Rigor Vitae: Life Unyielding

THE MANDATORY FOURTH OF JULY POLITICAL POST

2009-07-04T14:55:00.000-07:00

As in much of the country, conservatives are throwing “Tea Parties” here today in protest of what they see as irresponsible spending of federal funds. I'm sympathetic with the basic gist of their gripe and agree that only fools spend their money faster than they earn it (such behavior, of course, is always temporary). I notice though, that the loudest voices are the same ones shouting “drill baby drill,” and can't for the life of me figure how they reconcile their monetary and natural resource policies. However much you love it, the former is the abstract element of the two, and is wholly dependent on the latter. Despite my sympathy with the conservatives' denouncing our living beyond our financial means, I'm still more inclined to protest our using up our real resources faster than they're replenished. At this point it would be appropriate to post a Bald Eagle painting, but I've never painted one. Another big endemic American bird will have to do. Happy Fourth of July!
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illustration: CALIFORNIA CONDOR (2008) acrylic 30" x 20"

ART OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM XIV

2009-06-12T22:36:00.000-07:00

Today, Saturday, June 13th, The Bennington Center for the Arts will host the opening of their annual exhibition of animal art, Art of the Animal Kingdom. This year's Special Guest Artist is the newly-Canadianized Terry Isaac who will give a presentation at 11 in the morning. It promises to be entertaining and enlightening, but that's just too early for me. The exhibition,which is accompanied by a full-colored catalog, runs through July 26th.
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illustration: RUFFED LEMUR & PANTHER CHAMELEON (2007) acrylic 18" x 24"

WILDLIFE ART JOURNAL

2009-06-12T22:27:00.000-07:00

Back in 1988, when I decided to try to make it as an animal painter, my work had never been shown in public and I was as ignorant of the outside world of wildlife art as it was of me. The task of changing that reality seemed daunting, but I had a secret weapon at my disposal. Wildlife Art News was a bi-monthly periodical that featured articles about artists, exhibitions and the natural world. Like most of its ilk, it was almost offensively shy about being offensively denigrating, but I couldn't have asked for a better window through which to peer and plan my attack. New clues to understanding this world were offered with each issue and myriad opportunities for the aspiring wildlife artist were enumerated before me. Before long, the whole staff became good friends, both professionally and personally. Without the nice coverage they gave my work, I would likely be scrubbing urinals instead of typing this post. In the early oughts, the publisher, Bob Koenke, retired and sold the magazine, which moved from being a labor of love to one of commerce, and ultimately mailed out its final issue in the summer of '07.

After nearly two years of absence, frequent Wildlife Art News contributor Todd Wilkinson has launched an online journal to fill its vacant niche. Todd, whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Christian Science Monitor, etc., and has published a number of books, including Science Under Siege, expects this new publication, WILDLIFE ART JOURNAL, to be broader in scope than was its predecessor. He hopes to showcase more iconoclastic artwork from artists working in every part of the globe. So far, it appears to be off to a nice start.
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illustration: LANJAK DAWN (2009) acrylic 20" x 30"

FALCONER ON THE EDGE

2009-05-07T11:29:00.001-07:00

I grew up in Emigration Canyon, Utah, which, 15 years earlier, had been a small, rural, working-class town with a distinctive culture. Fifteen years later and it would become a rich bedroom community that would all but extirpate that old culture. The community I knew seemed much closer to the former than the latter, but that could have been because I naturally gravitated towards those elements. One of those distinctive cultural peccadilloes was falconry, a practice that many local boys indulged in. More often than not, it was a passing fancy, but for a number of us, the rare privilege of developing close personal relationships with complex, wild predators led to insight and obsession that would shape the rest of our lives. None of us were quite like Steve Chindgren, though. His passion for falconry and his drive to excel in it reached an almost absurd level. By the time he was 20, he was hawking game more successfully than most, and 37 years later, it's probably safe to say that no person alive has taken more wild game with falcons.

Meanwhile, in upstate New York, writer Rachel Dickinson was trying to understand her falconer husband's own obsessions. She decided to contact a second falconer – a stranger – and study him as her own subject, get to know him, write about him, and hopefully, grow to understand falconry. She couldn't have picked a better subject when she called Steve, and this book is the result of her journey.

It's an odd experience to read a book about a good friend whom you've known all your life. Dickinson draws a portrait that's quite accurate, though. I spotted a few factual errors, but they're pretty insignificant ones. (For example, two long-dead Gyrfalcons, one gray and the other dark-phased, are both described as “white.”) A number of different routes were available to an author seeking to write a book about a complicated guy like Steve, and, although she touches a number different topics (his efforts at Sage Grouse conservation and raptor breeding, his feuds with the law, and how falconry has molded him philosophically), Dickinson seems mostly interested in how the sport has affected his life, both professional and, especially, familial, and how he and his wife and daughters have worked around it. My own preference would have put a tighter focus on Steve's philosophy, and the supreme paradox of his life, as I see it, how the Sage Grouse and their habitat, which mean so much to him, are threatened by the petroleum industry that makes it possible for him to hawk that wonderful country.

Not only does Dickinson render Chindgren in a fully recognizable way, but she does the same for the art of falconry. Towards the end of the book she wonders if she'll ever really understand the discipline that captured her husband so fully, but in her prose she displays that, on some level at least, she gets it.
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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 240 pages 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches 11.2 ounces

PAINTERS OF UTAH'S CANYONS AND DESERTS

2009-05-06T16:43:00.000-07:00

Strangely enough, last Friday (my birthday) saw the release of two books with particular personal significance for me. Painters of Utah's Canyons and Deserts was timed to coincide with the centennial celebration of Zions National Park in the state's southwest. The fact of its concurrence with the news of what seems to be the solution to the Everett Ruess mystery is purely serendipitous. Ruess, a California native, was an artist, printmaker, writer and vagabond who loved the Utah redrock, where he famously vanished nearly 75 years ago at the age of 20. Denny Belson, acting on a story his grandfather had told him, found a human crevice burial near Comb Ridge, on the Navajo Reservation, over 100 miles east of what was thought to be Ruess' last camp. Belson's grandfather, a Navajo, claimed to have witnessed the murder and robbery of a white man by two Utes in the '30s, and had returned to the site to bury the man. Only days ago, forensic analysis determined the remains to be Ruess'.

