all photos and words © 2011 by Paul Erickson

Mysterious Stirrings

This week, in woodlands not far from my home, male spotted salamanders have emerged from the forest floor and slithered into a temporary “spring pool.”

I haven’t seen any of these little beauties themselves—only the gelatinous spermatophores they deposited on submerged leaves and twigs. Each of these translucent sperm packets—shaped  like miniature versions of Wyoming’s Devil’s Towers (as seen in Close Encounters of the Third Kind)—stands about 3/8th of an inch tall.

Soon, if all goes well, females will visit the pool, find the sperm packets and deposit their egg masses. Then at a time known only to them, all of the adult salamanders will leave the pool and return to secret passageways along tree roots reaching down through the thawing soil.

ice birds / below zero window crystals

photos and words © 2011 by Paul Erickson

Recently, we were hiking across the snow-blanketed fields of Hamilton, Massachusetts, when I began to think of the winter scenery as a vast work of contemporary art. As you may know, people celebrate the work of landscape artists such as Christo, who loves to wrap big things and drape outdoor expanses with fabrics. Call me crazy, but I love winter, and I’ve come to see snow as an immense free-to-see work of art in all its whites, grays, and soft cool-blue shadows, perhaps with a lost red glove perched atop a snow drift.

photos and words © 2011 by Paul Erickson

When it’s so cold here in snow-blanketed New England that it makes your nostrils stick together, I love to recall the warm waters of the Solomon Islands. There, some 70 feet below the blue-jello rolling swells of  remote Morovo Lagoon, I photographed this pair of anemone fish lounging in the protective stinging tentacles of a carpet anemone. Having seen the painful effects of these venomous tentacles on a fellow diver, the ability of these fish to thrive within things that sting strikes me as pure genius. Drop into nature and find yourself surrounded by a diversity of geniuses.