Nebraskaland

54 Nebraskaland • November 2023 THE LAST STOP Red Wing Wildlife Management area is a dangerous place for wildlife photographers. During the past three years, as you read earlier in this issue, I made numerous trips to the area between Clearwater and Neligh to document changes that occurred in the channel the Elkhorn River abandoned during fl ooding in March 2019. In late June 2021, armed with my mask, snorkel and an underwater camera, I set out to photograph the abundant aquatic life in the natural pools and beaver ponds and the streams between them, all fed by groundwater. In a backwater at the lower end of the old channel, I found a male bluegill tending its nest in the midst of beaver-chewed sticks in 3 feet of water. He swam back and forth, thoroughly annoyed by my presence, occasionally head butting the dome port on my camera. After 10 minutes, he'd had enough and swam up and bit my left index fi nger while I was gripping the camera. I've been bit by many fi sh, but only while removing a hook from their mouths, so this was a fi rst of sorts. I'm glad it wasn't a pike. The following May, I spent an evening sitting in the willows next to a beaver pond, hoping a fl ock of blue-winged teal I spooked from the water earlier would return. When they didn't, I walked to the middle of the stream below the pond to photograph the sunset. I turned to look downstream and saw a beaver swimming my way. This was the second time this had happened in less than an hour. The fi rst time, while walking the channel a few hundred yards to the west, I was also caught standing in the open. Wearing camo hip waders and a ghillie suit jacket, I froze. The beaver kept swimming my way, letting me grab a few frames as it did. When it swam behind a dam, I pre- focused on the spot I hoped it would walk across. Instead, it sprinted. I captured four blurry or poorly-composed frames, fi red off at 14 frames per second, before it splashed into the pool above the dam. Seconds later, it emerged long enough to slap his tail on the surface, his way of giving me the bird, before continuing upstream. The second beaver, like the fi rst, kept coming near, but at a more leisurely pace — closer and closer until my 600mm lens wouldn't focus. As a rule, my focus limit switch is set to on, as my subjects are typically more than 33 feet away. That no longer being the case, I slowly reached up and turned the switch off , and I kept fi ring away until it breached the lens's 14.4-foot minimum focus distance. And it kept coming. Have you seen the commercial where a beaver bites into some heavy-duty work pants and breaks its teeth? But I wasn't wearing heavy-duty work pants. So, having no clue how a beaver would react if startled — would it attack? — I reached, in slow motion, for the second camera hanging from my shoulder, fi tted with a wide zoom. Minutes earlier, I was photographing landscapes from a tripod. I was smart enough to spin the aperture dial to wide open, but it took way more frames than it should have for me to realize that wasn't enough to get the shutter speed fast enough for hand-held action photos. I slowly and blindly fumbled to boost the ISO, continuing to click away as the beaver walked up its run, me looking down as it passed three feet from mine. Whether this beaver was dumb, blind or just indiff erent, it didn't care that I was there. I shadowed it for 400 yards as it swam and walked up the channel, even moving ahead of it once, and capturing a few more frame-fi lling portraits, giving me 359 photos in all — most of them garbage — in the course of 16 minutes. Which was a much better outcome than if it had treated me the way that bluegill did. BIT BY A BLUEGILL, NEARLY RUN OVER BY A BEAVER By Eric Fowler

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