Slice: Patient by nature

By Rick Ruggles: WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

Photos: MATT MILLER/THE WORLD-HERALD

Photographer Michael Forsberg photographs wildlife at the Rowe Sanctuary near Gibbon, Neb.

GIBBON, Neb. — The nature photographer faced his challenge by striding along the edge of the Platte River, hands in pockets, eyes to the ground, trying to figure out exactly where predators go.

Understanding that was vital to Michael Forsberg's mission — getting a close-up of a bobcat, fox, coyote or badger.

If Forsberg could find a path one of those animals frequently used, he could set up a camera there and, through a fairly new technique, capture its image without his presence.

He walked away from the river and into a line of cottonwoods a couple hundred yards away. He searched for paw prints.

Forsberg, right, and assistant Nick Altadonna search for signs of wildlife at the National Audubon Society's Rowe Sanctuary near Gibbon, Nebraska, as they prepare to set up a camera trap to photograph a predator.

“Some scat over here,” said his assistant, Nick Altadonna. Helping Forsberg on a photo shoot was a treat. Typically Altadonna works in Forsberg's gallery in Lincoln. This day he would fetch equipment and assist in any way he could.

Forsberg poked at the scat, or feces, with a blade of stiff grass. His sunglasses rode atop his head. His hip waders, not hitched up, rode around his ankles.

Wildlife photographers like Michael Forsberg, who just published the book “Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild,” now have the ability to capture close-ups of wary creatures that can hear or sniff out a person from hundreds of yards away.

Forsberg intended to deploy that strategy this bright-blue October day just west of the headquarters of the National Audubon Society's Rowe Sanctuary. The sanctuary is known as one of the finest spots from which to view the sandhill crane migration in March.

Forsberg, 43, looked for a place to assemble a “camera trap,” which includes two small devices with an infrared beam running from one, the transmitter, to the other, the receiver. The photographer also sets out a camera and lights, or flashes.

Forsberg sets up a camera trap to photograph wildlife. When an animal walks through an infrared beam, it trips the camera, left, and two flashes. Of course, it might not be the particular animal that Forsberg is seeking.

A predator that steps through the invisible red beam triggers the camera, which in turn triggers the flashes. Forsberg can be far away, eating dinner with his wife and two daughters in Lincoln or photographing swans in the Sand Hills, when the image he covets is captured.

Forsberg conceals an infrared transmitter. It sends an invisible beam to a receiver. When an animal passes through the beam, it triggers the camera.

Forsberg wanted a photo of a predator for a story he is putting together for NEBRASKAland magazine. The story is about Rowe Sanctuary's John Dinan tract, 200 acres and a mile of riverfront named for a Nebraska Game and Parks Commission biologist who died of leukemia in 2005.

“When I'm photographing wildlife, I often feel that I'm chasing ghosts, capturing surviving wild spirits of species whose numbers have been decimated or all but eliminated from these wide-open spaces.” — Forsberg, “Great Plains.”

Forsberg has spent little time shooting photos in 2009. The year has been devoted to putting the final touches on “Great Plains” and promoting the book with talks, signings and interviews in Minneapolis, Denver, Rapid City, Scottsbluff, Lincoln, Omaha and elsewhere.

“Great Plains” contains 260 pages of Forsberg photos and text by him and others, such as Nebraska poet Ted Kooser.

It's Forsberg's second book. His first, “On Ancient Wings,” documents the journeys and habitat of the sandhill cranes. His work has appeared in National Geographic, Audubon, National Wildlife and other magazines.

This was one of Forsberg's first opportunities to get back outside and take photos. He loves the Rowe Sanctuary, a spot that was critical to his photos and knowledge of sandhill cranes.

He and Altadonna kept walking through the brush just south of the Platte River. They found part of a white-tailed deer carcass.

“It's stinky,” Forsberg said.

“Yeah,” Altadonna said. “It's pretty fresh.”

They also found spots where white-tailed bucks in the rut, or breeding period, had dug at the ground with their hooves and rubbed their antlers on trees. Forsberg looked for narrow trails that animals use. He wanted a place where they would funnel through in large numbers. They're just like people, he thought. They take the path of least resistance.

He finally found his spot — an opening between two trees, about a dozen feet apart, a likely place for animals to walk through on their way to and from the Platte River.

The background could produce a rich photo, for a tree limb had broken and fallen into another tree, creating interesting angles of wood to frame the scene. The horizon also was visible and could yield a sweet sky at dawn or dusk.

