I tried to take advantage of a the blackbirds coming back to town by doing some sketching for reference with a sculpture of a cow bison with birds on her back in mind (in life they were Brewer’s blackbirds last year) but the redwings near the Gardiner school are the only ones in town so [...]
Not just any bison would do… we were in search of COW bison. I’m working on a piece of a cow bison with birds on her back and needed some live models. SO, the pups and I drove up to Blacktail Deer Plateau in the Park. Down near the ponds were several groups of bison [...]
Jenny and i were hiking with the pups this morning down in Yankee Jim Canyon (15 miles downstream of the Park on the Yellowstone River) and spotted one male mountain bluebird! Spring may come to Montana after all!
As often happens around our place, unusual requests for reports, sightings, leads on animal carcassesare often aired. Of the myriad reasons, today it was for the purpose of getting some deer legs in order to mold and cast them in plaster - one front and one hind leg. It just so happened that the very [...]
Sunny and clear here today, but still, a cold wind continues to blow out of the northeast. Elk and mule deer continue to file in and out of the yard at ever increasing frequency. The drag of winter is hitting everyone who eats grass - especially in places in the Park where snows softened in [...]
The pups and I worked hard in the studio today getting some more work done on the life-sized version of the deer sculpture - it will ultimately be 2 times life-size, but enlarging it in stages lets one figure out many of the problems and find new ‘right answers’ not found in earlier versions. To [...]
This morning, as has been going on for more than a week now, the song sparrows and chickadees have been singing their sweet serenades of spring courtship (click Black-capped_Chickadee1.html for the chickadee song or here for Song_Sparrow.html the song sparrow - complements of Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology)… crazy enough, I drove through ‘downtown’ Gardiner this evening and [...]
I took the pups for a run this morning… actually closer to lunch- we were busy at work in the studio for most of the morning. Snow has reclaimed the brown lands around our home indicating winter is not finished yet. Waiting to jog was good on a couple accounts - one, enough cars had [...]
On our second morning out with the Winter Wildlife Watching class in Lamar Valley with the Yellowstone Association our friend Eleanor Clark snapped this wonderful photo of a line of cow elk looking for a place to cross the Lamar River. In lieu of not having my own camera, I made Eleanor promise that she [...]
Kirsty Peake is a good friend of ours from the UK who has a home in Paradise Valley with her husband Alan, and she dog behaviorist and also happens to be teaching a program on wolves, including wolf behavior. She asked that I make a couple sketches for her of a wolf with submissive and one [...]
