During one of my very first sessions about a year ago, I got to feed a lone starling at the Finger Lakes Raptor Center. This past Thursday, May 16, 2024, there were eight! My thoughts about this much-maligned species remain the same, so I copy it again here.
Session three at the Finger Lakes Raptor Center, June 1, 2023
Yesterday I fed a tiny, newborn starling by hand. She had fallen from her nest and now was the sole occupant of an incubator that probably seemed as foreign and austere to her as an intergalactic spacecraft darting about the exo-planets would seem to me. The presentation of my monstrous tweezer-wielding hand was probably that of an alien to the little winged earthling – my bare extremities, after all, offer none of the gorgeous iridescent black softness of a starling mother’s plumage!
There are few beings as vulnerable as a newborn bird with their plucked chicken-like baldness, appendages too soft to hold their weight, and, of course, their temporarily useless wings. This tiny orphan seemed to me to be a tortured mix of loneliness, fear, and hunger, but I doth project too much! Ha!
I based my impression of the creature’s existential state of being on her manner of alternately opening her beak so wide you could see way down into her throat as if peering into the abyss of a toothy yellow calla lily and then snapping it closed as tight as a clam, her head so low she appeared to be upside down in her paper towel nest!
Fortunately, hunger would be the urge that would invariably win out and the wee Archaeopteryx accepted the fortified tapas I offered, one by one, nearly cleaning up the whole dish!
This baby bird represents the “next generation” for me as her predecessors – the seven starlings I helped feed and who had “been there, done that” just three weeks prior, were now flitting about an outside enclosure and, unbeknownst to them, were about to embark on a new adventure as free starlings and emerging citizens of Murmuration Nation!
Before the release, however, Morgan and I had to catch all seven of them first. Okay – MORGAN had to catch all seven of them first. To accomplish this extremely delicate mission, we entered their enclosure – Morgan with a net in hand - to VERY carefully scoop them up before placing them in a mesh crate. This took several attempts and at least a half hour to get all of them boarded in their fabric Uber.
When the time came for releasing them – as momentous as a new epoch – Morgan let me do the honor of unzipping the carrier, essentially creating a portal to this exciting, new airy element – the very sky! Immediately, four little screeching fledglings bolted out, their wings beating the air percussively before promptly disappearing into the canopy of trees! A couple more quickly followed until just one tiny starling remained. It didn’t take long, though, until this one, too, was subsumed by the forest, becoming a prominent part of its sound section.
It floors me now that I would have been anything other than floored to bear witness to this event. Why did it surprise me to be so profoundly moved – to find it impossible to think of anything other than absurdly adorable starling faces and strange and beautiful starling bodies – ever since?
While so many find starlings to be “nuisance birds,” I marvel at creatures whose plumage mirrors the very stars in the constellations. Indeed, Morgan told me the word for a group of starlings is “constellation!” Surely the “star” in “starling” references the fiery orbs which glimmer in our night sky light years away?
And if one starling hearkens inky black air in solidified bird form, a whole constellation of starlings can become what is essentially an inverse constellation – black stars against a light sky! Only these black stars are making waves, scumbling the sky like powered graphite - that rare, thrilling natural phenomenon known as a murmuration!
Is there anything more sublime than that?
But the magic does not end there - these impossibly light, warm beings of hollow bones, feathers, air, and shimmering night wings are vocalists and polyglots, too - as nimble as translators or musicians who can play every instrument in the orchestra!
Imagine the derangement of putting these celestial ambassadors in garbage bags? And yet that is what some perverse member of our species did to four of these innocent members of the starling species. And yet, these four – along with three others who had tough starts - were in the end, the lucky ones. Defying the odds, they ultimately “landed” with Morgan (a woman who is a different kind of winged being)! Morgan put forth a Herculean labor of love and nurtured these birds (and many others) to health, vitality, and now, freedom.
After she invested the time, the energy, and the money into creating a refuge for birds on the broken wing, I get to swoop in for a mere 2 hours a week to interact with creatures I would not otherwise even hope to glimpse in their natural habitats.
