Bee & Thistle chef Kristofer Rowe focuses on bird photography when he's not in the kitchen

OLD SAYBROOK - Kristofer Rowe spends most mornings hanging out by the water, dressed in camouflage, holding a camera. Most evenings he spends at the Bee & Thistle Inn and Spa in Old Lyme, dressed in his white chef's coat, wielding his favorite knives -- the uniform and tools of his double life.

With more than 25 years in the restaurant business, Rowe is a prominent chef who creates "contemporary, distinctive New England cuisine" at the inn's popular Chestnut Grille and Lounge. He is also an emerging wildlife photographer who captures startling images of birds found along the Connecticut shore.

"I try to capture the emotion of the bird," he said when asked why so many of his birds seem to be looking directly into the eyes of the viewer. His photos of owls, egrets, eagles, hawks and his favorite, ospreys, among others, seem to reflect the souls of the creatures, as well as their habits and wild beauty.

It wasn't always this way. One morning in 2010, Rowe woke up agitated that he needed to go to work. His girlfriend convinced him that he should probably stay in bed since he was in the hospital just coming out of a weeklong coma.

Rowe was hospitalized with pancreatitis caused by a muddle of issues, including alcohol abuse. Although the root cause of his illness remains a mystery, the result of the scare was life-changing.

"I put down the bottle and picked up a camera," Rowe said over a cup of iced coffee, distracted for a moment by three glossy ibis he identified flying high in the sky through the window.

"How many people would know what kind of birds those are from this far away?" he asked as an aside. "It (photography) had never really been anything I was that interested in before," he continued, back on subject.

"Since I quit drinking, I have a lot more free time," Rowe shared, "I started experimenting with my camera. I'd put a feather in a vase and practice with different settings and different lights." For the first year, "I shot mostly black and white, artsy stuff, some birds," he said, "then one day after Hurricane Irene (2011), the wind was still blowing and there were two statues with birds on their shoulders and the ocean still wild in the background." The experience sparked his current passion for birds, specifically ospreys and other raptors.

"I don't do AA meetings," Rowe said. "I go out and shoot for a couple of hours, come back and process the photos; then I go to work." He posts new photos online almost daily and invites others to share them. He lives in Old Saybrook and takes most of his photos there as well.

"I'm completely self-taught," Rowe says, finding it a little ironic that people will ask him for photography and birding advice.

"I've had to learn photography, but also become a biologist, weatherman and an ornithologist."

To find the birds, "I have to know at what tide they like to feed, when they eat, when the sun is in the right place, how they take off," he continued. Although he can use his newly-acquired knowledge to find his favorite birds, "I can't control the subject or the lighting, and it's really hard to get just the right angle -- birds are twitchy."

What he can control is himself. "I'm a very patient person. That's unusual for a chef. I don't yell and scream," he said with a smile. While out one day, he saw a hawk swoop down and grab a rabbit, "I laid down on the frozen beach for about half an hour watching it." Often at low tide, he'll lie prone on the slimy rocks and take photos of shorebirds on their level.

"There's a lot of waiting in birding. It's kind of like a duck hunt video game; you never know what's going to pop up," he said one recent morning from his perch on the muddy green rocks below the Old Saybrook Causeway, his feet nearly in the water. His goal was to get the perfect shot of a diving osprey.

Watchfully waiting, blending into his surroundings, enables him to see things most people miss. The most unusual creature he has seen is a mink that lives in the causeway rocks, unseen by the hundreds of drivers, walkers, runners and anglers who use the causeway daily.

"I've been sober since 2010," Rowe says right up front, in person and online, in the hope that it will help someone else put down the bottle. "I take it one bird at a time," he wrote in one of his posts to his Kristofer Rowe Photography Facebook page, which he started in August of 2012 and to date has more than 3,100 "likes." Many people reach out to him through Facebook and urge him on, thank him for his inspiration and share their own bird encounters.

Many more people, awed by his talent behind the lens, thank him for sharing his photos so freely. Although not big business yet, he sells prints and notecards online through Facebook and his flickr.com/photos/coastalconn.

One photograph of an osprey with a bloody fish clutched in its talons won him a spot on the National Audubon's Top 100 Photo contest winners list. He also won Photo of the Year on thephotoforum.com.

He shoots with humble equipment, a 6-year-old Nikon D300, with a Tamron 200-500 SP F5-6.3 lens. "It's more about the eye," he says, although acknowledging equipment costing 20 times his $900 investment would be nice.

It's similar to the difference between chefs. The Food Network's "Chopped" show is a good example, and a show Rowe applied to to be a contestant. "Chopped" competitors are given identical ingredient baskets to prepare meals in identical kitchens, but use their own creativity and skill to achieve widely varying results. Rowe made it as far as the tryouts in New York, but they said he was "overqualified" and not "colorful" enough. He auditioned prior to 2010 and his venture into sobriety and photography.

