22 NEBRASKAland • AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2015
Photos and story by Michael Forsberg
S
pending hours or days in a blind waiting for animals
that may or may not appear can be a sacred practice
of sorts. It teaches the virtues and values of patience,
observation, listening and just being. You become finely
tuned to the world around you, and that in itself is its
own reward. But every once in awhile those photos you
imagine in your mind's eye can be conjured into existence,
and it makes those ants in your pants, frozen water bottles
and sore muscles even more worth it.
As a wildlife photographer for 20 years, I cut my
teeth working as a staff photographer and writer for
NEBRASKAland in the 1990s, at a time when the other
staff that I would learn so much from had a combined
experience of over 100 years in the field and had just
about as many different kinds of blinds as they did years
of experience. And what I didn't learn from Jon Farrar,
Bob Grier, Ken Bouc, Rocky Hoffman, Tom Keith, and
Don Cunningham, I learned on the fly through trial and
mostly error.
I remember the first story I did for the magazine was
photographing wintering bald eagles at Lake McConaughy. Jon Farrar suggested I use
a cardboard box that held a refrigerator. Looking back now, I am pretty sure he was
joking, but I didn't know any different so I went to a local furniture store and pulled one
out of the garbage, cut holes for a lens port, and slung an old white bedsheet over the
top of it all that I stapled in place and anchored in a snowdrift with rocks. It held up for
about a week along the shoreline before it was torn apart by the winter winds, but it
worked.
Blind
Time
