where natural history meets art
Give a Hoot, Get a Hoot! Donate $10 and we can thank you with a handmade owl.
Come on into the Museum to pick your own and donate! Call us if you’re far away; we shipped some to Alaska (for the donation plus postage)! (802) 434-2167.
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Guest post by Kari Jo Spear, Photographer, Novelist, and Daughter of Bob Spear
“Take a shot in that direction.” My father pointed down toward the brook through some hemlock trees. “Good ruffed grouse territory.”
“Okay,” I said. My job was to take an interesting photo. So I crouched down, trying to get into ruffed grouse mode, going for an eye level perspective. If I was a grouse, I’d lay my eggs right under the trees. Of course, I wasn’t a grouse, and this was another of my father’s crazy attempts to get me into his “carve all the birds in Vermont” project. He thought it would be helpful to have a plastic sleeve hanging from each display case with some facts about the bird and a photo of its nesting habitat. I thought all the leaves and flowers and stuff he was putting in the cases would be enough to clue people in, but he wanted photos, too. Wouldn’t it be nice if I took them?
Well, I liked taking photos, and my father’s fancy Nikon with interchangeable lenses was pretty cool. But nesting habitat was not exactly an exciting subject to photograph. We’d been hiking for hours, and I’d been dutifully taking shots of deciduous trees, evergreens, moss, and even dead stumps. That part wasn’t really so bad. The real problem was that habitat shots had to be taken in the spring when the birds were nesting. The birds needed to take advantage of insects, who were also doing their multiplying thing. Right now, every black fly in Huntington was taking advantage of their favorite food source—me. They didn’t care about my artistic endeavor, they didn’t care that I reeked of insect repellant, and they didn’t care that I was allergic to them. My eyes were going to be puffed shut tomorrow, I knew it.
I am a grouse, I thought. I snapped two more shots down toward the brook, even climbing into the brush to get a nice, curving limb to frame the top.
“Okay,” my father said. “Now I want to go to a farm up the road. There’s a pair of cliff swallows building under the eaves of the barn. We can get barn swallow habitat inside. And all the apple trees are in bloom. They’re real pretty, and they’d be good blue bird habitat.”
Anything to get away from the buggy brook. I swatted my way out of the woods—flies never seemed to bother my father—and scratched my way up the road to an old farm that looked as thought it had been there since the glaciers moved out. I liked the way the buildings nestled into the hillside. Sure enough, there was a small colony of cliff swallows building their funny little jug-like nests under the eaves. I didn’t even ask how my father had known they were there. While he chatted with the farmer, I photographed the eaves, then some rafters inside where some barn swallows were busy irritating the cows, and then I wandered around the apple trees in full bloom and thought about how nice a big bee sting would look right between my puffy eyes. Maybe some poison ivy to set it off. Then I tripped over a branch buried in the new spring grass and landed in a woodchuck hole, twisting my ankle.
My father got the car and drove me home. Fortunately, I wasn’t bleeding—my father was not good with blood—and the camera was okay, so there was no harm done. “An old war horse,” my father said, seeing me looking at it on the seat between us.
I didn’t think he was referring to me. A young warhorse, maybe.
“You may as well keep it,” he added.
“Until next weekend?” I asked, wondering if my ankle would be up to more traipsing around.
He kind of shrugged. “Till whenever. If I need it for something, you can bring it back.”
“Oh,” I said, it slowly sinking in that he’d just given me a really nice camera. On a kind of permanent borrow.
“Might as well take the lenses, too.” I noticed that they were in the back seat. A 300mm lens and a wide angle.
“Thanks,” I said, meaning it.
“It’s a good camera,” he said. And that was that. Then he added, “But we need to get the film developed right away.”
“What’s the rush?”
“Montpelier.”
Right, I thought. The state capital.
“Library,” he added.
“You’re going to carve books next?” I’d believe anything.
He shot me a look. “No. Going to have the carvings there next week.”
“What?”
“There’s an art gallery upstairs in the library,” he said patiently. We’re going to have a big opening. Newspapers will be there.”
I looked at him, wondering how he’d known how to set up something like this. He’d probably enlisted Gale. He didn’t even look nervous. I’d be frantic.
“We’ve got to start getting people interested in the project, you know,” he went on. “Need to find someplace to house them.”
At the rate he was carving, he wasn’t going to have room to breathe in the shop much longer.
“There’ll be a reception. With food.” He looked at me hopefully.
“Of course I’ll be there,” I said. And not just for the food.
“Good,” he said. And then he smiled, just a little. “It’s upstairs. Your ankle will be better by next weekend, right?”
Of course it would be. Who wouldn’t want to get all hot and sweaty lugging bird cases to an upstairs gallery? I heaved a sigh. I’d never figure out how he managed to talk me into getting deeper and deeper in this project of his.