Rowe started in the restaurant business in 1988 as a line cook in upstate New York while still in high school. He worked for seven years in the Berkshires, at a few popular shoreline restaurants here, and has been the celebrated chef at the Bee & Thistle for six years. He is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.

Linnea and David Rufo, owners of the Bee & Thistle, support Rowe's photography. A gallery for his photos is part of the inn's renovation plan. For his recent 40th birthday, they surprised him with a trip to A Place Called Hope, where he was able to hold an injured red-tailed-hawk and take remarkable photos of her and other injured resident birds in their care.

"It started out as a summer job, and I fell in love with kitchens," Rowe, the chef, recalls. Photography started out as a way to pass the time, and now "I just love my birds." From his photographs it seems the feeling is mutual.

To see more of Rowe's images visit flickr.com/photos/coastalconn, or his facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/KristoferRowePhotography.

Published July 26, 2013, New Haven Register

ttp://www.nhregister.com/connecticut/article/Bee-Thistle-chef-Kristofer-Rowe-focuses-on-bird-11389309.php

Notes from a cancer mom

OLD SAYBROOK - First-time author Leslie W. Jermainne often kicked-around the idea of writing a book. Maybe a light romance novel, she thought, never imagining that her first book would be born from the life-changing spiral of her son Brian’s cancer diagnosis at age 15.

 “Notes from a Cancer Mom” takes the reader along on Jermainne’s journey from a dark place of shock, and fear, to a place of hope and gratitude.

The Old Saybrook resident collected emails, facebook posts and letters she wrote and received during the 15-month struggle to save her son’s life, added some commentary, and self-published her work. She hopes that her experience will help parents who hear the dreaded words, “your child has cancer,” navigate the foreign waters of pediatric cancer.

“I always thought being an author would be so great, but this book began by getting blindsided with Brian’s diagnosis on April 18 and being admitted to the hospital on April 19. We just basically disappeared from our lives, so I started writing these emails to let people know what was going on,” Jermainne explained.

“Before pulling the book together, I asked Brian for his permission. He’s never read any of the emails, never saw the Facebook posts.” He said that it was brave of me to re-read all of those messages, but that he may never be able to read it.

 Jermainne re-read her emails, but she didn’t rewrite them. The original state of her words adds to their rawness, the awareness that this is happening to a real person. The book’s introduction and tales of fear and frustration felt shortly after diagnosis put the reader squarely in Jermainne’s world at the beginning of a leap into the unknown from which she, her son, and her husband would emerge forever changed.

People who learn about cancer touching a friend’s life wonder what they can do. Jermainne advises, “be honest, be curious, bring food – don’t ask, just bring something that can be frozen for use on another night if necessary. Don’t forget that this is going on, send a text just saying ‘how are you, what’s going on today?’….The first thing I would do in the morning is look at my phone. If I didn’t have any messages I would wonder ‘is there anyone out there?’”

“Knowing that this could not turn out well, I became focused on gratitude,” Jermainne said. People would ask me ‘how can you have gratitude about having a bench to sleep on?” I became so grateful for the little things. Friends told me that sharing these thoughts helped them bring gratitude back into their own lives.

Early in remission, “Brian went on a field trip with the Jimmy Fund…It was a huge turning point for him. He made friends, just being in the presence of all of these people who know what you’ve been through is a huge help,” Jermainne said, adding, “I felt like I had found my people too. Here were other moms who had slept on cots, given shots, worried about blood counts and took temperatures, here were my peeps.”

“I feel like the experience wasn’t going full circle, it’s more like a spiral, starting from a hard place and opening up as we went along,” Jermainne said. It’s hard even for her husband, also named Brian, to understand exactly how life-changing this experience is. He stayed home to care for the house and keep their business going while his wife and son were away in Boston for week-long treatments. “I think he thought we would go back to normal after Brian’s treatment was done, but you go forward to your new normal. You can never go back,” Jermainne said.

Last year, to celebrate Brian’s one year in remission from stage lll Burkitt’s Lymphoma, Jermainne participated in a St. Baldrick’s head-shaving fund raiser, 46 Mommas Shave for the Brave, in Boston. She thought about the women she would meet who had lost their children to cancer. “I’m coming face to face with my worst nightmare. What can I possibly offer these women? But I realized that just my presence and the group support was enough, and that they were there to help prevent this from happening to other mothers. Shaving my head was empowering.”

 “Brian’s very mature, he wants to get on with life. He realizes that life is fleeting and precious,” Jermainne said of her son now two years and four months into remission. Homeschooled since third grade, Brian graduated from a distance learning high school program, has his driver’s license, friends, loves his job at Otto in Chester, and plays his guitar. Although the chances of his original cancer returning are low, he will need lifelong monitoring to watch for some of the side effects of chemotherapy such as heart damage, or other cancers.