His story is one of the most compelling, but he is only one of dozens of great artists who've been inspired by the spectacular, rugged country of the Colorado Plateau. Two of the state's most respected art historians, Vern Swanson, PhD, director of the Springville Museum of Art, and Donna Poulton, PhD, associate curator at the University of Utah Museum of Fine Arts, have compiled this weighty volume with over 300 paintings, chronicling the artistic depiction of our state's canyon country. The unfortunate tradition with such histories is to begin the tale with the in-migration of white settlers, and this one is no exception. The earliest work dates to the period of the first Mormon pioneers' arrival. Still, the history detailed from that period on can only be described as comprehensive. The illustrations are well selected and reproduced. I was especially pleased with the several plates of my favorite Utah artist, Doug Snow, who merges abstract and representational painting more successfully than anyone else I know. The accompanying text is well researched and nicely written, except for the fact that my name isn't spelled exactly right, but this isn't the first book to have erred there.
Two upcoming events will celebrate this book: Tomorrow evening (May 7th) at 6:30, there will be a short lecture and a book signing at Williams Fine Art on 2nd East and South Temple, and on Friday, May 15th a small exhibition and book signing at Ken Sanders' Rare Books on 2nd East and Broadway.
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Gibbs Smith Publisher 12.8 x 11 x 1.3 inches 304 pages 5.6 lbs.

MASTERPIECES IN MINIATURE

2009-04-30T21:30:00.000-07:00

This weekend, Masterpieces in Miniature opens at Picture This! gallery in Sherwood Park, Alberta. The show, featuring paintings less than 155 square inches by 40 invited North American artists, officially opens on Saturday, May 2nd, and runs through the public drawing on May 21st. The entire show, including my "Wilson's Bird of Paradise" (above) can be seen online, and intent-to-purchase forms can be filed over the internet over the duration of the show.
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illustration: WILSON'S BIRD OF PARADISE (2008) acrylic 6" x 9"

QUIZ RESULTS

2009-04-30T10:27:00.001-07:00

Having such a smart readership is both gratifying and terrifying. Yesterday the Rigor Vitae ID quiz was trounced once again within the span of a couple of hours. Obviously, the photo was of a softshell turtle of the family Trionychidae, but closer identification was much trickier. The heavy lifting was done this time by Neil of Microecos, who correctly identified the subject as belonging to the genus Cyclanorbis, the African flap-shell turtles. I was unable to honor his request for a beetle box, and his coin-toss for the species came up tails. Had he done a Google image search for "Cyclanorbis," he'd have seen that I'd posted the picture earlier with the proper ID, which is what I suspect he did right after the fact. That proper ID (C. senegalensis) was supplied by Andrew R. Special thanks to hand-model Paco, whose distinctive arm-tone seemed to direct everyone to the correct continent. Aside from the prefrontal bones, the Senegal Flapshell is smaller and darker, with a narrower and differently-shaped shell (it also has distinctive throat callosities which aren't visible in the picture). No votes came in for the related and poorly-known genus Cyloderma, but C.J. covered the last base by taking up the card for Trionyx triunguis, the African Softshell (pictured above). A big applause to you all. I think it's only fair to declare the quiz a tie, so if Andrew and Neil can email me at cpbvkATjunoDOTcom with their subject requests and mailing addresses, I'll get to work on their drawings.
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photo taken in southern Cameroon by CPBvK

ANOTHER QUIZ

2009-04-29T08:50:00.001-07:00

Grab your field guides, it's quiz time again. Last month's puzzler turned out to be easier than I expected; Clare barely gave me time to punch the "publish" button before correctly identifying it, with several correct responses following quickly behind him. This time, then, we'll try something devoid of feathers -- still, not a terribly hard one. The creature in the photo above is typical of its species. The first person to comment with the correct species before the end of May 6th will receive a pencil drawing of the subject of their choice. Good luck!
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photo by CPBvK

THE ARRAIGNMENT OF TIM DECHRISTOPHER

2009-04-27T16:41:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow morning at 11:45, Tim DeChristopher will be arraigned at the Frank E. Moss Federal Courthouse in Salt Lake City.

For those who don't know, Tim is a 27-year-old economics student at the University of Utah, who became a sort of folk hero around here last December. In one of its final acts, the Bush administration set up a last-minute BLM auction for oil and gas exploration leases in rural Utah. Tim, with the sort of financial backing typical of undergrad students, signed up as a bidder and won 13 parcels near Canyonlands and Arches National Parks, totaling 22,000 acres, drove up the prices of numerous other parcels, and threw the entire auction into confusion. His total bill: $1.7 million.

I speak for many when I say I wish I had the inspiration and chutzpah to have engaged in such elegant sabotage. Tim caught us all by the imagination, and his support from the community has been a wonderful thing to watch. A website was set up to collect funds to cover the down payment on his BLM invoice, which was raised, though the government refused to accept it, saying it was late. On February 1, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar ruled that the auction had been improper, and ordered the BLM not to cash any of the checks. It's hard to say for sure, But I imagine Tim's act of civil disobedience played a big part in that decision. Even so, Brett Tolman, Utah's US Attorney, has decided to charge him with two felony counts punishable by up to ten years. Tim's attorney, Pat Shea, says he expects his client to plead not guilty tomorrow before the federal magistrate.

At 11:00am, DeChristopher's supporters will gather at Library Square in Salt Lake (4th South & 2nd East). Samba Gringa will entertain and former NASA climatologist James Hansen will speak, then we'll all march over to the federal courthouse for a silent protest until Tim's arraignment. After that, it will be back to Library Square, where Hansen and DeChristopher will speak.

