You don’t need to travel around the world to encounter exotic creatures and stunning landscapes. A current Joslyn Art Museum exhibit, “Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild,” brings the beauty of the Great Plains of North America right to you.
From Feb.6-May 16, Creighton students can experience photographs of birds, bears, and bison for free (the Joslyn Art Museum does not charge Creighton students admission).
The photographs depict the various ecosystems of the Great Plains, which covers about one third of the country. But more than beauty alone is captured in the photography- there is also a great desire to show the importance of preserving one of earth’s greatest grasslands.
The photographer, Michael Forsberg, desires to display the beauty humans rarely see. Humans are often too busy clearing land for crops or creating dams for irrigation to notice nature’s beauty. The Plains are a network of delicately connected ecosystems which can be easily altered through human activity. The photographs successfully show the animals and landscapes au naturale.
The pictures extend from the northern states of Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas down to the Mexican-United States border. Nebraska, Kansas and Iowa provide the familiar sandhill cranes, coyotes and prairie dogs, while Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico display the burrowing owl and breathtaking desert views.
Along with the 60 photographs in the exhibit taken from Forsberg’s book with the same title, there is a detailed description next to each photograph. If you take the time to read each one, you might learn a little more about grizzly bears, sandhill cranes, pronghorns and bats.
For example, did you know that the grizzly bear inhabits only 2 percent of its original habitat from 100 years ago? Or that the Platte River Valley in Nebraska is where half a million sandhill cranes, or 80 percent of the population, congregate during their migration? Perhaps you already knew that the Mexican free-tailed bat in Oklahoma can eat up to 3,000 mosquitoes, or that the pronghorn can ran at a speed of 60 because they have a heart twice the size of a normal mammal.
If facts or animals are not your particular favorite, there are also beautiful images of the landscapes reminiscent of a time before urbanization.
A timeline on one of the walls shows the progressing destruction that occurred as Europeans began to migrate farther west. From 1850-1950, the timeline provides the sobering message of humanity’s use of the earth as one giant renewable resource.
For example, the U.S. Biological Survey wrote a company name with 1,600 poisoned prairie dogs in 1933. I understand that they can be a nuisance but I feel that measure is slightly extreme and quite pretentious.
Forsberg took great care in attempting to capture animals in their natural habitat with minimal disturbance to their daily lives. His use of the video-eye system allows him to access the camera remotely and capture birds, such as Sprague’s Pipit, nesting.
A grizzly bear, bobcat and puma all look slightly caught off-guard in their portraits, thanks to the sly video-eye system. However, most of Forsberg’s photographs were done in the traditional manner with a backpack, camera and long hours of hopefully searching, waiting and watching.
Perhaps I am slightly biased, due to my interest in ecological conservation and animals in general, but I found the photographs beautiful in their simplicity and sobering message. My favorite, you ask? It would have to be the photograph titled “Bison Bull,” which depicts a lone bison in Wind Cave National Park, South Dakota underneath a startling blue sky, sharply contrasted with the billowing yellow plains. It’s the classic Great Plains its classic beauty.