breaks’ — a chance to walk through the forest during the day,” says Kruger. “It helps them to have better mental functioning during the school day.”

Many people accustomed to encountering forests and green spaces on a regular basis feel a subconscious yearning to get outdoors. Says Kruger, “When I don’t get out, I get restless, and mentally, I don’t function as well; physically and mentally, I feel better if I can spend time out in the forest every day or two.”

Carrie Madren writes from Olney, Maryland, and can be reached at camadren@gmail.com.

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Since Steve Bailey completed his American Forests story, “A Place Apart,” on Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) and Superior National Forest, a massive fire broke out within these renowned woods. In this web exclusive, we take a look at where the fire erupted and how it has impacted the region.

On August 18, 2011, a lightning strike ignited a fire 13 miles east of Ely, Minnesota, in Superior National Forest. Dubbed the Pagami Creek Fire, the blaze raged for months, engulfing more than 90,000 acres. As of the most recent update on October 22, the fire still smoldered with 93 percent of it contained. Firefighting personnel have been released, but the site remains under aerial surveillance. The hope is that winter weather will eventually extinguish the remaining flames.

While the Pagami Creek Fire is the largest Minnesota fire in acreage since 1931, it thankfully spared the populated areas of BWCA and Superior, unlike the smaller, but devastating 2007 Ham Lake Fire that destroyed nearly 150 buildings during its rampage. The massive Pagami blaze’s effects were felt 600 miles away in Chicago with reports of burning eyes and breathing problems. It sliced through 10 percent of BWCA, including two of its most popular entry points, Lake One and Isabella Lake, forcing closures and evacuations. As of October 18, seven travel zones and nine entry points to BWCA remained closed. Officials, though, are optimistic about the woods’ chance of recovery.

As reported in The Ely Echo, Kawishiwi District Ranger Mark Van Every says that wildlife is already returning to the area and that many of the campsites are in good shape around popular Lakes One, Two and Three. Only 114 of BWCA’s 2,100 campsites were impacted by the fire, and work has already begun to rehabilitate affected campsites.

Minnesota Public Radio’s Dan Kraker reports that on a recent trip through the burned area, “the Boundary Waters is largely untouched, lush and wild.” But, there are blackened areas, especially along Lake Three and the heavily damaged area between Lake Four and Insula Lake. Officials expect many of these areas to regrow naturally, but will keep an eye on the areas that burned hottest, like Insula Lake, to ensure that the forest is recovering.

Beyond the environmental cost of the Pagami Creek Fire, it did some heavy fiscal damage. More than $22 million was spent to contain the blaze and protect BWCA and its residents. At its peak, more than 400 fire personnel were engaged to combat the blaze. And, of course, local residents and business owners are concerned about how this fire will affect tourism in the area. With only a dozen of the affected campsites expected to remain closed next spring, fingers are crossed that the area experiences its normal, brisk recreation tourism next year.

As exhibited, firefighting and fire prevention costs money. In an op-ed for The Hill, our CEO Scott Steen outlines our recommendations of the congressional funding required to prevent, combat and control fire.

2011 has been a devastating year across the country for wildfires. For more information on the destruction, fire policy history and how we should manage and prevent fires in the future, check out “A Burning Need for Wildfire Prevention.”

Wildfire is a major priority for American Forests. Find out more about our work and how you can support efforts to prevent future catastrophic fires.

The post Fire and BWCA: A Place Apart Follow-up appeared first on American Forests.

American Forests Autumn Issue features Sparky Stensaas’ wildlife and landscape photography in an article about the Boundary Waters and Superior National Forest and in a new feature, “Last Look.” In this American Forests web-exclusive interview, Sparky discusses his love of nature, his quest for the elusive Canada lynx and how a photo of a snowy owl led to an encounter with the county sheriff and a police K9 unit.

When and why did you become a nature photographer?

I think I took my first wildlife photo when I was 16 in 1979. It is of a pair of flying mallards with a blue sky background taken with a Vivitar 35mm film camera and a cheapo 200mm lens. It was taken at the General Mills headquarters in Minneapolis. They had a pond they kept heated in winter, and the ducks loved it. To this day, it is my best shot of flying mallards! At the time, I was heavy into birds and so I tried to “collect” images of as many species as possible. I guess I still do that today.

Eventually, I became a naturalist and worked for many different organizations across northern Minnesota. The camera and resulting slide shows were simply extensions of my job — educating folks about the amazing natural history of the North Woods. To this day, education is a big part of my photography and writing; I love sharing the fascinating facts about our northern critters. My blog is even called The Photo Naturalist because I meld photography with natural history.

Are you drawn to a specific type of nature photography?

I truly am a generalist. I guess as the self-proclaimed “Photo Naturalist” I have to be!

