Tag Archives: Wildlife

Road Trip – A River of Grass

That name’s not mine, but it surely describes the Everglades and Big Cypress. A million acres of flat-as-a-pancake land, so flat that 20 miles from the ocean we saw a sign that said 3′ elevation. The vast amount of water that falls here each summer flows about 100 feet per day towards the Gulf, and subtle channels in this 100-mile wide “river” create very interesting “islands” of grass, cypress and pines. You can’t really walk out into it because it’s wet, so kayaks and canoes are the way to see it. We’ve messed it up pretty well, but there is plenty to see that’s still the way it should be.

We’ve seen many wood storks (one shown here) that are interesting critters. They sweep their bills back and forth in muddy water searching for fish. When they ‘feel’ one, their bill snaps shut at 25 millionth of a second, the fastest reflex of any bird or animal. And I thought I ate fast!

Nancy’s gotten some wonderful photography of this place that’ll find it’s way to her website, but for now we’re in New Orleans and I’ll have a post of  this crazy-fun place soon. Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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

Road Trip – Pronghorns All Over the Place

Second edition of the Road Trip. Going through Wyoming and South Dakota, we were amazed at the numbers of pronghorns. Hundreds! We were most happy to see so many, more than either of us have ever seen. White pelicans too, along with bald eagles, lots of magpies (of course), and a nice bunch of prairie dogs where they probably shouldn’t be.

We’re in western Missouri now, following the Missouri River south and watching a big Gulf storm pass through. The forests are just full of redbud and looking great. This painting in the car isn’t all that easy. The roads are just too bumpy. But I’ll continue. Oh, Canada geese just flew right by the open window, inviting Harry our Cat to join them. He’d do it, I’m sure, if only his toes would cooperate.

Larry

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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.

Crows Going, Going…

Each evening I see them, about 25 to 30  – northwestern crows, all heading someplace for the night. As the sun sets behind the Olympic Mountains, this bunch comes out of Chimacum Creek estuary, goes right over our meadow and moves on to someplace only known to the crows. As they go by, they’re constantly exchanging hoarse caws and croaks. I imagine it to be something like “What did you do today?” or “Boy that cockle was sure good, and I got it and not you, caw, caw, caw!” Or possibly “Who decided we had to head this direction every evening? Who’s in charge of this murder of crows anyway?”

Northwestern crows are a different species than the normal American crow. Slightly smaller and completely focused on the saltwater shorelines of the Pacific Northwest, we often see these birds doing what they’ve learned to do to make their living. At low tide, northwestern crows rummage around beach rocks until they find an unsuspecting clam. Dislodging it, a bird will fly straight up about thirty feet and let it drop onto the rocks below. It may take more than one try, but once the shell has broken or even just cracked, the crow has dinner. It’s evidently a learned trait that young crows are taught, because we’ll see adults showing the kids how to go about it. Dinner on the half-shell.

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on paper board, 5″ x 7 1/2″ and is $85 unframed.
This wood frame and a double mat makes it a total of $125 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print. Other mats and frames are also available.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
While I painted this in my studio back home, we’re currently in Hawaii on Oahu’s North Shore – and watching some amazing waves. Thanks, Jeff! Your kama’ina home is lovely. I’ll try to send some photos of these in a few days. It takes some kind of crazy person with a death wish to go out there and ride those monsters – and I sure wish it were me!

Larry Eifert

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.

Carson River Mural Unveiling

This week I finished up another large-scale habitat mural for a new visitor center along the Carson River in Nevada. This vibrant place, just below the High Sierra front and southeast of Lake Tahoe, has always been important to wildlife, and to me. I consider it one of the most beautiful and interesting places in the West.

