Ed Kanze, Naturalist and Adirondack Guide

Ed Kanze, Naturalist and Adirondack Guide I'm a naturalist, licensed guide, and nature writer who lives and works in NY's Adirondack Park, three times the size of Yellowstone. Come walk with me!

Life! It continues to amaze. Since the age of three or thereabouts, I have been a seeker of salamanders. These slimy, so...
09/15/2026

Life! It continues to amaze.

Since the age of three or thereabouts, I have been a seeker of salamanders. These slimy, soft-skinned creatures of the forest floor and various wet places continue to amaze and entrance me. They are ancient beings with pedigrees going far back beyond that of the dinosaurs, yet like all creatures that have been around a long time, they have had a lot more time than we've had to diverge and specialize and sprout new branches on the family tree. They are simultaneously very old and very new.

This is a red-backed salamander egg that I photographed in the Adirondacks a summer or two ago. Inside the egg is a larva almost fully developed and ready for prime time. This larva swam and swirled around inside the egg as my companions and I watched, awestruck.

I didn't pick up the egg on purpose. I'd just rolled a log, planning to have a quick and gentle look at anything that lurked beneath, and then put it back how I'd found it. But the eggs, which I had not expected to find, stuck to my hand and the damp rotting wood. I felt bad that I'd disturbed them. We splashed the salamanders with water from our water bottles to replace any moisture they'd lost during our intrusion and then moved on.

Back the next day, I moved the nest's covering slightly and peered underneath. All seemed well. Mother salamander was where we'd left her, snuggling with the eggs. I poured a little more lukewarm water on her and her brood, knowing she and the eggs depended on hydration for survival. The red-backed is a member of the group of salamanders believed to be the most recently evolved. They've given up the lungs of their salamander forebears, relying instead for respiration on oxygen absorbed through their wet skin.

I've seen a lot of thrilling sights in my life, but those little larval salamanders swimming around inside clear membranes, peering out, remains high on my list of awe.

09/06/2026

Many of you have sent kind words during the nail-biting days during which we raced our pet goat, Buck, to Cornell University's large animal hospital for emergency surgery, and during which he was drained, opened, emptied of urinary tract stones, sewn back up, and kept for nearly three weeks of further care and TLC.

On Friday, September 4, Buck the Goat had another long car ride. This time he came home in the back of our Toyota Prius V. We'd unbolted and removed the back seats to turn the car into a comfortable Goatmobile. Just before discharge and boarding, he'd been given a painkiller that doubled as a sedative.

Buck spent the five-hour ride generally calm and composed. My wife, Debbie, kept a close eye while our son, Ned, who eleven years ago selected Buck from a bevvy of four-legged kids available for adoption, did the driving.

At a time of great discord in our own country and abroad, Buck's recent adventure offers grounds for cheer and optimism. We can reach inside and find our best selves and do great things together. So many people came to our goat's rescue, and they rescued us, too! Among them were all the extraordinary staff at Cornell---the docs, the residents, the various technicians and helpers whose job titles are unknown to me, the office staff, the university itself and the donors that keep it afloat, the whole excellent team there. We feel giddy with gratitude. And let's not forget the value of all the kind words that came our way, nor our wonderful Ithaca friends Karen and Joe, who took Debbie and Ned in on short notice, housed them, fed them grandly, generally showered them with goodwill, and sent them on to Cornell fortified for the final homebound haul.

As for Buck, here he's just stepped out of the car and found his legs. He's gazing into his home pen where his dear friend and roommate, Kiko, waits and watches. Moments later, they were sniffing and nuzzling each other. A few minutes after that, they were head-butting, as goats are often inclined to do. For a little while longer, they will live in in separate halves of a subdivided pen so Buck can complete his recovery.

This photo, which reminds me of a Winslow Homer painting of a grizzled old guide rowing a wooden boat in the Adirondacks...
09/04/2026

This photo, which reminds me of a Winslow Homer painting of a grizzled old guide rowing a wooden boat in the Adirondacks, features my youthful and anything but grizzled naturalist wife, Debbie. We'd just finished an hour and a half or so of picking in our favorite top secret huckleberry patch. It was time to haul the bounty home.

Just before I took the photo, we almost back to our starting point when the clouds unloaded. Heavy raindrops drilled us and dimpled the surface of the pond. Debbie was paddling quickly. The image catches her scouting her landing.

The boat is a Hornbeck, made in the Adirondacks of Kevlar and likely built by the late Peter Hornbeck himself. It belonged to my late naturalist friend Evelyn Greene and is on loan from her son. The boat only weighs about fifteen pounds. It's the perfect boat for spontaneous naturalist jaunts that, in season, might include the picking of berries for pies.

My late mother was born in September. She's the one who schooled me in pie-baking, and it's in honor of her birthday every year that we try to conjure at least one huckleberry pie. They were her favorite. Debbie and I picked nonstop and returned home drenched, bug-bitten, and happy. We had enough fruit for just one pie.

Most people I know, including women and girls, see a big toad in the garden or driveway and tend to say, "He's huge." In...
08/30/2026

Most people I know, including women and girls, see a big toad in the garden or driveway and tend to say, "He's huge." In fact, in the case of the toad and various other animals, an extra-large "he" is often a she. Female toads are often much bigger and heavier than their mates.

