Sleepy Mother Fox in the Wild

After a hard night of hunting, this mother fox nearly fell asleep on her feet.

I saw this mother fox at the park today. As we were walking down one trail toward another paved trail, she was turning up to walk on our trail. She stopped, looked disgusted with us and then took off down the paved trail. She was so tired she looked as though she could barely stay awake. Then I realized why. She had been nursing a whole brood, evidently. She was skinny and hungry and her eyes kept closing. She eventually took off into the woods. I guess the hunting hadn't been going well lately, but her kits still had to suckle. It's tough out there.

A Bird With the Wintertime Blues

By
Carl Reader

I don't much care what anyone says: winter causes depression.

It's not just humans that suffer from this affliction.

I saw evidence today that birds do, too.

I was walking the dog today in the park when a Cooper's hawk flashed by me from behind, just over my left shoulder. He headed from the brambles by the side of the path, intent on flushing out a tiny sparrow for breakfast, but the sparrow had seen him coming and fled.

The hawk aborted his hunt, perhaps too disgusted with himself that he had been so easily detected.

He alighted in a sycamore fifty feet away, not really bothering to hide from me in its thick bare branches. He just sat there.

I took the shot from a distance, thinking I wouldn't get much of a chance to get a closer photograph of him.

To my surprise, he remained where he was as I walked toward him.

These birds almost never let a human so close. They'll fly off if they see a two-legged threat anywhere near.

This guy let me get closer and closer.

I didn't see much of a chance to get a decent shot of the bird, even though I was now twenty feet away. There were too many branches in front of him, and the light was not good.

Since he was waiting around, I gave it a try.

He didn't move.

This bird was definitely depressed. Here was a clear and present danger, me, and he didn't seem to care.

He was so depressed I think I might have reached up and taken him off that branch, and had my breakfast of him.

I felt for him. All he had wanted to do was grab a tiny bird out of the brambles, but he was frustrated even in that.

Was anything ever going to go right for him?

It's something we ask ourselves in the midst of winter on a daily basis. I was just getting over the flu, I had fallen on ice a month prior to this, I was poor, I was old, I was cold and hungry, I would probably have to move, none of my books was selling, I couldn't make any money from my nature photography and I was alone.

Worst of all, I was alone.

Imagine how much more difficult it had to be for this Cooper's hawk. He was likely suffering from all the things I was, plus he had to live outside in the cold.

He didn't have a refrigerator full of food at home and he didn't have a stove to cook it on.

No wonder he just sat there in his tree twenty feet away from me, not much worrying if he lived or died by this human's hand.

I stepped closer.

He came to his senses.

He flew toward my left the way he had come, but this time shot toward me and whooshed by as though to say, well, to hell with you. You failed to catch me, just as I failed to catch that little sparrow.

You're not going to have another chance.

He wasn't done with his depression yet, though.

He came to rest fifty feet behind me, out in the open on a branch stop the brambles.

It was as though he was taunting me to try to capture him.

I did my best.

My depression lifted as his did, too, for now he was in the sunlight and offered up a better picture.

I snapped away quickly, for I knew he had his heart back and was just toying with me.

Then he turned away from me and my depression.

I was no longer a threat.

And in another second, he took off, cured of his initial failure, having survived his failure and his encounter with me.

I headed home.

I felt better, too.

Philosophy and Photos: Beginning Again

By

Carl Reader

I decided to begin writing again at the age of seventy-one.

What precipitated this rather ridiculous decision were some drops of water that formed on my kitchen window this morning.

After fifty years of frustration with fiction writing, alloyed with thirty years of concomitant drudgery doing journalism, I thought I had had enough.

Then I saw the drops of water on my kitchen window.

Rain kept me in this morning. It was telling me something.

The droplets made me think of another photo I made over fifteen years ago. That photo was one of my most successful. It sold several times, once to a very rich person. A woman recently stared at that old photo in my apartment and told me how amazing it was.

Seeing these new droplets made me wonder it I still had it in me to make a photo that was just as good.

I have been working as a photographer for a company that provided pictures for yearbooks for many years now. It's how I've made money since my career in journalism petered out as newspapers died  (and continue to die).

At the age of seventy-one, I should be retired, but I'm one of those ancients kicked to the curb of poverty by my own poor financial planning, failed relationships, the wretched pay that most journalist suffer and my love of writing fiction for nothing when I should have been out working for pay.

So I decided to quit writing about a year ago.

Anybody with any sense would say it was about time. Of course anyone who writes fiction lacks even a scintilla of sense.

So I quit.

For about the millionth time.

Then I saw those droplets this morning.

And I just had to photograph them, several times, just to see if I was at least as good at photography as I was when I took that original photo of a wet spider web many years ago.

The droplets insisted I photograph them.

If it's one thing that a writer and photographer is, it's obsessive, so I took more and more photos of the water droplets on my window.

Another obsessive photograph.

It was time to find out if I was as good a photographer as I ever was. I went on the computer and ferreted out that old photo of a wet spider web, the one I was trying to live up to now.

You can see it below.

Wet spider web taken over the Delaware River.

I'll leave it to you to decide if the old me or the new me is a better photographer. If I had to say, I'd vote for the old me, but I could be wrong.

So what's the point of this?

I came to the understanding that I had been judging myself far too harshly when I decided to quit writing a while back. The photographs told me that in a strange way. Photographing the new water droplets this morning was a way of expunging the hate I felt for myself at being such a failure, for I realized I quit things out of self-hatred brought on by my many failures.

But who are we to judge ourselves? The water droplets asked me, like sirens calling me back to myself.

Judging myself is what I had done after fifty years of writing fiction and trudging through journalism for thirty of those years and ending up an impoverished old man because of it.

The water droplets spoke:

If I could still take those photos this morning of the new water droplets, they told me, perhaps I still had it in me to string together a couple million more words.

But another revelation came along with that one.

I had to write the absolute truth, for I saw the truth of those droplets now. Every water droplet is equal.

I know how impossible it is to write absolute truth, since any writing is personal, but what I had to do was write what was absolutely true for me. I had to write the facts as they happened, just as I photographed the water droplets as they happened, and then let the words flow out from that truth as best I could, just as I let the new photographs flow out.

We are in a post-truth era, and that is what was making me sick enough mentally to quit writing, which I love more than anything. I was experiencing the post-truth world too willingly. I was bombarded by it in the media and from the mouths of deluded friends and family.

I had to focus on the only truth I had access to.

My own.

I'd express that and let others decide if it was worth it, if they could be truthful enough to do that.

They always judge anyway.