Ed Kanze, Naturalist and Adirondack Guide

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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!

"Go with the flow" is good advice as far as it goes. Would you want to fall into this raging torrent and carom downstrea...
10/19/2026

"Go with the flow" is good advice as far as it goes. Would you want to fall into this raging torrent and carom downstream? I wouldn't. The conscious part of the ride would be brief, the chances of crawling out alive nil.

Better to stand back in a safe spot, well away from the brink, compose a few photos, and let the occasional falling leaf run the rapids.

We've had a good deal of rain lately. Waterfalls are looking their best. At this one, I was grateful for a leaning paper birch whose yellow leaves added a touch of warming color to this otherwise chilly image.

Al Jolson first recorded "I'm Sitting On Top Of The World" in October 1925, an astounding 101 years ago. It's a stirring...
10/15/2026

Al Jolson first recorded "I'm Sitting On Top Of The World" in October 1925, an astounding 101 years ago. It's a stirring song and an exuberant rendition, and it often plays in my head when I sit down on top of an Adirondack Mountain to eat a snack and count my lucky stars.

The song always brings to mind another rendition, one Debbie and I heard al fresco in a campground at Wilpena Pound, in South Australia in 1996. We were just starting up a trail, and there, sitting on a rock behind a screen of trees, sat a young man with an American accent belting out this song at high volume. Perhaps he was channeling Jolson. Or maybe the sun was already over the yardarm, and he'd already had a few stiff morning drinks. Or maybe he knew the lyrics and the melody, was feeling happy, and the urge to sing it could not be resisted.

The mountain we're seeing here is Poke-O-Moonshine, in the Champlain Valley side of the Adirondack Park. We're looking toward Lake Champlain. Somewhere out there in the hazy green of the far shore is my dear old alma mater, Middlebury College. A lot of water has flowed northward up the lake and under the Crown Point Bridge since my late parents dropped me off there one early fall day as a shy, green seventeen-year-old freshman. My life was about to take off in exciting new directions, but I had little idea where I was headed.

Now here I am, looking back, feeling grateful for all the great places I've been and all the fine people I've met along the way.

Debbie and I climbed Poke-O-Moonshine, a small but still substantial mountain in the Champlain Valley a couple of days a...
10/15/2026

Debbie and I climbed Poke-O-Moonshine, a small but still substantial mountain in the Champlain Valley a couple of days ago. The weather was cool, cloudy, and breezy, with occasional bursts of sunshine.

Colorful leaves at our place are mostly down now, so it was a treat to go back in time a week and see sugar maples still in brilliant orange prime. Red maples, white ashes, striped maples and a few other trees jazzed up the landscape, too, while American beeches remained mostly green.

This beaver pond offered one of my favorite views before the summit. I could have ogled it for an hour or two. However, we had miles to go before we slept, so after a few sips of water and a few photos, we moved on.

Friends influence us, good ones for the better.My pal Josh Clement, with whom I made videos for several years in the mid...
10/09/2026

Friends influence us, good ones for the better.

My pal Josh Clement, with whom I made videos for several years in the mid-two-thousand-teens (see the full set on our Curiously Adirondack channel on YouTube), handled the motion picture shooting and editing, while I did the writing and shot most of the stills. In my location work with Josh, I could see how delighted he was when rays of sunlight shot into his lens and did weird things. This phenomenon is called flare. Until this time I'd tended to see flare as the enemy of a good image. Josh saw it as an opportunity to go a little wild, and maybe viewers would say, "Wow!"

When Debbie and I spent an hour on top of a mountain with our friend Jamie a few days ago, we were sometimes shooting toward the sun. Flare flared up in our lenses. The old me would have seen the ricocheting light in my lens as a problem. The new me, or at least new since I had the pleasure of working with Josh, saw it as an opportunity. So I invited the flare in for a visit, aiming to see what weird things it might do. This is one result.

Big things often start from small beginnings. So it goes with snapping turtles.When a friend spied it, this little hatch...
10/01/2026

Big things often start from small beginnings. So it goes with snapping turtles.

When a friend spied it, this little hatchling, which one day might way 50 pounds (23 kg), was slowly making its way across a lawn, heading for a lake. I'd guess the turtle was only minutes out of the nest because we'd intercepted it not far from the water, and not far from water is where snapping turtle eggs are usually laid.

