Tag Archives: Wildlife

Surprise Canyon and Palm Bowl

The blog’s been silent! We’ve been away for a few weeks, hiking in the Southern California desert and visiting family and friends. No painting this week, but this was a hike so exceptional I wanted to share it.

East of San Diego, Anza Borrego State Park is California’s largest state park, so big all the other state parks could fit in it with room left over. Most visitors see the palms near the visitor center, but there are many other backcountry native palm groves that have few visitors except mountain lions and coyotes. Driving 50 miles south of the visitor center we found a vague sandy turnoff, parked the camper and began hiking up Surprise Canyon – and what a surprise it was. First one grove, then another, and finally the canyon opened up into an entire bowl full of them – 100’s of native California fan palms. We had never seen so many in one place.

It wasn’t the number of palms, but the cool and ethereal silence we felt here, and at the same time, the place was alive and vibrant. You could clearly see open areas where countless generations of Indians had made their homes under the trees. Dates were hanging everywhere, and several dozen western bluebirds and finches were flying from tree to tree, munching as fast as they could and chattering away. Date seed piles were everywhere too, showing that coyotes hang out here enjoying the same fruits, and sure enough, one big alpha male studied us from the ridgetop. Then, Nancy spotted a little nest on the ground, blown out of a palm by a recent storm we were sure. Judging by the size, it could have been made by a gnatcatcher or maybe a bushtit, but if you look carefully, you’ll see that every piece of the nest is actually a fishhook cactus spine. They’re all intertwined and tightly fitted, and each ‘hook’ is stiff as a needle. You’d need pliers to cut it. We can’t imagine how a tiny bird could have managed this construction feat. Just getting close enough to grab the spine is one issue, but how the bird broke off each spine, brought it here and wove the nest is beyond reality. I pictured a bloody and punctured bird when it was finished, and, of course I hoped it was a male. I thought it amazingly smart because what predator would attack an armored nest like this? Any ideas?


So why are these palms here at all? Native California fan palms are usually found where water is forced to the surface by an underground solid rock ledge. They need their feet wet but tops in the sun – and brutal sun this is. Young palms have wicked red spines along each frond stem, but older trees don’t. It’s thought that Pleistocene mastodons couldn’t reach any higher that about 18 feet, and so young palms adapted spines to ward off the huge browsers. With Climate Change, who knows what will happen to these last few groves of our only native desert palm. They could easily go the way of the mastodon.

 

 

Anna’s Hummingbirds and the December Deep Freeze

This is an older painting of mine, and the rhododendrons certainly in bloom, but I felt compelled to write about this week’s freeze and the little birds in our meadow.

From coast to coast, I know we’ve all had amazing weather this past week. The southern storms drove a giant blast of Canadian air down and west over the Cascades, and here we’ve had record lows for a week. Temps haven’t gotten out of the twenties, with nights down into the lower teens, weather we just don’t ever get in Puget Sound. None of us have clothes for this stuff. And while we’ve all been suffering, that can’t be anything compared to what our two wintering-over Anna’s hummingbirds must be experiencing. For all my decades around the Northwest, I’ve never seen hummers here in winter, but last year we had one stay all season, and we’ve heard we’re not alone with this. We put out a feeder when we spotted him, but it wasn’t because of the sugar water that he was here, because we put it out AFTER we spotted him. This year we have an adult and a juvie, and we were ready with a feeder (and a 150w flood lamp on it 24 hours a day after the freeze hit). So far it’s working.

I wrote about hummers a few years ago, and learned that they have ways to cope with this cold stuff. They have normal body temps of about 105-108F, with a sitting heart rate of about 250 beats per minute. However, at night they sleep normally, or, they can go into a turbid state where they actually drop their body temp to between 30 and 65 degrees (depending on need), and drop their metabolic rate to one-fifteenth of normal. In this way, they can maybe make it through a very long night of 15 degrees.

Before nightfall, they make one extra smart move. They find and remember where breakfast is going to be. Then, in the morning it takes upwards of an hour to fully wake up before flying. This requires a huge energy drain on this thumb-sized bird, and if that feeder is frozen when it gets to it, the bird is in big trouble (like a car on empty that gets to the gas station and the pumps are locked).

