Four +.

10:15 PM

As I get older, time always seems to be quickening. Where did that week go? How can it be the end of March already when the last time I posted was right after Thanksgiving? I guess I am lucky that I stay busy and time does not drag on. It is always exciting to move into the longer days of spring and summer when my days are expanded by the light. More time to work. More time to play. I really never realize how fast four minutes per day can add up until I take a shot with my camera and realize it is after 10 PM and my camera is prompting me to turn on the flash, which I don’t do out sheer obstinance.

Lifeblood.

For millennia salmon has been our lifeblood, touching every community with it’s nutrition.  This has been a hard summer.  The fish have been scarce all over Alaska with the exception of Bristol Bay.  We hope that our salmon are not disappearing and that this summer was just an off year.  Our salmon have to contend with many obstacles to make it home to our streams:  warming waters, hazardous wastes, plastics, pollution, and becoming by-catch of fishermen fishing for other species.  Once they get here,  we make sure the escapement for spawning is sufficient for future years.  Our subsistence foods feed our physical nutritional needs, but also fill our cultural needs; one is just as important as the other.  (Turn the sound down…that is just our constant wind drowning out the sound of splashing salmon.)

Horned Puffins.

PuffinsPuffins have always seemed such a comical bird.  I suppose just their coloring and crazy beak, plus their little round eye that seems to be bisected by two black lines is a good start.  They also have these colorful flappy feet sticking out of their rotund bellies that make them waddle-walk.  Out at sea, they run on top of the water, flapping their wings furiously for what seems like eons, trying to get their unsvelt bodies up off the water and into the air.  And somehow they manage to catch little fish and get them all lined up without dropping them, and walk and fly with them hanging out of their beaks.  We laugh at them a lot.  They are cute and funny.  I have to say, though, that I had to laugh at myself when I was going through my shots of trying to capture juvenilles flying to and from the cliffs, practicing flight and strengthening themselves for their time at sea and finding out that only two out of the twelve pictures I shot had birds in them at all.  Haha.  Crazy fast when you don’t want them to be.