Look how ferocious the fearsome snapper is! Terrifying, isn't it? Not really. They are peace-loving creatures and good citizens of their communities, where they play important roles as scavengers. I've been swimming with snappers all my life (chlorinated pools are not for me, thanks), and I still have all my fingers and toes.

The most interesting thing about this photo is the little white pointy thing below the turtle's nostrils. It's an egg tooth, also called a caruncle. The little turtle used the tooth to break its way out of its egg. Soon it will be shed.

Note to myself: leave at least fifteen minutes early for work. I was bustling off yesterday morning, running significant...
10/01/2026

Note to myself: leave at least fifteen minutes early for work. I was bustling off yesterday morning, running significantly early (unusual for me), when this scene caught my eye.

Fall color was ramping up in the Saranac River valley. Moose Mountain and the ridge connecting it to McKenzie were in the shadow of the rising sun. At the base of the high country, a band of clouds, a vestige of the preceding night's fog, was just beginning to rise. On the front passenger seat lay a camera and lens, ready to go. The gear is always there, because you never know.

I pulled over and hopped out. The grand view was blocked by a screen of aspens, maples, and other roadside trees. I hoofed it quickly up the road, knowing that lighting effects like this can be over in a flash. Happily, I reached a gap, and there was the scene I aimed to catch. I had just enough time to take a half dozen bad photos first before my brain, never fast out of the starting gate in the morning, realized that camera settings needed some tweaking. I tweaked, I shot, I bolted back to the car, and I arrived at my destination five minutes early.

Lately I find myself feeling small. But not to worry. It's because I've been spending time poking around the bottoms of ...
09/21/2026

Lately I find myself feeling small. But not to worry. It's because I've been spending time poking around the bottoms of very big trees.

How big is very big? That's a good question. I'm not sure. The white pine in the photo stands 150 high or so, I believe. It's in a grove, sometimes called the Elder Grove, in the Adirondacks on land owned by our fine local liberal arts and sciences, forestry, and culinary arts college, Paul Smith's.

I also had the pleasure one recent day of wandering through an area of old growth trees in the New York State Forest Preserve. There the giants weren't quite as tall as this pine, but they were massive all the same. Some were sugar maples, others eastern hemlocks, others yellow birches. We found some big hop hornbeams, too, but big is relative. Hop hornbeams are related to birches and produce fruit clusters that resemble (only visually) the fruits of hop vines. Big ones might be as thick around as a liter bottle of soda. They grow slowly and produce heavy wood dense with growth rings.

How old were the biggest, oldest trees I saw? I don't have good answers. Speculating, the towering pines might be 150 or 200, the grand sugar maples 400 or so, the old yellow birches nearly that or maybe just as old, and the biggest hemlocks 500 or more. Those are big numbers relative to our own time scale, but I've read that there are northern white cedars in our part of the country nearly 2,000 years old, and out West bristlecone pines live that were growing when the pyramids of Egypt were built.

I own a tool called an increment borer that can drill a hole in a tree and extract a cylinder yielding all the growth rings. Problem is, I never have the heart to use it. Who wants to inflict a wound on a being that has endured centuries of good times and bad, leaving an opening that could leave it vulnerable to a pathogen? Not me. The tool gathers dust on a shelf.

Seeing these trees and contemplating their great age made me think deeply about time, which begins and ends for us all.

A creature from a black lagoon? Yes, kind of. This is a freshwater sponge colony growing in an Adirondack lake not far f...
09/21/2026

A creature from a black lagoon? Yes, kind of. This is a freshwater sponge colony growing in an Adirondack lake not far from our kitchen door. It's submerged a few inches deep and attached to a branch of a tree that fell into the water. The location is not out in open water but tucked in a lagoon behind a mossy peninsula. The water in the lagoon is black, or at least it looks that way.

I'm only begin to learn about sponges. They are colonial animals, very tiny as individuals but sometimes large collectively. I didn't carry a measuring device when I photographed this astonishing bunch with an iPhone sealed in an underwater housing, but I'd guess from the outer tips on the left side to outers on the right it measured about a foot (30 cm or so) across.

Freshwater sponges are filter feeders, extracting nutrition from the soupy stuff that makes lake or stream water less than perfectly clear. The colony grows and flourishes during the warm months, hosts the symbiotic algae that color it green, and produces seed-like pods called gemmules. After winter ice demolishes what we see here, the gemmules start colonies anew again in spring. Amazing!

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.

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Bloomingdale, NY
12913

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Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm
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