Just Perfect!

 "Great Horned Owl Nest"

photograph © Bruce A. Morrison

(click on image for a larger view)

Its been a real struggle getting to spring; we're hoping maybe it'll get serious one of these days and it will stay till summer!  But we love it around here...the past couple weeks have really livened the valley up with the Meadow Larks singing and the frogs serenading...even had a good night of Coyote music a week back!

I've been working on too many things to recount just now, but jury duty was one of them.  If I can just get through June without being picked again, maybe I'll actually be ready for this summer's exhibit at the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge in July.

I had a chance yesterday morning to break away briefly and walk the creek across the road from us.  There has been a family of Great Horned Owls nesting there and I wanted to try and get some photos of them before they fledged.  We've watched the nest from the road for the past few weeks but to get a decent image of the nest I needed to walk around to the other side of the valley and see if there was a clear view of it from there.

There was enough to see the nest and to find there were two occupants!  However the nest is fairly small for two birds of that size and I wasn't able to get very decent shots of both birds at the same time.  If you look at the photo above, you'll see the ear tuft of the other sibling just over the left shoulder of the bird in the foreground.

It was really fun to watch them for a while and took some video footage of them as well.  But the wind was beginning to pick up and I headed down to the creek below to cross back over.
 

"Osprey"

photograph © Bruce A. Morrison

(click on image for a larger view)

 

Just as I made it across, a large bird move nearly above me and was holding its position with wings flapping hard into the wind.  I immediately recognized it as an Osprey and struggled to set the tripod and get the camera swung around.  The Osprey kept moving north along the creek stopping momentarily while looking for a fish breakfast.  I managed to finally get a couple shots as it moved further up stream...nothing spectacular but at least you can identify the bird...maybe I'll use the pose in a future painting or drawing someday?

 

What a great ending to my first spring morning jaunt in the valley...this is a great place to be and we don't take it for granted for a moment.  It may not seem that way to most people, but its just perfect...for us anyway!

 

Night Noise

"Hunting Moon"

limited edition 8 color serigraph (screen print)

© Bruce A. Morrison

The nights are getting shorter and the days are lengthening; it's still uphill to spring but there are many signs on the horizon!  Now, I'm not really ready for spring yet in the studio...sounds a bit off, but I just have too much work ahead here and studio work is much more productive when spring chores don't get in the way.  I need to make the best of winter yet I'm afraid!

But there are signs of spring never-the-less; we have nesting here in the valley now.  I haven't "witnessed" the nesting, but still know it's going on.  Each night for weeks we've been hearing the valley pair of Great Horned Owls vocalizing in the "neighborhood".  But in recent weeks it has accelerated to hours on end of "love talk" right here in the yard around the house.

I really do not know which bird has the deeper voice, but suspect it is the female, which is the larger bird by a good margin in the bird of prey world.  The other night (and morning) both birds sat around the house here really talking it up...sounding even excited.  Both bird's voices were overlapping one another, kind of like when two people are talking excitedly at the same time.  Around 1:30 a.m. I got up to try and get some audio recording of this banter, only to find out my recorder's battery was dead and the adapter and other battery was out in the studio!  Rats!  Oh well, just listening was fun enough...drifting in and out of sleep for the next 5 hours with the deep, wild rooted serenade outside the windows was pleasant to Georgie and I.

Great Horned Owls nest in late January/early February here.  It's still cold here, in fact I believe the last week of January and the first week of February are statistically our coldest time of winter.  Night time temps below zero Fahrenheit don't seem to matter!  These are tough birds!

I've written about these birds before on past blogs, in fact the blog image this time is from a cropped image I posted 3 years back.  There is some mystic about owls for me and many other people...it's likely the secret lives they lead in the dark I suppose.

It's snowing out fairly good right now and we'll be contending with this storm system for the next day or so...we're definitely in the middle of the winter season now.  But somewhere out there the Waterman Creek valley Great Horned Owls are nesting.

Nearing the Equinox

 "Night Pasture - Great Horned Owl"

8X24" color pencil rendering - © Bruce A. Morrison

(click on image for larger view)

Summer is just about a memory now.  I'm sure we'll still have plenty of nice days to come "hinting" at what we selectively remember fondly of the past season...but autumn is in the air and the Monarchs have left their roost here at Prairie Hill Farm (see "A Tallgrass Journal" blog) and are well on their way to Mexico!

