Winter Waste / Wonder Land

Freezing morning at Leslie St Spit - almost cold enough to bail on the whole plan, but I should trust the process. The first 20 minutes or so suck, right at the lake shore, biting wind - I was especially worried about my numbing fingers - but once you’ve been moving for a bit your body catches up to you and you’re… borderline comfortable, even without having to jog on the spot. Clear sky and piercing sun nudging the ambient temperature up a bit didn’t hurt either, as much as it made the LCD screen on my camera a hopeless glare - I really need an eyepiece…

While I’m griping about the camera - I understand it’s a cost saving thing but relying on a touch screen for most settings is… tolerable indoors / the rest of the year, infuriating in the dead of winter with, as mentioned, numbing fingers.

Leslie St Spit is beautiful any time of year but wow does it show off in a deep freeze. Endless wave action and freezing cycles have built up two-to-three meter walls of ice at the shoreline, especially impressive when a bit of the pebbly beach shows through and you can see the scale of the build-up. Giant hunks - practically icebergs - have calved off where the weight couldn’t be borne any longer, and made shuffling out to the edge for photos… a little anxiety-inducing.

Just a liiiiittle closer...

Along the shore, the spray of water has also coated plants in otherworldly skins of ice.

But beyond the winter glamour, how was the fauna? Limited. I suspect a lot of them had hunkered down until the weather got a bit kinder. There were the usual small conglomerations of waterfowl just offshore, punctuated by a swan or two. Mallards in a big group plus I heard some long tailed ducks calling. 

Also, some evidence that there are definitely still hawks around…

Sir, are you ok?

But beyond that the only real activity was chickadees, and how convenient! They’re exactly who I needed.

My mission was mostly to capture a white wasteland - I hadn’t gone out to shoot since we got a heavy dump of snow so all my winter footage so far had been brown, and a lot of the episodes I’m working on rely on the idea of a whitewashed landscape. So I wanted to make sure to catch it before we get a swing back into melting temperature. 

But the unexpected bonus was some of the best chickadee footage I’ve gotten all winter. Maybe they were too focused on foraging to be skittish but they hung out just off the path and picked their way through branches and stumps in exactly the way I needed. And the monotone snowy backdrop made a much clearer point than the aforementioned fall browns.

The lesson I have to learn again every time is, if you put yourself in the place, and take your time, good things will just kind of emerge. It seems to never fail (knock on wood).

Going to try out my little tabletop studio setup soon for some additions to the chickadee and swan episodes, and then it’s off to Ottawa to chase down wild turkeys and sugar maples. Why do I have to chase the sugar maples? Because hopefully by then the sap will be running.

I’ll see myself out.