All too often, activists are hotheads whose philosophies are weakly constructed and whose actions are poorly thought-through. Tim is one of those rare individuals who not only has the courage of his convictions, but who's scrutinized those convictions thoroughly. We need to publicly demonstrate the civic support behind this thoughtful young man and not allow him to waste his next decade behind bars. See you there.

A NEW TIME-LAPSE PAINTING CLIP

2009-04-26T10:11:00.000-07:00

I've given the time-lapse treatment to a new painting. Feeling more confident with the process, I tackled a major painting this time: A pair of courting Crowned Flying Lizards (Draco cornutus) in the foreground compete for our attention with a big old male Orang-utan (Pongo pygmaeus) calling from his sleeping nest in the background. In celebration of getting it done, I've used some real music instead of the silly original compositions I've relied on in the past. Of all the great Salt Lake musical combos that I've listened to over the years, my absolute favorite was Thirsty Alley. We're favored with 1½ wonderful compositions, I Formed the World with my Tongue, I Cleared the Bar with my Diaphragm and Haloumi (Part II).

THE ASSASSIN DOCK

2009-04-01T08:59:00.000-07:00

(originally posted two years ago)
I'm devoting today's post to a very unusual arthropod that's rather common in the immediated vicinity of my home, although I've never seen it anywhere else. The Assassin Dock (Lappazoon sarcophagus) displays an extreme sexual dimorphism: the small, flying males live but a few days, fluttering weakly upon the breeze. The much larger females are sessile, saprophagic, plant-like creatures anchored to the soil by their rootlike heads.
Every other year, these females, which can reach over a meter in height, "flower," giving rise to numerous burr-like sexual bodies. Attached weakly to their stalks, the mature sexual bodies break away if snagged on the fur or feathers of a passing animal, and begin growing "feeding tubes," which pierce the skin of the victim, secreting a potent toxin, while extracting nutrients. The injection kills the host in a few days, and the sexual body, after being fertilized, scatters eggs about the corpse. The larval Assassin Docks feed on the flesh of their host, and overwinter as cysts. Most larvae metamorphose into mature males the following summer. Female larvae live in the enriched soil for two seasons before metamorphosing, and "sprouting" from the ground.
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illustration: "ASSASSIN DOCK" (2004) watercolor 24" x 18"

A FLASH OF LIGHT IN A MOMENT OF DARKNESS

2009-03-29T16:02:00.000-07:00

Last night I shut off the power, locked the door, and wandered through the neighborhood, following the lead of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), who suggest a cessation of non-essential energy use from 8:30 to 9:30pm on the last Saturday of each March. I left a couple of minutes early, hoping to witness a perceptible dimming of the city at the appointed moment, but saw only a normal March evening in Salt Lake City, with the glare of streetlights, automobile headlights and well-lit parking lots brightening the pallid bellies of migrating sandpiper flocks as they passed overhead. Even the newly vacant shell of a Circuit City continued to favor its interior with perpetual illumination. From my vantage, the tall buildings downtown were hidden, but a friend tells me that only the Mormon Temple darkened in deference.

The point of Earth Hour, as the observation has been christened, is to bring about greater consciousness of our everyday energy-consumption. Begun two years ago in Australia, it is said to have caught on a bit already in certain parts of the world. This year, the Swedish power transmission authority estimated a 2.1% drop in the nation's power consumption during Earth Hour, and reports of Toronto's decrease range as high as 15.1%. For the most part, though, Earth Hour was met with a big collective yawn. The mainstream attitude was reflected in a number of snarky articles; the smartest one I saw came from the Libertarian think tank The Competitive Enterprise Institute, who lampooned the idea by vaunting a simultaneous observation of their own: “Human Achievement Hour,” where we're encouraged not to change our behavior in any way. The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto made a similar, feebler effort, and Keith Lokitch, PhD, that Ayn Rand Institute stalwart best remembered for his fallacious smear campaign of Rachel Carson on her 100^th birthday, had his own suggestion:

“Try spending a month shivering in the dark without heating, electricity, refrigeration; without power plants or generators; without any of the labor-saving, time-saving, and therefore life-saving products that industrial energy makes possible. an entire month without fossil fuel.”

His tone was decidedly tongue-in-cheek, but his recommendation was one that would do any of us a world of good. Before they die, Dr. Lokitch's grandchildren may well bring those very words to life, courtesy of the philosophy that Grandpa jovially celebrated.

Proud they may be of their grasp of the obvious link between porcine energy consumption and porcine standard of living, but the critics of Earth Hour miss the important points altogether. Like a secular Shabbat, last night's ritual benefited the individual, without intending a direct solution to global problems. Too few people ever spend an hour quietly reflecting on the issues raised by Lokitch, Taranto and the CEI, and too many find the very notion distasteful. During last night's peripatetic reverie, it occurred to me that a mere five minutes might be easier for the uninitiated to swallow, to eventually acquire the taste. I imagined for a mere three hundred seconds, an entire population moving with single intention, dousing their lights and their televisions, closing their storefronts and stifling their ignitions. Putting aside the concerns of ambition and commerce, stepping outdoors into the blackness and reveling, many of them for the very first time, at the simple beauty of the Milky Way.
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illustration: MARKEA NEURANTHA (1997) acrylic 30" x 15"

SPACEBALLS

2009-03-25T11:00:00.000-07:00

Of all the powerful, innate drives that guide our behavior, my vote for favorite goes to that drive to understand the natural world. We've come a long way since the days of a geocentric universe composed of four elements. The universe described in Sir Isaac Newton's Principia gave us a sensible, useful model for over two centuries that only began to fray at the edges upon the closest scrutiny. During the 20^th century, troublemakers like Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg and Bohr left us with two irreconcilable models, one describing physics on a grand, cosmic level and the other describing it on the most minute level. Later physicists, the perpetrators of Superstring and M-Theories, snuck through the back door, designing elaborate algorithms to mathematically reconcile the theories of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity.

