Get Up Close With Alabama’s Rivers

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A close of view of a salamander's face.
Photographer Mac Stone gets eye level with a southern dusky salamander in Alabama. © Mac Stone

When most people outside of Alabama think of the state, they think of football rivalries. At least that’s what Mac Stone, a photographer who lives in South Carolina, always thought. Then in April and May 2025, he began photographing the state’s waterways for a story in Nature Conservancy magazine. What he found repeatedly surprised him.

“When I got there and started seeing these pitcher plant bogs and these nesting bird islands and these really beautiful river systems that are so sinuous and winding—carved through all these floodplain forests and then up into the headwaters and then up into the cave systems,” he says, a bit breathless, “I just thought, how can there be so much diversity in such a small area?”

Stone photographed river systems all over the state—the way they shape the landscape and the animals and plants that rely on them. Among the places he captured was the Cahaba River system, an area of the state where The Nature Conservancy have recently helped conserved thousands of acres in the newly named E.O. Wilson Land Between the Rivers Preserve.

Photographing such diverse areas would ultimately require everything from planes to see above the landscape to studio equipment to get up close to carnivorous plants. Even so, Stone feels there’s still more to explore. “I’ve seen some spectacular places in the South and Alabama was a truly surprising place,” he says. “I left the assignment feeling so excited and hopeful and also really enriched by the knowledge that there are still places and things left to discover even in my own backyard.”