“What do you think, Nick?” Forsberg asked.

“Where are you going to hang everything?”

“We'll put stuff in trees and on the ground,” Forsberg said.

He pulled equipment from a case. He and Altadonna went to work, setting the camera trap.

They jabbed four metal stakes into the dirt, then screwed the infrared transmitter and receiver, the Canon Rebel XTI camera and one of the flashes into the stakes. Forsberg then screwed a thin metal piece into a cottonwood so the second flash device could be attached to it.

The process was slow. Forsberg doesn't consider himself a gadget guru, and he took his time assembling it all, sometimes looking at written instructions. He has used camera traps since 2006. Increasingly, serious wildlife photographers must have that tool to get the photos that editors desire.

Forsberg had this camera trap system built for about $4,000. He has two others at home.

For the best nature shooters in the world, camera traps have yielded great photos of snow leopards in the Himalayas and mountain lions in the Arizona desert.

They also produce many shots of things that the photographer isn't pursuing — dogs, raccoons, rabbits, leaves and waving blades of grass that pass through the infrared beam.

Once Forsberg set up a camera trap to get photos of wood rats on the Niobrara River. They chewed through one of his power cords, knocking the system out. Another time he obtained a camera-trap shot of a coyote pulling the duct tape off the transmitter — not exactly a predator-in-the-wild moment.

“Great Plains” contains eight photos from camera traps, including one on the dust cover. He used three shots of mountain lions in South Dakota's Black Hills after setting out a camera trap there over two winters.

He desperately desired an excellent photo of a bobcat for the book. Although he traveled about 100,000 miles for “Great Plains,” he was running out of time when he set up two camera traps at Audubon Spring Creek Prairie, just west of his Lincoln hometown.

The camera trap had yielded no bobcat photos when his December 2008 deadline was extended. In early March he checked the camera one last time. There was the shot he wanted — a bobcat crouched and looking at the camera. It was the final photo for his book.

“And it is my hope that someday, future generations will thank us for the courage we had and the efforts we made, each in our own way, to preserve and restore these treasures for their future. We certainly owe it to them, we owe it to the land and its wild inhabitants . . . ” — Forsberg, “Great Plains.”

Forsberg captured this image of a bobcat with one of his camera traps. © Michael Forsberg

Forsberg lay on the ground and peered through the camera lens.

He adjusted the camera's position. He and Altadonna tweaked the placement of the transmitter and receiver. Forsberg tested the flashes and they went off.

Altadonna crawled through the scene twice while Forsberg looked through the lens. Forsberg's camera-trap equipment was covered in camouflage or Army green tape. Once he had the equipment in the right positions, he and Altadonna covered the cords with grass and bark, and zip-tied twigs, bark and grass to the bottoms of the stakes.

Forsberg knows the animals will recognize the devices as strange, but they can't be so foreign-looking that they scare the animals away. He also figures that the animals will smell human beings on the equipment for a while, and he leaves the camera traps in position for weeks and months. He comes back occasionally to check the equipment and look at the images.

He put a new battery and a digital compact flash card into the camera. The card should provide up to 215 images.

“One more thing we've got to do, Nick. When you walk through, I want you to stop this time,” Forsberg said. Altadonna froze in front of the camera. Forsberg checked the focus.

“OK,” Forsberg said.

It had taken about 95 minutes to set up the system.

“One thing is for sure. If this place one day has no cranes, it will have lost its spirit, and the soul of this remnant landscape will wither.” — Forsberg, “On Ancient Wings.”

Just before dusk, Forsberg went for a walk down a dirt road near his camera trap. He hoped to see some sandhill cranes coming back this way on their migration south.

Photographer Michael Forsberg uses his fingers to see how many minutes he has until the sun sets as Rowe Sanctuary.

But the evening was quiet. Cattle mooed in the distance. He took some photos of cottony milkweeds with the sun behind them. He photographed tall prairie grasses and sloshed into a marsh to shoot the reflection of a cottonwood and the half moon in the water.

Then he and Altadonna went back to their camera trap to test it in the light of dusk. Dry leaves rattled high in the trees and sounded like water.

Altadonna crawled through the scene again. The camera went off and the lights flashed.

“There he is,” Forsberg said. “In all his glory.”

Forsberg planned to return in a week or two to see what his camera had captured.

Contact the writer:

444-1123, rick.ruggles@owh.com

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