Science periodically goes through awkward stages. Our recently acquired skills at genetic analysis will one day lead to a biological nomenclature that describes the relationships of living things far better than it ever did before, but for the moment it's left us with a confused taxonomy that's all but useless. Similarly, physics at the beginning of the 21^st century paints an insane picture of an 11-dimensional universe where space and time are woven into a fabric that's curved into higher dimensions by matter, which on the subatomic level cannot be understood or predicted, but can be affected by simply observing it. At its very core, according to current physics, nature makes no sense.

Obviously, the picture still lacks a piece or two.

It's possible that an important missing piece is the quantization of space-time, or, the idea that space itself is structured the same way as matter: of tiny “particles.” Hartland Snyder first proposed this idea in the 1940s, but didn't receive much attention for it. When viewed through the hindsight of M-Theory, though, Quantized Space-time creates a common-sense model of quantum mechanics that seems to explain away all of the last century's counter-intuitive observations. In this model, space is composed of particles, or quanta, one Planck length (about 1.6 x 10^-35 meters) in diameter, randomly moving about in superspace, much like the gas molecules that make up our atmosphere. The 11 dimensions required by Superstring and M Theory can now be defined. The three familiar dimensions, x, y and z, can pinpoint a location no more accurately than to identify a single space quantum. To describe that quantum's place in superspace, one needs another set of x, y and z coordinates, and to describe locations within the quantum, another set of three. The final two dimensions are temporal ones, one for space and one for superspace. In this model, the gravitational curvature of space described by Einstein is nothing more than an increased density of space quanta. One can visualize the particle/wave duality of light once it is seen as a wave propagating through space quanta. The bizarre behavior of subatomic particles becomes understandable when one visualizes those particles interacting with space quanta. The Quantized Space-time model restores logic to nature.

Salt Lake whiz-kid Thad Roberts recently found himself with some extra time on his hands, and he put it to good use writing an excellent book on this topic, Einstein's Intuition. Thad's still fine-tuning his manuscript, but he's ready to share his ideas with us, and he'll be giving a free lecture at the main Salt Lake Public Library on 4^th South and 2^nd East, that promises to be fascinating and exciting. Thad's a skilled communicator, and he believes that everyone will walk away being able to visualize 11 dimensions and the Quantized Space-time model. The presentation will be geared to the lay person and free of obscure jargon and advanced mathematics. It's bound to be the best two and a half hours you'll spend next week.

When: Monday, March 30, 2009 6:30pm – 9:00pm
Downtown City Library; 210 E. 400 S.; Salt Lake City, Utah
Conference Room A
Seating will be limited. Please RSVP to qst AT moebiusgroupe DOT com to reserve a seat.
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digital illustration by CPBvK

KLEINSCHMIDT'S FALCON

2009-03-23T08:23:00.000-07:00

In 1925, three pale, unusual-looking young falcons, two males and one female, were removed by otter-hunters from an eyrie in southern Chile, near Punta Arenas. They were sold to M. Carlos Strauss, a German animal dealer living in Punta Arenas, who shipped them to the Münster Zoo. All three lived through their first moult, and their skins survive today as study specimens, two in a museum in Münster, and the remaining male in Bonn. Little is known about the lives of the Münster specimens, but the Bonn bird is known to have died at the Münster zoo in October 1932, but not before being paired with a female Austral Peregrine (Falco peregrinus cassini), who laid a clutch of eggs that he was reported to have incubated, one of the first records of attempted nesting by captive falcons. He was ultimately examined by ornithologist Otto Kleinschmidt, who at first doubted the bird's South American origin, mistaking him for a Barbary Falcon (F. pelegrinoides). In 1929, Kleinschmidt described it as a new species, F. kreyenborgi, after the falconer who had brought the bird to his attention.

It was over a decade before another one of these birds would be collected, and taxonomists argued vehemently over the status of the species. Some called it a subspecies of Peregrine (in a 1939 paper, Kleinschmidt himself referred to it as Falco peregrinus kreyenborgi) or Barbary Falcon, others thought it was allied to the Gyrfalcon-Saker-Prairie Falcon complex. Some believed the birds simply represented a single aberrant clutch. Careful measurements of the specimens revealed them to be morphologically identical to the local Patagonian Peregrines, but their plumage differed so radically that most taxonomists hesitated to lump them together.

Further data on Kleinschmidt's Falcon were slow in coming. On April 7, 1940, the eminent Swedish-Argentine ornithologist C. C. Olrog collected specimen number four, followed by a fifth, a juvenile, by Károly Kovaks in August 1961. On March 10, 1979, David Ellis and R. L. Glinski took the first known photograph of a Kleinschmidt's Falcon, and in December of the same year, my homeboy Terry Roundy took the first known movie footage. From 1979 through 1981, the field work in Santa Cruz province, Argentina, of Ellis, Glinski and Roundy, along with C. M. Anderson and Cesar Peres Garat provided a solution to the mystery. Observations of nine eyries revealed mixed pairs of typical Peregrines with Kleinschmidt's as well as normal Peregrine pairs yielding phenotypical Kleinshmidt's. F. kreyenborgi was not a valid species after all, but instead just an alternate color phase in the only known case of polymorphism in the Peregrine, and evidently a recessive trait with a high level of heterozygosity in the population.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that this should have been the case, but it was common knowledge at the time that Peregrines were a monomorphic species, and such dogma can effectively block one's vision. The names “Kleinschmidt's Falcon” and Falco kreyenborgi have been relegated to the history books; the preferred name for the color phase is “pallid falcon,” but those old monikers still serve as effective reminders to always give the obvious the consideration it deserves.
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Pallid Falcon photograph taken last year in southern Argentina by Steven R. Chindgren

MERLIN UPDATE

2009-03-20T10:34:00.000-07:00

Two years ago today, I saw a small falcon spring from atop a power pole to pursue unseen prey. It was nearly dusk, and I saw the bird for but a few seconds, but its flight was far too powerful to have belonged to a Kestrel (Falco sparverius), the common little falcon of this area. Illuminated by the setting sun, it appeared quite ruddy, and I suspected it may have been an escaped Hobby (F. subbuteo) or other exotic falcon. The next dawn found me back in the neighborhood, where I soon saw the bird again, which I was able to identify as a Merlin (F. columbarius). I devoted the next couple of days to watching her, on the off chance that she might establish breeding quarters there. I managed to snap a few poor photos of her (below), but after the third day I never saw her again. I put up a post about her and she began to fade from memory.Last night I rode up the same street just before dusk and saw a small, athletic raptor fly overhead for a few yards, then wing-over and stoop, chasing another bird out of sight. It was another Merlin (or, more likely, the same one).

