The National Wildlife Refuge System celebrates its 108th birthday on March 14. On this date in 1903, President Teddy Roosevelt established the first national wildlife refuge on Florida’s Pelican Island to protect wild birds from bounty hunters.
President Roosevelt would go on to protect 52 more areas as wildlife sanctuaries before leaving office. Today, the Refuge System’s 553 national wildlife refuges and 38 wetland management districts support at least 700 species of birds, 220 mammals, 250 reptiles and amphibians, more than 1,000 species of fish and countless invertebrates and plants.
I am very proud to be a contributor to Douglas Brinkley’s latest book The Quiet World: Saving Alaska’s Wilderness Kingdom 1879-1960. This is the second book in his conservation trilogy which began with his award-winning tome about Theodore Roosevelt, The Wilderness Warrior.
It sounds odd, but I have been looking specifically for cattails lately. They make for beautiful layered shots of color and texture.
This past weekend I went out shooting with Libby and David, who orchestrate my workshops. We headed out to Washington’s Sauk River, dodged the rain squalls, and got some lovely shots.
The Sauk is a tributary of the Skagit River and drains from the Cascade Range. It has the reputation of being a great flyfishing river. It is also very, very wet.
The moss swells on the bigleaf maples and hangs in long wispy tendrils from the alders.
And then finally I found the cattails, standing tall and golden against red twig dogwood, with pale green forest beyond.
For 40 years the Washington Environmental Council (WEC) has been a strong voice for environmental protection in Washington. Their collaborative leadership and forward thinking reforms have helped protect the people and natural areas of Washington and created models for change now used around the nation.
Art is proud to support WEC and its important environmental mission.
According to a new study by James A. Johnstone and Todd E. Dawson of the University of California, Berkeley, the redwood ecosystem of the US West Coast is increasingly drought stressed as the occurrence of summer fog has declined in the past century. The long term implications could be serious for the flora and fauna of an iconic ecosystem.
