When wandering through a stadium during the off-season, the stillness can be overwhelming.  The arena is full of life and commotion during the season, but most everyone is gone now.  Only a few die-hard athletes and year-round staff remain, preparing for the next year, or just hanging around because they don’t have anywhere better to be. 

As you walk around in the near silence, it’s easy to imagine the kind of bustling activity that occurs when everyone is around.  While much of the mess has been cleaned up, the main infrastructure remains and you can squint your eyes and envision the players moving about on the field.  While meandering about, you feel nostalgic about previous visits as well as a strong yearning for the start of the upcoming season.

While it can be a moving experience for devoted fans, a visit to a stadium during the off-season is an ineffective way to recruit new enthusiasts.  Newcomers don’t have the context to understand the significance of what, for veterans, easily conjures up visions of previous events.  The inexperienced see only the vacant shell, not the memories of what happened inside it. 

New fans are enticed by the exhilarating color and drama that comes when the stadium is full of life – when there is more to see than can be seen.  After sufficient time, however, they will also come to appreciate a walk unhurried through an empty arena, soaking in the atmosphere.  Reminiscences of the past and anticipation of the future provide ample gratification. 

The ridiculous amount of attention being given to my parody roadside wildflower field guide continues. In addition to continued traffic via Twitter, Facebook, etc., I was contacted this week by reporters from two different prominent online publications, who both wrote articles about the guide. The first was Colossal, an art and visual culture blog with a monthly readership of 1-2 million people (according to them) and the second was Atlas Obscura, which Kim assures me is a ‘big deal’ online magazine and travel company. If you’d like, you can see the feature in Colossal here and the Atlas Obscura piece here.

I’m hoping maybe all this craziness will at least lead to a few more people thinking about prairies, if just for a moment or two. If I’d known what kind of reaction it was going to get, I might have spent more time trying to make the guide into a better ambassador for grasslands and their beauty. Silly me, I thought I was just going through a lot of work to make myself laugh.

When I’m not basking in my new celebrity status as a writer of parody wildflower field guides, I still get out, now and then, and take actual nature photos. (Oh, and I’ve been working on a little science and conservation too, in case my boss reads this.) Last week, I ventured out to our family prairie to catch the sunrise on a very cold morning.

In contrast to some other recent outings on frozen wetlands, where I’ve had to be careful to fall through the ice, I was in no danger at all on this trip. I take that back. I was at risk of getting a really cold nose, since that was about the only part of my body not covered up on the frigid morning. I was also at risk of frustration from cold-related camera issues. If you’ve never tried to handle a camera on a really cold day, one of the challenges you might not expect is that it’s incredibly hard to prevent the glass on the camera from fogging up – and then freezing in that state.

It might seem simple enough to just avoid breathing on the camera, thus keeping the glass frost free. Unfortunately, when you’re wearing a hat, hood, and neck gaiter (like a stocking cap, but around your neck/mouth), the breath coming out of your mouth gets funneled in seemingly random directions. And since taking photos kind of necessitates putting my face right up to the camera, frost is always a problem. Fortunately, on this day, I was able to keep my frosty breath off the lenses, and just had to repeatedly wipe off the viewfinder and LCD screen. (I also kept my spare camera battery in my warm pocket because cold weather drains batteries very quickly.)

Apart from the minor issues related to cold weather and cameras, it was a great morning. I found muddy coyote and raccoon tracks on the ice. The raccoon tracks informed me that at least a couple raccoons are traveling through (or lodging in?) the overflow pipe on the dam of our little pond/wetland. I also saw that a coyote has been feeding on the big ol’ raccoon carcass that’s been sitting on the top of the frozen pond for the last few weeks. (See Chelsea’s recent blog post on coyotes, raccoons, and their coinciding tracks.)

A few weeks ago, when there was still a little bit of open water on the pond, I spooked up a great blue heron when I arrived. I assume it was feeding on the leopard frogs that were active around the edge of that open water. This time, there were no frogs moving around, and no heron either. The only frog I saw looked decidedly dead, and encased in ice.

I really do like hiking around on cold days, especially when I can explore and appreciate the patterns found in the ice and frost. Having to talk about that dumb wildflower guide so much lately has been making me a little heartsick for the growing season. It’ll be a while before there are wildflowers around to photograph, but as long as it’s cold enough to freeze water, I’ll get by on frost, ice, and snow.