I had resisted a journey to the coast to photograph the snowy owls partly because everyone else was getting such great photos but mostly due to time commitments. I finally relented and spent parts of two days last week photographing from York, Maine to Newburyport, Massachusetts.
My goals for the trip were to get a good shot of a snowy and also photograph the Milky Way with a decent foreground. I found snowy owls in Rye, NH and Salisbury, MA, but I did not see a decent place to set up for an early morning photo of the Milky Way. So I journeyed to Cape Neddick in York, ME. I must have photographed the lighthouse there many years ago, but I sure don’t remember doing so — my photos were probably not very good. To my surprise, sitting in the field to the right of Cape Neddick (Nubble) Light was a snowy owl. It was too far away to photograph, but it eventually made a trip to the mainland where I was able to get a shot just before the sun set.
I accomplished my goals, but the real special event for me was when a mink walked right up to me as I was photographing common mergansers feeding in the Merrimack River. It came within 6 feet, looked me over, and then dunked into a cave in the bank. A short while later, after a few peeks out of the cave to see if I was still paying attention, it emerged from a hole in the snow a bit above the cave. The photo above is a completely uncropped photo of the mink just before it went into the cave.
Here are some of the photos I took during this too-short trip.