This morning I talked to a friend who has been telemetering wintering Merlins in southern Idaho. He tells me that they normally leave for their breeding grounds the last week of March, and that they are exceptionally regular in their routine from year to year. I had assumed they left their Utah wintering digs a month earlier than that, but his observations seem to agree with what I've seen with this bird, which appears to spend a few days in this residential neighborhood in Salt Lake City before heading north each year.
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upper: WORKING THE FLOCK--MERLIN & STARLINGS (1989) acrylic 30" x 20"
lower: Merlin photo taken March 22, 2007 by CPBvK

MASTERWORKS IN MINIATURE

2009-03-02T10:37:00.001-08:00

I was hoping to draw yesterday's contest out for a day or two, but Clare of The House correctly identified the subject as a Long-tailed Meadowlark (Sturnella loyca), a mere two hours after my posting it. John Carlson requested and received points for giving the common name of the bush, Calafate, though for all I know, it was a big bluff. Clare will receive a pencil drawing of a Gyrfalcon, and John, Ashok and the rest of you will have another opportunity down the road.

On a completely self-serving note, Gallery One in Mentor, Ohio will kick off their big annual miniatures show, Masterworks in Miniature, on Friday, March 6th with a reception from 7 to 9pm. Intents-to-purchase can be filed at the gallery or on line, and the public drawing for purchase rights will take place on March 21 at 5pm. Two-hundred original paintings are on offer, including my Golden Pheasant painting (above) .

While I'm in self-promotion mode, permit me to brag a bit about being named a "Master Member" of the Society of Animal Artists. There are 12 of us: Charles Allmond, Chris Bacon, Gerald Balciar, Robert Bateman, Carl Brenders, Carel Brest van Kempen, Guy Coheleach, Bob Kuhn, Walter Matia, Leo Osborne, Mort Solberg and Kent Ullberg. This designation was established last April, but I just got the nice surprise a couple of weeks ago.

PIGEON CONTROL

2009-02-26T10:01:00.000-08:00

(Excerpted from my book, Rigor Vitae)The ancient silo loomed before us, a monolithic silhouette incrementally blocking the night sky as my companion and I approached. While sealing an opening with cardboard I gestured to Stan with my net, indicating where he was to block the other exit. Persuading him to stop here hadn’t been easy. We were returning home from a day of hawking in northern Utah. Stan’s falcon had flown poorly and been lost. Daylight’s final hour was spent tracking her down. Now that she was hooded and calm, preening on the cadge in the back of his station wagon, he just wanted to get her home.

Stan’s grumbling was just perceptible as he fitted his cardboard in place. Once sealed, the structure's contents were ours for the taking. Inside it was warm, humid, and absolutely dark. The tower pulsed with birds, those three successful immigrants: Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris), English Sparrows (Passer domesticus), and my quarry, Rock Doves (Columba livia).
I climbed the decrepit steel rungs to the upper roosts the pigeons preferred, net and canvas bag dangling from my belt and darkened flashlight gripped uncomfortably in my mouth. Stan remained below to receive the birds I lowered to him.

Halfway up a disturbed entity fluttered blindly about my face. I reflexively snatched it from the air. The alarm call of a starling is a shocking thing: a high, strident croak describing unimaginable horrors. This avian siren launched the silo’s entire population to flight around its interior, drowning their sentry’s cry with the thunder of ten thousand wings. Barely audible through the din was a string of invectives rising from Stan. As each bird became airborne it emptied its ballast, and when I returned to terra firma, my reluctant accomplice was drenched.

Just beneath their skin-deep beauty, we are all smirkingly aware of birds’ capacity for hyper-metabolizing. The tension between the lovely songster and the mess it makes has been clear ever since Basho penned his Bush Warbler haiku in the seventeenth century:

Bush warbler—
A dropping on the rice cake
At the verandah’s edge

Thirty years ago the sight of a few braying Canada Geese (Branta canadensis) overhead was a rare treat for most Americans. A few decades of concerted habitat management later, you can't swing a male model without hitting one of the birds, leaving many of those same Americans cursing as they scrape up the scuz.

In cities throughout the world, millions of man-hours are devoted to eliminating the common Rock Dove and its droppings. Originally a Eurasian species, it’s been domesticated for some 5,000 years and has accompanied humans in their diffusion across the globe. Now hardly a city fails to slump beneath the weight of the birds. Even Antarctica harbors feral pigeons.

As we’ve become more cognizant of chemistry’s dark side, many of yesterday’s toxic pigeon controls have given way to mechanical devices for excluding the birds or driving them away. Today’s most popular chemical weapon is Avitrol, a brand name for strychnine-laced birdseed. The victims that eat sublethal quantities go into paroxysms that are said to frighten off other pigeons. Unfortunately, they are also apt to attract predators to a lethal meal.Until recently, a more gruesome concoction prevailed. Fenthion is a potent organophosphate that was sold in a form that could be painted onto favorite perches. So powerful were its effects that contact with the foot of any bird that dared step in it caused necrosis, loss of motor control and eventual death. Fenthion is very stable and persists in the food web, accumulating in body fat. In 1999 the EPA came to an agreement with Rid-A-Bird, Inc., makers of the Fenthion perch to voluntarily discontinue their product. Fenthion is still sprayed in Florida against mosquitos, and is still used as an avicide in much of the world. In Australia it is an important weapon against Mediterranean Fruit Flies.