The next morning, I limped into school with my eyes puffed mostly shut, my arms and legs sunburned and dotted with red spots, and my left ankle wrapped up.
“What happened to you?” my homeroom teacher asked. All around us were kids with honorable injuries, acquired by heroically sliding into home plate or after bursting through a finish line. Everyone turned to me, waiting to hear my glorious tale.
I dropped into my desk with a sigh. “Wood chuck hole.”
Everyone’s eyebrows went up.
I nodded wisely like this was a big deal. Lowering my voice, I said, “Okay. Let me tell you guys about… habitat shots.”
Author’s Note: Visitors to the museum will notice that there are no photographs hanging from any of the cases. My father finally realized, as someone had tried to tell him, that people would get the idea where the birds nested from all the leaves and flowers and stuff in the cases. The habitat shot phase passed quickly, but to this day if I take a photo with no apparent subject, my father will look at it, smile a little, and say, “Looks like a habitat shot to me.”
And I still have the camera, tucked away somewhere safe. Permanent borrow: thirty-five years and counting.
Kari Jo Spear‘s young adult, urban fantasy novels, Under the Willow, and Silent One, are available at Phoenix Books (in Essex and Burlington, Vermont), and on-line at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Previous posts in this series:
Part 1: The Early Years
Part 2: The Pre-teen Years (or, Why I’m Not a Carver)
Part 3: Something’s Going On Here
Part 4: The Summer of Pies
Part 5: My Addiction
Do you do birds? The Birds of Vermont Museum and the Vermont Center for Ecostudies are collaborating on an exhibit for this year at the Birds of Vermont Museum. We are celebrating the VCE’s updated Breeding Birds of Vermont atlas and its release as a printed book (see more at http://www.vtecostudies.org/vbba/). This atlas is a gigantic citizen-science project and the result of hundreds of volunteers and thousands of hours of birding observations and data analysis.
We seek art to complement the data-rich maps and species descriptions. The exhibit will run from May 1 through October 31.
The birds we’re looking for are these:
The art we seek is ready to hang, and is at least 10” x 10” (up to say, 3’x3’). We’re happy to consider sculptures (especially if it fits on a small wall-mounted mantle-style shelf or can be hung on a wall). We are hoping for a diversity of media, and we’re happy to carry some prints and cards of yours in our gift shop as well for the season. The original work can be for sale or not, at your discretion.
Are you interested? Do you have something you’d like to exhibit with us? Do you want to check out our exhibit space? Call or email us, tell us about it, and send us an image (.jpg preferred) by Friday, April 5. We’ll be choosing up to 15 works of art for this exhibit. We’ll need to hang the artwork by the first weekend in May. You can reach us (Erin, Kirsten, and Allison) at (802) 434-2167 and museum@birdsofvermont.org.
We look forward to seeing your work!
Guest post by Kari Jo Spear, Photographer, Novelist, and Daughter of Bob Spear
I sat in my health class, knowing I was doomed. I had all the symptoms: obsession, distraction, longing… I began to feel huge tears welling up inside me. Life as I’d known it before was over.
My teacher led me into the hall. “What’s the matter, dear?” she asked, putting her arm around me.
“I couldn’t help it!” I sobbed. “It’s not my fault! He made me do it!”
She looked very concerned. “Who did, dear?”
“My – my father!”
“What – did he do?”
“He – he gave me – binoculars!”
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It happened on my birthday. We were sitting around the kitchen table, and there were two gifts from my father before me. Both were carefully wrapped in the comic pages from the newspaper—he and Gale were recycling before recycling was popular. Two innocent packages that were about to change my life forever.
Kid fashion, I opened the biggest one first. As the paper fell away–the last moments of my youthful innocence–I saw that I held a box containing a brand new pair of Nikon binoculars.
I looked up. I’d been hoping for books.
“They’re the best,” my father said excitedly. “Small and light, but with great optics. 8×24. That means they magnify eight times the naked eye. Twenty-four is the size of the objective lens. That means they have a superior light gathering ability.”
He must have registered my lack of enthusiasm. “They’re what everybody has now,” he added.
I was pretty sure none of the kids at school had Nikon 8x24s with superior light gathering ability. He must mean his birding buddies–folks who wore mud boots year round, baggy clothes with lots of pockets, dorky hats, and were always talking about their all-important life lists.
“You’ll need this, too,” my father went on, pushing the other present toward me.
It was a book, but it wasn’t fiction. It was Birds of North America.
“Wow,” I said.
He chose to interpret that as excitement. “Figured you were old enough,” he said. He dug my new binoculars out of their Styrofoam packaging as though he was dying to get his hands on them.