As the winter snows melt off these great mountains in spring, this water runs off into the valley and eventually out into the Great Basin where it evaporates with summer heat. Along the way, vernal pools and backwater pockets are filled with rushes and cattails, providing fabulous habitat for birds that make wildlife-watching wonderful. I’ve gotten to know this area pretty well, as I’ve also painted another, similar painting just north of this for the Lahanton Valley National Wildlife Refuge. In some small way, I’m always hoping my work will open some eyes, change some hearts and minds and possibly, just possibly, make it so these beautiful landscapes (and fictitious paintings) will both continue past my lifetime.

I wrote two other posts for this one as the project progressed. Here’s the original sketch (these open in separate browser windows) and here’s the half-way image showing the development of details. It’s kind of fun to see all three stages because things always change as I go along. For example, I added a yellowthroat and a Savannah sparrow to the final – and they’re not in the second stage painting.

And below is the initial reference photo I developed the painting from. Supplied by the client (and, thank you, Anne), you can see how far from reality these big paintings stray. Still, there are basic elements here that remained the same, making it a recognizable place. I like to say this photo was the launching pad, but where the final painting landed, no one knew – especially me!

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff. To see more than 50 other murals like this, click here.

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

Flying Baked Potatoes

Winter-Murrelet
Flying Baked Potatoes
How a little seabird helped save some big trees

(Published in 48-North Magazine last month. It’s a pretty good read, I think, but it’s long enough that I posted the entire thing on the web blog.) I also think I’ve worked out all the bugs on this new software, but if it’s not working for you, please bear with me.

Here’s the story!
“Things are bad – really BAD around here!” he said, “And it’s all because of that stupid owl and the purple murel-thing that shut down the logging.” “You know, that STUPID purple. …bird!” Docks are interesting places, aren’t they? There I was, just heading for our boat and now I was thrust straight into some big environmental debate. Didn’t even know this guy very well, but after I heard his blathering, I took a deep breath and realized I probably needed to stop and do some ‘splainin’ – as Desi used to say. For some reason, I continue to think that a little honest and friendly education might just result in social change at the ballot box, so: “It’s a marbled murrelet,” I answered, “I saw one just the other day out in the bay, fishing with some cormorants. Probably a juvenile from the Olympics or North Cascades. Got a minute? I’ll tell you about them.”

Flying-Murrelet

Marbled murrelets! For 30 years I’ve heard them lovingly described by biologists as a flying baked potato with a beak. But not just ANY flying baked potato, for this little chubby ocean bird was once America’s biggest ornithological mystery. While we were putting men on the moon and gloating about how smart we were, no one knew where these local birds even nested. Science ‘discovered’ the murrelet in 1789, but it took another 185 years for us to find a single nest! (Thank goodness murrelets knew where their nests were, or they’d be even worse off than they are.) And while we knew that Alaskan marbled murrelets nested on mossy rocky cliffs, no murreletnest had ever been found between San Francisco and Southwestern British Columbia at the south end of their range. The birds were often seen oddly out of place flying around the big trees in coastal old-growth forests and loggers referred to them as “fog doves,” but why were they there if they live on the ocean?

Then, in 1974, in the Santa Cruz area of California, a tree climber almost stepped on a chick in the canopy of an old-growth redwood, and the mystery was solved. Instead of nesting on mossy rocks, to increase their range southward the birds had adapted their nesting habits to the huge horizontal upper limbs of the giant coastal old-growth, often hundreds of feet in the air, and sometimes upwards of 45 miles from salt water. They hunt for small fish like herring by day in the ocean and return to their nesting duties in the evening. And, what caused this dock guy to think murrelets were Armageddon is that without old-growth trees, murrelets wouldn’t be able to nest on the West Coast of the Lower 48. It’s not just big trees they need, but big horizontal branches thick with moss and lichens, and trees don’t become like this until they’re centuries old. Because of this, and all the logging we’ve done in the past 200 years, the marbled murrelet is now listed as federally threatened and state endangered in Washington (12,000 birds), Oregon (7500) and California (4500). Some scientists believe that it’s not whether murrelets will become extinct, but when, because old forests are now few and far between, and what’s left have badly fragmented murrelet populations. Sometime later this century, when the only birds remaining are small population pockets in our national parks, this strange and unusual sea bird will simply not be viable as a species any more. And if that happens, I hope I’m not here to witness it.

