Watching Bird Watching Art

"X never marks the spot." -Indiana Jones

This could be anywhere, but it is in Scottsville, VA. I just happened through, and it must have been Arts Walk or something, because here was this pigeon with an elaborate installaton.

Sure, what people noticed first was the massive scaffolding surrounding a large lone building, a brick of red in a crochet of scaffold rust. Especially nice against the Spring-greened dike and trees stretching out behind.

Then, perched in a pinnacle of empty panes, there stands the artist. In the crux of the X, smack-dab at scaffold-center stands an iridescent neck flanked by grey shoulders, rising from sleekness against darkness of the warehouse cavern. And atop this oiled rainbow of a neck, a head sharply grey, whetted by an eye piercingly orange, an orange borne of the saturatallucinated union of the brick and rust all around.

The artist glances one way then the other over and over, one eye always focused right on you. Nobody can explain how the pigeon simultaneously looks into each eye of everyone below, but it happens nonetheless. Meanwhile, the profile either reflects or parallels the pigeon's clever pecking of a pigeon-profile void in the pane to our left. Juxtaposition of the breast curve--a sublime, eloquent line depicting beauty all puffed-up and proud--with the shattered lines converging at the head (is that a woodpecker?) is nothing short of brilliant. 

Meanwhile, above and to the right, we see Pigeon's nod to the landscape. A mountain profile appears in the broken corner pane. Sophisticated as this installation surely is, a moment of simple representational art is not beneath it. A certain amount of self-mockery appears to be part of this Scottsville aviant garde piece as well: the artist's feet are a hilariously awful color. Just as the eye-orange clinches the artist's brilliance as a colorist, the scaly alcoholic-clown's-nose colored feet establish this pigeon as a humorist.

So, Bravo Scottsville Pigeon. You took a ruin and made it a font of creativity. You showed us that Pigeon-Americans are not just garbage-scrounging winged rats, and I think you showed those snooty NY birds a thing or two about real art.




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Blue Ridge: Distant

From Spy Rock, on a clear and slightly hazy day.

Same shot, blued up a bit.

Blue to da max.

Blue Ridge: Close

Beyond time to plant corn, according to oak leaves larger than mouse ears.

The second week of April in the Blue Ridge mountains in this wild year of Winter-straight-to-Summer, buds responded to the 40's to 90's weather by exploding. I walked through woods in their last gasp of long visibility, canopy emerging.

And flowers, too. Roadside redbuds blossoming ahead of their understory kin. Other flowers I do not know on branches above the fading daffodils strewn in the woods.

Meanwhile, the less glamorous trees flicked a fleeting beauty, befire getting on with their biomassing.

 And their Virginia creeping.

Meanwhile, in civilized clearings of the foothills, imported Asian magnolias danced, tossing off petals into the heated air.

Flowers and leaves battled it out to adorn the water color sky.

The tulip poplar began it's year of display.

A grave-side hawthorn stood guard, stark against the sky in these days before flower and foliage soften its profile.

The orchard trees beckoned bees.

And ornamentals let it be.

Belle blossoms pealed.

Buckeye foliage unfurled.

And sumacs shouldered their way in.

Bird, Watching

I've been in the Eastern US for the past couple of weeks, spending some time in woods just waking up from Winter. Just about a year and 3,000 miles from the Watercolor Spring post, these woods have a similar open grey lattice, dappled lightly with the colors of emerging leaves, but here there are so few evergreens that you can see much farther. 

In the forests and orchards, birds abound now, and I could not help but watch them. Long ago, I worked for a local Audubon Society, running a small bookstore and learning about birds as I went. I never became a Birder, that species of naturalist obsessed with amassing the longest "life list" of species observed, often as not, through massive and expensive scopes. Yes, I've seen some cool birds in remote and exotic locales, but mostly because I was working there, not because I'd planned a trip to see the birds. If the bird is pretty, or doing something interesting, it doesn't really matter to me whether it is rare; what it eats or is eaten by--how it fits into it's ancient or adopted ecology--ends up being just as important as whether it qualifies as a rara avis.

So, this one was worth watching. It's a thrasher (a species that sticks in my memory because of it's punk-sounding name and it's virtuoso voice), neither rare nor far afield. I sat in an orchard on the Blue Ridge, appreciating the blossoms when it's rusty back came into view. Unlike most birds, who know to dart away or duck behind a branch as soon as the camera comes out, it just sat there while I took a shot, and another, moved around to get a better view, and even when I stepped closer. For about 15 minutes, this continued, and it was aware of me, but not inclined to take flight. It was watching me as much as I was watching it.

Later on, wandering through the woods, I came upon a family of crows, also wandering through the woods, pecking through last Fall's leaves. Through long experience with jealous farmers and rock-wielding boys, they made sure one was always watching me, and kept their distance. No unobstructed posing, no sitting still while I got closer. But also, no stopping what their foraging sweep through a Virginian forest floor. Like the guard pictured above, they were hitting the ground hard enough to poke through the leaves and into the red piedmont clay. Like the sentinel pictured above, they kept their beaks open, but said nothing; maybe they were cocked and ready to snap up bugs, maybe they were panting away the heat. 

My limited bird brain cannot say for sure what the thrasher or the crows were doing. All I know is that they watched me watch them.