Temperatures are warming up now, but we’ve felt a great privilege to keep tabs on these two intrepid birds this week. Snow and hummingbirds just don’t go together, but if this is a sign of Climate Change, I’m happy with it.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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Comments are good. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

Welcome to Sol Duc Valley

Since this wayside panel is being printed this month, I thought I’d pass it on here. I published another one of these back on November 8th, and you can see it here. For this project, I painted 21 paintings for 3 panels at Olympic National Park’s Sol Duc Valley entry kiosk. With the others last year, that makes 24 images you can see while driving the 17 miles from national park gate to road’s end where a trail leads to this grand waterfall – Sol Duc Falls. At 4′ x 6′, these are pretty large panels.

So what? Well, I like to call these efforts “public art galleries in our parks”, and I now have hundreds of these things in parks, preserves and wildlife refuges around the West. You’re hiking or driving along, and suddenly there’s a piece of art and a small story to tell you, or interpret, what you’re seeing. It’s just a great way to experience a beautiful place, and, I hope, to heighten your experience beyond what nature is providing (if that’s possible). These panels don’t use the original art itself, but are always fabricated out of fiberglass, stainless steel or a Formica product, so they’ll probably last longer than I will. I’d like to image someone coming along decades from now and stumbling over one of these things – and having it enhance their day.

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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Red-breasted Nuthatch

If you click the image, it should enlarge. If it doesn’t click here for the web blog.
SOLD. Sorry to say, I sold this before I could get it up here. Thought I’d send it out anyway. I think it’s a nice little painting.

These little birds are constant neighbors here. I’ll bet we have at least five families around our meadow. We watch them from our dining room windows working the feeder, daintily picking at the suet cake and carrying away one sunflower seed at a time up to the safety of the nearest branch. Their voices are so thin and sweet as to sometimes sound like fluttering leaves. These guys normally feed by circling down tree trunks as in the painting, gleaning insects from bark crevices. They then fly over to another tree and start again. We have another bird here, the brown creeper, that fills just the opposite niche. It circles up the trunk, catching bugs the nuthatches miss.

 Did I ever say I take commissions? Lots of them. If you liked this one, I won’t do it again, but it’s always a treat for me to try a subject in a different way. This painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and we offered it for $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.

Thanks for reading this week. Nuthatches: It feels like I’ve just painted a family member 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. She has some interesting new work from the Seattle Day of the Dead Festival on her blog.

I recently put up a web page of many of my murals. I think there’s about 50 of them here. Check it out.

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Ancient Bristlecone Pines mural

Finally, I got this puppy finished up. It was quite a handful with lots of other work coming and going through the studio. If you click on the image, it should enlarge. If not, go here to the blog.

This is destined for The Crater Lake Institute, that, through the years, has commissioned me for many of these types of paintings. Next summer we’ll have products like puzzles available, but there’s lots of design work to do before that happens.

When I sent out the sketch for this awhile ago, I received lots of mail about where to see these trees and just how to do a painting like this. The 3′ x 5′ painting is on hardboard so I had a smooth surface to begin with. I primed it with dry-brush latex to rough it up slightly, making for good textural effects. These are worked up from the back forward, so the foreground flowers are the last to go in, and there’s lots of hidden stuff in that foreground. I recently put up a page on the main website with a page of murals. There’s currently about 50 for you to see, so check it out here.

SO: Where can you see these bristlecones (that DO have bristled cones)? Well, you’re not going to this time of year, but if you’re looking for a great trip next summer, check out the bristlecones east of Bishop CA in the Whites or at Great Basin National Park way out near Ely Nevada, or Brice Canyon National Park in Utah. They’re high-elevation trees – at 10,000 feet or so on dry windswept ridgetops in limestone, a place where nothing else can easily grow. It’s worth a trip to walk beneath the oldest trees on the planet, some dated to almost 5,000 years of age. Even the downed branches are beyond my comprehension – some have been dated back 9,000 years from the present. To put that into context, the woolly mammoth was still around then!

Here’s the original pencil sketch:

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. There’s some good new stuff here on her blog about the Day of the Dead Celebration in Seattle.

