Spring is here. Here is spring.

Two goldfinches sat quietly as I passed under their perch in a bare tree above the northernmost path at Dick Young Forest Preserve. The birds' plumage was the color of early March; seemingly flattened ochre, pale grey and a hint of white. These colors will soon enough rub away leaving the lemon yellow plumage of late spring and summer. The goldfinches will dally about playfully eating insects and seeds until August, when they'll gather thistle down and fine grasses, make nests and crank out one more round of goldfinch buddies for another year.

I am content with a photo of a goldfinch on a cold spring morning. The camera is so cold to hold in my bare hands that every photo comes with a cost of pain. Using a camera with a scope to shoot photos is an unwieldy business. Even my best results are not on par with true photographers. But the effort is often informative and fun. Coming home with a digital card full of nature images is like Christmas any time of the year.

There is also a documentary aspect to the process. In the program iPhoto, pictures are racked up in rows that when scrolled through result in a stop action movie recording the seasons. My photo collection moves through snow, sleet, rain and heat. It moves through winter ducks, spring cranes, summer sparrows and autumn blackbirds. Again, none of my pictures is magazine quality. But I use them to make paintings and share them with friends. And to learn more about birds, animals, insects and more.

My favorite "almost great" photo shows a red-eyed vireo clutching a large katydid under the shadow of a giant hickory leaf. The insect is half the size of the bird, and my series of photos shows the bird whacking the insect on a limb to soften it up before chomping the thing to pieces for a hearty meal. I wish I'd captured a similar scene years ago when a greater yellowlegs downed a fat leach. It bit the length of the slimy leach like corn on the cob and then gulped down the sloppy, dead meal.

Recently I've been thinking about moments like this more, and my humble photographic records of animal life. I blogged this Nelson Lake Year for my own purposes, not expecting many people to pick up on reading my musings so much as it was a discipline to get out more often to avoid the deadly void that forgetting to visit nature creates in my head.

That is why I avoided going to see the movie Avatar. I much prefer my humble reality and what I can capture in the real world to the supposedly amazing "virtual" natural world created for Avatar. Technically, it is a great achievement to invent a natural world from nothing. But what's the real message behind the movie. As I understand it, the plot is the same as the cartoon movie "Ferngully" or "Dances With Wolves." We're messing up our planet with we mess with people who are not all about extraction.

So I'd rather humbly extract my observations from the natural world than invest in an overblown commentary on man's inhumanity to man, and other creatures. We should all be more vested in such processes.