Natural Photographs Research Articles

A LEGACY OF LIGHT

Ansel Adams with Mary Street Alinder. Ansel Adams: An Autobiography. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1985. 385 pp. Ulus. Mark Klett, essay by Denis Johnson. Travels in the Desert Southwest. Boston: David R. Godine, 1986. 42 pp. Illus. Beyond the exhibitions, a foundation, many books and articles and other generous teachings, the legacy of America's great modern nature photographer, Ansel Adams, is of course a collection of forty-thousand negatives, templates for the most serene and expansive photographic images of the American landscape. Adams' pictures will speak for themselves, and thereby, for him. What can an autobiography, eked out in the last days of his active eighty-two years, add to such riches? About a third of the chapters of Ansel Adams: An Autobiography are titled by others' names, and toward the end Adams, considering fame, muses: "The individual is but a cell in the larger body... .Superior minds and spirits emerge, yet who can deny that countless others... might have been revealed had circumstances favored them...?" Adams thought himself favored by friends and this book is in large part testament to that. The first of these might be Adams' father, for the venerable, familiar, crumple-nosed mountain gnome of an Ansel Adams we see on the book's cover emerged from a frenetic elf or—as Adams writes—"an adenoidal brat." We can only guess what would have happened had not Adams' father plucked his hyperactive son first from school (encouraging him still in piano lessons which brought into Adams' life a sense of discipline, an abiding under- standing of art, and a sense of rhythm and anticipation), then out of San Francisco for trips to Yosemite. It was in that then unpopulated Park that Adams' wild exuberances could have scope—provided they did not kill him, as they almost did on several occasions he relates. And it was there that his commitments to the natural environment and to photography were sealed.

Bobcat Year by Hope Ryden

358 Western American Literature bond with those who have gone before her. Moffat writes of a literal, pioneer trail and a metaphoric, personal one. She tells us that for her they fuse, that the literal and the metaphoric come together in the western moun­ tains. At the start of her trip, Moffat’s first descriptions are so factual that it is not easy to recognize preoccupations with states of mind. The land, not Moffat, is “alien”; morning is “like a bad day in the Scottish Highlands.” (She had lost a friend there.) Moffat, as seen by us through language, is unresponsive, better-oriented to things she already knows, caring about quantitative measure, using language that is controlled, unimaginative, unfeeling, but without falsification. “The country looked flat, but once into it, it was a maze of dry gullies of varying depths.” By Wyoming there are changes. Moffat reports herself “punch-drunk with images.” As she becomes changed by experience her sentences expand, her ideas become more complex, and image and metaphor become abundant. She uses cliches, seldom chooses what gives pleasure as a perfect word; and yet words work for her. She can call a “vista” a “world,” and when her statement comes after paragraphs of increasingly-expansive prose a reader can set aside cliché and believe that Moffat means and feels that what she looks out on could in fact be everything. Hard. Road West depends on language that makes dual statements. The language of experience, that looks as if it derived from an actual preliminary journal, gives us emergent metaphor and style that come spontaneously when life becomes joyous; superimposed, controlling metaphors order the book and establish its overview. Sometimes the languages are distinct; sometimes they blend; always they interrelate. We cannot tell how near an actual journal, how near spontaneity the book is. And metaphor can tease. Specu­ lation on those problems could well be a reader’s hard road west. JOANNA LLOYD, Rutgers University Bobcat Year. By Hope Ryden. (New York: The Viking Press, 1981. 211 pages, $15.95.) Nature writing as a literary genre has become increasingly popular as the public’s environmental awareness has increased. Consequently, there have emerged a number of writers with the special combination of creative writing ability and scientific knowledge necessary for true nature writing. The combination of undistorted, unsentimentalized factual accuracy with vivid, evocative writing that creates an experience of nature in the imagina­ tion of the reader makes special demands that not every writer can meet. Hope Ryden is one who has achieved that combination. Reviews 359 This is Ryden’s seventh book about wild animals, three of those for children. Her others have dealt with wild horses, coyotes, and the Florida Key deer. She is an accomplished nature photographer as well as writer, and this book, like her others, presents a series of photographs to illustrate her text. This book, however, is different in approach. Her original plan had been to observe a captive bobcat family from the birth of a litter of kittens on through their growth and development. When her plans went irretriev­ ably awry with the death of the litter, she was left with a variety of observa­ tions of and experiences with bobcats in various parts of the West, but with no other unifying element than the species itself. Ryden solved her problems by writing a fictional narrative of a year in the lives of a population of bobcats in Idaho. Such an approach presents many dangers to the nature writer — anthropomorphism, sentimentality, excessive dramatization — but Ryden has avoided them all. Birth and sudden death, hunting and play, failure and success are all presented sim­ ply as accepted elements in the life of a wild predator whose survival is always precarious. In such a presentation, she deals with behavioral patterns, including problem-solving techniques and motivation, but she carefully keeps these processes within the range of a bobcat’s conscious awareness and instinctive response. She uses patterns she has actually observed in various contexts in various places, fitting them into her narrative framework in ways that seem acceptably probable. Ryden’s style is clear, direct, and interesting without being overly dra­ matic. Her sympathy...

