It's cold here in Minnesota at this time of year. In fact, at the time I sat down to rough out a draft of this post, it was snowing hard and the wind was whipping making hiking--or photography for that matter--a rather undesirable activity. My last hike a few days ago in the forest behind our home was really nice. Just cold enough that it was difficult to work up a sweat and warm enough that the camera didn't freeze to my bare-tipped fingers.

As I was wandering around on that hike I ran across this white-tailed deer as he fed in the forest. I know this buck having photographed him several times in the last couple of months and, I think, he thinks of me as just about the most inept and boring predator in the forest. So much so that he pretty much ignores me. I like that. Making wildlife photographs is so much easier when deer are doing things that they do when they are not watching us. 

Still, I moved slowly moving into a position where the background was going to be as good as it could be and hoped he would walk into it, which he did. For those of you who know me, I believe that backgrounds are so important that I spend as much time finding a nice background as I do a subject and I pass up a lot of shots simply because a suitable background isn't available. I really don't need more mediocre photos of white-tailed deer. White-tailed Deer 20201222-03744

Then he laid down in a patch of winter-killed white snakeroot. There was only a tiny opening in the weeds and there was only one place where I could stand to minimize the obstructions between the camera and the subject. I moved to that spot and took a couple more photos, but it was, by itself, not a particularly fetching shot, but photons are cheap and I had time to spend waiting for something better.

As I watched another hiker appeared moving through the background. The buck studied her for a few seconds, dismissed her as a threat, and resumed chewing his cud. "Nice" I muttered in my best David Attenborough voice, "This is the very thing, that thing, that intangible, the very story of wildlife living amongst us." The hiker never knew that she was a part of that story and she passed just 40 feet from us unaware of our presence.

White-tailed Deer 20201222-03771 As I stood there I wondered how often we miss wildlife. It's a question that I've pondered before. Wild animals usually prefer fading into the background employing both camouflage and behaviors to avoid detection. Just standing still works really good for whitetails. Just ask any hyper-alert photographer that has just experienced an unseen deer suddenly erupting from the brush just 40 feet away. The senses of wildlife are, usually, much better than ours because their lives depend upon their ability to detect and evade predators and they use those senses to detect us and then choose some strategy to avoid us. 

There are few ways to know what we miss.

A number of years ago, I was hiking the Gunsight Trail through the postcard-perfect mountains of Glacier National Park to the picturesque Sperry Glacier Chalet. The hiking was easy for the first several miles along a rushing Sprague Creek, but then things got harder with the trail clinging to steep terrain and switchbacks that led up to a cirque, a hanging valley glacially sculptured out of the valley's headwall. As I puffed my way into this tiny cirque I knew I'd have a hundred yards or more of flat hiking and most importantly I'd get a breather and really get to enjoy the spectacular scenery. And awe-inspiring sights extended in all directions. The air was clean and crisp with that edge that imbues mountain air. Gorgeous mountains rose all around and the view down the valley to Lake McDonald was inspiring. 

I strode past a reddish-orange sign warning me that grizzlies were frequenting the area. Seeing these signs always gives me pause and perks up the alert levels a couple of notches and it was with some relief when the chalet finally hove into view. As I approached the chalet I noticed a gray-and-green clad park ranger sitting on the edge of the cliff peering intently through his spotting scope into the valley through which I had just hiked.

I plopped my weary behind down beside him and pulled out a bag of walk-around gorp sprinkled liberally with that backcountry currency sometimes referred to as M&Ms. 

"Watch you watching?" (I already knew.)

He looked at me from under his NPS ball cap and then at my M&Ms. I extended the bag to him and he took a handful and stuffed a couple in his mouth. 

"Have you seen any bears?" he countered.

My ears perked up. "Recently, you mean?" I counter-countered.

"Yeah, like 30 minutes ago."

"No...." I replied. I paused, "Should I have?"

