Mountain Bluebird
Thank goodness it finally perched!
I took a hike this week at a natural area outside of town. I ran into a mountain bluebird that stood still just long enough to snap a decent pic. Here’s what I got…
In the rare instance that I capture a decent image, I like to play around with it a bit. If there’s a good enough distinction between background and foreground, I’ll use Affinity Photo to layer the image and create a retro 3D version, like so…
Unless you happen to have a pair of old-timey red and cyan 3D glasses like this, you can’t really appreciate the magic. I spend so much time creating 3D pics, I’ve personally upgraded to this enviably fashionable version. Sometimes I wear them to the local bar just to look cool.
There’s a reason why I like to render modern photos of nature using this antiquated technique. As a kid, I remember enjoying comic books, tv shows, and movies presented in anaglyph 3D. So it’s nostalgic for me. Nostalgia is a very powerful human foible that taints our perception of just about everything—including nature.
Heraclitus correctly observed that the only constant is change. The natural world obeys this edict, remaining in continuous flux as fragments of the living and nonliving intersect, interact, and evolve. The dynamism of the Earth is equally evident and important. And yet over time, it inevitably leaves us unsettled, anxious, and sad.
As a species, we seem oddly hardwired to appreciate stability and resist change. We harbor an irrational instinct is to keep today’s landscapes, ecosystems, and species exactly as they are forevermore. We guard against extinction, cordon off “wilderness”, and attempt to restore altered habitats to some remembered, bygone glory. Were we able, we might preserve entire ecosystems in amber.
But experience shows our efforts can only stave off unwelcome change for so long. Like our own bodies, the natural world bends under the weight of time. The innumerable drivers of change—fire, flood, predation, competition, and evolution, etc.—consistently outlast our efforts to combat them. And in response, the natural world tolerates what change it can, adapts to what it cannot, and buckles when it can do neither. Without fail, landscapes grow increasingly unrecognizable against our deepest recollections.
The open fields of our youth become crowded with shrubs and trees. Trails from our earlier travels are rerouted, forgotten, or lost. A favored forest retreat burns asunder in a fiery holocaust. The birds that once roused us with morning serenades are now nowhere to be seen—or heard.
When it happens, our nostalgia for the past brings us sadness. We can only look back fondly on what we once knew. And in so doing, we amplify the favorable and suppress the less so. More often than not, we view our history with the natural world through rose (and cyan) colored glasses.