A documentary on insect life during a Minnesota winter. Winter Bugs! April 24, 2009, Winter Bugs! Exhibit opens at White Wolf Creek Gallery in Stockholm, WI.
Lisa's Winter Bugs! exhibit and book have entertained thousands of visitors while on display at her galleries, and the National Eagle Center in Wabasha, MN, as well as being featured in regional news, papers, and magazines.
Lisa's revised and expanded edition of Winter Bugs: The Exhibit will be released in late May 2009.
About Lisa's Winter Bugs! Exhibit:
Lisa’s private collection of over 200+ photo images of insects and spiders, both land and aquatic, documented in their native Minnesota winter habitat.
All of these insects and spiders were photographed while Loucks-Christenson was working on her documentary Walk The Burn, in the Whitewater Management Area during the winter of 2005, to March 20, 2006.
Many of the insects and spiders she discovered both on land and in the marshes were smaller than a grain of sand. Loucks-Christenson used her collection of digital cameras and microphotography recording equipment to capture moments in time with these miniscule creatures going about their daily lives; while enduring freezing to sub-zero temperatures – some days were as cold as 37 below zero, with wind chill.
It’s important to note that no homes were uprooted, and no rocks or logs were overturned to find subjects by Loucks-Christenson, with the exception of times when she went through the thin ice in search of her aquatic subjects.
In some images, you may notice insects sitting atop grasses that were torn by coyotes that traveled her project paths in the twilight hours; other images show the lives of insects and spiders walking across fresh deer scrapes.
All life was photographed as found on the ground surface, undersides of leaves, on tree trunks and branches, walking across the snow, under the surface of thin ice, or in the openings in the ice, where other wildlife or Loucks-Christenson went through the ice while crossing the marshes.
Excerpt
The Culvert Experience:
This was probably the most fascinating, dark place I ventured. It may have been the layers of ice that drew me in, almost like clear stalagmites in the caves I've explored, but also clear, and cloudy, blue, gray and black, and transparent. It was easy to follow the water's flow into the darkness of the culvert. Once I entered there I found thousands of creatures under the ice, some frozen within the layers, some under the ice searching for oxygen in the diminishing water where death was inevitable.
As I crawled along the ice, three feet deep, I could hear my husbands' words from the day before when he had accompanied me on my winter bugs trek, and as I looked back to the end of the tunnel into the light I could almost see him there again, pointing at me and saying, "Don't go in there alone, I know you're going to do it anyway. . . but don't."
I felt an eeire calm come over me as the ice crackled beneath my steps. I reached the far end of the culvert where over the past few days I'd found the amphipods, earthworms, water boatmen, diving beetles, backswimmers, daphnia and more....
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