Tag Archives: Wildlife

New Published Story

Northwestern Crows Published

This was published last month in 48 North magazine for my monthly contribution. We have a pair of these guys nesting in our woods, so it seems appropriate.

Here’s the story: And just why is this guy doing a crow page in a sailing magazine? Because they’re not just crows, a common bird that everyone knows, but a Northwestern crow. Yes, we have our own crow species! Looks exactly the same but smaller, ‘KAWWW’ sounds the same but deeper and hoarser voiced. If you’re on or around salt water in the Salish Sea and north all the way to Alaska, likely the all-black beach bird you’re looking at is a Northwestern crow. Problem is, you can’t be sure because in urban areas they now mingle, mix and interbred – but once you get to the Olympic Peninsula, you can be fairly confident you’re seeing one of these guys.

By far, the best trait you can look for are their clamming skills. Browsing the shoreline wrack for anything edible, they’ll often pick up a live cockle or clam, fly straight up to about 30 feet, change course to level off – and drop the shell to the rocks below. Most of the time the shell breaks on the first try and down they go for lunch. Evidently they level off to see where the shell lands so they can grab it before a gull does. Normal American crows don’t seem to do this, just Northwestern crows. On some beaches, I’d have to say that of birds on the beaches, there may be more Northwestern crows than gulls.

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.

New Painting Post

Summer Return of the Prairie – a new painting

Last week I posted another outdoor wayside panel – the spring version of this same place. Now, here’s the second panel about summer at the Naas Preserve on Whidbey Island prairie – prescribed burns, summer flowers and pollinators, a real riot of color. They’re both going to be installed at just north of my home in Port Townsend. Not easy making a nice painting with a fire in it, but I’ve actually painted several fire images before for a National Wildlife Refuge in North Dakota. This one was much more fun.

These paintings require lots of field trips and research time. It’s the best part of it, with both of us joining forces to figure out details from white-crowned sparrows to goldenrod. Sure, field guides tell me what the thing looks like, but not how they attach to the ground, or how they look in summer when the landscape is drying out, or how does the sparrow grab onto the goldenrod as it’s singing. Here’s Nancy working on some strawberry plants that the Whidbey – Camano Land Trust is growing in a small nursery at the site. Later, I put all these images on my tablet for reference at the easel.

So what’s the point of these outdoor panels? To me, they’re like an an outdoor art gallery. Some trails have a couple of dozen of these panels, and I love to imagine people hiking along enjoying the nature around them but maybe not understanding it. Behold, here’s a nice painting with some words to help them out. While I still sell  paintings to private collectors (who then hang them on their walls, never to be seen in public again), I think I see these outdoor efforts might be a higher calling. It’s public art in the best way, don’t you think?

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.

Murals

Spring in a Vanishing Ecosystem – a new painting

Click and this will enlarge in your browser

Two new wayside panels went off to the fabricator this week. Here’s my favorite. Both are 24″ x 48″ and will live their lives right here on this lovely bit of nature called Nasse’s Prairie on Whidbey Island, Washington. Part of the Whidbey Island Land Trust’s rather heroic efforts to restore this bit of natural prairie on the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve where some extremely rare flowers live. In fact, golden paintbrush is here and is only found in twelve places, two right here on this prairie. The original painting is 24″ x 48″, acrylic on hardboard. Thanks, everyone at the Land Trust, but especially Mark, who helped me in delightful ways and never once got ‘postal’ on me.

And here’s Nancy with her pack full of camera gear taking the reference photos for this painting. Looks like I got the colors about right in the painting above.

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.

New Painting Post

Song Sparrow study

A new painting today, a small study of one of my meadow-buddies – an LBJ (Little Brown Job – as a very skilled birder once referred to them once).

Song sparrows are fairly common little birds, but their spirit in singing makes up for a lack of rareness. I think I remember reading that there are something like 50 separate races of these guys across America, and each bird can know up to 1000 variations of it’s song. The one common thread for all of them is that the song, no matter where it’s singer lives, ends with four notes resembling Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 opening, TA DA DA da. And so there’s your nature class for the day. Nancy says I cannot go an hour without attempting to teach something to someone! Okay, I admit it!

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 framed. Outside edge of the frame is about 12″ x 15″.  I also have traditional oak frames.

This custom frame has a triple liner and glass. Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week. Send this to someone who might appreciate what I’m painting and tell them to sign up. I’m trying to expand my list. An email will work.
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.

New Painting Post, Wildlife

Western Tanager study

Western-Tanager

Nancy has put oranges out by the pond for these birds. I think we get the very same pair back each year – after a winter holiday all the way down in Central America. While the female lacks the red head feathers, I’ve read that the male gets them from eating certain insects – along with berries from our cherry trees. We gladly give up our fruit for the companionship of this pair – and so I painted the male on the hunt.

And here’s the frame it’s currently in (and comes with the painting). I think the color is a tad off on the photo. The wood is more blond, painting less blue – I took it on the porch on a sunny day, so things got funky.

Western-Tanager-framed

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 framed. Outside edge of the frame is about 12″ x 15″.
This custom frame has a triple liner and glass. Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week. Send this to someone who might appreciate what I’m painting and tell them to sign up. I’m trying to expand my list. An email will work.
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.

