Things come on fast once the weather turns hot and even more so if the rain actually starts.  We aren't out of the drought "woods" yet but it has improved from the past 3 years...very grateful for that!

The Dickcissels are back this June and are a happy lot once again - I swear we have one every 50 feet down the road and several in the pastures as well...its great!  They are even nesting in the pasture here - very fun!

 

And the Bobolinks did show up in the pasture across the road...occasionally they'll chase one another across the road to our place so we can get some enjoyment out of their company!  It was a special time when they nested on our place and when we'd see them up the county blacktops and highway pastures as well, but, again...I am grateful for what we still have.

 

The spring prairie flowers are happy with our rain too, and the heat is moving them along faster than I can keep up...every time I find something new blooming, its finished before I know it...help!!!

 

 

One evening I was down in the SE corner of the north pasture shooting the While Wild Indigos and just as I started walking away a beautiful female Ruby-throated Hummingbird was suddenly right in front of me - feeding on the White Wild Indigos!   The light was subsiding as it was mid evening, but I had the camera on the tripod already and managed some nice photos of her - really fun!

 

 

 We are always fortunate to have Meadowlarks in our neighborhood.  I do have difficulty telling "Eastern" from "Western" - UNLESS they sing...Western Meadowlarks are so much more vocal and melodious than Eastern's are...and we get Westerns here quite often each summer.  

 

One day a week or so back I was in the studio working and heard a beautiful Western Meadowlark belting it out, and it sounded so loud I thought it must be on the barn roof.  I stepped out the door and it was right in front of me on the grass across the driveway...maybe 20 feet away!  We've never had a "Lawn" Lark before!!!  Crazy neat!  I stepped back in and grabbed the camera only to see a Robin dive bomb it...maybe it was stealing his thunder?  But it flit just another 20 feet or more toward the crib so I walked over by the barn's corner and took a few pictures of it in the fresh mowed grass.  I watched it pull a worm up and it commenced to beating it into submission...maybe that's why the Robin didn't want it around - encroaching on its food supply?!

 

It sang in the yard for another day or two but is now back to it's normal perches around the pasture and down along the road.

 

 

Another fun change this year has been the Eastern Kingbirds.  We always see them down along the road...flitting from fence wire to fence post to electrical wire and back.  This year they have taken up residence in the yard!  During noon time Georgie and I would be sitting at the kitchen table having lunch and we watch the Kingbirds flycathing right outside the kitchen windows!  We noticed the favored perches the birds would use to dart out and catch bugs on the wing.  One spot was an old Common Mullein stalk from last year...made a great perch for them.

 

I decided this would be the perfect opportunity to get some closer shots of these guys...I set up the tripod out side and set the camera on it with a electric remote transmitter/trigger.  While I sat eating lunch that day I was holding the trigger in one hand and eating with the other...click, click, click - "Wow that was a good one!"  

 

Went through quite a few shots and missed quite a few too, but very happy with the results...fun birds!

The days are moving quickly now, even though there's more daylight time - it's still packed with chores and work...inside and out.

I hope you have a good summer ahead yourselves...be good to one another and I hope to see you on the Tallgrass!

 

August's Archival Works Friday!

 

It's Archival Works Friday – so soon??!! 

As I mentioned before - I'll post a painting, drawing or serigraph (silkscreen prints) from the "archive" files of years past...and give a little back story on the work - the first Friday of the month. 

I am now including photographs of past years. I hope you'll find it interesting! 

I know I've gotten into this topic before with 'some' of you; it is something I relive occasionally when someone poses the question where I started; where it all began I guess. 

First it was just unintentional small steps...parents who didn't protest about the little things...frogs, toads and turtles "free ranging" in the basement; keeping a Brown Bat in a bird cage on the front porch; science summer school; teaching the neighborhood squirrels to eat out of my hand; wading and fishing in neighborhood streams. (OK...the bat in the cage didn't go over well but we kept it for a couple days anyway.) 

I gained an appreciation for the beauty of this scheme of things. I was fascinated by the light shimmering off the membrane of an amphibian, the colors and design of a turtle's carapace and plastron, the shapes of trees, their leaves, the hillsides along the Des Moines River valley, the rocks and fossils along the favorite stream of my youth - Lizard Creek, or lying on a pasture hillside staring at the sky...watching clouds and the birds that intersected my field of view. 