Normally, I’d rather hold a drawing implement than a cleaning implement of any kind, but holding one of Morgan’s scrub-brushes in my hand feels as empowering as a lightsaber in a world where one too often feels powerless.
For this is a world where birds are not only found in bags of garbage, but garbage is found in birds – even in birds nesting thousands upon thousands of miles from human habitation. It is the fate of far too many seabirds (and plenty of other animals, too) to find their digestive tracts choked with the plastic detritus we dump into our life-sustaining waterways. Sadly, we discover the trash in their decomposing bodies only after starvation or punctured stomachs or colons does them in.
Other threats to birds (and all life on the planet) include climate change, oil spills, fire, floods, deforestation and other forms of habitat destruction, factory farming, hunting, scarcity of food, etc. Alas, it is said we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction!
I desperately want to fix it – to make the pain and loss stop!
And yet, no matter how many petitions I sign, letters I write, or impassioned voice messages I leave on the phones of legislators, I still feel helpless.
Powerless.
Writing letters is an imperative, but I am not profoundly moved when I hit “Send.”
Releasing a bird I had the privilege to hand-feed three weeks ago is a different story. We cannot directly help save the suffering albatross who swallowed the bottle caps and plastic toys of Christmases past, but we can go to Morgan’s Finger Lakes Raptor Center and feed an orphaned wren, a robin, a duck, a raven, or, yes, a starling, and no longer feel as helpless as a newborn bird!
Nearly Every Seabird on Earth Is Eating Plastic (nationalgeographic.com)
A Forest Sounds Like a Ship at Sea
A Forest Sounds Like a Ship at Sea
A Research/Drawing/Animation/Projection project to be screened at the Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, Ireland TBA
See previous entries from my blog while in remote residence at:
Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre (uillinnwestcorkartscentre.blogspot.com)
A Forest Sounds Like a Ship at Sea
Graphite on paper, montage of baby birds who were in residence at the "Finger Lakes Raptor Center." Clockwise from left: kestrel, starling, mallard duck, fledgling kestrel
A Forest Sounds Like a Ship at Sea
A Research/Drawing/Animation/Projection project to be screened at the Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, Ireland TBA
See previous entries from my blog while in remote residence at:
Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre (uillinnwestcorkartscentre.blogspot.com)
A working artist statement:
It is important to know what has been lost (and how it happened) in order to fully appreciate and protect those beings left who struggle to coexist with our habitat-consumptive species so that they don't end up as tragic "specimens" in museum drawers.
My ongoing project "A Forest Sounds Like a Ship at Sea" involves animals, trees (consider the saga of the American Chestnut!), and plants which thrived in abundance in the land of the Haudenosaunee for thousands of years before European colonization.
A Forest Sounds Like a Ship at Sea
Newborn Starling
A Forest Sounds Like a Ship at Sea
A Research/Drawing/Animation/Projection project to be screened at the Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, Ireland TBA
See previous entries from my blog while in remote residence at:
Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre (uillinnwestcorkartscentre.blogspot.com)
The 19th Century Pennsylvania Woods would have been filled with various species of birds - some of which I now have the privilege to study up close as a volunteer at the Finger Lakes Raptor Center in Lodi, NY.!
Session three at the Finger Lakes Raptor Center, June 1, 2023
Yesterday I fed a tiny, newborn starling by hand. She had fallen from her nest and now was the sole occupant of an incubator that probably seemed as foreign and austere to her as an intergalactic spacecraft darting about the exo-planets would seem to me. The presentation of my monstrous tweezer-wielding hand was probably that of an alien to the little winged earthling – my bare extremities, after all, offer none of the gorgeous iridescent black softness of a starling mother’s plumage!
There are few beings as vulnerable as a newborn bird with their plucked chicken-like baldness, appendages too soft to hold their weight, and, of course, their temporarily useless wings. This tiny orphan seemed to me to be a tortured mix of loneliness, fear, and hunger, but I doth project too much! Ha!