For the better part of my life I’ve played my own consequential role in pigeon control. Live pigeons are a valued commodity for falconers, used to trap falcons, train them, or serve a “bagged” quarry on the days when a decent slip at a wild duck or pheasant couldn’t be found. For many years I flew a wonderful Prairie Falcon (Falco mexicanus) named Hillary, a passage bird (trapped in her first fall). When Hillary was in the air, a live pigeon in my hawking bag was essential, to flash for a split second when her mind began to wander. Trapping pigeons during the day or netting them by night, one had to be mindful of Fenthion, Avitrol, and the rest of the day’s arsenal. Even products like Ornitrol, a sort of avian RU486 were worrisome when the birds were winding up as hawk food.

As an adolescent, my nets and I scrambled about vacant warehouses and office buildings deep into the night, arrested for it but once. I scaled the face of Salt Lake’s city hall for the pigeons in her belfry, and am surely one of very few who can boast of having smoked a joint on top of that structure’s clock tower. Deciding to seek actual permission to enter the place at night, I put a formal petition before the city council. The pigeons had been seen as a problem, and my permission was granted with surprising speed. A newspaper reporter noticed my petition in the council’s minutes, and thought it might make a good story. He had no idea. While I was at school he called my mother, who had been ignorant of my participation in the political process. When asked to confirm that I wanted the pigeons for breeding stock (My petition hadn’t been 100% on the level), she replied, “No, I imagine he’s probably going to feed them to his hawks!”

When I got home, I called the reporter and after some fancy talking hung up, believing I had convinced him not to mention my falconry. The next morning’s paper bore a scandalous article complete with remarks from the head of the local Humane Society chapter, who called falconry “inhumane.” My key to the bell tower was revoked and a poisoning campaign was unleashed on the pigeons, to which the Humane Society had no objections.

Thirty years later the Rock Doves still own that belfry.
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upper: FEAR OF FLYING (1990) acrylic 20" x 26"
lower: THE PLUMING POST--PEREGRINE & ROCK DOVE (1989) acrylic 30" x 20"

SNAKES ON A (COASTAL) PLAIN

2009-02-17T23:22:00.000-08:00

Animals move around. It's what separates us from the minerals. When I was about five, the first sight record for a Cattle Egret (Bubulcus ibis) was established in my home state of Utah. When I left high school the species was still considered accidental, but within five years it had become a common breeder. Today the New World population of these birds, descended from African stragglers a century ago, inhabits relatively unexploited pastureland habitat from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Any year now, Nine-banded Armadillos (Dasypus novemcinctus) should cross into my state as well. In the past couple of decades, the lovely Eurasian Bluethroat (Luscinia svecica) has traversed the Bering Strait into Alaska and Yukon, as the West Indian Shiny Cowbird (Molothrus bonariensis) slipped up the Eastern Seaboard into New Brunswick. These pioneering events can be random, or can be precipitated by climatic, geological or ecological changes. The Pliocene formation of the Isthmus of Panama was one of the most profound occurrences in recent geological history, allowing the migration of placental mammals into South America, and a sparser flow northward, which included those advancing armadillos.

These days, most pioneer species are assisted by humans, either exploiting anthropogenically altered habitat or actually being transported, either purposely or inadvertently. Peninsular Florida's subtropical climate provides the most welcoming habitat in the contiguous U.S., and a wide array of recent animal and plant species have set up shop there in the past century, including some 47 reptiles. Florida's most common reptile, the Brown Anole (Anolis sagrei) is a recent stowaway from Cuba, but lately all eyes have been on the big constrictors. Boa Constictors (Boa constricor) have reproduced in the Everglades for some 40 years, but are not known to breed elsewhere in the state (since they bear live young, it's a bit harder to confirm these things). Green Anacondas (Eunectes murinus) and Yellow Anacondas (E. notaeus) have been found in southern Florida, as have Reticulated Pythons (Python reticulatus-above), with no confirmed breeders from these three species. The fifth pioneer constrictor, the Burmese Python (P. molurus bivittatus), has so far been the only constrictor to really establish itself, a feat accomplished within the past six years. The first nesting Burmese was found in 2006, but it's likely that a thousand or more eggs had been laid in Florida by that time. The graph below shows the number of individual Burmese Pythons removed from Everglades National Park over the past fifteen years (data from last year are not yet available; the only released figure so far is “over 300”). In each of the past few years, increased effort has gone into removing pythons, probably exaggerating the curve's steepness some. It's much harder to estimate the species' total population with any accuracy than it is to assume they're there to stay.
Last week, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida introduced a bill intended to address this situation. The degree of sound biological advice he received can be inferred from the bill's title alone: A bill to amend title 18, United States Code, to include constrictor snakes of the species Python genera as an injurious animal. Should the bill pass muster, it would (despite the awkward phrasing) prohibit the interstate transport of Python spp. within the United States. Nelson's introductory comments were typically hyperbolic, particularly his contention that “...recently, researchers also found cougar parts in the stomachs of captured pythons. This development could signal a new threat to the endangered Florida panther, which we have been working so hard to save,” referring to an incident in November, 2005, when a Bobcat (Lynx rufus) foot was found in the lower GI tract of a female Burmese. This is just the latest in a string of hysteria, including a couple of fairly crazy USGS projections predicting python migrations into the American heartland (see below). These papers have been nicely debunked here and here.Nutty discussions about a problem, though, don't necessarily invalidate concern, and pythons in South Florida are something to be concerned about. Last year, the state initiated new regulations defining Burmese, Reticulated and African Rock Pythons (P. sebae), Green Anacondas, Amethystine Pythons (Morelia amethistina) and Nile Monitors (Varanus niloticus) as “reptiles of concern,” mandating implanted microchips in all captives over 2” in diameter and a $100 annual permit to own one. Legislators, wildlife managers and journalists have generally worked under the assumption that the wild pythons are descended from intentionally released, unwanted captives, but there is no evidence to support this. It is at least as likely that their release was a single unintended consequence of 1992's Hurricane Andrew. Whatever the case, the new state legislation is sound. The release of any exotic wildlife in Florida is a first degree misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in prison and a $1,000. fine. Further dissemination of this fact and a bit of education for prospective snake-owners would go a long way here, especially at the pet shop end. Putting the practice of importing young, wild-caught pythons from Asia out of its misery would be a welcome blow against a destructive industry, in addition to driving the price of captive snakes out of reach of the less-than-serious keeper.