“This is where you focus,” he said, like I didn’t know what the knob in the middle was for. I’d played with his binoculars when I was younger. I liked looking through a lens backward—it made everything seem really far away. My father carried his binoculars with him wherever he went. I’d never seem him use them when he was actually driving, but I wouldn’t put it past him if something for his life list flew over.
He was waiting for me to do the obvious, so I picked them up. Well, I thought, this wasn’t the end of the world. I got dragged on bird walks all the time, and it would be good not to have to stand around getting cold or swatting bugs, pretending I could see what everybody was so excited about. At least the binoculars were light, so my neck wouldn’t break. I raised them and turned to the window where a bunch of chickadees swarmed like bees around a feeder.
I looked, focused, and then—holy cow! I could see their eyeballs! And all the little feathers on their heads stood out. Their sharp beaks dug into the seeds they anchored to the branches of a lilac with their feet.
My father chuckled. I lowered my binoculars quickly. Ten minutes had gone by. Huh.
Then my father pushed the bird book toward me. “This is where you mark your life list,” he said, pointing out pages and pages of bird names in the back. Each name had a little box in front of it to be filled it.
Like I was going to start a life list. The kids at school would never let me live it down. Not that anyone knew what a life list was, anyway.
“You’ve already got a bigger one than a lot of people,” my father said, tapping his finger part way down a page. “Start here. You’ve seen Common Loons when we’ve been canoeing.”
“You mean, I can count species I’ve already seen?”
“Sure.” He pushed a pen at me.
Dutifully, I filled in the box next to Common Loon. “Hey, can I count the Red-throated Loon we saw on Chincoteague?” I could remember him dragging my attention away from the wild ponies for that.
“Of course.”
I filled in that one, too, and then flipped back a few pages. “I’ve seen lots of gulls.”
“Ah, but were they Ring-billed, or Herring?”
I didn’t know gulls came in different flavors. According to the book, there were at least half a dozen in Vermont regularly!
“Burger King parking lot,” my father said. “We’ll eat there tonight and you can get two, maybe three species of gulls.”
Well, I wasn’t going to say no to French fries.
“And look! There are sparrows under the lilac. You can get two–no three–species right now!”
I had my binoculars up before I’d even realized it. When I looked down a few minutes later, my father had my book open to the sparrow section. He had a grin on his face.
Darn it, I thought. He’s done it to me again.
Kari Jo Spear‘s young adult, urban fantasy novels, Under the Willow, and Silent One, are available at Phoenix Books (in Essex and Burlington, Vermont), and on-line at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Previous posts in this series:
Part 1: The Early Years
Part 2: The Pre-teen Years (or, Why I’m Not a Carver)
Part 3: Something’s Going On Here
Part 4: The Summer of Pies
Nuthatch Carving Class with David Tuttle
Saturday, November 10 • 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Come to a one-day carving class with David Tuttle of the Green Mountain Woodcarvers. We will carve and paint a White-breasted Nuthatch. Wood blank, eyes, snacks, and coffee provided.
No carving experience required! Beginners are as welcome as experts. Do bring your tools and gloves if you have them; if you don’t, let us know. Dave often brings some knives, gloves, etc. to sell.
Great for teens and adults. $25 for Museum and GMWC members • $35 for everyone else. Call 802 434-2167 to pre-register.
Saturday October 27 • 8:00–9:30 a.m.
Join experienced birders on the last Saturday of every month for the monthly bird monitoring walk. Discover more of the Museum’s forest and meadows! Please bring binoculars.
Free • Adults and older children have the most fun
Optional: pre-register by emailing museum@birdsofvermont.org or calling (802) 434-2167.
Wood Carving Demonstration
Saturday, October 20 • 1 – 2 p.m.
Check out our wood carving demonstration upstairs in the Birds of Vermont Museum workshop.
Ask questions, collect fresh ideas, learn a new technique. See what birds are in progress or guess which one will be added next to the collection.
A perfect complement to a museum visit. Appropriate for all ages. Free with admission.
Chip Carving Class (with David Tuttle and a Great Blue Heron)
Saturday, September 29, 9am – 4pm
Try your hand at chip carving! We will be doing a heron and possibly some decorative bits under the expert tutelage of David Tuttle of the Green Mountain Woodcarvers.
Pre-register, please! Blank wood, morning coffee and pastries provided. Please bring tools (including chip carving knives), gloves*, and your lunch. The class will be at the Birds of Vermont Museum, in the workshop.
$35 (Members of GMWC or the Museum get $10 off!)
*Call us if you need help ordering knives or other tools.
Guest post by Kari Jo Spear, Photographer, Novelist, and Daughter of Bob Spear
One summer day when I was in my early teens, my father greeted me in the doorway of his shop with two aluminum pie pans in his hands. He was looking really excited. Since the pie pans were empty, I got a feeling that this had something to do with The Birds in Their Habitats thing that he had going.
