Tag Archives: Stories and Articles

Seahawks – My monthly 48-North story

2014-3-Seahawks

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Okay, okay, I’m not normally into any sort of spectator sports. Can’t see wasting time watching someone else run around when I could be doing it myself – even if it’s far less successful. However, as with everyone else around this part of the country, we got somewhat carried away with the local team that actually won something last month, and so I did sort of an explanatory story on the team’s name. I’d like it better if they called themselves the ospreys, but you’ll have to admit the play on words with Sea – Seattle – Seahawks is pretty good. And,”Go Spreys” doesn’t have much of a magical sound to it anyway.

    And, a football team allowed me to paint one of my favorite birds again – and then do a story about it. Almost worth buying a ticket next year if I wasn’t off in the mountains somewhere doing my own ‘sport’. See the story on the web at 48north.com during March, 2013. At my count, it’s my 38th article for them – almost enough for a book.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Dungeness Crabs – My 48-North story for January

2014-1-Dungeness-Crabs

Holiday Fresh Dungeness Crab Eating: it’s like a holiday itself and we’ve been doing a lot of it lately. So, besides the crabs, I cooked up a story about them for my monthly page in 48-North magazine that just hit the stores this week. What a lot of work being a crab!

Each year, over a million pounds of Dungeness crab is caught and consumed here in the Salish Sea. Most everyone knows how to catch, cook and eat this tasty crustacean – we use the third and fourth feet for the meat picks – no metal, please. Yet few know the details of a crab’s life – so here goes. They were named after Dungeness, Washington near Sequim on the north side of the Olympic Peninsula, where the first Northwest commercial crab fishery began. Like most creatures with external skeletons, they must shed their hard shells as they grow larger. By carefully backing out of their shells, they moult between May and August, and mating occurs immediately afterwards before the new exoskeleton hardens on the females. This happens when the male begins a physical embrace with the female that lasts for days. With the female tucked underneath the male and oriented so that their abdomens touch, heads facing each other, the ‘love-making’ begins. Try to picture this. I’ll bet you can’t and not smile.

Ah, but life goes on, and several months later the female ‘lays’ her eggs, possibly up to 2.5 million of them. Completely helpless, they remain attached under her abdomen for 3 to 5 more months until they hatch. Then the free-swimming young crabs go through 5 larval stages and about 10 molts over the next 2 years. Male Dungeness crabs reach legal catch size at 3 or 4 years of age, at which time they weight 2 or 3 pounds. They may live for 13 years.

Thanks for reading this week, and Happy New Year. May it be better than the last one. 2013 – RIP.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

COOTS!

2013-12-Coots

At the request of my editor, here’s my 48 North magazine story on the American Coot for December 2013. It’s a tad bit early, but I liked the illustrations enough to show it off. Everyone thinks coots are just gray and black, but a closer look in the sun and you’ll see all sorts of colors. They’re odd little birds, as the story and illustration explains. Click on it and you’ll see a bigger version in your browser. I’m not kidding about the amazing color of those chicks!

    Climate Change: If you’ve read this stuff before, you’ll know I’ve been working on two large paintings about Climate Change and how it’s effecting Yellowstone. Today I spotted a couple of dozen purple violets in bloom in the yard here in Port Townsend – just as a hummingbird dive-bombed me. Now, it’s been unseasonably clear here and getting down below freezing at night because of it – and now here are these violets! Hummmm. Here I was complaining about the chilly nights. With hummingbirds and violets, what could I possibly have to complain about anything. Life is good!

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

October’s Story for 48 North Magazine

2013-10-Turnstones

Click the page to enlarge it in your browser for easier reading.

Shutdown, day 11! While the Park Service may be shut down and leaving us with a bleeding business – and sales and commissions are looking to like someone run over by a tank – and we may be unable to go to parks for research or even get it from the web because all park websites are down (and it’s a bunch, let me tell you), or, for that matter, even go camping for a couple of days and enjoy OUR own parks in OUR country – life goes on. (that’s a bad sentence, I know, but one I’m leaving because it represents some big frustrations) So, here’s my story for 48 North magazine for October about some little birds that just want to be able to exist in a safe and secure place, carry on normal life and be safe. Sounds like us!

PLEASE, ALLOW ME A RANT: I know I’m preaching to the choir here, and probably HALF my readers get this on computers that are currently turned off or even available to be turned on, but I just want to say I’ve appreciated every minute of trying to make an honest living painting nature in national parks. A lot of that has to do with the scenery and our heritage, but even more has to do with the fabulous people we’ve met over the years who work for the government. They’re not all bureaucrats, but scientists, naturalists, people trying to spend their lives making a difference in a good way – and currently they’re draining their savings accounts to pay the bills. Yesterday, Day 10, it was announced that parks and their local communities have lost $750 million dollars in lost revenue THIS WEEK, money that will never be regained or back-paid, and most are in some pretty remote communities that need it.

It seems lost on people who support the Tea Party that Congress’ job is to pass laws that then require spending money, and shutting down government and not paying the bills it already rang up is ludicrous – like buying a car and then refusing to pay for it. I urge everyone to not forget about all this when it comes time to vote the next time!

