No Place Like Home

by Jeff Sullivan
July 12, 2013July 31, 2014
29 Comments

An old residence returns to the wood it's built from, providing shelter for birds, bats, rats, lizards and snakes until it finishes its journey back to the soil.

I was standing an open doorway placing light inside this old building when there was a sudden loud noise and something large was heading directly for my head! It turned out that a large bird, probably a flicker, had made its home in the walls of this old building. Startled by my arrival, he was heading for the door, but he couldn't see well, so his wings were hitting the walls and ceiling, making far more commotion than normal. I ducked as the large, noisy ball of feathers came flying out of the shadows at me and crashed past my head. I laughed and finished placing the lights. There was one more building that I wanted to place lights in and this time something silent flew directly at my face and turned, only inches away. This second building was the bat house. There had been a lizard on the wall before sunset, a kangaroo rat hopping clumsily down the driveway at night, I helped a small rubber boas snake off of the road, and bears roared to each other on a nearby ridge after sunset.

A depression in the firm decomposed granite sand by some nearby rocks looked like the indentation a cat might make in your bed sheets to sleep in, and it was raised up above the level of the surrounding sagebrush, a perfect vantage point from which to survey the surrounding area for deer and sage grouse. It looked like a stop on the 100 mile hunting route of a big cat, a mountain lion, but fortunately there were no fresh tracks since the last thunderstorm, so it was probably long gone. Or due to return any time now.

A few months earlier a female mountain lion was struck by a car not far from here in the Eastern Sierra, and wildlife management officials had been studying her with the help of a radio collar, so they knew that she had three cubs with her. Fortunately they were over a year old, so close to the point where they'd go their own way and establish their own hunting territories. This site is probably a little too far from that cat family for it to be occupied by by them, but bobcats and mountain lions are certainly common in the area.

On my last two night photography workshops in Bodie a moderately-sized mammal had a "hissy fit", literally, from inside a wall. It sounded like she had nursing babies, and I had stuck my face and flashlight right up to the flicker hole she was living in to see if I could see what was making the little nursing kitten noises. I jumped back to avoid finding a weasel attached to my face.

You never know what you're going to find on these excursions into the dark, but whether watching meteors or wildlife, there's never a dull moment!

Here's how you can create your own star trails photos:
How To Take Star Trail Photos
http://activesole.blogspot.com/2011/05/creating-star-trail-images.html

Or you can come to one of my photography workshops. I'll lead 7 or 8 more of them this year, and I'll be getting notices out on the pages linked to from the top of my blog:
www.JeffSullivanPhotography.com/blog/
Contact me if you have a particular interest, and I can let you know when the next workshop in that region or park is announced.

Blog: www.JeffSullivanPhotography.com/blog
Prints: www.JeffSullivan.smugmug.com