Spring Has… Not Sprung.

We’re in that torturous non-season where the weather teases us with a day here and there that you can unzip your jacket for, only to plunge you back into bitter chill and the bitterness that comes with it.

I had a rare instance this weekend of a trip down to Leslie St Spit in which I did not end up shooting a single frame. Almost. I caught a bird high in the sky and couldn’t quite identify the flapping pattern. It was big, whatever it was, but it wasn’t flying like a swan or a bird of prey… so I turned my telephoto on it just to solve the mystery and resolved an early-returning (or maybe never left?) heron. But the footage was basically useless.

Real inspiring stuff.

Apart from that one sign of the seasonal shift, the Spit was brown, cold and windy. It’s in its least charming phase. But I’m trying to be disciplined about getting down there at each once a week because, brown though it may be now, we’re at the precipice of a lot of very rapid change that I need to be around for.

Spring is going to bring with it the usual flood of arrivals, returns and regrowth and there’s so much of it I’m reliant on for upcoming episodes and which have a short period of viability. I’m desperate to capture some nesting and fledging material, for example. 

True story, the first thing I ever shot for this project was this nesting Phoebe.

The hooded mergansers who I’ve been hunting in vain all winter should be coming back north in greater numbers soon, but may only stop over on the lakeshore for a little while before moving on. 

Garter snakes! I lucked out a couple years ago on an unseasonably warm early spring hike encountering a couple of their signature mating balls but at the time I was shooting everything vertical and I’d love to get some cinematic material of the same phenomenon. Someday I’ll do an exhausting blog post about the torture of choosing between portrait and landscape.

There’s the early-returning swallows as well, three species of which I’m dependent on for an episode this summer. Tree swallows, in particular, are usually some of the first birds back on the scene and I don’t want to miss their mad scramble for tree cavities and nest boxes. Not to mention, I’ve wanted for years to capture the act of nest-building among barn or cliff swallows - both of which have colonies at the Spit - as they painstakingly bring single drops of mud up from the shorelines and deposit them one at a time to build out a cup or cavern.

Meanwhile, editing continues apace. I mentioned I have nine episodes on the go broadly in the ‘winter’ category (though some fit more in the ‘any time’ category). Nine edits at once is a tad overbearing so I’m breaking the into groups of three for the sake of my sanity. I’ll be finishing the assembly of the third today, god willing, and can then go back and start to actually polish up and (again, huge elephant in the room) work on the animation. For those of you keeping score at home, the three episodes in this batch are broadly on the subjects of:

Chickadees.

Turkeys.

Diving Ducks.

With more to come. I didn’t plan for them to be the first three, circumstance just provided me with enough footage for them first… ish. It’s one of the inevitable tortures of this kind of project that you could always envision a slightly better shot, a bit more coverage, a nicer version of what you have… but if you give into that feeling, the outcome is you never finish anything and spend the rest of your life chasing that ‘slightly better shot’ when no one watching would have ever noticed the difference. 

You're in focus. But could you be MORE in focus?

I realize I haven’t actually set myself a release deadline for this. The act of doing so still feels quite intimidating given where I’m at with them. But as I move into the next stage, it’s also a little exciting to think that’s on the horizon. I hope it is for you too.