One day, after saving for weeks, I bought a book..over $12 - a lot of money back then for a kid!  I was eleven or twelve; the book was full of color illustrations by Louis Aggassiz Fuertes. They were awesome, beautiful...the slip cover of this 1937 edition book, for the lack of a better word, transported me. On the front cover were two of my most favorite birds, a Cooper's and a Red-tailed Hawk - perched on treetop branches above forested hillsides. The landscape and the birds were mesmerizing for a young impressionable me. I wanted to paint birds. 

Birds in the yard would never seem to hold still long enough for me to draw; I got the idea I needed to photograph them, and then I could draw them from their photo; brilliant idea I thought. After all, Audubon drew and painted from his birds after shooting them – this would be less messy! 

I didn't have a camera, but my mother loaned me her old box camera. Ya, the old Ansco Shur-Shot Jr. at the top of this post, was to be my first camera. I actually took quite a few pictures with this Ansco...all B&W...it was a 120 film camera (2 1/4X2 3/4" or 6X7cm). You can kind of guess how useful it was as a bird camera though - not very. 

One incident convinced me to get a "suitable" camera. I was walking the upper banks along Lizard Creek's south branch west of town (Ft Dodge, IA) one summer afternoon. It was a typical hot and humid day and the afternoon wasn't the best condition to find birds. By just dumb luck I came upon a Great Horned Owl sitting in a tree jutting out of the high bank below me. The bird was maybe 3 - 4 feet out from the bank on a branch about 8 - 10 feet above the water flowing beneath it. The bird was awake, looking across the creek into the woodland there. I dropped as fast as I could into the grass above the high bank and crawled very slowly on my stomach to the bank's edge and peered over - it hadn't seen or heard me, the noise of the creek had masked my presence. My heart was pounding so loud I was sure the bird would hear it! 

The owl was sitting in deep shade. I pushed the box camera ahead of me and tried peering into the viewfinder without raising my head too much and giving myself away. I was no more than 6-8 feet away from the bird, yet I could not find the owl in my viewfinder; the old box camera's viewfinder just was not bright enough. I looked up again and tried to reference where the bird was, then looked back into the viewfinder - still no bird, I looked up again and the owl was no where...it was gone. 

My first SLR 35mm camera in 1963

 

Whether the bird spotted or heard me I really don't know, what I do remember is the rush from the experience and the needling anguish of blowing it! That was not going to happen again! I spent the next year saving money from about any odd job I could find, (mainly my paper route) and bought myself an East German 'Practica IV' SLR and a 400mm lens. As best I can recollect, this was in 1963. 

My first bird photo with my Practica SLR in 1964 (White-breasted Nuthatch) on Kodachrome slide film with a Kowa 400mm lens and a bellows attachment for a closer focus range.

I became hooked on nature photography that way...birds eventually led to all flora and fauna and to the landscape. Painting nature eventually led the same direction. I don't know why I didn't become an ornithologist, biologist or botanist? There was always an urge to paint, draw or photograph and that's all I can say. 

We all gotta start somewhere! 

Hope to see you on the Tallgrass!

 

Archived Works Friday - No.4!

Post No. 4! The next post for "Archived Works Friday” comes as a pair from the mid 1980's. As I mentioned before - I'll post a painting, drawing or serigraph (silkscreen prints) from the "archive" files of years past...and give a little back story on the work. I hope you'll find it interesting!

 

Back in the 1980's I experimented with floating bird blinds; the kind you take pictures from. I took my first one out to a favorite marsh. it was a floating "bass buddy"...maybe I'm not getting the name right but it was essentially a nylon zippered slip cover that fit over an inner-tube, with a seat sewn in for the "occupant". It made a "bobber" out of the wearer! It was actually made for a fisherman to wade and float around on small ponds and fish from it...I guess the idea was to make you more mobile and get you out to where the fish were without a boat.

 

I got the brilliant idea that I could use it as a floating bird photography blind. I made a dome of chicken wire mesh and covered it in cattails which I tied to it - trying to imitate a muskrat hut. Great idea huh!???? I wore chest high waders and walked the blind out until I lost contact with the bottom, then just kind of bobbed around and "paddled" with my feet...took some getting used to but eventually made my way to a clump of reeds and anchored my feet around them to try and hold still.

 

It was kind of hit and miss that first try out on the marsh...muskrats would swim by and look at me like "what on earth!?". Thankfully none tried to “enter” the hut!!! An occasional Yellow-headed Blackbird would land on top of me - where I couldn't get its picture of course! The neatest encounter this first trip in the blind was an American Bittern - I had never been so close to one before! It was up clinging to the rushes trying to get a better look at this "thing" (my blind) - it was probably thinking "This wasn't here earlier!?". I did my best to get shots with the camera but it was difficult with the blind bobbing with every move I'd make.