I have some interesting connections with this bird, the one loggers loved to hate and conservationists used as a poster child to halt logging the last few percent of coastal old-growth forests. During the logging turmoil 25 years ago, I spent some time helping research these birds down in California’s coastal redwoods where the world’s tallest trees hug a foggy shoreline. Only 2.5% of the old-growth redwoods remain, and, as an artist I helped draw attention to the murrelets as a way to raise public awareness to the speedy demise of both trees and birds. It was the good, bad and the ugly. Ugly, because, as an artist, I was black-listed by timber organizations. Good, because business was good because of it. And not so bad when I spent one dark and foggy morning at 4:30 am up Redwood National Park’s Lost Man Creek valley, intently listening and watching for murrelets flying from nests to ocean. I remember that listening to murreletcalls in the redwoods reminded me of sailing. Often, when you’re cruising along with little wind to drivethe boat, you can hear that definitive oceanic call of keer, keer, keer. I’ll bet you’ve heard it too. Those are the bird songs of the ocean, not of the forest. I wasn’t a scientist, but an artist just doing his job of observing and responding, but when the National Park purchased one of my murrelet paintings to present to Bush One’s visiting Interior Secretary, I thought I had possibly made a remarkable coup in nature conservation. Now here was art opening the eyes of the powerful. Not so, one park official dryly whispered. This guy was just a patronage placement, a Midwestern pig farmer that didn’t care anything about birds unless they were stewed, fried and on a plate. Where is that painting now – I’d like to know.

Nest-Sitting-Murrelet

Murrelets have a definite ‘look’ to them on the water and so they’re easy to identify. About the size of an American robin, they’re smaller than gulls and cormorants, but here’s the key. They always hold their short bills slightly upward at a different angle than any other seabird, like the graceful angle of a schooner’s bowsprit. Fast fliers with rapid wing beats both in the air and underwater, they spend most of their lives in coastal waters where they court, feed, loaf, molt and preen. These long-lived birds only visit old-growth forests when they do nesting duties, where nests aren’t built but rather squished into place in the moss. Only one egg usually once a year is laid. Incubation lasts about a month with both parents incubating the egg in alternating 24-hour shifts, and chicks fledge in another month. Summer adults have sooty-brown upperparts and are lighter brown below, colors that make them highly camouflaged against the giant trees they’re nesting on. In winter, adults and young become brownish-gray with white wing patches that more closely match ocean colors of wind on waves.

So, let’s say you’re a very young murrelet only a month old. You were born in the top of a two hundred foot tall Douglas-fir up the Dosewallips River in the Olympics. Your parents had chosen THE nest tree just around a sharp river bend near Little Mystery Peak, where they had located a big mossy branch maybe fifteen stories off the ground. The definition of ‘nest’ is pretty casual here; because it’s just a thick bunch of moss your parents had smooshed into a shallow cavity. When you were born, your egg was pale speckled green, the exact same color of the limb’s moss in spring, not like the dried-out brown stuff of late summer or the lush soft green of winter. It wasn’t much of a nest, and so your parents rarely left you unattended so wandering-babes wouldn’t stagger off into thin air. Small fish your parents brought up to eight times a day ended up creating quite a crusty edge to the platform that helped keep you from falling off. And there were other dangers too. Steller’s jays, crows and ravens didn’t often come here before, but thanks to the nearby road that now brings campers and their food, these birds now threaten young murrelets sitting exposed on mossy branches – so you instinctively stayed low. After a month, wings had grown flight feathers and you sensed you were ready to explore. It felt like you could fly like your parents – but how to learn? And where would you go? Then, one evening just after dusk, and with one death-defying jump into space, flight had to be learned in a half second or a much squashed murrelet would have resulted. Somehow it all came together to happen properly, and you were on your way.

