Stories from the Field Archives – J. G. Coleman Photography

Woodbridge Mist (Unnamed branch of Wepawaug River, Alice Newton Street Memorial Park, Woodbridge, Connecticut) — “Woodbridge Mist”
Unnamed branch of Wepawaug River, Alice Newton Street Memorial Park, Woodbridge, Connecticut
© 2013 J. G. Coleman Photography

With winter behind us and the spring renewal ahead, I find myself looking back through my last three months of work in search of the highlights of the past season. There have certainly been plenty, from a golden sunrise over the frigid Shepaug Valley in Washington to the icy cascades of Wepawaug Falls in the forests of Woodbridge (photo above). By far, though, my most enjoyable shoot this past winter was at the Ansonia Nature Center, a 150-acre parcel of woodlands and wetlands in Southern Connecticut.

I’ll be the first to admit that a small nature preserve in the equally small town of Ansonia, nicknamed the Copper City for its manufacturing prowess, hardly seems like a promising place to pursue the wild and rustic qualities that form the core of my landscape work. Factor in the high population density —more than 3,000 people per square mile— and you might just think I’ve lost my mind. But the fact of the matter is that you don’t need a thousand miles of wilderness to feel as if you’re thousands of miles away from the din of civilization. Within this swath of forest in Ansonia, I found a cozy microcosm of Connecticut’s natural landscapes.

Two Mile Solitude (Two Mile Brook, Ansonia Nature Center, Ansonia, Connecticut) — “Two Mile Solitude”
Two Mile Brook, Ansonia Nature Center
Ansonia, Connecticut
© 2013 J. G. Coleman Photography

Every open space worth its salt, for example, ought to have a watercourse of some kind. Two Mile Brook, a small stream that snakes its way through the western side of the Center, fits the bill and even possesses a delightfully dynamic character. When I first crossed this brook, only a few minutes into my hike, I found it lazily meandering through a wet meadow (photo at right). So subdued was its pace that its surface reflected the branches of nearby trees with mirror-like fidelity.

Yet, when I hooked back up with the Two Mile further north, it had an attitude altogether different. Now a lively brook, it weaved its way through the forest, dodging mossy boulders and murmuring energetically with occasional riffles. Indeed, the sound of a woodland brook is an aesthetic must-have that complements the Nature Center’s property nicely!

What’s more, Two Mile Brook has actually enjoyed quite a good deal of attention historically. As far back as the late 17th-century, it served as a useful landmark when drawing up property deeds. When the town of Derby was incorporated in 1720, for instance, Two Mile Brook was cited as its southern boundary. The banks of Two Mile Brook were even home to a number of mills throughout the 1800s, albeit in the more southerly stretches of the stream after it has gained some additional water volume and momentum.

Now is as good a time as ever to mention that, during my visit, the Ansonia Nature Center was cloaked with an absolutely exquisite blanket of mist. The temperature had managed to rise above 50° F, truly a rare occurrence for a late-January day in New England! The resulting mass of warm, humid air conjured a balmy fog that drifted across the landscape instilling an aura of both serenity and mystery. Conditions like this bring a veritable treasure trove of possibilities to a nature photographer, offering a marvelously ethereal means of conveying depth in a scene, as well as impeccably diffuse light that gently coaxes detail from shadowed surfaces.

Needless to say, even this spell of unusually warm weather wasn’t enough to melt away the ever-present traces of winter. Redwing Pond was still frozen over, such that rocks in the shallower sections sat half-entombed within motionless swirls of textured ice. Even along the woodland trails, there was no doubt that nature remained dormant. The only sounds to be heard were the occasional rustle of grey squirrels as they leapt cautiously from tree trunks to the forest floor, digging feverishly for hidden food stores amongst snow and thawed leaf litter.

Memories in Stone (Old Fieldstone Wall, Ansonia Nature Center, Ansonia, Connecticut) — © 2013 J. G. Coleman Photography

Within the woodlands of the Ansonia Nature Center, we also find telling traces of human presence from a bygone era. Much of the acreage of the Center is now bristling with trees which, to the plain senses, might seem to have been here since time immemorial. But the fact of the matter is that this forest is actually relatively young, having slowly regrown upon the grassy expanses of what was once farm land. Evidence of this earlier use is found in the old fieldstone walls that criss-cross the Nature Center property (photo above). Looking at the place now, it’s truly difficult to imagine a time when this tract of land lacked all but a few shade trees and possessed a decidedly bucolic character.