 

This was back way before digital cameras. I didn't even have auto focus back then and shooting Ektachrome E-6 film that I'd process myself. The photos didn't turn out too bad. The Bittern's body was somewhat hidden by the reeds as it climbed along. As I looked at several of the slides I picked some out and created a composition from them - trying to portray the bird among the rushes without it's features being so obscured from view.

 

I first did a detailed pencil sketch, and was fairly pleased with it...but I was looking for something a bit more "graphic" in presentation and decided to do a serigraph (silk screen print) of it. I won't get into the details of that process this time, as its very lengthy. I had been accepted into the international "Birds in Art" exhibition the year before with a pencil drawing and thought I'd try entering again with a serigraph...I wanted to prove to myself that the acceptance the year before was not just a "flash in the pan".

 

The design was drawn directly on separate screens from the original pencil composition and broken down into solid colors...the exhibition deadline was fast approaching and I was having great difficulty registering colors and getting everything to look like I wanted. I finally managed to get one that I liked and hurriedly got it entered in time for the deadline.

 

It was accepted! I was over the moon and beside myself... once again being included in the prestigious international Bird Art exhibition "Birds in Art". Rubbing shoulders with artists from every continent was very humbling - I could see how far I had to go to even measure up to what work I was seeing.

 

As a side note on my maiden voyage on the marsh - when I had been out on the water, the wind had come up from the south and soon I had white caps! I was a good 100-150 yards out from shore and the wind was taking me to the other side of the marsh! It took all of an hour, or more to fight my way back to the landing. Completely played out, I drug myself into the car and turned on the radio - it was giving high winds/watercraft warnings for the day! NO KIDDING!!???

 

I revised my "floating blind" design - used marine plywood with foam filled pontoons, a lighter camo covered chicken wire frame that sat on top, and a platform for a tripod "head" to affix the camera and lens...so much better! (and safer) Still have it today...hanging out in the studio shed. Just need the time and "energy" to take it out again into the marshes...sounds like "The Old Man and the Sea" revisited to me!

 

"Rush Lake, American Bittern - Study" - pencil drawing - ©Bruce A. Morrison (from an Iowa private collection)

 

"Rush Lake, American Bittern" - serigraph - ©Bruce A. Morrison (from the Permanent Collection of the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, WI)

 

(These and other archived artwork can be viewed at - https://morrisons-studio.com/archived-works/ )

 

June Approaches...Keep Savoring Spring!

Eastern Bluebird

photograph - © Bruce A. Morrison

 

May seems a bit messed up to me with Memorial Day weekend coming so early; and yes, its been a dry - then soaking month as well.  But we are fortunate here...we didn't need a lot...got more than we wanted...yet no serious flooding here.  Oh there's some of the typical streams out of their banks but no more so or damaging than usual.  But we're lucky - other parts of the state are having real flooding issues.

 

Cape May Warbler

photograph - © Bruce A. Morrison

 

One thing May has brought is cool weather and some real interesting fallout of migrating birds.  Always up for cool birds!   One of the best migrants that stopped for about 3 days during the constant rain was a Cape May Warbler.  Now we've seen Cape Mays before...up in Canada, but never passing through on migration.  It was a real treat!  Liked grape jelly - had to fight for it with all the Orioles but held it's own despite only being a third of the size!

 

 Summer Tanager (first year male)

photograph - © Bruce A. Morrison

 

We also were lucky to get a Summer Tanager (first year male) to visit the feeders for a day.  We've been seeing a "Lot" of reports for both Summer and Scarlet Tanagers this spring and actually "did" get a Scarlet Tanager for "a few seconds" across the driveway in the Dandelions with the Goldfinches, but it never showed again...a shame - I'd really have liked to have gotten a photograph!!!

 

Baltimore Oriole

photograph - © Bruce A. Morrison

 

Brown Thrasher

photograph - © Bruce A. Morrison

 

Of course there were many of the old familiar friends that returned, like the Baltimore Orioles and Brown Thrashers...but we also got our Hose Wrens, Catbirds, Orchard Orioles, Red-headed Woodpeckers, Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, Ruby-throated Hummingbirds and many others back for the season...they so brighten up our days!

 

Bobolink

photograph - © Bruce A. Morrison

 

Our pasture's birds also returned; just yesterday afternoon our Dickcissels arrived!  They're usually the last grassland bird here.  Luckily our Bobolinks have also come back and have been flying from pasture to pasture doing their flight "thing"...like they're staking out their territory...or trying to attract a lady.  I worry about the Bobolinks on the south pasture, as it was slightly decreased in size by maybe 3/4 of an acre...the neighbor who owns the 4 acres south of our one acre, wanted to take his fence line out and make things more expedient for his equipment.  Every sliver of grassland gone can make a difference...I don't know if that will deter another nesting on this small bit of ground.  Who knows how much it takes to convince one Bobolink that there's enough space or forage to raise a family?  I'm crossing my fingers.

