WATCH THE RIVER FOR OBSERVATIONS
Rex Burress
At a bird-watching time just before the January 25-29 Snow Goose Festival, I stopped along the Feather River and looked out over the flowing water. From a thicket a few feet away, a tiny ruby-crowned kinglet dashed upward to catch an insect, inspiring me to pause and stare for a moment.
I uncased my binoculars that had been neglected for some time. Sometimes just a glance will reassure experienced river watchers that the birds are there and they don't look as closely for the design of details as they should. Someone said it takes a stranger to show you your hometown!
The beauty of feathers, fur, and flowers never gets old though, and bears repeating over and over again, as Robert Frost said about autumn leaves: “The same leaves over and over again...,” or as Robert Louis Stevenson said about a river, “There is no music like a river's. It plays the same tune over and over again, yet one does not weary of it...”
As I sat there in my car during the morning chill for a mere ten minutes, I began seeing birds. Staring out at one portion of a scene, you begin to notice movement, and soon I had seen nearly a dozen species! It's somewhat like squirrel hunting when I was a boy-- in studying the boughs of a tall tree, a wisp of hair, the tell-tale color, a slight movement, leads to discovery! Or in looking for morel mushrooms—you have to stare at the understory for awhile until the camouflaged fungi comes into focus. You have to think what you're looking for, too. Henry David Thoreau said to find arrowheads, you have to think arrowheads. As a man, woman, or child thinketh, so are they!
Pause, watch, and stare! I am reminded of artists pausing, watching and staring at my “Understanding Nature Through Photography and Sketching” Adult Art Class at Oakland Camp back in 1994. There are plenty of places there, to pause and stare at nature.
One student stood out—Greer Alley from Berkeley—who said she “liked to stop and stare,” verifying that trait by carrying her tripod and thoroughly studying her subject and making adjustments to her camera before snapping the shutter!
I dug in my camp files to find the artist's statement Greer wrote in August, 1994, the first Adult Art Camp at Oakland Feather River Camp near Quincy, CA. “I love to STARE. Look at details intently. Focus on patterns in everyday use. Photography allows me to do this for hours on end, without people around me getting nervous. It allows me to practice my selective seeing and to keep those selections for as long as I want.” --Greer Alley. She applied her skills to nature and captured some lovely shots, and found the experience so inspiring that she sent me a card on the solstices and equinoxes for several years, showing some nature thing she had photographed.
Another already skilled photographer, John Bonwell, wrote: “My principal passion now is to seek out various kinds of wildlife and record what I find them doing—living their lives. Of course this is all impossible without the wondrous gift of sight. As the psalmist said, 'We are wondrously made.'” I went on to teach that class for eight years, and the art program continues under Director Karen LeGault. “Going to the woods is going home,” thus John Muir's words embellishes a plaque at the entrance of the camp on Paul Covel's nature trail. Go take a look!
Included in what I saw on that January ten minute Oroville stop was a phainopepla lulling in a leafless cottonwood, sharing the tree with a scrub jay perched over a nest, a kingfisher, and goldeneyes riding the rapids. “You can observe a lot by just watching”-- and staring!
“A poor life this if, full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare.” --W. H. Davies
“To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place. I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.” --Elliott Erwitt
“Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.”--Wallace Stevens