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Stream Stones and Bristlecones


Progress on the Bristlecone Pine mural
I sent out the pencil sketch for this painting on September 8. and now, after several review comments and changes only a dendrologist (tree scientist) would recognise, I’m moving along pretty well on the final. Many large-scale painters do a complete smaller image first, then recreate it in the larger final version. I’ve never been comfortable with that process because it seems like I’d just be painting something twice. It’d be like remarrying the same person you’ve already divorced – all those little issues you hated the first time ’round are still lurking there. Nancy and I have done several 90′ paintings without a finished ‘baby’ painting and it was truly exciting – for both us and the clients that were scared numb. Nancy once stated: “we are in SERIOUS trouble here” but we still pulled it off nicely. Next week I hope this’ll be close to finished and I’ll send another update.

But that’s not all:

Stream Stones

This is another painting from our recent alpine excursions. If you know your Pacific Northwest geology, you’d pick up that these stones are from the North Cascades and not the Olympics. Cascade stones are very much more diverse in color and texture – brownish iron oxides and lots of gray speckled granites. If you see these stones around the Olympic Mountain edges, they undoubtedly came there from scraped streambeds in the Cascades by way of the mile-high Cordilleran Ice Sheet 80 centuries ago, and they match pebbles you’d find in any Cascade river today.

You might think 80 centuries is awhile ago, but consider this: there are bristlecone pines in the White Mountains and Nevada that approach 50 centuries. And that’s the way I tie the top part of this entry with the bottom part of.

Dipper Dipping

For local readers – This weekend we’ll be exhibiting at the Fort Worden Wildlife and Nature Exposition in Port Townsend. Hope you see you there.

This little dipper (or water ousel, as my naturalist-mom called it a generation ago) sat here for quite awhile. Dippers dip – up and down, up and down, almost constantly as if doing a little stationary dance, and this one did just that. It’s mate was close by, and as the dipping went on, the little bird made pleasant and soft chattering calls. Then it left my view by simply launching itself over the log and into the water – sinking out of sight. I thought this was a very ‘dipper like’ scene, so here’s my effort to hold on to that memory. The way the water curls over the partially submerged log made for interesting lighting changes.

Dippers are pretty crazy birds. They live year-round, thought the worst winter storms, around clean and cold high mountain streams, nesting behind waterfalls and always sticking closely to their local stream. Summer or winter, these robin-sized birds make their living by jumping into these chilly, sometimes icy, fast-moving crystal-clear waters to walk along the bottom, kicking over stream stones to find aquatic insects. I’ve heard they even hold their wings outstretched to pin them down in the current – which means they are even more exposed to frigid waters. This river (in September) was probably 50 degrees F, having just been released from a glacier up the hill, and it would be the warmest it would ever experience – so you get my drift about ‘crazy’ birds. But then they have feathers, and we don’t, so comparisons are probably idiotic.

This is an ORIGINAL painting in acrylic on stretched linen canvas. It’s 9″ x 12″ and offered for sale for $140, or $180 framed as you see it. Priority mail shipping will add a bit more, as well as sales tax if you’re in the state of Washington. Email us if you’re interested.
Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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

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Artist’s Sketch – Bristlecone Pine mural sketch #2

Ancient Bristlecone Pines
This is straight from the artist’s studio.
You’re receiving this weekly email blog because a friend or associate thought you’d like these occasional postings. This is from Larry Eifert, long-time artist and writer, the guy who has more art in America’s National Parks than any other. These postings show some of the personal inner workings of an artist creating everything from large wall murals to smaller easel canvases. All are about America’s Nature. To not receive these emails any more, simply hit reply and write “unsubscribe” in the subject line.

Bristlecone-sketch

If you click on the image, it should enlarge. If not, go to the blog here.

And so: For years, I’ve wanted to paint the ancient bristlecones of the high and dry western desert mountains. Thought I had it at Wheeler Peak, Great Basin National Park (where I experienced as close to a spiritual moment as I’ve ever had), then later at Utah’s Bryce Canyon, but budget problems or scheduling always got in the way. Now, thanks to a nut (and NOT a pine nut) burning down the visitor center in the Shulman Grove of California’s White Mountains just east of the High Sierra, and the generosity of the Crater Lake Institute that is spearheading a high-elevation pine interpretive program, I’m having a go at the most iconic and picturesque grove of them all.