 

 "The Hurt-Adkins Mill"

oil painting - © Bruce A. Morrison

 

Finished a commission for someone out of state.  Was a bit challenging as it was an actual location (in Kentucky) and historic grist mill, that fell down about 30 years ago. Very little to work with...spent a lot of time going through historic records to get it as accurate as possible...worked through the late winter months on this landscape/location, am very happy with how it finished out! "The Hurt-Adkins Mill" - oil painting.

 

 "In the Wild Plum - Nashville Warbler"

oil painting - © Bruce A. Morrison

 

I talked about this painting a couple years back...was working on it the summer my father passed away.  I felt pretty good about this painting and wanted it considered for an international exhibit but held off until this Spring, as I wanted it to be included in my solo exhibit at the Pearson Lakes Art Center last fall.  

The exhibit I wanted it considered for is "Birds in Art".  I've been accepted into this prestigious exhibition 5 times since 1983...that's only 5 times in 37 years!  Its a real difficult exhibit to be juried into...but most years I keep at it.  Then a couple weeks ago I was notified that this painting "In the Wild Plum - Nashville Warbler" has been selected by 3 independent jurors across the country to be included in the international "Birds in Art" exhibition for 2020 this fall. 

I still find it overwhelming to be selected to exhibit with 90 other artists from all over the world. Because of the pandemic there will be no traditional weekend gathering of artists, so we will not get to meet new faces or talk with many we've met over the years. This is the coveted holy grail exhibit for bird artists - hosting work from across the US, Canada, South America, Africa, Europe, the British Isles, Asia and Australia. 

The Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, WI will exhibit Birds in Art from September 18 through November 29th - after which the exhibition will go on national tour. Years back one of my serigraphs was selected for an international tour traveling through the US to Bejing, China. 

I guess all those distractions from the birds I so love paid off once more...I feel very blessed. 

 

Now that I'm a "bit" caught up in the Studio I'm back onto the native pastures here doing some work.  The 1/5 acre affected by the septic installation last June had created a Brome patch...should have seen that coming...more work!  But I am now seeing more prairie garlic than ever on the east side of the north pasture this year - I'd only documented it in two locations and two patches before...now its up to 8 patches, and the Lead plants are multiplying as well with 7 plants now...up from 4!  I appear to have gained Sawtooth Sunflower in the disturbed area and the Prairie Spiderwort (Tradescantia bracteata) has really multiplied on the gravel hillside on the NE section..doing so well they were showing brilliantly from the bottom trail!

Its been a busy late winter/spring here but now its back to reality...stay safe out there and treat each other with caring and respect. 

 

Have a Good Summer! 

 

Catching Up Again...

 "House Finch in Snowfall"

(photograph - © Bruce A. Morrison)

Well now...we're nearly in the middle of January!  Things have been mostly digging out of the piles I left for later, these past couple of years, while I worked to put together the solo showing this past fall and winter at the Pearson Lakes Art Center. 

And the pile has been substantial!  

I have always had a slight issue with "putting things off"...especially when I have other things on my mind.  That's not so unusual is it?  I think a lot of us have the same problem.  My neglected work just happened to be a couple years or more worth of image files that had yet to be processed and filed.  That may not sound like a lot but believe me it is a real "time killer"!  I am now down to my last 30 folders of thousands of shots of birds, prairie plants, landscapes and other images I've taken in the past year.  I'm slowly making progress, I think...

But its a good time to take care of these things isn't it?  I mean its really crappy outside right now - bitterly cold and really not that visually interesting..."here" any way!  But while I sit here doing my computer house cleaning, I keep coming across files that really stop me and get me thinking...gee, that would make a great drawing or painting...or maybe that file should be marked for more work as a photograph?!  It's aggravating to not readily afford to take time out to just do these things!  If I did, I'd still be back in my 2017-2018 folders and putting off the inevitable!

So in the meantime I have rehung the gallery here, am finding work for clients searching for that something special they were looking for, practically nailed to my seat in front of the computer, and constantly being distracted by things outside my office window...doesn't really seem like much has changed!!!!!!!  Ha!

Well enough said.  If you wonder where I'm at - I'm here "catching up"!

Have a great winter and stay safe and warm out there, and we'll see you on the Tallgrass!