As a geologist-turned-professional photographer, Shaun Terhune has traveled extensively, including stints in the Arctic and the western U.S. But the close-knit communities and natural beauty of northern New England called him home, and he’s settled near Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, not far from the Vermont homestead where he grew up. In 2019 he opened a fine art photography gallery in Littleton, New Hampshire. His images – including the one gracing the cover of Northern Woodlands’ Spring 2021 issue – portray the region’s landscape and wildlife and showcase Shaun’s wanderings along backroads, through the woods, and into the mountains.
A lot of being a wildlife photographer is just understanding how the woods work and understanding the animals that live there. I’ve been reading Northern Woodlands since I was a little boy. This has been one of my favorite publications since I was like 9, because I love the woods, I love nature, I love animals. The more time you spend in the woods, the more you read about the natural world, and the more you hang out with people who have a real knowledge about wildlife biology and other natural sciences – the more you start to understand what drives these animals and how they move in different seasons.
One of my favorite habits lately is hiking in hardwood forests, especially hardwood ridges. Exploring the woods without being on established trails is often second nature for people who hunt. Walking slowly and taking your time hiking across a hardwood ridge is such a spectacular way to see wildlife. These kinds of woods – a mix of hardwood species without a lot of pine or other softwoods – are easier to walk through, and you never know what you’ll encounter out there away from trails and places people normally go. Many animals in this area rely on the nuts and bark of various hardwood trees to survive, so if you’re walking along stealthily and stopping to observe what’s around, you have a very good chance of seeing porcupines, turkeys, bear, deer, and even owls. The other day I bumped into a nice moose doing this.
I think I had a storybook childhood in a lot of ways, just growing up in the woods, building forts, learning how to fish, being relatively unsupervised in a bucolic part of Vermont where you can get away with that and not get into too much trouble. There are eight kids in my family, and we were raised on a homestead, a 50-acre piece of land in West Glover, Vermont, with a log cabin that we all grew up in. We were homeschooled. We had a big garden. We raised animals for food. My parents were excited about having a big family and raising us in the natural world and hoping, perhaps, that we would learn from it. We were outside all the time. In fact, for a lot of my childhood, I never even wore shoes – I was one of those barefooted kids.
The farm I grew up on was our playground, and all of the adjoining forests and fields and meadows and mountains. Fort building was a big part of what we were doing in the woods every day. If you go out there now, 25 to 30-ish years later, you’ll see ancient ruins of forts, decades old, that are sort of in shambles and rotting back into the earth. At a pretty young age I discovered that streams were like roads out there. Following them from one to another was the clearest way to navigate and not get lost. I spent a lot of time following a few of those splendid little brooks way out in the woods, staying cool and poking around looking for rocks.
I think a lot of little kids are intrigued by rocks. Most people seem to grow out of that at some point, and I just never did. Rocks are a very tactile thing that you can get your hands on and understand the environment around you. As I got into my teen years, I became more and more fascinated with geology and wanted to pursue that in college. To this day, I still love rocks. I love to root around for garnets and other gemstones when I can, and I pan for gold in a lot of the streams here. There’s not a lot of gold in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, but there’s enough to get me out there! My previous career as a geologist is well behind me now, but I’ll always have a certain love for dirt, rocks and minerals, bones and fossils.
Geology was a very practical way for me to try to make a career in the outdoors. But most geology jobs these days are not climbing down inside volcanoes and smashing rocks with a hammer. A lot of it is computer-based now. The further I got into my career as a geologist, the more time I ended up spending in front of a computer and the less time I was spending outside.
I did get to travel a lot for that work, and I began to fall in love with the wild landscapes of this country. I got to work in the Arctic on a number of occasions and spent a lot of time in the Southwest. I always had a camera with me when I traveled. Eventually I developed what felt to me like something of a gift with my camera. The more disenchanted I became with working in an office, the more I started to play with the idea of finding a way to make a living with my camera.
Moving back to New England and making a go of this was an experiment and a gamble. In the first several years of this adventure with my camera, I was doing mostly commercial work, which meant photographing real estate, weddings, families, doing architectural photography, anything I could do to make money as a photographer. But the underlying passion has always been nature photography. At this point, I don’t really do any commercial work. I can hardly believe it, because that’s kind of the dream – to do what you love. As a nature photographer to literally make a living selling my photographs is surreal.
Like many New Englanders, I love to do just about anything outside, including skiing, snowshoeing, canoeing. I hunt, I fish, I climb, I really love hiking. Some people have a hard time understanding how I can be a wildlife photographer and really love these animals and also be a hunter, but that gets into the whole conversation about conservation and how conservation works. I want to a be a part of that. But it was also just a part of the way I grew up and the culture, and the resourcefulness of the great folks who live in Vermont and the tradition of living off the land.
I have really enjoyed the challenge of learning how to be a tracker over the years. I learned to track from an older man in northern Vermont who is a former Alaskan guide. Learning how to track – being able to pick up a deer track, a moose track, a bear track – has aided me immensely in locating these animals when I’m out with my camera, too, which is most of the time. I hunt for a very small portion of the year. The rest of the time, I hunt with a camera.
I have an obsession with bears. Bears are just fascinating and unbelievably intelligent. When you spend a lot of time around bears, that becomes evident in a way that you don’t notice with other animals. You can almost see it in their face, in their eyes. When you study their behavior, it becomes clear just how well equipped they are to learn and understand things that other animals don’t seem to understand. When you’re interacting with a bear, it’s extremely clear that it’s a wild animal, but at the same time, it’s very clear that the animal is perhaps fully as intelligent as you are, and that’s a bizarre, incredible thing to experience. I just have a connection with these animals. I try not to over spiritualize the natural world, but there’s something that I can’t quite put my finger on with bears that is really special.
There’s no place like home. In terms of a place to settle down, plug into a community, and raise a family, there’s nothing like the small towns of northern New England. And that secret is getting out. A lot of my customers are people from Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and the more they come here, the more they want to be here. As an adult you realize how special this place is. I would say New Hampshire in particular has one of the most rugged mountainous landscapes in the country, and they’re compellingly beautiful mountains. The verdant, mountainous forests of northern New England are one of the big factors that led my wife and I back here. I just love this landscape.
I love the tradition of land stewardship in northern New England. A few examples I remember from childhood were my father’s careful selection of certain trees to cut for firewood, or using manure from our own livestock to re-fertilize the soil. I do feel uneasy about increasing development. More people are looking to get out of the city these days, and I can’t blame them for wanting to live in this little slice of north woods paradise up here. Some places are going to become less wild, and I fret about that a little bit.
I think, as I continue to photograph this region, my greatest hope is that people will be captured by its beauty and be more motivated than ever to protect and preserve it. We have some of the most special mountain ranges in the country, and some of the most unique species of animals. Photographing things like quaint church steeples or charming barns and fences is fun, too, but I really want to focus on capturing the loveliness of the forests and mountains, the animals, the wilderness and wild beauty we still have left, because those are the things that will be lost if we don’t work to protect them.
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