In the case of bald eagles, where females sport lethal toenails and are also larger than males, courtship can be a dangerous proposition for the males.

The eagle in this photo is, I suspect, a female. She was very, very big, which is to say, long, wide, and massive. When I photographed her, she was perched in a dead tree, keeping an eye on a pair of common loons. The loon pair failed to produce offspring this year, so I was looking at a triangle made up of one eagle and two adult loons.

All was peaceful when Debbie and I arrived to pick huckleberries. The eagle perched stoically, making only slight occasional movements of its head. The loons were doing what loons do well, diving in pursuit of fish, crustaceans, and whatever else they could grab or skewer.

At some point while Debbie and I had our faces buried in the huckleberries, something changed the dynamic. The loons began laugh riotously, sounds that in fact tell of loons feeling threatened and ready to do battle with their rapier-like bills.

I stopped picking and turned around for a look. The eagle had moved to a new perch, the one where we see it resting here. Perhaps the raptor had made a strike at the loons. Or maybe it had just revealed its presence by moving. Whatever had happened, the loons were suddenly wise to the eagle's game, and they said so. Accepting the new status quo, the eagle went back to watching.

In the Adirondacks we often tell the story of Theodore Roosevelt's midnight ride to the presidency. Set in 1901, it's a ...
08/18/2026

In the Adirondacks we often tell the story of Theodore Roosevelt's midnight ride to the presidency. Set in 1901, it's a rousing tale in which the forty-two year old vice president races down Mt. Marcy, wolfs down dinner, kisses his wife and children, and races off into the night. He travels through the darkness over terrible rough roads with a driver and horse team, heading for the train station at North Creek. There he arrives around dawn. A telegram handed to him tells of President McKinley's death. Young Roosevelt has become the country's twenty-sixth president.

This past Saturday night, Buck the Goat, age eleven, also made a breakneck journey through the night. He had stopped eating and largely stopped drinking. Everything about him spoke misery. Buck's excellent personal physician hurried to our goat barn and conducted an exam that included ultrasound, but she acknowledged that Buck was suffering from a possibly life-threatening condition of uncertain nature, one she lacked the tools to diagnose and treat. There was only one thing to give Buck a shot at survival: drive him to Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine, where a crack team of vets and techs would do what could be done.

That day, I'd given a talk and led a walk at the Lake Placid Lodge, and in the evening I'd delivered a slide presentation at Adirondack Loj. I came home weary. My wife, Debbie, daughter, Tas, and I quickly conferred. We agreed there was only one course of action we could live with. Tas and I would leave with Buck at once. We'd drive five hours to Ithaca. Debbie would hold the fort, care for Buck's roommate, Kiko, and report for work at her new job the next morning. It all happened quickly.

After coaxing 230-pound Buck into the back seat, we launched. We drove dark winding roads to Tupper Lake and on to Cranberry Lake and Wanakena. Midnight came and went. Near Watertown, we hopped on I-81, and at Cortland we veered off. At 3:30 a.m., Buck, Tas, and I pulled up to a horse-sized sliding door at the back of Cornell's hospital for large animals. We did not have to knock. The door was open. Lights were on, and a team of kind faces leapt out and surrounded us. In minutes Buck was in an examination room, surrounded by new friends. Tas and I collapsed in a waiting room until the news came. Buck had stones in his urinary tract. His bladder was at risk of rupture, and his pain was surely intense. A surgical solution was suggested. Tas woke Debbie with a phone call, and we agreed I would sign the consent forms and hand over a charge card. Buck's chances suddenly looked bright.

At 10 a.m., a surgical team led by a skilled and lion-hearted vet from Brisbane, Australia began the effort to save our much-loved goat. At 1:30 p.m., Tas and I, who had grabbed a couple of hours sleep sitting up in the car, received joyful news. Surgery had confirmed the diagnosis, and Buck was drained, opened, de-stoned, and sewn back up.

His prognosis is excellent. Three cheers for modern medicine, including modern veterinary medicine! Three more cheers for the kind, caring, talented, hard-working, sleep-deprived people who came to Buck's rescue in the middle of the night! Buck will remain at Cornell for ten days, healing and getting his plumbing working again. Tas and I drove home, arriving around 9:30 last night. Now it all seems like a dream---a dream that began as a nightmare and morphed into something happy and full of gratitude.

The photo shows the patient shortly after surgery, still d***y with anesthesia. Tas is delivering TLC. A young vet-to-be doing her residency hovered just out of view, keeping our much-loved quadruped under close watch.

Root around long enough, and you find things, things you might have not have found otherwise. I was poking along a river...
08/08/2026

Root around long enough, and you find things, things you might have not have found otherwise. I was poking along a riverbank near our house a few days ago, admiring the lurid red blossoms of late summer blooming cardinal-flowers, when I spotted a somewhat rare white form of the plant.

