[An excerpt]
...Having spent many thousands of hours studying birds in the field, I find that bird art takes me back to special sights—to a Snowy Owl
(Nyctea scandiaca) standing on the tundra of the Hudson Bay shore, to
a Sunbittern (Eurypyga helias) dancing down a stream in Costa Rica,
to a Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus) zooming after ducks in Cornwall. Bird paintings and drawings can depict action that would be very
di;cult to capture in a photograph and nearly impossible to observe
with the naked eye. That is especially true of acts of predation, which
in my more than sixty years of field experience is both rarely seen and
usually over with too fast to observe with clarity even with binoculars (see Plate 69). Mobbing is a much more common sight, but I have
never gotten the same feel for it in the wild as I get from Carl Brenders’s magnificent painting (see Plate 53). I often wonder whether the
artist who etched the 30,000yearold owl in Chauvet Cave was not in
part just trying to evoke the same sense of awe and mystery that comes
over me when I encounter a perched large owl and exchange stares
with it (see Plate 2). This example points out one of the attributes of or
ganizing this book as a gallery.
© 2008 Darryl Wheye and Donald Kennedy
|
|
The worldwide archive of bird art is im
mense, but by presenting major topics and arranging a small number of examples sequentially, Wheye and Kennedy make it easy for us to re
flect on the long relationship between human beings and birds. Some
of the bird images will likely evoke personal memories, adding to the
pleasure of this form of bird study. And some of the aspects of science
portrayed will likely surprise even longtime students of birds. ... |