It seems a fairly lame way to survive as a species, but you did it anyway – you just walked off that branch and as you went going down at 32 feet per second, you figured it out fast – and in 30 minutes and 20 miles you made your first awkward sea landing in the Hood Canal. I say 30 minutes, because murrelets normally fly at about 50 mph. They havebeen clocked on radar at over 100, so in theory you could make that 20 miles in five minutes, but a first-flight-flier probably wouldn’t do this. In fact, you’d be lucky to do it at all.

As you learned to fly through the giant forest in growing darkness, alone and without your parents as guides, you somehow steered properly towards an ocean you had never seen. In doing this, you were unaided by anything you’d ever witnessed before, and you began a new life you didn’t know existed, began to catch fish untaught by parents you’ll likely never see again, and eventually you’ll nest in a treetop miles from your watery home. Remarkable!

So, when sailing in Puget Sound, the Straits of Juan de Fuca or outer coast all the way down to Santa Cruz, keep your eyes peeled for a small and chubby seabird, head held up like a schooner’s bowsprit and possibly with a small herring in its bill. If its summer, chances are good that it will soon be flying over some of the tallest trees on Earth to hand that little herring over to a chick on a mossy branch hundreds of feet in the air.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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 up to.

Warming Up With Tampa Bay Manatees

No painting this week – we made a quick trip down to Tampa over the last few days. Actually, I’m pretty lucky to be writing this, as our return yesterday involved a 2.5 hr tarmac hold at Dallas, de-icing and watching a record blizzard drop a foot of snow there. Ours was one of the lucky few planes to get off the ground, and it was pure joy to get back to 50 degrees in Seattle and Port Townsend.

 

But back to Tampa.
While there, we heard about the weird Florida weather and how it’s affecting the local manatees. These 1000lb ‘sea cows’ need shallow water that’s about 75-80 degrees F, and the Gulf right now is 58. So, what are the manatees doing? No, they can’t just go to Florida for the winter! The local coal-fired power plant has a 78 degree outfall into a nearby river and mangrove forest, and the manatees have all gone there to hang out. We counted about 150 of them, but locals said upwards of 300 have been spotted at once. The power plant has built a pretty good viewing platform that gets you to within about 20 feet of some of these soft giants, so you really get to study them. Also enjoying the warmth was a six foot shark and a bunch of rays ‘flying’ around between the bigger beasts. It was quite a show.
Manatees are very interesting critters. They normally spend upwards of half a day sleeping on the shallow bottoms of bays and rivers, only breathing once every 10-20 minutes. They don’t exhale to descend, but compress stored air, and in this way can stay down very long periods of time. They can eat upwards of 100 lbs of ‘greens’ a day. Manatees are not doing very well because of invasive species that are choking their out their watery homes – as well as being hit by boat propellers, so this was a real treat to see.

Thanks for reading this week. I’m back to painting, so I’ll tell you about that soon.
Larry Eifert

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

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Singing Marsh Wren

I’m still working on the mural project for that Carson River, Nevada visitor center. A singing marsh wren is featured, so this is a warm-up painting. It’s sitting in some cattails, so I needed some research for those too. These (in the painting) are a late fall variety, where the seeds have dried and are being blown off by storm winds – but the strap-like leaves are still hanging in there. I like the way the wren’s fluffed-up chest and throat mimics the cattail fluff.

Singing Marsh Wren
 This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.
The gold frame makes it a total of $180 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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.

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Carson River Mural Beginnings


This should enlarge if you click it. If that goes nowhere, click the blog here and do the same.