Ruby-throated hummingbirds have been found to be the chief pollinators of cardinal-flowers. Hummers are attracted to bright reds, oranges, and yellows and to reds most of all. This fact has me wondering if white cardinal flowers find themselves short of cupids to move their pollen grains (containing male gametes) around. Could this keep white cardinal flower the generally rare plant in the wild that it is? Other prospective pollinators would surely have trouble navigating the long tubular blossoms to get at the nectar and pollen deep inside.

This, I confess, is just idle speculation, the mental drift of an overheated nature enthusiast on a swampy, rainy, mosquito-haunted August night.

Thanks to the kind friend who responded to my last post by thanking me for suffering for my art.Here's how much I suffer...
08/08/2026

Thanks to the kind friend who responded to my last post by thanking me for suffering for my art.

Here's how much I suffered to get this photo of a white-tailed deer buck, or stag, the night before last.

We'd enjoyed dinner with dear friends at a restaurant. Dinner was early because we had to get home and put our goats and ducks to bed before bears, bobcats, coyotes, and foxes laid them to rest for us.

Stepping out of the restaurant, we noticed this handsome paragon of whitetail male virility standing on the far side of a two-lane highway. He was nibbling on this and that---browsing, this kind of feeding is called, employing the same word we use to describe a human nosing around a retail store. Sometimes easy photo opportunities like this fall into our laps. Of course, they're only valuable if a camera is at hand.

Mine was. It lives, with long lens attached, more or less permanently on the front seat of my car, ready to shoot whatever wild thing---moose, bear, whitetail deer, etc.---steps out and poses. There's an old saying among photographers. The best camera is the one you have with you.

If you know wild birds, you know this is a cedar waxwing. If you don't know wild birds, you may never have heard of a ce...
07/29/2026

If you know wild birds, you know this is a cedar waxwing. If you don't know wild birds, you may never have heard of a cedar waxwing. But in much of North America, at one season or another (or in some places, all of them), this is a common bird to see.

If you see one, you often see many. Cedar waxwings spend much of their lives moving around in flocks. Together they seek fruits to eat---various kinds of wild cherry (this one is perched in a choke-cherry), along with crabapples, the fruits of wild dogwoods and viburnums, and even the white berries produced by poison ivy. They also eat flower petals and insects. The first half of their name comes from eating the berry-like cones of junipers including the juniper we call red cedar.

As a frugivore myself, there's one time of year when I have mixed feelings about cedar waxwings. I rejoice in their sleek and dark-eyed beauty and waxy red tips on their secondary wing feathers, but I groan as they appear seemingly out of nowhere and eat just about every wild strawberry in the neighborhood. A few weeks later, they strip the fruit from our blueberry bushes. But why not? Are the strawberries and blueberries really ours? Members of my family have been gorging on wild Adirondack fruits since about 1795. I suspect cedar waxwings have been here longer.

This photo comes with a story. I guess they all do.Debbie and I were heading home after a visit with our horses. These d...
07/24/2026

This photo comes with a story. I guess they all do.

Debbie and I were heading home after a visit with our horses. These days, Dakota and Cupcake board at Honey Dew Farm, a wonderful place run by very fine people, not far from St. Lawrence University where our daughter Tas will be a junior. We were less than ten minutes from home and dinner. Suddenly, though, a hawk flew across the road and landed in a tree at the road's edge. We were pretty sure it was a broad-wing.

The logical thing to do would have been to keep going. We'd overshot the bird's landing spot by a few hundred feet. But the bird looked gorgeous, and I had a camera and long lens in the car, and the camera has had scant exercise lately. So I made a U-turn, passed the bird, made a second U-turn, lowered the driver's window, and put the camera on my lap. We crept forward.

The bird was a broad-winged hawk, and it was still there, struggling to balance in a balsam fir. I shot a few quick pics. Then it flew back to the wire where the bird had been perched in the first place. A child of the film era and always hesitant to create large numbers of images I'll have to sort through later when I'd rather be doing something other than staring at a computer, I took one shot of the bird's departure. Here it is.

Freshwater sponges? You betcha. This one (photographed yesterday) flourishes in a cool, clear, highly oxygenated stream ...
07/21/2026

Freshwater sponges? You betcha. This one (photographed yesterday) flourishes in a cool, clear, highly oxygenated stream near where Debbie and I live. Its location will remain a secret because these colonies are all too prone to disturbance. Slosh around in a stream, and you kill them without meaning to. Even a light touch may damage them severely or wipe out an entire colony.

Sponges belong to the animal order Porifera. The name refers to the group's abundance of holes, or pores, through which these colonies of tiny organisms filter food out of their home waters. This particular colony, which Debbie spied first, occupies a patch of rock roughly the size of a half-dollar coin.

Some freshwater sponges, like this one, live where sunlight hardly ever strikes them. This sponge may well belong to the shade-favoring species Spongilla fragilis, but that's not much more than a guess. The resource that informs my casual spongology is Ann Haven Morgan's classic Field Book of Ponds and Streams, published in 1930. One must devote a large portion of one's life to the study of sponges to gain much mastery of them, and I confess I am too much of a generalist. Other freshwater sponge colonies, sometimes in the same stream, glow a brilliant green. These harbor chlorophyll-carrying cells called zoochlorellae inside their own cells. Amazing!

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