5 - Bengal Tiger A Wild Year – 23 or ‘23

On December 2, 2022, I left a good job in the city, as someone once said, deciding to venture into the unknown world of semi-retirement. I like to call it trial retirement. Life seemed to be slipping by and while I knew I would deeply miss the people at Lindblad Expeditions (and still do), I needed a new path.

In 2022, my mother had crossed over from this realm, from here into whatever was next for her. Perspective on what matters comes very quickly when you arrive in a place where both your dad and your mom have left. My sagging spirit, my disappearing soul needed something that was not here. It was out there.

Where that something waits, for me, is in the wild places of our planet, and the privilege to spend time with some of the critters who inhabit these lands. These places are where I worship. I was looking for that solace that nature always provides. It never lets you down and never leaves. I needed to feel that spirit again.

So, I set an intention for the year to observe and document as much as one person can, the vast, mind-blowing biodiversity of our planet. The story starts in 2022. I am writing here about 2023 which now seems eons ago as it is almost halfway into 2024. Got that? Good, because I am not sure I do! I am still trying to make some sense of ’23, the year gone by, the year that was.

I traveled on my own but along the way crossed paths with so many amazing people. Through it all, I strived to stay present, conscious, aware. It is presence that carries us. Come to think of it, it is everything, really. I have sort of learned the importance of the presence mindset over all these years through the good and through the bad. Of course, it might have been good to know how important just staying present is, say 30 years ago! Presence, breathe, be aware, be conscious.

As humans, we are burdened imagining the future while assessing, evaluating, thinking, thinking, thinking about the past, wanting to change it sometimes. Although I really don’t want to, I go there more often than I would like.

It is a blessing too, these journeys through the past, as our minds, our memories allow us to almost taste the air of spring days in wild broadleaf forests feeling nature exploding everywhere. Or arrive again on a soaking May night to hear the first aching notes of Stevie Ray Vaughn’s guitar at Champs de Brione Winery, the Gorge.

As someone else wrote one time, it seems that all this life was just a dream. But, of course, the year that was, 2023, wasn’t just a dream.

I have struggled to write about my 2023, struggled all the way well into this next year. Writing requires vulnerability. Putting yourself out there. It is frickin’ hard! Is this shit something people care about, are interested in? They say write about what you know, but, for me, it is way deeper than that. It is write about what grabs hold and refuses to let go.

Wildlife. Sometimes, I wonder how and why the passionate, perhaps obsessed drive to observe and photograph wildlife in their world captured me. I am just glad it did. Oh, the roads we travel, the zigs and the zags. Geeky kid birder, 7-years old, Buffalo, New York found himself, myself in February of 2023, 55 years along in life on a Himalayan Mountain at 13,000 feet, Seattle Seahawk toque keeping my head warm, steps glacially slow, breath coming hard, scanning nook and cranny for the ghost of the mountains, the Snow Leopard. And the cat, this wonder of the genus Panthera, where the 5 big cats taxonomically call home, did appear, but in wholly unexpected ways. Life does that sometimes.

So, I suppose this is my attempt at some vulnerability, (something I have never been real good at), putting my creative work, my images, my words out there and telling the stories of the wildlife I saw and photographed last year, 2023, a wild year.

There is always more to tell, to be sure, more about each individual adventure from deserts of Rajasthan, India to the edge of a California super bloom to the craggy mountains of Andalucia, southern Spain. Then, back to the US on, maybe, a not real well-thought-out adventure to photograph all the members of one bird family, the North American Wood Warblers. And finally, to perhaps my favorite country, Mexico, and its Sonoran deserts and Baja California Pacific waters.

That is enough about me, far too much, really, because this post is about the wildlife I saw and photographed last year. For, it is way more than any one individual, wildlife is about the world we live in, the Earth we live on, their Earth, the one we are lucky to inhabit.

And all this life wasn’t just a dream.

I have added a new Gallery to my the website.  Please visit the 23 for '23 Gallery to see a collection of pixels coalesced into images of wildlife from around the globe...some of the animals of Planet Earth…with whom I crossed paths last year...