Here’s an updated version of the initial sketch that has changes from comments from all the bristlecone-pros.

This image shows two ancient trees, both possibly 4500 years of age and living at 10,000 feet of elevation in a super-dry limestone mountain landscape. The bits of dead trees strewn around the ground could be thousands of years older still. Birds and animals shown all live here, at least during the warmer months, bringing the only other sounds to this stark and beautiful landscape besides the singing winds through branches and past needles. It’s quite a place.

As I did with the similar whitebark pine painting last year, I’ll send an update on the progress of this one next week. This is going to be fun.

Thanks for reading. If you’re received this in error, we apologize.
Larry

We have posters and jigsaw puzzles of the last “High-Five” painting (whitebark pine = five-needled high-mountain pine).
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Herring Balls

48 N September 09

Cover art and story – 48 North Magazine, September 2009. (48 North is the premier sailing magazine for the Pacific Northwest) This month features my painting of our little sloop, Sea Witch, sailing by downtown Port Townsend. They also featured my short story about herring balls.
Sorry if this is a long entry, but the story’s a good one and I’ve shortened it abit.

Sea-Witch-Herring-Ball
Fish Balls
by Larry Eifert

An amazingly nice afternoon! Get the sail covers off Sea Witch. Back her out. Head down the channel and out into Port Townsend Bay. Then, get the sails up, sheet’r home. And away we went to the north out into Admiralty Inlet, watching the freighters and navy ships tooing and frowing. A warm northwesterly wind was gently spilling out from the hills of Port Townsend and into the bay. It was tee-shit weather.

We hadn’t made it to the Mid Channel Bank when ahead we could see a great mass of moving birds. Actually, there were several masses of birds, all wheeling and spinning, diving and making a ruckus. “Herring balls” we both said at the same time as we nodded in unison. The birds were going crazy. About fifty glaucous-winged gulls were in each group, and more flying in as fast as they could from other areas nearby. Cormorants, rhino auklets, a few pigeon guillemots and even a bunch of mergansers were all bobbing about, diving, grabbing at others nearby and generally making a “happening” as I use to say 40 years ago. The gulls couldn’t dive very deeply, being very buoyant-birds, so they just gave it their best, plunging from about five feet into the water and grabbing at nothing. “Mine, mine, mine, mine!” they all yelled continuously. It was a riot, and as we approached, none of the birds seemed to care we were there. Then a slow, huge and powerful swirl of water nearby showed something else was going on below the surface. Unseen until now, a sea lion was there as well, circling up from below to concentrate the herring ball close to the surface. A 650 lb, 8 foot-long sea lion can make an impression on everyone, including tiny fish. It was intense – and this was just one of about six riots of wildlife within our view.
Pacific-Herring
Well, I knew what was going on, but maybe you don’t, so here’s what these big events were all about.

Pacific herring are little fish, and if you’re a little fish, you can gain odds for prolonging your life if you stick together. A bunch of little fish can become a very big fishy thing if you hang out together – think teenagers hanging out! One teenager – no big deal, but a half a million of them and you get Woodstock. That’s the herring teenager’s idea too, but there are lots of bigger critters out there trying to dine on them. There’s not a moment’s peace. And while sticking together can increase your odds of individual survival, it also announces to everyone where you’re hanging out.

Most Puget Sound herring spawn from late January to early April, depositing transparent sticky eggs on eelgrass and marine algae in shallow water, mostly in quiet bays and estuaries. Each female deposits between 20,000 and 40,000 eggs a year, and it’s these sheer numbers that insure the herring’s survival. These sticky eggs cling to eelgrass stems, and, after about 14 days, hatch into small transparent larvae about a half-inch long. The little critters are at the mercy of currents as they drift about, but the larvae that survive grow until after 3 months when they are about 1½” long, when they metamorphose into adult fish, eventually growing to become six to nine inches long. Think sardines in that square little can, but bigger. Most of us know Pacific herring from bait shop freezers, where we see them lined up in blue Styrofoam trays.