Florida Panthers (Puma concolor coryi) surely have bigger worries than pythons, and I consider the widespread agonizing over possible competition with Indigo Snakes (Drymarchon corais) to be overboard as well, due largely to the widely divergent optimum body temperatures of the two genera. The endangered Key Largo Woodrat (Neotoma floridana smalli) is another story. Perhaps the biggest concern of all is the potential spread of Reticulated Pythons further south into the Caribbean. This species swims well and has dispersed itself throughout Indonesia and the Philippines. In the simple ecology of the Caribbean islands, these snakes could wreak far more serious havoc than is likely in the complex Everglades community, where wildlife managers are busy trapping them, tracking them with dogs, and following radio-telemetered males to females. Because pythons and other poikilothermic predators do not feed regularly, a parcel of land can support far more individuals than it could a similar homeothermic species, and the maintenance of a python population at a somewhat innocuous level is feasible, if labor-intensive.
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upper: RETICULATED PYTHON & MASKED FINFOOT (1999) acrylic 20" x 30"
middle: Graph based on USNPS data. 2008 data added by CPBvK
lower: Map by USGS

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CHARLES DARWIN!

2009-02-12T04:10:00.000-08:00

Two hundred years ago today, Robert Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England. Over his 73 years of life, he was an ardent observer of nature and a prolific writer who published tracts on Pollination of Orchids, Formation of Volcanic and Coral Islands, Expressions of Emotion, Phototropism, Ecology of Earthworms and many other subjects, but it was the book he published in 1859, On The Origin of Species, that he'll always be remembered for. Evolution--the changing of organisms over time--had been recognized long before Darwin, but in this book he proposed an explanation of the engine behind the process. Over a century and a half, his ideas have been refined, but the more we learn about evolution, the more his theory of natural selection seems to fit.

Who'd have thought that by his 200th birthday the poor old guy would be as vilified as he is? But blaming Darwin for evolution is like blaming Einstein for gravity. Both fellows only did their best to describe how the phenomena work—they didn't invent them. So as a birthday gift to our good friend Chuck, let's agree to stop blaming him for evolution. To all of those who'd prefer to live in a world where organisms never change, blame Nature instead. She's your real antagonist.

IT'S THE STUPID ECONOMY

2009-02-10T22:08:00.000-08:00

We don't have Dubya to kick around anymore. That red, white and blue SUV of State may be high-centered down a swampy road marked “Danger! Do not enter!,” but it has a new hand on the wheel: one that, upon first inspection, appears to be a smarter, more thoughtful one than we've seen in a while. The accuracy of this impression remains to be seen, but it's sure nice to hear a president calling on us to take more civic responsibility than simply to go shopping and to “Get down to Disney World in Florida.” So as we climb down and look for an open spot on the bumper to shoulder, let's try to figure out just where we are.

Our nation faces a lot of daunting problems, but all eyes seem focused for now on the economy, which makes sense, since it affects the other problems. Our economic woes are many and varied, and blame can be aimed in many directions, but one factor can't be ignored: We've been working within a flawed paradigm for years.

I've always thought of economics as a sort of branch of ecology. Where ecologists study how energy is circulated around communities of organisms, economists study how capital is circulated around communities of humans. It's the same thing, really, and (as far as I can see) the same rules apply to both. I have nothing against economic growth--in fact I'm all for it, when discussing Chad or Bangladesh. But as standards of living rise in a nation, there comes a point of diminishing returns, and at this point America's obsession with an ever-bloating economy is to our detriment, not to mention downright unseemly. Equilibrium is sought by any system, but in our economy it's been anathema. Here, recession is enemy number one, and whenever we've caught a whiff of it, we've employed artificial props, postponing the inevitable collapse while feeding it. A nation as wealthy as ours can easily afford to weather natural downward adjustments in the economy and to protect those who are hurt by them. We like to think of ours as a true “free market” economy, but that's something the industrialized world has never known. Modern economies differ only in how, and to whose benefit, they are manipulated.

Over the past three decades, the entire conversation has been hijacked by the supply-side philosophy. Reagan got the ball rolling and Clinton picked it up and ran like hell. Since it's the wealthy individuals who create companies, jobs and livings--the thinking goes--just keep the troughs of the fattest pigs full enough and plenty will spill over for the rest. We average Americans have sat by happily and watched this process, secretly expecting to gain a place at that trough, however unlikely it may be. There's some truth to the supply-side argument, but once again, we're faced with the law of diminishing returns. Before long, the harm of the super-rich outweighs their benefit.

So what can we do as individuals? For starters, we can think about shifting our own attitudes about capital and our relationship with it. Our collective worship of money has been the ultimate root of our current state. It's caused companies to stop seeing themselves as providers of goods or services, but as generators of wealth, and caused government, industry and individuals to blindly throw cash at problems whether the solutions are financial or not. It's left many of us living frenetic, unpleasant lives trying to hang on to houses that cost four times their real value. Let's stop calling ourselves consumers and start calling ourselves citizens again. In recent weeks it's become obvious just how well the supply-side-fed fat cats have allowed their advantage to trickle down. It's been refreshing to see the widespread popularity of the recently applied ½ million-dollar pay cap for executive beneficiaries of federal bailouts. I'm hopeful that it's a step toward public repudiation of the cartoonish application of capitalism that's brought us to the position we presently enjoy, possibly even toward an embrace of such “un-American” ideas as a maximum wage, a notion I've championed for years.