He grinned with the knowledge of someone who knew something I didn't. I extended the gorp bag and he selectively rifled through the granola for another helping of my limited supply of M&Ms. He popped one appreciatively into his mouth. "Yes, you walked past a grizzly sow with a small cub. You didn't see her, but she saw you. She was bedded down just off the trail, but she stood up and looked at you as you walked past and then laid back down."

On another close encounter, I was portaging a canoe in Ontario's Quetico Provincial Park. At the end of the trail I wearily slid the canoe into the lake and leaned up against a fallen tree to take a breather. It was a hot and sweaty day and it felt good to lean into a tree and just to savor the day, the trail, the lake, the jackpine-scented air, but before I could settle in I spied a suspicious indentation at the water's edge and I wandered over to take a closer look. It was a perfect wolf track neatly pressed in lakeside mud. Now, wolves are not uncommon in the area and neither are the signs of their passing. At night it isn't unusual to hear a pack howling and tracks sometimes litter the softer parts of trails in this hard country. It is, however, rare to see one. This track, though, was somewhat unique among tracks that I'd seen before because a slender tendril of water was flowing into the indentation made by the interdigital pad (sometimes thought of as a heel pad). The wolf had to have just been there. I took a quick look around, but the wolf was gone, probably. Possibly it was watching me from behind a screen of nearby Labrador tea, maybe. I had just missed seeing a wild wolf and the only remaining clue was this track slowly filling with lake water ticking off the time between the wolf's departure and my arrival. 

A few years before that my Brother-in-law and I were hiking up Cascade Canyon in Grand Teton National Park when we stopped to catch our breath in a small meadow that we had just entered. The magnificent scenery would have taken our breath away if we hadn't lost it already slogging our way up a steep incline. Magnificent country, wonderful scenery. Then I heard something, very close, take a very deep breath. I spun around to spy a bull moose standing about 20 feet off the trail we had just come up. We flat-landers had missed it completely in our oxygen-deprived state as we passed by the hulking behemoth. But the amazing thing was that after we watched the statue-still moose for several minutes we suddenly spotted a second bull just 20 feet from the first one. How could you miss one of the biggest animals on the North American continent at the range of only a few feet, stare at it for several minutes, and then duplicate that dubious feat by missing a second one just a few feet from the first?

My point in recounting these stories is that we miss things even when we think we are being observant. As photographers we miss photographing things that we never see either because they remain hidden or because we aren't looking and, only rare instances, will we know what we missed. I'm sure that I've walked past bedded deer, hunkered snowshoe hares, coiled rattlesnakes, sleepy moose, alert elk, crouching bears, wolves, lynx, and that these encounters are known only to them.

I have no comprehensive solutions to seeing more animals. There are the little things such as looking for tiny movements: a flicker of an ear or that of a tail, but a deer is very good at not being seen if it doesn't want to be seen. This spring I often found Nashville warblers by watching for twitching snakeroot plants as those tiny birds fed unseen deep in the vegetation. A horizontal line amongst the verticals of a forest may be just a fallen log, but it may be the backline of a deer, moose, or elk. I usually spot snowshoe hares by spotting their black eyes amongst the snow. And I can now spot an insect crawling across a flower twenty feet away out of the corner of my eye when I'm shooting macro shots. Practice in seeing those things helps and I probably see more than most people do simply because I spend so much time looking. 

For me the realization that I miss things keeps me more alert in the field, but I'm equally sure I miss a lot even in a heightened state. Still, that is the adventure of photographing wildlife and makes me appreciate those things that I do see and maybe that is good enough.

And that little grizzly family in Glacier National Park? The next day I left the high country and headed back down the valley. The ranger was again stationed on his rock peering through his spotting scope. He grinned at me when I asked if the grizzly was still there. (I knew, of course, it was.) He didn't answer me directly but suggested singing or whistling while walking through the cirque would be a good idea, unnecessarily adding that he'd watch my progress from his safe perch a half mile away. Great. I didn't see her that time either and I wonder if she saw me. I'll never know...