The Trials of a Nature Photographer

The Trials of a Nature Photographer

Identifying Nests of the Anatidae of the Canadian Prairies

Duck nests typically are lined with many down feathers and some breast feathers. This soft mass also forms a concealing and protective cover for an unattended nest. Since both breast feathers and down exhibit differences characteristic of species, they provide a definite means of nest identification. This article includes natural size photographs, also a key, based on the dual system of feathers and down, for identification of wildfowl nests on the prairies of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. The only species regularly nesting on these prairies and not included herein is the Canada Goose, whose down is far larger than that of any species illustrated in this article.

International Exhibition of Nature Photography

THERE was a large assembly of naturalists and Nature photographers at the opening on October 16 of the Country Life International Exhibition of Nature Photography at the British Museum (Natural History), Cromwell Road, South Kensington. The Earl of Onslow, president of the Society for the Protection of the Fauna of the Empire, referred to the great value of Nature photography and cinematography as “a very powerful incentive towards the preservation of wild life in all its forms”, and to the fact that the Exhibition contains a large number of subjects that have never been seen before. He went on to remark that “there is a very grave danger at present hanging over us and that is that unless wild animals, big-game and birds of all kinds are carefully preserved a great number of species will become extinct and they will be a downright loss to the world in general. We could do without poison snakes but most other animals are a very valuable asset not only from the natural history point of view, but from the scientific point of view and from the point of view that they tend to preserve the balance of Nature.” The audience, which included, among many others well known for their interest in wild life, the Duke of Sutherland and Lord Desborough, afterwards inspected the Exhibition. More than thirteen hundred photographs are displayed on screens in the Whale Hall, one wall being devoted entirely to the work of pioneer photographers, which includes the late J. H. Symonds' picture “Goldfinches fighting on Teazle”, “Marsh Harrier” by the late Col. H. Moore, and no fewer than seventeen fine studies by Mr. C. J. King. The Exhibition will be open—admission free—until November 30. A souvenir volume (55.), containing reproductions of 120 pictures from the Exhibition, has been published.

Nature Photography

WITH the coming of the cinematograph and the large aperture lens, and with the great improvement in the quality of telephoto lenses, Nature photography has made such strides that excellent photographs of pre-War days seem childish beside the modern product. There are many who would follow the new technique did they know how, and to them the revelations in this book will be welcome and helpful. There are hints on cameras and lenses, on the construction of ‘hides’ and methods of approach, on cinematograph work, special chapters by experts on big-game, marine and plant photography and on low-power microscopy, accompanied by illustrations of the art and an anecdotal narrative that makes the book good reading for the field-naturalist as well as for the Nature photographer proper.