Willow catkins are one of the first things to happen in spring here. The snow isn’t fully gone, the ground is still half-frozen, and the willows are already pushing out these soft gray tufts along their branches. Most people know them as pussy willows. They don’t last long, which is part of why I wanted to photograph them before they went by.
I brought a few clipped branches home to look at them up close, and ended up spending a couple of hours at the kitchen table trying to figure out how to shoot something a few millimeters across.
What you’re actually looking at
A catkin is a cluster of tiny flowers packed onto a single spike, no petals, the whole thing built to move pollen with as little fuss as possible. Willows are in the genus Salix, and they’re dioecious, which means a given willow is either male or female, not both. Both sexes make catkins, but they do different jobs, and once you look closely, they don’t look much alike.
The male catkins are the showy ones. Each is covered in dozens of stamens, and as they mature the anthers open and coat the whole catkin in yellow pollen. Depending on the species, the anthers start out red before they open, so a partly opened male catkin can be red and yellow at once.
The females are quieter. No pollen, no yellow. Each flower is a pistil, and the part you see is the stigma, split into two and covered in fine white hairs that catch pollen out of the air or off an insect. Under magnification, the stigmas range from pale yellow to deep red, sitting in a nest of white wool.
Shooting something a few millimeters across
I started with a 50mm lens and a 36mm extension tube on my D850. That got me close, and I got a few decent frames, but not close enough to see the detail I was after.
So I switched to the Laowa 25mm Ultra Macro, which is less a lens than a microscope you bolt to a camera. It magnifies hard, but the focal plane is paper-thin. At that scale, anything moves. A catkin sitting on a branch clipped to a step ladder, indoors, no wind, still drifts in and out of focus while you watch. I clamped the branches down, put the camera on a macro focusing rail, and worked one tiny slice of the catkin at a time. Most of the frames went in the trash. A couple were worth the afternoon.
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For the wider shots, I went back to the 50mm with an extra extension tube, stopped down to f/8, and that turned out to be the sweet spot for the whole catkin in focus with the anthers and filaments still sharp.
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Nikon D850
50 mm f/1.8 Nikon Lens
Kenko extension tubes (available for multiple camera systems)
Laowa 25 mm f/2.8 Ultra Macro (available for multiple camera systems)
Which willow?
I couldn’t pin the species down.
Most of what I photographed looks like Salix alaxensis, with maybe some Salix arbusculoides mixed in. I noticed the catkins with yellow-tipped stigmas were on reddish stems, and the ones with red-tipped stigmas were on paler stems. Reddish stems can point toward arbusculoides, but that alone doesn’t settle it, and the color difference could just as easily be maturity, or environment, or normal variation within one species.
The real tell is leaf shape, and when I took these photos the leaves hadn’t unfurled yet. So it’s a wait. It’s also entirely possible these are a Salix I haven’t considered. There are a lot of willows, and they hybridize, and telling them apart from catkins alone is a good way to be wrong with confidence.
Why the timing matters
Here’s the part that makes the willows worth paying attention to, beyond the fact that they photograph well.
They bloom before almost anything else. For insects coming out of winter, that early pollen is one of the first meals available. Overwintered bumblebee queens, in particular, need it: they emerge with nothing in reserve and have to feed before they can start a colony. When you see a bumblebee working a willow catkin in early May, you’re watching one of the first transactions of the season, and a load-bearing one.
Birds and mammals lean on willows early too. So these gray tufts that show up while there’s still snow on the ground are doing more than announcing spring. They’re feeding the first things awake.
I’m documenting this as part of my ongoing Alaska Wildflower Guide. Once the leaves come out and I can settle the species, I’ll add them in. The macro work is a newer thread for me, growing out of my Water and Ice project, where I’ve been shooting snowflakes and frost at the same kind of magnification. Same idea, really: get close enough to something ordinary and it stops being ordinary.
Snowflake macro from my Water and Ice Gallery
If you want to look closer, the full set is up in 4K where you can zoom in on the individual stigmas and anthers: https://photos.lwpetersen.com/Date/2023/May/2023-05-13. Prints and wall art are available there too, and buying one directly funds more of this work.