Murals

Eifert on the Washington Ferries for the Summer

2015-Getaway-Cover

The Port Townsend Leader newspaper puts out a free summer magazine for visitors, and this issue has a piece of my Mount Rainier mural on the cover. That’s fun for sure, but they also used a bunch of smaller wildlife paintings scattered throughout the inside, making the entire thing sort of an Eifert Gallery in print. These magazines are on all the local ferries and in the terminals, lodging and visitor centers, a nice thing for awhile until I get sick seeing this painting everywhere I travel. Thanks, Marian, for being so delicate when you chopped up the painting and moved a few critters around. Here is the entire magazine online.

And here’s the original painting in the Ohanapecosh Visitor Center, Mount Rainier National Park.

Rainier-installation

I did this painting back in the day when I used to just dance into park offices and offer my services – as if I were somebody. I was cheap and completely unaware of the ‘rules’ of RFQs, IDIQs, funding sources and liability insurance policy constraints. I’d just go in and say “you need this” and they’d say, “sure, we’ll take it out of this fund here in the bottom drawer”.  Now? Well, don’t get me started.

Thanks for reading this week. Send this to someone who might appreciate what I’m painting and tell them to sign up. I’m trying to expand my list. An email will work.
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.

Murals, Wildlife

Point Reyes National Seashore

Point-Reyes-final

I think some of you will say “wait a New York minute, I’ve seen this.” True, but this week I was in a client’s office looking at my website on her computer and this painting wasn’t there. Embarrassing.  There were posts of progress, of locations last year, the sketch – but I spaced out the posting of the final version. I keep this stuff on my blog/website for reference, like a catalog – and with almost 500 pages it’s a handful to keep track of. So bear with me while I add this one from last year to it.

If you haven’t seen this place, it’s Point Reyes National Seashore just north of San Francisco. A landscape full of atmosphere and history for me (I’ve hiked it, rode a horse through it, sailed by it in my own boat twice). We arrived at Headquarters and asked what they wanted in the painting. The beach, lighthouse, fog, ocean, redwoods, Doug-fir, Drakes Estuary, Tamales Bay, about 50 sq miles of coastal scrub with all the critters. Nothing to it! The painting hangs in the main visitor center, the back of the new park map features it, and now it’s  here.

Finished map and mural.

finished-maps=web

Labels were added on a draft design that wasn’t used.Point-reyes-labels

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.

New Painting Post, Wildlife

Some Little Bits of Art for a Prairie Exhibit

In these posts I always try to show what I’ve currently been painting. This week it was finishing up over two dozen of these little insets for outdoor wayside panels – Land Trust on nearby Whidbey Island. (thanks, Mark and Pat) I like the looseness of these illustrations – telling a story, yet artistic enough as stand-alone little paintings.  Here are a few of them.

Vole
Vole in the grass

Bumblebee-and-Golden-Paintbrush
Bumblebee on Golden Paintbrush, one of the Northwest’s rarest flowers

Chorus-Frog
Chorus Frog – they’re singing tonight.

Rear-Admiral-and-Selfheal
Red Admiral and Selfheal

Swallowtail-and-Aster
Swallowtail and Aster

A friend and painter recently asked me if I ever tired of pushing all this paint around flat surfaces. I had to think, no, never – but pushing keys on this silly computer, dealing with all the amazing amount of stupid details of an art business, it just drives both of us nuts. Give me a trail, a sketchpad, a sunny day and I’m in heaven.

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.

New Published Story

Anemones – A 48 North published story

2015-2-Fish-Anemones

This was my 48 North magazine story recently. Below is the text that went with this ‘sketchbook’ image. Almost forgot to post it! Too much art coming out of here.

Like a scene straight out of ‘Little Shop of Horrors,’ the brilliant red and yellow flower unfolds, over 100 petals waving in the current, a strawberry red delight for a passing perch to nibble on. A young perch moves closer, then closer still, and suddenly receives a stunning jolt that renders it useless. Through the haze, the fish vaguely sees those beautiful petals reach out and pull it towards the flower’s center, where once a flat pad was, now a mouth opens. A delight it’s not, but a splendid sea-predator whose tentacles first sting small fish, shrimp and even crabs, and then entirely consumes them in one slow-motion swallow. Fish go in tail first, and they can turn a crab around so claws are facing away before proceeding.

It gets better. The fish-eating anemone can switch between being male and female – and may live to be 100-plus years of age. Sure they look like beautiful flowers, are related to coral and jellyfishes, but at 10 inches across, these hunters are some of the Salish Sea’s largest anemones. But everyone has a softer side, and the fish-eating anemone may also play host to small fish, allowing six-inch painted greenlings a safe harbor. Leaving the protection of the anemone by day, at night the greenling sleeps without harm right over the anemone’s mouth on the central oral disc. The fish are safe here because anemones use their tentacles for defense against predators like sea stars or snails.

Thanks for reading this week. Send this to someone who might appreciate what I’m painting and tell them to sign up. I’m trying to expand my list. An email will work.
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.

New Painting Post

Ruby-crowned Kinglet study

Ruby-crowned-Kinglet

Sorry, this little painting is sold – thanks Matt. When I painted it a couple of months ago, it went out the door before I could post it here. And then I completely forgot about it. Acrylic on board, it’s a little study of a Ruby Crowned Kinglet. The thing about these little birds, at least to me, is that they’re so fleeting, so flitty and nervous, that I never truly get to appreciate the top little red beret hat on the males. Luckily, paintings hold still for as long as you want so you can check it out.

Ruby-crowned-Kinglet-framed

Short but sweet this week. Consider it catching up on things, a spring cleaning event when the cherries, currents, trilliums and bluebells are all in bloom.

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.