This week, the Lens-Artists Team welcomes Dawn Miller who chose the theme Fences to share some of her photos and to show us how those separators of property can be used to provide a cohesiveness to our photos. You can read her entire challenge post here.

My opening photo, probably my favorite black-and-white that includes a fence, truly demonstrates Dawn’s ‘leading lines’ images showing a fence’s capacity to direct the viewer’s eye through a photograph. The short fences are guard rails over a small creek that empties into the ocean on Kauai in Hawaii. From there, the walkway takes on the role of a leading line.

These short sand fences are in place to suppress beach erosion. This image captured just after sunrise along the beach demonstrates their typical configuration.

Someone had a great idea with a fence design to hide some of the service areas at the Red River Zoo in Fargo. Rather than create a typical wood-colored blockade fence, the builders used round posts pointed at the top ends and painted to look like a selection of colored pencils.

The Enchanted Highway in North Dakota features many sculptures along the drive from I-94 at Gladstone exit to the city of Regent. One of those sculptures, all created from scrap metal, features two deer jumping a fence. The short fence in the foreground borders the parking area and provides a scale to demonstrate the size of the sculpture.

Fans of Mark Twain’s work will find the boyhood home of Samuel Clemens, Twain’s real name, at Hannibal Missouri. Twain wrote of his time growing up in Hannibal as his alter-ego, Tom Sawyer. The story of how Tom got friends to whitewash the fence he was supposed to paint is a memorable point in the story. That fence is depicted next to the home that is now part of the Mark Twain Museum.

Fences don’t have to be permanent. These short fence sections can be used to allow pedestrians to use the parking spaces along the street for special events like parades. Whether these fences are temporary or a more permanent safety device that is seldom moved is a question I can’t answer. They were in place when we visited Nashville in 2016.

Each year, thousands of elk from several populations migrate in the spring from their winter ranges in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho to high-elevation summer ranges near the core of Yellowstone National Park. In the fall, they return along paths their ancestors traveled for centuries.

Man’s need to section properties with fencing to corral domestic animals has seriously affected those migrations. In recent years, environmental programs have encouraged the development of open routes to allow migration across private ranch lands. On a fall trip through Wyoming in 2020, I saw first-hand the result of these fences. We were stalled in a long line of traffic as dozens of elk blocked the highway when the lead elk in this group apparently couldn’t figure out how to get over this obstacle.

There were hundreds of elk in the area. I focused my telephoto lens toward some herds further along the path and could see them again stalled by more fences along their path.

As we waited, we noticed one elk step away from the fence several feet and take a running leap, clearing the fence. Others saw the solution and eventually, most cleared the obstacle.

As the road cleared of elk, there were a handful of younger elk that were not capable of jumping the fence. We saw spots of fur and blood along some of the posts and wires left there by those who could not clear the fence, or those who just barely cleared.

There is a happy ending of sorts to this story. The fencing we saw in the fall of 2020 was west of Cody Wyoming. In sharing these admittedly disturbing photos, I did some research on the problem. I found the following information in a National Geographic article here. “On a warm July morning, roughly two dozen volunteers gathered at a ranch outside Cody, Wyoming, carrying wire cutters, gloves, buckets, and bottles of water. The goal was to take down several miles of barbed wire that had not been used to fence livestock for many years—and were now a useless and even dangerous blemish on the landscape.”

Whether or not these specific fences were removed, I don’t know, but it is good to know that people are working on solving this problem. It’s a shame that it took well into the 21st century for anyone to take action.

“Good fences make good neighbors,” so penned Robert Frost in the poem, Mending Wall. That’s especially true if your neighbor is a 500-lb (226 kg) tiger. On a trip to North Carolina, we visited the Carolina Tiger Rescue. The organization’s mission is “Saving and protecting wild cats in captivity and in the wild.” Their rescues come from private owners, mom-and-pop zoos, traveling circuses, and other facilities as a result of being abandoned, relinquished, or confiscated by the authorities.

As you might imagine, the big cat fences are extremely tall or have fence “ceilings” to be sure there is no risk to visitors. They even have double fencing with a “no man’s land” between the inner and outer fence. As a result, this image was shot through an opening in the outer fence, too small to even insert my lens into the no man’s land.

On the property, they also have human fences that act as protective cages stationed in strategic places in case of an animal escape. Visitors can run to a nearby cage, go inside and close the door behind them.

All of the images in this post can be viewed with metadata available on my Flickr site here. Thanks to Dawn Miller for hosting this week’s challenge. Next week, guest host Dan Fenner from Departing in 5 Mins leads the challenge. If you’d like to join in the challenge and are wondering how to get started, click here.

John Steiner