We're still enjoying the invertebrates of this season though - minus the mosquitoes, black flies and the soon to come hoards of Asian Lady Bird Beetles.  It's a philosophical exercise in "justifying" those bugs that torment us!  But this is the season of goldenrods and asters...and there are still many butterflies, "friendly" wasps, bees, and spiders to see on the prairie!  

We've been enjoying the sounds of the season here very much.  Each night has been bringing the late summer insect serenades, the neighborhood Great Horned Owl has been hooting from the yard by the house around 3-4 a.m. each morning and the Coyotes in the valley have "sung" numerous times for us this month!

I'm going to share our Great Horned Owl, serenading insects and one lone (distant) Coyote calling for it's friends, with you.  I posted this audio snippet with friends on Face Book and I'll share it here on the Prairie Hill Farm blog too.  If you are an e-mail subscriber to this blog you'll need to visit the physical blog or my Studio Face Book page to view/listen!

"Night Noises" - © Bruce A. Morrison

Since Google's blogspot doesn't have a really easy way to post simple audio files, I'll share it as a video file.  The image used on the video is a small "detail" of the image posted at the beginning of this blog...one I shared about 3 years back on this very blog.  It is of the pasture across the road from us, depicted at night in late summer - a moon lit landscape with a Great Horned Owl passing through in flight...maybe (?) on it's way up to Prairie Hill Farm to spook a rabbit or skunk out of cover for it's dinner!

This artwork original sold at the Artisans Road Trip back in 2008 but I do have signed open edition prints of this work for sale at the 2010 A.R.T. event this year.  I also have many new works (photographs, drawings and paintings) this year and would love to share them with you at the 2010 Artisans Road Trip coming up in just 2 weeks!  We'll share a lot of mouth watering treats from Georgie's kitchen as well!

Why not go on a early autumn road trip the 1st, 2nd or 3rd of October and stop by the studio here at Prairie Hill Farm?!!!  Even take a walk through the late Tallgrass Prairie here too and enjoy that air we all remember in the fall!

Enjoy the "Night Sounds" audio video and stop in for some day time memories if you're in the neighborhood!!!

From the Beginning

I don't know if I've ever gotten into this topic before (?), but it is something I relive occasionally when someone poses a question where I started; where it all began I guess.

First it was just unintentional small steps...parents who didn't protest the little things...frogs, toads and turtles "free ranging" in the basement; science summer school; teaching the neighborhood squirrels to eat out of my hand; wading and fishing in neighborhood streams.

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 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 I bought a book, 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 1917 edition book, for the lack of a better word, transported me. Two of my most favorite birds, a Cooper's and a Red-tailed Hawk, were 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.

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 blog, 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 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 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, it 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.

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, and bought myself an SLR and a 400mm lens. As best I can recollect, this was in 1962.

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 a 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!

Spring for Some!

Great Horned Owl, pencil rendering

Purchase a print

The past couple days brings doubt to the Groundhog's ability to predict spring but I still definitely wouldn't bank on winter's effects being through for the year. However, it is now truly spring for some in the neighborhood here at Prairie Hill Farm!

An old favorite from many years ago is now raising their spring family in the neighborhood. Seems crazy but the Great Horned Owls start nesting as early as late January! Georgie and I have been seeing and hearing the GHO's in the yard and along the valley the past 2-3 weeks; they're becoming more vocal and active around here and whether or not that corresponds to their nesting habits I don't know but we've now entered the egg laying and hatching time for these great birds.

I've been stuck on Great Horned Owls since I can barely remember and they've been a favored subject in my artwork off and on for a long time, as I've mentioned in past blogs. But this idealistic view is not shared by many and I do understand others point of view.

Great Horned Owls are big and brazen critters. They've been known to harass Bald Eagles and to kill other birds of prey, such as other owls and even hawks. Our favorite little Screech Owl is always in danger of the GHO's. A bird of this size, and with a rough demeanor can bring a tough night's sleep for many larger birds!

But these are really cool looking birds aren't they! I think so. And the sound of a Great Horned or a pair of them is sweet music to listen to at night or just prior to dawn. Its primordial. There's a sense of wildness in those voices but I'm also glad I'm not another bird trying to get some shut eye...wondering if I've been spotted and if that GHO is in a bad mood or not!

The Great Horned Owls are optimistic birds, why else would they be setting up house and raising kids already!? I'm trying to be optimistic too! Can spring be just around the corner??!!