Pond Island offers a bit of everything…a sweep of beautifully mature old-growth forest, songs of birds celebrating their fitness for breeding, magnificent Alaska yellow cedars, and a bit of coastal meadow leading up to an old beaver dam.
The spruce and hemlock branches were laden with moss and draped with lichens, all this biological padding acted as an acoustical vortex, absorbing and dampening the sounds of our voices, footsteps, and exclamations of wonderment.
The same mosses padded our boot steps and added a trampoline-like quality to each footfall, that was until we got to the mud. The mud added an auditory quality to our experience, squichy into the mud followed by a schlorp as we made fevered attempts to extract our boot with socks and foot still within.
Added to the auditory cauldron were the voices of hermit thrush and varied thrush as they both showcased their stylistic differences with trills and songs advertising their fitness as potential mates and defenders of nesting territories.
Along the reflective edges of the beaver pond, yellow lilies with their pancake-sized pads floated in the stillness, adding a delightful foreground element as we contemplated, composed, and captured a few snippets of Alaska with our cameras.
The minute details of buckbean flower fringe, sundew paddle droplets, and clusters of bog kalmia flowers were expanded into massive images by the strategic use of our camera’s “flower” button. We diversified its functionality and it became the “fungus” button, morphed into the “lichen” button, and ended as the “carnivorous” button. It turned out to be an amazingly versatile photographic setting.
The day ended with a brief look at a young brown bear making a slow retreat into the moss-laden forest. A fitting end to a magical day in the temperate rain forest.