A man holding two bags of photo gear at the entrance to a cave.
To capture the diversity of the state’s water systems, Stone relied on an extensive array of equipment. “We had a van full of gear,” he says. “We had drone equipment for aerials, and we hired airplanes for aerials too. We had underwater equipment. We had timelapse equipment, video equipment. We had studio equipment for setting up studio strobes.” At one point, he found himself lugging hundreds of pounds of equipment to the site of a cave, which he planned to photograph to show the ways water literally shapes the landscape. Above, he’s hauling ropes in one of several trips to the cave site in northern Alabama. © Mac Stone
A person descends into the opening of a caves as freshwater from rainfall cascades down the walls.
Throughout the photoshoot, Stone, says, “We wanted to show how water moves through the state and the diverse ways that water shapes the landscape and the way that animals and plants are shaped by that water.” In watery bogs, a spongy ground and a lack of nutrients provide a good environment for carnivorous plants. Rivers overflowing their banks fill floodplain forests. And then in caves like this one in northern Alabama, water moves into underground aquifers, creating unique subterranean habitats. “There are species down in these caves that you don’t really find in any other place,” he says. © Mac Stone
Aerial view of a river delta.
To convey the scale of the Alabama landscape and the ways rivers like this one in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta region, wind through the state’s forests and bogs, Stone joined a volunteer pilot in a Cessna. They flew low over the forests, capturing the morning light on the trees and the occasional bank of fog as in this image. “You have to get up at sunrise to make sure that you have that low angular light,” Stone says. “It creates this sculpting of the landscape where you can really see the details in the trees.” © Mac Stone
A close up of pitcher plans covered in dew.
Among the odder plants Stone encountered on his journey were carnivorous plants like these pitcher plant blooms in TNC’s Ruth McClellan Abronski Splinter Hill Bog Preserve. Sitting on the ground, seeing them at eye-level, he says, it was like something out of Dr. Seuss. “If you’re an insect and you’re down on the ground and you have all these very colorful, towering oddly shaped plants—carnivorous plants—around you, what does that look like and feel like?” he says. “I want the viewer to feel like they’re sitting right there, that they are feeling that morning dew.” © Mac Stone
A white, male biologist measures an alligator snapping turtle.
Stone, who has previously photographed swallow-tailed kites for Nature Conservancy magazine, knows that when it comes to capturing images of wild animals, local experts can be your best friend. In Alabama he joined biologist Jim Godwin as he examined alligator snapping turtles. On this venture, Godwin unexpectedly caught two reptiles, including one who was found with a hook in its nose, which Stone and Godwin removed. In this image, as Godwin calmly measures the carapace of one reptile, another rests upside-down on the boat—a technique used to keep the animal calm while a researcher works. © Mac Stone
Underwater image of an alligator snapping turtle in the Coosa River, Alabama.
Alligator snapping turtles are the largest freshwater turtles in North America, and they’re ancient too: Researchers have found fossils of the reptile dating back about 100 million years. To capture the dinosaur vibe of the snapping turtle, Stone got in the Coosa River to photograph as Jim Godwin released the animal. “It was a little hairy,” he says of the situation. “His foot is essentially touching the dome of my [camera’s] underwater housing.” But, looking at the animal’s foot, he says, “you get this sense of where they live and the tools they need to survive.” © Mac Stone
An orchid grows underneath a cypress tree.
As Alabama’s rivers move down through the state, some like the Tensaw River seen here spread out across vast floodplains home to centuries-old cypress trees. Some of these trees have survived the logging that felled so many others in the area because of their undesirable shapes. Today, swamp lilies grow under them. “You don’t just have an abundance of lilies,” Stone says of the area. “You also have an incredible array of wildlife that feeds on the lilies, that pollinates the lilies, that are underneath the lilies in the water: the crayfish and the mussels.” © Mac Stone
Brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) nesting on Gaillard Island, Mobile Bay, Alabama.
A vast number of birds rely on Alabama’s waterways. The Mobile-Tensaw River system ends in Mobile Bay, on the Gulf, where small islands provide nesting and roosting habitat for birds like the brown pelican. Like the bald eagle and the peregrine falcon, the brown pelican was deeply affected by the once-widespread use of DDT in the United States. After the U.S. banned the pesticide, the bird’s population bounced back. Stone ultimately captured multiple generations of the bird in a single image here: adults, a bird about to fledge and newly hatched chicks. © Mac Stone
An aerial view of birds on a coastal island.
On the Gulf coast of Alabama, small sand islands, or spits, have formed. These spits are constantly changing—shaped by changing sea levels and storms that batter the coastline as well as the changing hydrology of the rivers that carry sediment and nutrients down through the state. Stone used a long lens to capture this image while riding in a small airplane. It shows, he says, the temporary nature of the islands even as they remain vital for shorebird nesting and roosting. © Mac Stone
A man rafts along the Locust Fork River near Cleveland, Alabama. He's sitting in the raft and holding a paddle.
As much as Stone focused on capturing images of the natural world around him in Alabama, he turned his camera to the people who have dedicated their lives to these areas. “In order to do these places justice, you need to be in the shoes of the people who have spent so much time there,” he says. People like biologist Jim Godwin or Jason Throneberry, director of freshwater programs for TNC in Alabama, who Stone captured deftly navigating the Locust Fork River at flood stage. “It’s important to get their perspectives so you can follow their breadcrumbs to what is the heart of the story.” © Mac Stone
A man with a camera on a tripod as birds fly over his head.
As Mac Stone photographed Alabama’s waterways, videographer Wes Overvold filmed many of them in action. Overvold—who splits his time between Montana and Georgia—filmed as the crew traveled down various rivers, rappelled into caves to photograph unique plant life, trekked through swampy floodplains over cypress tree knees. And as they reached the coastline, he captured birds—like these laughing gulls on Marsh Island—taking off from the small islands they rely on. © Mac Stone

As Mac Stone photographed around the state, filmmaker Wes Overvold shot video by his side. Overvold documented both the natural landscape they saw as well as Stone himself. Check out Overvold’s video of Mac Stone at work.

See more of Mac Stone’s photography in “The Secret South” in Issue 4, 2025, of Nature Conservancy magazine. In the issue, you’ll find articles about forest bioacoustics, a major deal to protect Mongolia’s vast landscapes, and the opening up of an Adirondack wilderness for the first time in 100 years.

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