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Swivel-toes – My Story for July, 2013

If you click the story, it will enlarge for better reading in your browser.

 

 Gee.. July’s almost over and I almost forgot to post my 48-North magazine story for this month – and they already have August ‘in the can.’ Just too much summer in not enough months, doesn’t everyone agree? I was sailing out in Port Townsend Bay a bit ago and saw an osprey dive on a fish. Poetry in motion – a fisherman with perfection. It was truly thrilling to watch. So I cooked up a little story about that bird and the osprey’s amazing ability to successfully land it’s catch on nine out of ten dives. So successful I thought – until some years ago I saw a jealous eagle dive-bomb an osprey in Banff National Park and forced it to release its catch in mid-air, which the eagle then caught on the way down. And they say eagles aren’t as good at fishing as ospreys, but they’re sure better at being bullies.

 

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

The Artist’s View – Eifert’s 48North Page for June, 2013

Recently we were in the Seattle Aquarium and while Nancy was photographing the yearling sea otter, I spent some time in the tidal tank area with my sketchbook. This is one of my favorite Seattle-places, almost as good as the Woodland Park Zoo. I’ve spent hours in here drawing and just watching life go on in the big salt water exhibits. So, from that came this little sketch showing the community of critters that live there on one of the pilings. This is all raw ocean water that gets piped into the aquarium, and it’s all unfiltered so much of the marine life comes in naturally. As I was drawing this, I realized everything in front of me was either trying to eat everyone else, or trying to just hide so as to not be eaten. What a scary place to live – so I wrote about it for my monthly story in 48-North magazine.

And here’s my original sketch before I added watercolor to it as an underlay. Lets see: plumose anemones, kelp crabs, pile perch, acorn barnacles, ochre star, little brown barnacles and a hermit crab or two. Got it!

And just in case you missed it last week, here’s our newest puzzle, “A Walk on the Wild Side” for Fort Townsend State Park, the old-growth forest park near us here on the Olympic Peninsula. Check it out here on the website. And thanks, everyone, for the initial interest in this new interpretive puzzle. Very gratifying.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to. And you can follow me on Facebook where I just posted a new hiking album.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Mississippi Calling – A New Ebook by Larry Eifert’s Mom


 This is the fifth of twenty I’ve now made available for Kindle and Nook, and your phone, tablet or computer – published this week. Made a new cover, added photos – and I discovered it’s still a very good read. In 1957 I was 11 when this was first published – now after all these years I just have to wonder what my mom would think at all of today’s digital stuff. She traveled over 6,500 miles on Mississippi towboats, hand-writing field notes in journals and taking amazing photos with her little film Roliflex camera. The original manuscript plus rewrites were on her MANUAL Underwood, written mostly at night when I was asleep (and quiet). Today, I’m republishing her book on a 3.4 GHz pc, Photoshoping a new cover by taking her original photo and scanning a watercolor beneath it on layer 4, just beneath the titles. What I could have done for her!

 

For the added photos, I dug out a huge box of her old custom 8 x 10 enlargements. Here’s one from the 50’s, an amazing steam-powered towboat still burning coal. There are also some interesting images of New Orleans from that period, plus some other period river and towboat shots.

While ‘River World” (republished a couple of months ago) was about the Mississippi’s nature, this book is about the people who discovered it, changed it, fought over it or lived beside it. Several stories are about finding the river’s source, or not! One chapter is about the woman that ran one of the largest river canals in America – 150 years ago. Another is about Nauvoo, Illinois and the story of the failed Mormon colony, then failed French Icarian (socialist) community. My family came from that Icarian group.

If you’d like to see this book on Amazon.com, click here for Kindle. Barnes and Noble’s Nook is coming soon. And thanks, everyone, for supporting this project.

For more information about Virginia, check her web site at http://virginia.larryeifert.com.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was published to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Sea Lions – My 48-North article for May

Geez: I turned in my monthly offering for June and realized I hadn’t posted my story for May. 

The page should enlarge for easier reading if you click on it. This story is about one of the other big carnivore-predators around the Pacific Northwest (besides us) – and how these big guys keep getting in the way. It’s the good, the bad and some ugly all rolled into 225 words. The photo below was the inspiration and reference I used for the initial illustration. This is the “Big Red Can” that’s just offshore at Port Townsend’s Point Hudson harbor entrance. I’ve seen more sea lions on this thing than I can count. I was sailing out there a couple of days ago and a very large male was ‘laying out’ on the top, just like my little watercolor shows. As I sailed past, he didn’t even wake up. I could almost hear him snoring – 1000 lbs of snoring. Check out the entire magazine online at: 48 North, I’m on page 33.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

River World – a new book by Virginia Eifert

“River World” was first published in 1959, and was called “an ambitious book – and – a thrilling kaleidoscope of nature.” I agree! This is the fourth of my mom’s 20+ books that I’ve scanned and is now available on Amazon Kindle (and soon to be on Barnes and Noble and Itunes as well). It took me awhile for this one, simply because I had so much fun reading it. I think Nancy got a bit tired of me saying things like “wow, listen to this! A possum sky!” It’s a book about the Mississippi River, written as if there were no people living along it – a pure nature book, and I could easily see she really relished writing this one. There’s a joy there that’s infectious. All chapter headings are Virginia’s ink drawings, too, and there’s a freshness in them that I think is very nice.