As soon as I got inside, he asked, “Want to make some leaves?”
He sounded exactly the same way he’d sounded when he’d asked me a few months ago if I wanted to paint some mud. Here we go again, I thought. I was a teenager, and I had, quite frankly, a lot more important things on my mind than birds. Like the novel I was writing, and my friends, and well, boys. But I knew that “No,” would not be the right answer.
“Okay,” I said as non-enthusiastically as I could. The next thing I knew, I was sitting on a stool beside him at his workbench. He handed me a cutting board covered with a thin piece of black rubber. What that had to do with leaves, I had no idea. Then I noticed a pile of silvery, oblong shapes on the bench between us. Each one was slightly different, but in general, they were about three inches long and maybe half an inch across. One end of each was pointed, and the other end was rounded. They reminded me of long fake fingernails, except they had delicately jagged edges.
“Watch,” my father said. He laid down the rubber-covered board, put a fingernail on it, then picked up a long, narrow tool like an oversized pencil with a very sharp tip. He pressed the tip gently to one end of the fingernail and drew a fine line all the way up the middle to the other end. Then he drew in a lot of little lines running from the center line out to the jagged edges. And when he held it up, the fingernail looked like a pretty, silver leaf.
“I’ll paint it green,” he said, as though that would explain everything.
I just looked at him. The word “habitat” formed in my mind. This had to do with habitats, I knew it!
“I’ve got some more nests,” he said, “and the limbs they were built on. But the leaves have all dried up and fallen off, and besides, they have to look like spring, if I’m going to carve eggs to go in the nests.”
I guess that made sense. “But how are you going to get the leaves to stick onto the branch?”
“Glue,” he said, as though he’d already got it all figured out. Then he added, “But it’s all got to look real, so I’ll make some more branches out of wire and wrap them with cotton and coat them with glue, too, and paint them to look like bark, and then glue on more leaves.”
I think I might have been staring at him.
“I’ll cut the leaves out,” he went on as though I was really thrilled about this, “and you can press in the veins. Here.” He handed me the sharp tool and pushed the pile of fingernails toward me. There were maybe three dozen there.
“That’s a lot,” I said.
He was busy picking up the pie pans and pretended he hadn’t heard me the way that people who are hard of hearing are really good at doing. In a minute, he was carefully cutting out more leaves from the bottom of the pan.
I gave into peer pressure and got to work. My first center vein came out a little crooked, but hey, nature’s not perfect. After my fifth leaf, I had the technique down. I was creating some pretty awesome looking leaves that any nest with wooden eggs ought to be proud of.
The problem was that my father was cutting out more leaves faster than I could press veins into them, so my pile was getting bigger, not smaller. And then he bent down and pulled out a couple more empty pans from beneath the bench.
“Hey, where’d you get all those?” I asked.
He smiled. “Gale’s been buying one of every brand she can find. Some pans are a lot better than others. They don’t have so much writing and stuff on the bottom, so I’ve got more space to cut. I think we’ve got it figured out now.”
I just stared at him. Most people bought pies based on how luscious they looked. Gale was buying pies based on what the bottom of the pan looked like?
Then he grinned. “There’s a blueberry pie we’ve got to eat up for lunch.”
The day suddenly got a whole lot better.
“Hold on,” he said as I was about to jump up. “We’ve got to get another dozen leaves done first. But then there’s a cherry pie for dinner.”
I gaped at him.
“And maybe you’d like to have some of your friends come up next weekend? I’ve got plenty of sharp tools. Tell them there’ll be lots of pie.”
I decided that leaves might be okay after all.
The days became a blur of eating pies and making leaves with my friends and eating more pies. Soon pairs of warblers began to perch proudly around their nests surrounded by lush green habitats, and I got to buy new clothes because none of my old ones fit any longer.
The glorious summer of pies ended very abruptly one day when the UPS truck pulled up in front of the shop, and a delivery man staggered in. In his arms was the end of an era — a roll of aluminum sheeting the same thickness as what pie pans were made from. It was all shiny and pristine, unmarked with any lettering. It looked like it was five feet long and weighed a couple hundred pounds.
“I found it in a catalogue and Gale made me order it,” my father said very glumly.
I could tell that even he could never make enough leaves to use it all up.
“Oh, well,” he said. “There’s still a few pies left in the house. Can’t let them go to waste, can we?”
We laughed, and then went back to that day’s quota of leaves before lunch.
I had no idea that we were getting closer and closer to having a museum in the family.
Kari Jo Spear‘s young adult, urban fantasy novels, Under the Willow, and Silent One, are available at Phoenix Books in Essex, and on-line at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Previous posts in this series:
Part 1: The Early Years
Part 2: The Pre-teen Years (or, Why I’m Not a Carver)
Part 3: Something’s Going On Here