Birds are my first love. I’ve been birding since I was 14 and have seen most of North America’s breeding birds. But who doesn’t love shooting wildlife? My buddies and I often go out to Yellowstone in the fall, and the chance to shoot grizzlies, pronghorn, Rocky Mountain elk, coyote, river otter or even the tiny Pika is a great thrill.

As a publisher of field guides, I also get very interested in photographing whatever book we’re working on now. Over the last few years, I’ve become obsessed with dragonflies, butterflies, fungi, insects, spiders and moths — all subjects of field guides that we’ve published.

But, how can one live in the wilds of northern Minnesota on the rugged shores of Lake Superior and not be a landscape shooter too?

What was the most difficult image you ever tried to capture?

The most difficult image I’ve tried to capture is that of a Canada lynx — no luck yet!

But one of the most difficult shots is of flying birds. My favorite challenge is that of getting sharp images of flying/hunting great gray owls. Northern Minnesota is invaded in some winters by large numbers of these mostly Canadian owls — some do nest in Minnesota. They come south in search of voles. The Sax-Zim Bog north and west of Duluth seems to be a favorite place for the owls — lots of voles, bogs and meadows.

It takes great patience and fortitude to wait for a great gray to take flight on a minus-20 morning. And then it may just slip back into the woods and you get nothing. But great fun, nonetheless.

Do you have a favorite story that revolves around your quest for photographs?

One winter morning, I found a nearly pure-white male snowy owl perched on a fence. I strapped on my snowshoes, threw my tripod over my shoulder and plodded through the deep snow. Only once I got close enough to get some good shots, did I hear the loudspeaker, “PLEASE RETURN TO YOUR VEHICLE!” I turned around to find a police car and three official security vehicles. Soon a police K9 unit showed up and the county sheriff. Unfortunately, it was the day before the first post-invasion Baghdad elections and security warnings were high. You see, the fence the snowy owl was perched on was the perimeter fence of the Duluth International Airport, and it was right across from the federal prison! Not a great place to photograph. Thank goodness for digital photography, as I was able to show them that I was only shooting a lonely owl and not planes or buildings.

Where is your favorite shooting location?

Okay, I have to give a few answers to this.

• Favorite international location: Iceland — stark, bizarre, puffins, waterfalls
• Favorite U.S. location away from Minnesota: Yellowstone — non-stop shooting, grizzlies, wildlife galore, geysers
• Favorite Minnesota location: North shore of Lake Superior — cliffs, waves, ice, lighthouses
• Most visited location: My own five acres — With a three year old and a 17-month old, I often don’t get to travel far afield these days. It’s amazing what one can fine to shoot on five acres.

Do you have a favorite photo?

My favorite photos are often animal-in-the-landscape photos — ones where the bird or mammal is shown in its habitat. But my northern owl photos(great gray owls, northern hawk owls, boreal owls) are my favorite single subject.

Which other photographers do you admire?

Jim Brandenburg has an unbelievable eye. His images are true art; a very Japanese esthetic. He puts far more emphasis on the image than on equipment, often handholding shots to be more fluid rather than being weighted down by a tripod. He was a well-known National Geographic photographer for years. I also admire his quest to give back to nature; he has founded a nonprofit to preserve prairie tracts near his boyhood home in southwest Minnesota.

I’m also a big fan of British photographer Andy Rouse, Canadian Tim Fitzharris, German-American Rolf Nussbaumer and the fantastic Finnish wildlife photographers Jari Peltomaki, Markus Varesvuo, Tomi Muukkonen and Hannu Hautala.

Digital vs. film?

DIGITAL! My fun-factor went up 200 percent when I switched to digital with the Canon 10D in 2004.

At first, I missed the Christmas-like excitement of opening up your slide box from the developer and the glow of the Velvia from the light table. But now I can experiment and play and shoot a thousand images in a thousand different ways for free and not worry about “wasting” film and money. One thing film does do, though, is make the photographer sloooow down and really plan a shot. This is especially true in landscape photography, where I tend to not be as careful when shooting digital.

Sparky Stensaas is a naturalist, photographer, publisher, writer, filmmaker (i.e. “no full-time, real job”) based in Minnesota’s Nemadji Valley by Jay Cooke State Park. He is the author of five books about the natural history of the North Woods including the bestselling Rock Picker’s Guide to Lake Superior’s North Shore. Sparky’s latest venture is Friends of Sax-Zim Bog, a nonprofit aimed at educating the public about the natural history of bogs and dedicated to creating a Sax-Zim Birder/Photographer Welcome Center. When not chasing after his two young sons, he may be out taking photos, blogging or watching “All My Children” (not in that order!). You can see more of Sparky’s images at www.ThePhotoNaturalist.com

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