Skip to main content

@what.sue.seas

A storytelling naturalist in South Jersey.

As I sat and watched a colony of nesting shorebirds one day, I realized that I had a story to capture right in front of me. All I had to do was show up with my camera and patience.

I quickly learned that nature is full of stories happening everywhere, every day. I show up at sunrise and sunset, through the seasons, to document the beach, pines and critters.

My visual study of local wildlife, expanded to three dimensions when I started an apprenticeship with carver Lance Lichtensteiger in Surf City.

I spend my weekends sawing, sanding and shaping American chestnut logs into the birds, fish and mammals that I love photographing. The logs were once part of cabins that were torn down at the turn-of-the-century. Before that, they were part of forests dense enough to shade away the noon sunlight. A blight eliminated Chestnut trees in the Northeast. Today, the logs are hard to come by, but no other wood grain comes close to mimicking the feathers of birds and the scales of fish.

The galleries on this website feature the nature stories I photograph and the carvings I am learning to make.

Delaware Bay 

The busiest Jersey Shore buffet opens following full and new moon high tides in the spring. The menu is limited to what looks like cotton candy-flavored Dip’n’Dots spilled onto the sand, but in reality those multicolored dots are horseshoe crab eggs packed with enough protein to fuel shorebirds on the second leg of their migration to the Arctic.

Watching the hollow-shelled horseshoe crabs crawling ashore to spawn is as close as one can get to seeing dinosaurs. In fact, these crabs are older than dinosaurs and have earned the name living fossils.

The number of birds arriving each year has been declining by the thousands in recent years. Less than 7,000 birds arrived in 2021.

Black Skimmers 

With a scissor-shaped bill, the Black skimmer flies inches above the water, drawing a line as it slices the surface in search of fish. On land, parents bite at their catch, breaking it up, but not eating it—they are making it more manageable before feeding it to their chicks.

Sand flicks into the air above two tiny legs furiously digging into the sand. When a chick is signaled to hide, it burrows into the sand that matches the color of its feathers.

Under the blazing sun, the birds collapse flat onto the beach—beak on the ground, wings out to the side. They appear dead, but they’re just resting in the heat in the absence of any shade.

Foxes 

Mom is wiped out after a day of tending to her seven kits. She’s laying on a plank in a beachfront yard—eyes shut—but she’s still listening for dogs and danger. Her kits are racing and rough-housing on recently cut lawn and kicking up mulch as they leap in and out of the flower beds. Dad is probably off somewhere in the dunes chasing dinner.

I rest my bike against the beach path fence and find a spot to sit down and shoot. Mom comes out of the dunes and onto the path. She glances at me and then walks to a pair of plastic flip flops that were left at the beach entrance. She picks one up and takes it into the dunes where she proceeds to bury it. The following week, I discover that she’s collected a variety of shoe styles and brands. Her kits fight over a pair of Birkenstocks.

There is never a dull moment when fox watching.

Grand Canyon 

I first saw the Grand Canyon during Tait Chirenje’s Northwest Southwest Field Experience, a class that focuses on natural resources and environmental issues along the Colorado River. I knew I had to go back.

Since then, I have visited Havasupai Canyon, volunteered with the Arizona Game and Fish Department on an electrofishing trip from Pipe Creek to Pierce’s Ferry to monitor native fish populations, volunteered with USGS on the Little Colorado River at Salt Camp for a juvenile Humpback Chub survey, and rafted the full river on a photo expedition with Ralph Lee Hopkins and AZRA.

Close Menu