On the second or third year, herring normally return to their original spawning grounds. Unlike salmon, spawners don’t normally die but continue to spawn in successive years, although most don’t make it past five years of age. A few may live to the ripe old age of fifteen. However, it’s been estimated that, for every 10,000 herring eggs, ONE adult will live long enough to return to spawn, such is the level of predation on these little fish. In Puget Sound, we, as the dominate prey species, have decided that spawning herring make up 18 different “management stocks” (because we, as herders of the world’s critters need to count all this stuff so we know how much to “take”). In the past, herring have been caught for food, then caught and ground up for oil and pet food. Some of the eggs are used (in Canada) as high-end gourmet food for Asian markets. The reality of it is that the many seabirds, marine mammals and larger fish species have a greater need and eat these important little fish to help them survive. Fewer orcas these days? Well, it might be that a bunch of us dropped our anchors in those wonderfully quiet back bays where eel grass beds live, our 45lb Danforths tearing up the bay’s bottom and depriving herring of good quality habitat for them to lay their eggs. Or, more likely, shoreline trophy home owners have altered the spawning grounds off their front yards by adding elaborate stone walls and lawns that use chemicals that then run off into the nearby waters – killing the ecosystem they spent zillions of dollars to live next to. Fewer herring means less food for salmon, an important food for orcas. Fewer herring also means less food for orcas, too, which catch them the same way seals do. In Puget Sound, 60-70% of the herring are eaten by larger critters each year, and the numbers of herring is decreasing each year. Get the picture?

We watched the herring action for awhile longer as we sailed past, then headed over to the next ball of birds and fish. Out of that cloud of wheeling and screaming gulls, a lone rhinoceros auklet flew by at top speed holding a 3” flapping herring in its bill. You could almost imagine the bird’s thoughts of “I got mine, now I’m getting out of this party as fast as my little black wings can carry me.”
Rhino-Auklet
Well, so what? So what’s the big deal with watching a bunch of birds? To me, it’s a matter of the quality of life. Sure it was a pleasant day for a sail. The scenery was beautiful, the company wonderful, the experience memorable – but experiencing the herring balls made it much more. We had watched nature at a very close range, beyond the beach and parking lots, beyond the signs that say: Wildlife Viewing Area. Out here on the waters of Puget Sound, a daysail can turn into a real experience if you just look for it. Many sailors might have just sailed by, maybe only worried their sails might get a dab of bird doo on them. Some wouldn’t have even noticed, for it seems that many of us have diminished attentions these days to the natural world around us. We spend most of our lives chained indoors, watching nature on monitors or TVs, watching movies about penguin marches or watching others do what we once took for granted we’d do ourselves which is to seek outdoor experiences. Well, I’m telling you those experiences are still there, still waiting for us, and still exciting to see when we let them into our lives. I’d like to think that, with a good-old recession now altering our grandiose lifestyles a bit, we may begin to think about returning to the old ways of enjoying ourselves. Get outside, get in a boat, get your eyes open again and see a few things. You might find you like yourself more for these experiences.

If you want more of this stuff, you can click here to go to our index page of more published stories.

Check out 48-North magazine completely online.

Link here to the same story on our website, larryeifert.com.

If you’d like to see why I write about this ol’ boat of ours, here’s more about Sea Witch.

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Black-tailed Deer – Port Townsend Trail

Eifert_Deer_Larry_Scott

Just west of our marina and downtown Port Townsend, an old railroad grade goes along the bay before turning inland. This is now a public trail, part of the great Northwest Trail that goes from Cape Avala, west of here, all the way to Glacier National Park in Montana – three states and 1200 miles away. And while it’s a hiking trail like the John Muir, Pacific Crest or Appalachian Trails, here you have to climb on our ferry for a few miles to keep going east.

Coming into town, there’s one place under the bluffs where, late in the afternoon, black-tailed deer like to congregate. You eyes focus on the marvelous views ahead and they often miss the fact you’re being watched yourself – but Port Townsend deer are pretty tame, having been raised from birth on the garden roses, apples and all manor of tasty plants carefully bought and planted by the locals.

This is a larger painting today. This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on archival board, 14″ x 10″ and $650 unframed. If you’d just like the painting framed, that makes it a total of $690 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is an ORIGINAL painting, NOT a print. Email us for details.

To check the availability of the other originals I’ve blogged about the past few weeks, check the blog here and go down the listings.
Thanks for reading this week.
Larry EifertClick 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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