On a quick side note, did you ever wonder how you can tell if an old stone wall delineated crop land or pasture land? The trick is to examine the stones themselves. When livestock pastures needed to be created, the process was fairly straight-forward: first you would cut down the trees, then you’d remove the largest, most obnoxious stones from the landscape and dispose of them by building them into a wall on the pasture perimeter. Thus, stone walls which were constructed around pastures were usually made almost entirely of large, loose-fitting stones. In contrast, land that was to be plowed and farmed required ever smaller stones to be removed from the soil, so the stone walls that bordered crop land would typically contain a wealth of smaller rocks.

The coarse stone walls I discovered at the Ansonia Nature Center were certainly characteristic of those that would’ve been built around pastures. Of course, we could skip a few steps and simply visit the Nature Center’s website, which explains that the property was originally “a small family-owned dairy farm”, but aren’t you glad that you learned a thing or two about how to interpret stone walls?

A Ghost in the Woodlands (Old telephone poles for the Nike BR-04 Missile Site, Ansonia Nature Center, Ansonia, Connecticut) — “A Ghost in the Woodlands”
Relics of the old Nike BR-04 access road
along the Raptor Woods Trail
Ansonia Nature Center, Ansonia, Connecticut
© 2013 J. G. Coleman Photography

Surely, the most perplexing discovery of the day came as I walked through the forest along the Raptor Woods Trail in the northeastern corner of the Center. At one point I came to a straight-away where I could peer into the distance to see the unswerving stretch of trail ahead, flanked on both sides by a seemingly endless expanse of trees, each reaching longingly towards the featureless sky. But as I looked up at the bare crowns above, I was suddenly drawn to a peculiar horizontal shape amidst an otherwise vertical pattern of tree trunks. Right beside me, in the middle of the woods, stood a telephone pole (photo at right).

As I walked onwards, I realized that there were actually several telephone poles along this trail, each one evenly spaced from the next just as they would be along a suburban street. None of them were strung with wires, so I knew that they had been decommissioned, but I couldn’t begin to imagine how or why these telephone poles had come to be intermingled amongst trees almost twice as tall.

My curiosity was insatiable, so after I made it back to the trailhead and off-loaded my camera gear at the car, I decided to check out the visitor center. The building has a rather interesting design, whereby the interior space is basically circular with various exhibits around the perimeter and the main visitor center desk in the center. On this particular day, an older man (I regret that I didn’t catch his name) was manning the desk and I decided to see if he could shed some light on the peculiar telephone poles in the forest. “Oh, yes,” he explained,” that used to be an old access road for a missile base.”

Ah ha! Suddenly it all made sense. During a previous outing in the summer of 2012, I had hiked to the summit of Pinnacle Rock in Plainville, where one can still see the old concrete pads from a long-decommissioned Nike missile base. As it turns out, the telephone poles along the trail at the Nature Center are remnants of the control site access road for a similar installation dubbed “BR-04”, a missile base in Ansonia which was built in the mid-1950s to protect Bridgeport from the threat of bomber attacks.

For those of you that are scratching your heads over all this talk about missiles, here’s the abbreviated history. With the advent of the Cold War in the 1950s, there was concern that the most important cities and military bases in the United States were woefully susceptible to nuclear attacks by Soviet bombers. In response, the US government built anti-aircraft missile installations in strategic areas around each location with the goal of shooting bombers out of the sky before they could drop nuclear warheads. The installation in Ansonia was just one of a dozen sites in Connecticut that were tasked with defending Bridgeport and Hartford. Yet, for all of the effort and expense of building these installations, most of them were decommissioned less than a decade after they were built. By the late 1960s, the facility in Ansonia was one of only three sites that remained operational in Connecticut. All of these remaining sites were finally shut down in 1971. It’s not entirely clear why the old telephone poles along the access road in Ansonia were never taken down, but they make for a fascinating addition to the Raptor Woods Trail.

Winter Pathway (Boardwalk on the Raptor Woods Trail, Ansonia Nature Center, Ansonia, Connecticut) — Boardwalk Through Wetlands on the Raptor Woods Trail,
Ansonia Nature Center, Ansonia, Connecticut
© 2013 J. G. Coleman Photography

I’m always scouting new landscapes, trying to seek out and familiarize myself with places that are uniquely photographic. Inevitably, I return home some days having found nothing of particular interest, so I had no idea what I might discover when I set out for the Copper City on a misty day in January. But within only 150 acres at the Ansonia Nature Center, I was treated to a lively blend of woods and waters where tangible memories of years past lay concealed beneath the forest canopy. The dense suburbs of Ansonia are never more than a mile or two away from even the most secluded trails at the Nature Center, yet the forests here somehow manage to feel wild, remote and timeless.

