This is my favorite place so far; you can come here, too. Be careful, though; there are no people here most of the time. No people on the road to the launch site, no people at the launch, no people on the water, no neighbors, no help, don't get hurt here and don't go alone.

The place I stay is only about 15 minutes away in Huntington, Indiana, so I can paddle later than when I go to other places.

My first picture to share is an HDR (high dynamic range) image. One makes such a thing from two shots, one overexposed for shadow detail and the other underexposed for highlight detail. A 30-dollar plug-in from http://www.fredmiranda.com takes the best parts of both and makes a new image. Adobe CS might even have this built-in somewhere. Also, you can cheat it (as I do) by creating both over and under images from a single shot during the RAW conversion procedure. Convert one to too dark, convert one to too light (then save them as unique file names).

(You can even build these by hand using your two files.
Use layers: one pic in front and the other in back. Just erase the parts of the front pic (over or under exposed) that you don't want.)

The area pictured below is my main hangout at Salamonie River. The area takes up about 10-15 acres. It's an amorphous area below the reservoir with a number of small islands and coves, a mix of solid land and marsh grasses, and plenty of natural debris. No people. Like, really zero people. It's super dangerous in that respect but the water is less than a foot deep for most of the area. I don't know if the dreaded Massasauga rattle snake lives in the area, but it should. I watch my step, believe me.

I got lost for a bit the first time I came to where this picture was taken but now it looks perfectly familiar to me now.
Egret Cove is directly to the right. Monarch Landing is ahead to the left. Woodpecker Alley is to the rear. The boat ramp is around here somewhere.

The cormorants and egrets are back this month but not in great numbers; I think I'm about two weeks early for the massive bird invasion that I remember last year. It's so wild here that even the herons are skittish and they spend the most time here of all; they should be familiar with boaters but I guess not. For the most part, one must try to sneak up on the birds and peer through foliage to get a shot. I stood up and nabbed this egret from just 100 feet away while it hunted near an island way over on the east end of the StumpLand river basin.

Salamonie is a human-made lake. They dammed the river in the seventies and came up with a lake. I suppose they bought up all the properties in the 12,000 acres they wanted for state lands but I think it was the resulting lake that decided where it wanted its boundaries. Any roads, old bridge abutments and forests are all covered, or partially covered, with lake water.

There's a place just west of my hangout that I call StumpLand. The water is murky with mud and algae here so I can't even see for one inch below the surface and there are plenty of logs and stumps. I rolled up over 3 or 4 of them yesterday morning alone. Going to deeper water doesn't help at all, neither does going near the shore. The logs are everywhere. It's all an old dead forest with a lake on top of it. It's pretty, though.

The cormorants hang out in Stumpland. Last year they were in the trees but this year so far they sit around on logs and sandbars. Their grunts, although not as absurd as the sounds an angry heron makes, are weird. And loud. I had to go deep into the log field to get close enough for a cormorant shot and even then I was very far away from them. Nobody goes out here. It's too shallow, too many stumps for those with fishing boats. All birds know full well they'll be left alone here.

Any human-type person nearby is an oddity worthy of a stare.

I got a late start yesterday morning and didn't launch until 9am. Not cool. I couldn't sleep and when I was up at 5am I should have just stayed up.

Anyway, there were a couple of young sharp-shinned hawks out the night before. One let me approach to ridiculously close but the lighting was meager and dull. The next morning at 9am I caught up with one of them. He or she seemed very interested in what was in the woods and not too much interested in me.

I hung out and watched it for a while. There are crickets and birds here. The main road, state Route 124, is over a mile away through deep woods and there are simply no sounds here except for the natural ones. Fish suck air here and plenty of them jump, full body, out of the water. Not dangerous, though, they just do it just for audio ambience and entertainment.

I watched the hawk for a while when it jumped to a nearby branch and turned around for a classic portrait.

That's from about 20 feet away. It flew away after a while with screeches slicing through the relative silence and I decided it was time for me as well to leave the area. I stayed at the boat ramp for about 40 minutes very much unwilling to leave. Redheaded woodpeckers are still there but their favorite branch, and the whole tree for that matter, has toppled due to a recent storm. No saw marks. All natural breaks.

I miss the purple martins that were here in the spring and my personal pileated woodpecker was nowhere to be found but the hawks were new and the cormorants and egrets are returning. There's always something different here as long as a couple of months pass between visits, but I'll not be letting a couple months pass this time. I'd like to study the red tailed hawks before they migrate. I'd like to see more egrets grazing in the water. I want to find the woodpecker again.

There are deer, here, too. They are wild. Really wild. Not park deer. These are deer worried about being shot. When they run, they run with fervor. These two kids were in the crop fields to the right of the "driveway" to the launch.

On the way back to the ramp I saw a pair of Sandpipers running around on some logs in the water.

Please EMAIL with questions, comments and/or corrections; visit us at Kohne Camera & Photo in Perrysburg, Ohio.

Return to 2007 trip reports.