In their frenzy to find a solution, our political leaders look a bit like the Keystone Cops, and the ultimate effect of their antics is anybody's guess. I hope, though, that in crafting their plan they'll think of it less as a stimulus and more as a parachute, intended to guide us safely into a healthier paradigm, where a sane standard of living (with a bit of cushion) represents a long-term line of equilibrium.
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upper: SILKY ANTEATER (1997) acrylic 17" x 10.5"
lower: SELF PORTRAIT WITH SOAPBOX (2008) watercolor/ink 8" x 4"

TIME LAPSE PAINTING CLIP: GOLDEN PHEASANT

2009-01-11T11:33:00.000-08:00

LYN ST. CLAIR

2009-01-06T17:00:00.001-08:00

If you're knowledgeable about the field of wildlife art, you're certainly familiar with Lyn St. Clair, the creator of the above coots and many other wonderful pieces. Not only is she a skilled, prolific and creative painter, she's a fine naturalist that's smart as a whip, with an eagle eye. Lyn was recently diagnosed with breast cancer—ironic indeed, as she dedicated the better part of 1993 to a project she called 48 x 48, a fund raiser for cancer research. Now it's time for her to raise some funds of her own, to cover the expenses of surgery, hospitalization and therapy for her uninsured self. With that in mind, Lyn's friend and colleague Paula Waterman has set up an art web page dedicated to helping defray Lyn's medical expenses. There you'll find for sale numerous excellent artworks by numerous first-rate artists, many of them substantially discounted (my own piece, Juvenile Red-tailed Hawk & Western Rattlesnake [below], has been cut by more than half). Check back often, the site will be updated as more work is added.
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upper: WATER BALLET (2006) by Lyn St. Clair oil 40" x 40"
lower: JUVENILE RED-TAILED HAWK & WESTERN RATTLESNAKE (1988) acrylic 18" x 24"

FLORA & FAUNA IN PERIL

2009-01-06T15:49:00.000-08:00

Conservation is a paramount cause to most of us wildlife artists, and we tend to wax self-congratulatory at the drop of a hat over the positive effect our work has in educating the public to its importance, a notion that's at best delusional and at worst a cynical sales con. Affecting positive change takes more than drawing pictures; what little intelligent preaching our work does tends to fall solely on the ears of the choir. The best we can hope to do with our work is to spark a bit of thought and conversation, and that is the idea behind an exhibition now up at the U.S. Department of Interior's Interior Museum, “Endangered Species: Flora & Fauna in Peril.” The exhibition, which consists of 50 sculptures and flatworks depicting species listed on the U.S. Fish & Wildlife's Endangered Species List, was organized by the Wildling Museum in Los Olivos, California, and curated by David J. Wagner PhD.

I'm afraid I dropped the ball on this one; I wanted to participate, but simply couldn't find the time to paint a new piece before the jury deadline. An article in the Washington Times seemed a bit short of flattery (the final sentence, in particular), but it provides a short slide show of works from ESFFIP. The decision to select Suzan Hamilton-Todd's painting of an Aplomado Falcon (below) to illustrate the article was interesting to me.

These small chaparral falcons with long tails and legs are the most accipiter-like members of their genus. With their bold black belly-band, dark blue-gray upperparts (“aplomado” means “leaden”) and distinctive facial pattern, they are unmistakable. While it's a perfectly fine image in itself, exactly what Hamilton-Todd's Saker-like painting says about its intended subject eludes me. If you see something I don't please comment. Perhaps the editors liked its “post-realist” look, or maybe a deeper point was being made. Of the nine pieces in the slideshow, I regret to say that nothing strikes me as terribly noteworthy. It's hard to judge a show of 50 pieces on the basis of nine little jpeg images, but I see the very fact of this exhibition as a good thing. Hopefully it will encourage more artists to move in this direction, and it's bound to spark at least a bit of that all-important thought and conversation. It runs through February 7th.
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upper: AYE-AYE & GIANT LEAF-TAILED GECKO (1996) acrylic 18" x 24"
lower: Northern Aplomado Falcon painting by Suzan Hamilton-Todd

OKAY, I RESOLVE TO POST MORE FREQUENTLY IN 2009

2008-12-31T18:05:00.001-08:00

Here at Rigor Vitae, 2008 pretty much began with a post about viper tails that discussed the recently discovered Iranian viper Pseudocerastes urarachnoides, so what could be more appropriate than to post this great little video that has recently turned up?

As far as I know, this is the first footage of a live P. urarachnoides. How strongly it supports my assumption that the tail is used in caudal luring is hard to say, since it seems pretty clear that the snake here is being subdued. Nonetheless, it's interesting to see this fantastic tail in action. The specimen was collected by Behzad Fathinia in Iran's Ilam province, where the two type specimens originated, and the video comes from Steve Anderson's website, Swasiazoology. I have no idea where this individual snake is now.

URBAN HERPETOLOGY

2008-12-15T15:34:00.000-08:00

Implementing effective conservation policies and techniques is impossible without first understanding wildlife population trends and how they're affected by anthropogenic factors. The third and just-released book in the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles' (SSAR) Herpetological Conservation Series represents an important step toward this goal. Consisting of 40 technical papers and 13 case studies, Urban Herpetology features sections on habitat loss and alteration, effects of roads, trails and railroad tracks, chemical and light pollution, anthropogenic water bodies and introduced species, ubanophiles and urbanophobes, among others. Like the previous books in the series, Urban Herpetology is North America-heavy in scope, but unlike them contains additional research from Australia, Russia, Germany, Italy, France, the West Indies and elsewhere.
Reptiles and Amphibians are important ecological components throughout most of the planet. Unfortunately, though, they have little direct impact on the economies of industrialized nations, and so receive comparatively little of the sort of attention this welcome volume offers. Urban Herpetology deserves a place in the library of anyone with a deep interest in herps or conservation, and especially those who care about both. 11 ½ inches x 9 inches; 590 pages.
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illustration: LEATHERBACK HATCHLING/CITY LIGHTS (2008) pen & ink; one of 50 from URBAN HERPETOLOGY