The reason Jermainne shaved her head, and the reason she shares her story are the same. She writes a heart-wrenching, four-page reason for everything she does. The following are a few excerpts: “It’s for a woman I will never meet. I will never know her name, or her child’s name. But I do know that tomorrow her world is going to come to a crashing halt…She will be sitting in some hospital waiting room with too bright lights and a cup of cold coffee…she will hear some of the most horrible words of her life “your child has cancer”(46 moms in this country hear those words for the first time each day)….She will touch her child ever so gently, her innocence as a mother already shattered into tiny little fragments…She will answer her child’s question ‘yes, honey, it’s cancer.’….She will have no idea what is coming, but she can tell her child the universal words of comfort, ‘it’s going to be okay.’”

Proceeds from the book will go to a fund for Brian, Make-a-Wish Connecticut, The Jimmy Fund, and St. Baldrick’s (cancer research).

Photo: Leslie and Brian, courtesy of Leslie Jermainne.

The Book of Noticing

Author Katherine Hauswirth’s new work, “The Book of Noticing, Collections and Connections on the Trail,” features essays inspired by frequent walks, family and an ever-present thirst for learning.

Hauswirth plans several workshop/book signings to share her work and inspire other budding nature writers, including Wednesday, July 12, 4-6 p.m., Guilford Free Library, and Saturday, July 15, 1-3 p.m., Stewart McKinney Refuge, Westbrook. A full list of scheduled events is available on the author’s website, fpnaturalist.com/book-of-noticing-events/.

As inspiration for future essays, the Deep River author recently spent time as a writer in residence at Maine’s Acadia National Park. While it may be easy to notice the natural world when surrounded by so much rugged splendor, she says that it is just as possible to appreciate nature in our every day travels.

“I’ve had an affinity for writing since I was very small, but got away from it in high school,” Hauswirth said. After moving to Connecticut from New York about 20 years ago, she began to reconnect with writing, honing in on nature writing for about the last five years.

Her book also includes essays inspired by a previous writer-in-residence week at the home of naturalist Edwin Way Teale in Hampton, Conn. She writes about the creatures and plants that she sees, and what they bring to mind as she watches them. Her essays include references to other nature writers, naturalists of long ago, life stages, snippets of hymns, and her research done simply to satisfy her own curiosity. What she does can be summed up as paying attention, or noticing.

She credits her slow-paced walks and passion for paying attention to nature to her walking companion, an aging beagle named Molly, who has since died. The author also took to heart a quote from poet Mary Oliver, “attention is the beginning of devotion.”

What Hauswirth attends to is the natural world, whether deep in the woods, at the edge of a pond, or in the parking lot behind her workplace. Even, she says, in a potted plant, "because that’s nature too."

Hauswirth writes about finding a word important to her, “When I looked up ‘attend’….I was reminded that it means so much more than to show up. Showing up is just the first step. My favorite part of the lengthy etymologic summary…is this part, literally ‘to stretch toward,’ the notion is of ‘stretching one’s mind toward something.’”

She ends the section with this: “My soul stretches along with my mind when I am attending to the birds’ dawn chorus, the scent of freshly fallen pine needles, even a lone, garden variety ant hurrying along in its determined quest.”

The back cover fittingly lists “Nature/Wellbeing” as the categories the book is filed under.

For a recent workshop at Connecticut Forest and Park Association in the Rockfall section of Middlefield, Hauswirth arrived wheeling a suitcase full of her favorite resource books. She talked about her book, read an excerpt, distributed a packet of tips for writing about nature, and then sent the 12 or so attendees out on the trails at dusk to observe, reflect, listen and write.

After returning about 30 minutes later, the participants were encouraged, but not required, to share what they had written. One wrote poetically about a tree’s scaly bark and its similarity to her own recent medical diagnosis; another described the depths and variety of greens she could see through the picture window as she had chosen not to walk the trails. This writer wrote about the trepidation felt entering the darkening woods and wonder of seeing an owl up close in the wild for the first time.

Hauswirth says that she is frequently amazed by people’s creativity. She remembers a previous workshop participant: “One woman always wanted to write, but didn’t think she could do it. She ended up putting together a beautiful piece written from the perspective of the dock.”

“The Book of Noticing” is published by Homebound Publications, 2017. Hauswirth has also written many published essays and two self-published books, but says her latest book is, “more representative of where I am.” She also writes as part of her “day job,” but in a drier, more technical form for an Old Lyme company.

Hauswirth collects more than ideas on her walks. She and her son Gavin, now a teenager, created a “cabinet of curiosities,” a box that holds mementoes from their excursions, and fodder for her essays in the colder months when she can’t get outside for her morning rambles.

“I really hope that when people read this book they are motivated to look around, use all of their senses, and take time to be in nature.” For her, she says, “It goes beyond the labels – what the leaf is, etc. It makes me more contemplative, and more connected. I hope that other people can feel that too, then the book will be a success.”

Photo by Ann Gamble