Humboldt Park provides a refuge to people and nature and brings joy to so many residents and visitors. Taking care of our park and promoting its beauty has become the work of many Humboldt Park Heroes.
In an ongoing series of blog posts, we will be honoring and highlighting some of the people that give their time to maintain and promote the park and help protect the urban oasis that we all enjoy.
Our first Humboldt Park Hero is Konrad Kuchenbach, a long-time Bay View resident and photographer. On any given day, you can find Konrad in the park documenting the amazing variety of wildlife through his photography. We asked Konrad to share his story with us, and we want to thank him for his contribution to the park and honor him as our first Humboldt Park Hero.
Humboldt Park, Me and my Camera by Konrad Kuchenbach
I came to Milwaukee in 1963 to take a job as a librarian with the Milwaukee Public Library. In 1977, my partner and I bought a house in Bay View. I’ve always been intrigued with photography, but I’ve never been able to master the mechanics of it. I like cameras that do that work for me. My earliest pix of the park are from November of 1979. They are slides which I have loaded on to my Mac Book Pro. I’m not a professional, but have a fairly good eye for composition and have been lucky to catch some interesting shots over the years. The secret is to take lots of shots and thru the “law of averages”something will turn out interesting. Digital photography has made the hobby a lot less expensive.
I bought my first digital camera in 2005, I think, but didn’t start taking pictures with it in the park until 2008. For many years my subject were the trees and views. The cameras I had were not that good at taking shots of birds, etc. I loved the two Willow Trees that stood on the small island and documented their demise. I also loved the small Coper Beech Tree that stood near the benches on the west side of the Lily Pond and documented its demise.
August 2015, I bought a Sony Sony DSC-HX400V, which has a wonderful zoom lens and the pictures quality is good enough for me, but not professional grade. It allowed me to look into the lives of the bird population of Humboldt Park and in my backyard where I have seven feeders. That was the first year I photographed the Black-Capped Night Herons and the Blue Heron. Over the years i’ve expanded to include Cooper’s Hawks, Red-Tailed Hawks, Mergansers, Sea Gulls, Raccoons, Squirrels, Opossums, Deer, Red-Winged Blackbirds, House Finches, Goldfinches, Pied-billed Grebes, American Coots and many others. I rarely photograph people and only rarely post them. With close to sixty thousand photos on my computer it is impossible to say which are favorites.
In the early years, my partner and I would walk to the lake picking up trash on East Oklahoma. After retirement, the walks became shorter and we stopped picking up trash and just did shorter walks thru the park and I took a camera along. Alzheimer’s had its way with my partner and the walks with the camera became solitary especially when John went into Memory Care in 2018. He passed in August 2020 and the Park has been my refuge since then.
I live about a half a block from the park and my main reason for my daily walks is to keep my Apple Watch happy. I call it my “Nanny Watch”. It encourages me to keep moving and at age 83 I need all the encouragement I can get.
Since 2015, the Journal/Sentinel has published twenty-two of my photos on the Weather Page. Twelve of them were taken in Humboldt Park. I take between a hundred to three hundred pictures a day and spent an hour or so loading them onto the computer and discarding a large percentage of them. Some I post on my Facebook Page, daily, which is open to my friends and some are posted on public pages, but not often.
I mourn the loss of the Ash Trees and the others thru the years. They are what attracted me to the park and since then, photography has helped me to look deeper to see what else is there. Last June, it was great fun to come across a huge Snapping Turtle laying its eggs. The pandemic has been kind to the wild life in the park. The Pied-billed Grebes raised a family and they are back this year. I wish that the park people would not destroy the Geese eggs. It was fun to see the three goslings that survived last summer. As humans we are only in the park for a few hours, but the park, especially the lagoon and islands, is home to a nice variety of wild life. We have got to learn to co-exist peacefully. Please, no boats on the lagoon. [I met Steve, today, who was in his kayak cleaning up the lagoon.] I hope the Night Herons, the Blue Heron and the Green Heron come back. The Osprey was a new visitor last year and a few years ago several Egrets stopped by on their way North. I have not seen the Eagles that others have seen.
Normally, my life would be taken up with operas, plays and concerts, but the pandemic brought that to a halt. I hope to get back to performances soon, but until then the park keeps me entertained along with reading and what is available on Zoom, YouTube, etc. I’ve met some other bird watchers in the park, some take pictures. I’m only on first name basis with some and others just keep their distance. The Oak Leaf Tail south of South Shore Park is another place I like exploring and good for shooting the moon rises. I recently purchased a Sony RX-10-IV, which takes sharper pictures, but has only half the zoom capability that the Sony DSC-HX400V has. I use my iPhone for many of the landscape shots. It does an amazing job.