This is a phenomenon I’ve come across often during the course of producing my landscape photography. The population density of the Nutmeg State is one of the highest in the nation, so in most places, open space is going to be measured in acres rather than square miles. Yet, in several populous areas across Connecticut, there are surprisingly “wild” pockets of land nestled skillfully into areas that are otherwise overwhelmingly tame. The Ansonia Nature Center is a shining example of a natural oasis amidst suburbia, but no matter where you live in the state, you’ll surely be able to find a refreshing piece of the natural world that is astonishingly close to home.

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If the title of this most recent post seems odd, you aren’t mistaken: portraits have never been my specialty. Anybody that is familiar with my work knows that I invest my time almost exclusively in landscape photography. But at least one unexpected advantage to spending so much time in the wildlands of Connecticut is that I’ve had the privilege of observing a wide cross-section of the state’s fauna. Over the past year, I’ve really started to embrace these photographic opportunities.

The most recent addition to my online galleries includes a small cavalcade of native reptiles and amphibians of Connecticut, creatures which are also found throughout much of the American Northeast. As a child, discovering creatures such as these in the woodlands and wetlands around home served to nourish my enthusiasm and curiosity for the outdoors. I’m grateful to be able to introduce you to some of these remarkable animals through my work. This is probably the closest I come to producing anything that could vaguely be called a “portrait”.

Eastern Box Turtle

Most people are probably familiar with the term “endangered”. In common parlance, it is broadly used to refer to a species that is facing extinction, or at least a severe decline in population. But Connecticut officials actually apply this term fairly technically, as do many states throughout the nation. Only creatures that are potentially facing extinction in the very near future are classified as “endangered”. There are also two less severe, albeit equally serious, categorizations: “threatened” and “special concern”. Although law books specify definitions for these categories, it will suffice to say that “threatened” species are those which may soon become “endangered”, while “special concern” species are those which are in danger of becoming “threatened”.

The Eastern Box Turtle (Terrapene carolina carolina) is a Connecticut-listed Species of Special Concern. This may be surprising to those that live in isolated areas of the state where the Eastern Box Turtle still thrives. Unfortunately, such places are becoming more and more uncommon. While the Eastern Box Turtle may not be in any immediate danger of going extinct, biologists are warning of a potentially grim future for this woodland turtle.

Studies of the Eastern Box Turtle have revealed that most adult specimens, such as this one which I photographed in southern Connecticut (above), will spend the majority of their lives wandering only one or two acres of home territory. In short, they don’t travel too far. This habit served these turtles well for thousands of years, but makes them especially vulnerable in modern times. I think that we tend to rationalize that, when we develop small portions of land, the local wildlife will simply learn to avoid that area. But for the Eastern Box Turtle, which has such strong ties to its limited home range, the construction of an ordinary one-acre home lot can potentially mean the destruction of the animal’s entire domain.

So while the Eastern Box Turtle continues to thrive in those areas of Connecticut where development has occurred slowly, its numbers continue to decline elsewhere. As a Connecticut state-listed species though, this turtle now enjoys a certain measure of protection against careless land development, at least in those places where its presence has been confirmed.

Black Rat Snake

One of the largest snakes in Connecticut, the Black Rat Snake (Elaphe obsoleta obsoleta) is among the more common serpents of woodlands and meadows. I happened upon this particular specimen (above) along Connecticut’s Metacomet Trail in mid-April, probably only a short time after it emerged from hibernation. In fact, this Black Rat Snake was rendered so sluggish and docile in its post-hibernation stupor that I was able to observe it quite freely. For nearly 30 minutes, I watched as it weaved its way through the tangled branches of a fallen tree only a couple feet away, lacking any sense of urgency to escape. Eventually it slithered to the ground and casually vanished beneath a large boulder.

This type of groggy, springtime temperament doesn’t last very long, though. By late May, I ran into another of these serpents in a rocky meadow in central Connecticut. This time around, the Black Rat Snake was not nearly so accommodating. Alertness was noticeably heightened, it was reactive to my every movement and, after only a few minutes, it grew weary of my presence and staged a lightening-quick escape into the grasses.

Gray Treefrog

Gray Treefrogs (Hyla versicolor) are the only “true” treefrogs that make their home in Connecticut. Despite a slow decline in population throughout the 20th century, the Gray Treefrog remains at least stable enough that it is not currently a state-listed species. This may come as a surprise, though, because most people have actually never seen a Gray Treefrog… even those that spend a good deal of time outdoors.

Why are these frogs so elusive? The simple answer is that they spend the vast majority of their time in the trees, a behavior which could be easily inferred from their name. In the rare case that Gray Treefrogs venture to the ground, its typically by cover of night in order to breed. So although these arboreal amphibians are quite comfortable in the landscapes of Connecticut, they manage to remain out of sight and out of mind to most people.