 

Here’s a sample I especially liked:  “I stand on the river shore with white cliffs behind me—the haze bridging the far distances across the Dardennes marshes of Missouri and up and down the river for endless miles—and I try to discover what creates this mystic, hushed atmosphere of the willow-goldened river. But the spell of autumn makes even such slight mental effort quite unnecessary. It is enough to live and feel the magic of the river.”

 

“For now the river world knows a breathless, timeless moment, a windless waiting for winter, until the violent breath of a north wind finally sweeps away these last remnants of Indian summer, sending willow leaves sailing away on the surging brown water. But today even the river seems slow, a smooth and shining lake with no visible current; the willows are very still, each leaf poised in a transient permanence against the sky.”

 


AND: SOUTH TO THE SEA

Most of Virginia’s personal notebooks and manuscripts are now in Western Illinois University or the Illinois State Museum, but in my own collection I found a binder that I had never read. It’s the basis for “River World”, I think, and so I scanned the pages and photos, and added this as a 56-page bonus. It’s quite amazing to read. In April of 1956, Virginia somehow talked her way aboard a towboat transporting over 2,000,000 gallons of gasoline (see photo below) and traveled 2100 miles down and back on the Mississippi. 17 days of living on a 1000-foot-long gas-bomb – and they allowed her to do it! The binder is filled with the nature she saw, food she ate,  people she met, life aboard this boat with engines the size of buses. There’s a tour of a giant oil refinery down in the Gulf, and at one point the tow looses steerage and plows into a willow bank, dropping tons of dirt and plants on the deck (a sample of which was still taped in the binder). It’s quite some story in its self, and I’m thinking of published just this part as a separate book.

 

The Cape Zephyr – a real Mississippi working boat that women just didn’t travel on.

 

And so many thanks to all of you who have already bought some of Virginia’s other books. River World is now available at Amazon.com here. Or just search for book # ASIN: B00CBM5TQA

Email us if you want to know more. The is my legacy, and I see more and more of my own journey through these books. They’re like mirrors – she did the Mississippi, I did Alaska and Mexico.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Another book from Larry Eifert’s Mom – “Journeys in Green Places”

I have two more of Virginia Eifert’s books available on Amazon.com now, plus the author page at Amazon and on her own website. Sure takes some time to proof these books carefully – I’m hoping that I hear from you if there are any errors.

Journeys In Green Places was first published in 1963 and is illustrated with 40 photographs and 78 drawings and maps by Virginia. It’s nature writing at its best by one of the Midwest’s finest! Set in the Door Peninsula of Wisconsin—that narrow, tapering, ninety miles long finger of rock, sand and forest thrusting northward between Lake Michigan and Green Bay. Here are rugged bluffs, dunes, ridges, beaches, woods, and cherry orchards. It is a magical area for the naturalist, then and now, varied and unique, particularly in the Ridges sanctuary where the splendid wildflowers have drawn botanists from many parts of the world. The book is a vivid and passionate exploration of a beautiful landscape that was still entrusted to some of the original homesteaders and fishermen in the 60’s – and before tourists found this singular place.

I’ve added a lot of other stuff to the book, including some photos; above at the Clearing in the late 1950’s, and below she’s lecturing to a packed class (as usual). There’s a large section with a published diary of her first Clearing week (it’s an adult school in the woods on the peninsula) that shows a direct spark of creativity that finished a few years later in the Journeys book itself.

Yes, that’s me with the deer!

And on page 112 in the photo section of the original book, there’s a photo of me and a yearling white-tail. The caption reads: “Larry and the fawn, like the natural world around them, are prepared for winter and its challenges”. And here I am exactly 50 years later doing the same darned things – including pitching her books.

When I was a little older than the photo with the deer, I began to go with her when she gave Audubon programs, lectures or book signings. She’s sign – I’d handle the cash box. Checks and cash was all I did back then, but I’m sure it sunk in that this was a pretty fun way to make a living. She eventually traveled 6000 miles on river boats – mostly working tows and barges, poked around in muskeg bogs, hired guys to take her to Canadian bird rookeries and taught me to do the same.

You can see more – or buy Journeys in Green Places at Amazon by clicking here. And see her new author page  here. And see her website (not completely finished but it’s getting close) here at virginia.larryeifert.com. (There are currently almost 100 copies of Virginia’s books for sale on Amazon – 50 years after they’re out of print. Not a bad legacy for someone who has been gone since 1966.)

[AND, no, you don’t have to have a Kindle to read these, just an Amazon account to get it on your PC or Smartphone. Reading on your phone is pretty nice since you always have it.]

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.