Thursday, February 3, 2011

Sandhill Cranes

I managed to take photos of my sandhill crane paintings this morning, the portraits are posted on my art blog,  click on image in right sidebar to see all three portraits.
A parent lesser sandhill crane bringing swamp vole lunch to junior, mmm tasty treat. We watched the parents attentively bring food to the youngster. They would bring food and place it gently a couple of feet away then watch to see that the youngster took it. I had never seen wild sandhill cranes before so it was quite a treat. I fell in love with these small 3 feet tall birds. I painted six paintings of them in January, three portraits, two full single parent birds on brilliant color backgrounds and this one. January has been a good month.

I read that the sandhill crane is like the dinosaur of birds in that its been around a long time. Sadly industrialization and devastation of habitat has affected all the various world crane populations with the sandhill seeming to be the most adaptive and holding it own to the point of nesting in busy areas close to man. These ones nested at Reifiel Sanctuary in Delta BC. The Whooping crane does not fair as well and the only wild place it nests is in Wood Buffalo National Park in the far north of Alberta and does not nest if disturbed by man. I want to paint a whooping crane soon as well, though I have not yet had the opportunity to watch them in the wild. I do have a few zoo bird photos that maybe usable.

Lunchtime: Sandhill Cranes
Acrylic painting on 16x20 inch canvas painted right around the sides so no need for expensive framing.

2 comments:

Carol Blackburn said...

Just popped over to your art blog, really nice work you are showing there. Thanks for the link.

Red said...

I've always liked sand hill cranes. When I was a little kid in Sask. we would hear the sand hills in the spring but it was hard to spot them as they were soaring very high up. Now with changes in farming practices they land in the fields and feed as they do no till farming and there's lots of grain left in the fields.