Eastern Ribbon Snake

Undoubtedly among the most commonly seen snakes in suburban neighborhoods, the Eastern Ribbon Snake (Thamnophis sauritus sauritus) is oftentimes mistaken for the closely-related Common Garter Snake. The misidentification is understandable, as both snakes grow to roughly the same proportions and possess distinct, yellow lateral stripes.

For the most part, the field guides will tell you that Eastern Ribbon Snakes live beside wetlands or ponds, feeling most comfortable in the transitional zone between water and dry land. And while that may be the case most often, I discovered this particular specimen (above) on the west-facing ledges of a traprock ridge in southern Connecticut. Naturally, one might wonder how it could possibly find drinking water in such a place; the answer was to be found in the forests towards the interior of ridge top. Although the woodlands there are rather dense, just like any lowland forest, the soil is actually quite shallow. Only about two to four feet below the soft soil lies the solid basalt of the ridge, so that any depressions in the terrain tend to accumulate springtime meltwater and year-round rain run-off. The result is that a small network of vernal pools can be found in this otherwise dry and rocky ecosystem. The Eastern Ribbon Snake routinely makes use of these pools, which occasionally even fill with water during spells of heavy rain during the summertime. As an added benefit, the pools also serve as excellent breeding habitat for various frogs and toads which ultimately provide ribbon snakes with a much-needed food source.

Northern Green Frog

Wherever large swaths of land are developed in Connecticut, there’s almost always some significant impact to the plants and animals which previously had reign over the territory. Some species, such as the Wood Frog and Eastern Box Turtle, can easily vanish from the local landscape. Then there are those creatures such as the Northern Green Frog (Rana clamitans melanota), which probably comprise a larger percentage of Connecticut’s frog population these days than they ever did before the landscape was significantly developed. What accounts for this population explosion in Northern Green Frogs when so many other species are struggling just to avoid yearly declines in numbers?

Quite simply, the Northern Green Frog is supremely adaptable to all types of developed landscapes. While amphibians such as the Wood Frog require undisturbed vernal pools to survive (and will literally perish without them), the Northern Green Frog is content to make its home just about anywhere: rivers or brooks, ponds or lakesides, wetlands and even roadside ditches and storm drains. They are also just as opportunistic in their choice of food, eating nearly anything that they can capture and swallow. This remarkable flexibility means that, even as its wild habitats are tamed by development, the Northern Green Frog nonetheless fares relatively well in comparison to more disturbance-sensitive species. And wherever other species of frog begin to decline in numbers, you can bet that the infinitely versatile Northern Green Frog is itching to fill in the void.

Northern Black Racer

The Northern Black Racer (Coluber constrictor constrictor), growing to sizes of between 4 and 5 feet, is one of the larger snakes of Connecticut. The name “racer”, not surprisingly, alludes to the lightning-fast escapes it stages whenever feeling threatened by an encroaching human. While these snakes are undoubtedly fast, I’m not sure that other snakes can’t attain similar speeds on the right terrain. Instead, my experience with these reptiles in the wild would seem to suggest that they are simply more skittish than other snake species that share their habitat. Thus, they are able to escape from approaching humans much faster, not only because of their speed, but also because they tend to be exceptionally weary of potential threats.

My encounter with this particular specimen (above), was a rather intriguing one for reasons that aren’t at all visible in my photograph. As I crouched only a few feet from the snake, being sure to move slowly so as not to startle it into retreat, I suddenly heard a distinct rattling sound. Now, to be clear, there was no question in my mind that this was a Northern Black Racer… a non-venomous and completely harmless snake. Yet the rattling was so peculiar, and so loud, that I actually doubted my eyes for a moment and found myself involuntarily glancing at its tail to verify that it did not possess the trademark rattle segments of the venomous Timber Rattlesnake. It did not, of course. Instead, it was rapidly beating its smooth tail on the leaf litter. Surely, I imagined, this must be some fantastic mimicry tactic in which the Northern Black Racer strikes fear into the hearts of approaching threats by posing as a rattlesnake!

The truth of the matter, however, is perhaps even more fascinating. As it turns out, this supposed “rattlesnake mimicry” is actually common among many varieties of non-venomous snake. And, rather than being an attempt at imitating a rattlesnake, researchers now believe that this behavior is very ancient and actually predates the evolution of the modern rattlesnake. Several snake species will rhythmically beat their tails on the ground in an attempt to frighten approaching threats, but only the rattlesnakes took this behavior one step further and developed a unique rattling tail structure which could amplify the sound.

To see more photography of the creatures discussed above, as well as several others, please visit Fauna of the Eastern US on my online galleries at JGCOLEMAN.COM.