Seeing the Big Picture
Read the first blog posting here and the second here.
GBR RAVE blog #3 by Caitlyn Vernon, Sept. 7, 2010
The wildlife photographers who are participating in the Great Bear RAVE are not looking for close-up photos of bears or wolves. Those pictures are amazing, of course, they give us a rare opportunity to see incredible animals up close. Such as photos of a mother grizzly bear with cubs, rain drops glinting off their windblown hair. Or photos of an eagle perched on a branch, sharp eyes looking straight at the camera. These images are a reminder to stop and appreciate the amazingness of life all around us. To feel a connection with the birds and animals we share this earth with, and to notice that what happens to the hair of grizzly bears in the wind and rain also happens to our own.
No doubt the RAVE photographers will take these kinds of close-up pictures. But their goal, as they head out on boats and on foot into the rainforest, is to capture images of wildlife as part of the landscape. Images that tell a story about the rainforest.
Because the grizzly bear and her cubs don’t live just anywhere. They live in dens under old growth trees high up on mountainsides through the winter. They live along salmon streams in the fall. In the spring they live in estuaries and in places where skunk cabbage grow. They live amongst trees the cubs can climb, while their mother goes in search of food. They live in interaction with other animals – they chase away black bears, hide from male grizzly bears, and run from wolves. They live along the shoreline, eating clams and crabs and even barnacles. They live deep in the forest, eating berries and the insects that live in rotting logs.
These days, the grizzly bear and her cubs live in an ecosystem threatened by a risk of oil spills, and this is what the photographers hope their images will convey. Bears are not just creatures of the rainforest, they depend on salmon and seafood and the plants that grow in estuaries where rivers meet the sea. They feed at the interface between rainforest and ocean, right where an oil spill would wash ashore.
iLCP photographers Florian Schulz and Joe Riis set off into the rainforest in a beautifully maintained old wooden tugboat called the Pioneer. It’s still an active tugboat, but the ship captains are taking a break from work to assist with the Great Bear RAVE. For twelve days they will go wherever Florian and Joe think they can find the best pictures - up inlets, anchoring in bays, and out to the windswept sandy beaches of the outer coast. Joe is setting camera traps to catch images of wildlife as they are without people around. Florian is seeing the big picture - of watersheds and the connections between ecosystems - and sharing it with the world.
Read the fourth blog posting here and the fifth here.