Last week I sent out the sketch for this painting. A commission for a non-profit, this painting is for their new visitor center. The scene isn’t exactly accurate as to the way it truly is, but hopefully will give the viewer a ‘sense of place’. I have a nice little singing marsh wren painting I’ve also done to warm up for this, which I’ll send in a few days.
In the meantime, I’ll tell you how this is going. The painting isn’t as large as many I do like this, maybe 3’x5′. At this size, it’s large enough that I can get some details in, and small enough so it won’t take a month to paint. I first put down several coats of a very dark brown (almost black) base, so when I paint this up to lighter colors, it hopefully looks like a landscape just emerging from night. Those dark areas around the bottom will soon disappear. You see the High Sierra Front (east side of Lake Tahoe area) is almost finished. It’s on the west side of the Carson Valley, putting early morning light right on these high peaks. They’d shine like crazy when that morning light hits them.
I paint these things from the background to foreground, usually top to bottom, so the mountains go in first as you can see, then the area slightly closer to the viewer, and so on, but to give me a sense of the entire composition, you’ll see some critters outlined or just roughed in. This helps me figure out what the final image might look like. This photo was taken yesterday, so today it’s much farther along, but why waste time photographing it? Let’s get back to work.
Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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

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You can also leave comments on the blog here. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

Carson River Mural Sketch

Pencil sketches are always difficult to see here, so click on this image to enlarge it. A large non-profit organization is working on a project south of Reno Nevada along the Sierra Front, and, as part of it this painting will soon be installed in their new visitor center at the ranch. It’s an exciting prospect for me to paint this. Sandhill cranes, bald eagles, large populations of white-faced ibis, and one of the only colonies of tri-colored blackbirds in Nevada are here. With 250 species of birds and a backdrop of mountains that just doesn’t quit, it’s an exciting place to paint one of these complex habitat murals. I’ve painted for this private organization before. There’s been a mural and nature guide for the Kenai River in Alaska (exceptional field trip), one for the Great Salt Lake wetlands north of Salt Lake City (where we got to see a peregrine falcon’s nest up close as the parent divebombed us) and another one north of this current image in the Lahanton National Wildlife Refuge. That mural included a very fun airboat trip out into the tule marshes – you know, the boats with the big propellers on the backs that go in about 2″ of water. USFWS showed us some fresh water clams still living there that are hold-overs from the last Ice Age.

I’m working up a ‘warmup’ painting for this mural of a marsh wren singing that I’ll post soon.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing.

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Where Are The Black-tails?

Deer-Wet-Meadow
Where are all the deer? I asked that yesterday, realizing I hadn’t seen one in our meadow for a long while. (click the painting and it should enlarge.

We’ve created a pretty critter-friendly habitat here in our little patch of forest and meadow, and the wildlife know it. We’ve kept a count of our critters over the years and now have a ‘yard list’ of over 80 species. A salt lick for the deer, a couple of feeders, no outside pets (especially cats) and over the years we now have Douglas squirrels patiently waiting right on the feeder while we dish out the morning seeds. Two hummers are still overwintering. The Cooper’s hawk juvies still fly around overhead freaking out the towhees and chickadees. But the deer? Don’t know!

All summer we had two families of deer – multiple fawns in tow. We’re in a no-shooting zone around here, so when Fall safely progressed, alters appeared on the bucks and lots of coy antics went on it the meadow – lots of racing around like they were all schoolyard kids. But then (with hunting season the last two weeks in October) the deer just vanished. It must just be habit. They’re safe here, and they seem to know it, judging by their ‘almost’ taking our homegrown apples out of our hands, but, poof, they were gone anyway. Now, in a couple of months I know they’ll be back, females with a new one or two in their bellies. It’s a cycle of life I know I can depend on – but what’s the deal? Why don’t they just stay?

Black-tailed deer in a wet meadow:

No deer, so I painted one. This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.
The gold frame makes it a total of $180 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

To read my other blog entries, check the blog here.

Thanks for reading this week. It’s a window into our little artistic world here.
Larry Eifert

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

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