The 2009 Blue Ox Moose Tour
G’day everyone,
Spend, say, three days in Baxter State Park in Maine, especially in Spring or Fall, and you’re bound to encounter a moose. Though, on any given day, you could beat the bushes from the first glimmer of dawn until the last bit of twilight gutters without ever seeing Alces alces. I know. I’ve done it, as have many people. In fact, I spoke with a couple I met in the park during this year’s tour who told me they paid a professional guide $400.00 for one day to help them find a moose. They eagerly followed the guide to several dozen ponds, wallows, and wetlands throughout the park, in vain. The guide apologized and kept their money.
On the one hand, Baxter State Park, central Maine for that matter, is the moosiest area in all of New England. On the other hand, it’s a huge area with thousands of wetlands, ponds, and lakes where one might see a moose out in the open. The thing is that on any given day moose will indeed make an appearance in any of these areas. But not necessarily every day and not consitently in the same location. Question is, will you pick the same location a moose has chosen to visit on a particular day?
Bull Moose
Canon EOS 1-D Mark II N
Canon EF 300mm f/2.8 L IS USM lens with Canon 2x teleconverter
1/400″ @ f/5.6, ISO 400
Gitzo GT3541LS carbon fiber tripod with Wimberley Head
And if you see a moose, well, there’s seeing a moose and seeing the moose.
You know, the bull with antlers so big you could plow your driveway with them. When this fella appeared out of the shrubbery on the first morning of the tour, I recal Owen Weddell - an intrepid man in his seventies whose been on three of my tours and who can get up at 3:00 am, follow a slimy trail through the woods in the dark with a headlamp for 1/2 a mile, and be in position along with the rest of us “youngsters” - asking what the hell he was looking at. Owen hadn’t seen that many moose and I suppose that he had expected to be looking for them closer to the ground; the head of this moose poking out of the branches of the trees about nine feet over the water at the far end of the pond threw him off a bit. Now this isn’t the biggest bull I’ve ever seen, but it’s certainly the grandest bull moose I’ve caught in a photogenic situation. Fortunately, everyone had long lenses with teleconverters and were able to pull him in but the light was still very dim and there was a dense mist over the pond so we had to increase the contrast and clarity in post-processing to bring him out of the mist. He’d been thrashing the trees moments before, part of his mating ritual, as evidenced by the foliage still draped on his left antler. Owing to the mist and distance, the detail in the capture isn’t stellar. So, I vignetted the moose a bit, printed the image on 12″ x 18″ Red River Linen (a finely-textured paper), matted and framed it. The textured paper disguised the slight lack of detail and the resulting presentation is very painterly.
Meanwhile, when there’s no moose in the viewfinder, Baxter State Park isn’t a shabby place to hang out waiting for them, especially in the morning.
Sandy Stream Pond and Fall Foliage
Canon EOS 1-D Mark II N
Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L IS USM lens at 70mm
Moose 81A polarizer
1/800″ @ f/5, ISO 200
handheld
Aaron Fracht-Monroe (another repeat offender) had joined me in Baxter a day early. He and I enjoyed the company of a young bull moose the day before the big bull made his brief appearance. The young bull lingered for nearly an hour and was an outstanding poser. I suspect that he was practicing his moves for the year he sports a truly impressive set of antlers. 
Young Bull Moose (both images immediately above)
Canon EOS 1-D Mark II N
Canon EF 300mm f/2.8 l IS USM lens with Canon 1.4x teleconverter
1/160″ @ f/4, ISO 400
Gitzo GT3541LS carbon fiber tripod with Wimberley Head
Admittedly, there’s no guarantee that we’ll always get that quintessential image on any single expedition. Even landscapes are elusive owing to the contigencies of light and clouds and sundry atmospherics over which we have no control. Telling someone that you can give them a photogenic moose, even in a place like Baxter State Park, is a chancy proposition. Nature photographers understand this. Although we do what we can to be savvy naturalists, to maximize the odds of being in just the right place at the right time, there will be those occassons when we come home without any images to hang on the wall or to sell, without so much as a stock textbook image. No matter how aware you were at the outset of the risk of not getting that “money shot”, coming to Baxter and not photographing a nice bull, or traveling to Kenya and not getting that leopard, or leaving Machias Seal Island without that puffin with a beak full of fish on your memory card can be devastating, especially if one’s invested a great deal of hard-earned money and most especially if the trip was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Of all the Sojourns In Nature photo tours, the Blue Ox Moose Tour is, quiet honestly, the most problematic. I was reminded of this several times (Recall the story of the unfortunate and $400.00 poorer couple in the first paragraph.) not only on the moose tour but again during the Fall Foliage Magical Mystery Tour which, this year, immediately followed the moose tour. Rob had joined me for the tail-end of that tour and we spent a few extra days beyond the tour photographing reflections on the Swift River, waterfalls framed in autum colors, etc. (There’ll be more about the foliage tour in the December blog.) As we were walking out of Diana’s Baths, we caught up with a couple who were on their last day of a week-long fall vacation in the White Mountains. In exchanging remarks about the brilliant fall foliage and the breathtaking waterfalls we had just visited, the woman happened to express her dissapointment over not having spotted a single moose during their visit to the Whites. Remember, they had been there a week. Rob had just joined me the previous evening and that morning, the first day of Rob’s sojourn in the Whites, we happened upon the following cow and calf in a wetland right alongside the Kancamagus highway.
Moose Cow and Calf in Wetland
Canon EOS 1-D Mark II N
Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L IS USM lens at 100mm
1/100″ @ f/4, ISO 400, .67 EC
handheld
Does this mean that Rob and I are better at finding moose than most people? Not necessarily, though we do get out of bed much, much earlier than the average tourist. This was sheer luck of the draw. Any gambler knows (and don’t kid yourself, professional nature photographers are gamblers) that the role of luck is reduced by increasing the frequency with which one persues an outcome. Play a slot machine often enough, you’ll eventually hit the jackpot.
So far, we’ve not been skunked on any of our moose tours and we’ve been offering them for four years. To further increase our chances of getting the moose shot in the future, we’re extending the 2010 Blue Ox Moose Tour to five days. And should that year come when Lady Luck lets us down and no one in the group gets a keeper moose shot, we’ll be considering a partial refund of your tour fee. Because, though I don’t know about that guide who kept the $400.00 without coming through for his clients, I want to be able to sleep soundly at night. 
May the light be with you,
Gustav
Posted by Gustav under Fall,Fine Art Prints,Maine,Wildlife,Workshops & Tours | Comments (0)