I based my impression of the creature’s existential state of being on her manner of alternately opening her beak so wide you could see way down into her throat as if peering into the abyss of a toothy yellow calla lily and then snapping it closed as tight as a clam, her head so low she appeared to be upside down in her paper towel nest!
Fortunately, hunger would be the urge that would invariably win out and the wee Archaeopteryx accepted the fortified tapas I offered, one by one, nearly cleaning up the whole dish!
This baby bird represents the “next generation” for me as her predecessors – the seven starlings I helped feed and who had “been there, done that” just three weeks prior, were now flitting about an outside enclosure and, unbeknownst to them, were about to embark on a new adventure as free starlings and emerging citizens of Murmuration Nation!
Before the release, however, Morgan and I had to catch all seven of them first. Okay – MORGAN had to catch all seven of them first. To accomplish this extremely delicate mission, we entered their enclosure – Morgan with a net in hand - to VERY carefully scoop them up before placing them in a mesh crate. This took several attempts and at least a half hour to get all of them boarded in their fabric Uber.
When the time came for releasing them – as momentous as a new epoch – Morgan let me do the honor of unzipping the carrier, essentially creating a portal to this exciting, new airy element – the very sky! Immediately, four little screeching fledglings bolted out, their wings beating the air percussively before promptly disappearing into the canopy of trees! A couple more quickly followed until just one tiny starling remained. It didn’t take long, though, until this one, too, was subsumed by the forest, becoming a prominent part of its sound section.
It floors me now that I would have been anything other than floored to bear witness to this event. Why did it surprise me to be so profoundly moved – to find it impossible to think of anything other than absurdly adorable starling faces and strange and beautiful starling bodies – ever since?
While so many find starlings to be “nuisance birds,” I marvel at creatures whose plumage mirrors the very stars in the constellations. Indeed, Morgan told me the word for a group of starlings is “constellation!” Surely the “star” in “starling” references the fiery orbs which glimmer in our night sky light years away?
And if one starling hearkens inky black air in solidified bird form, a whole constellation of starlings can become what is essentially an inverse constellation – black stars against a light sky! Only these black stars are making waves, scumbling the sky like powered graphite - that rare, thrilling natural phenomenon known as a murmuration!
Is there anything more sublime than that?
But the magic does not end there - these impossibly light, warm beings of hollow bones, feathers, air, and shimmering night wings are vocalists and polyglots, too - as nimble as translators or musicians who can play every instrument in the orchestra!
Imagine the derangement of putting these celestial ambassadors in garbage bags? And yet that is what some perverse member of our species did to four of these innocent members of the starling species. And yet, these four – along with three others who had tough starts - were in the end, the lucky ones. Defying the odds, they ultimately “landed” with Morgan (a woman who is a different kind of winged being)! Morgan put forth a Herculean labor of love and nurtured these birds (and many others) to health, vitality, and now, freedom.
After she invested the time, the energy, and the money into creating a refuge for birds on the broken wing, I get to swoop in for a mere 2 hours a week to interact with creatures I would not otherwise even hope to glimpse in their natural habitats.
Normally, I’d rather hold a drawing implement than a cleaning implement of any kind, but holding one of Morgan’s scrub-brushes in my hand feels as empowering as a lightsaber in a world where one too often feels powerless.
For this is a world where birds are not only found in bags of garbage, but garbage is found in birds – even in birds nesting thousands upon thousands of miles from human habitation. It is the fate of far too many seabirds (and plenty of other animals, too) to find their digestive tracts choked with the plastic detritus we dump into our life-sustaining waterways. Sadly, we discover the trash in their decomposing bodies only after starvation or punctured stomachs or colons does them in.
Other threats to birds (and all life on the planet) include climate change, oil spills, fire, floods, deforestation and other forms of habitat destruction, factory farming, hunting, scarcity of food, etc. Alas, it is said we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction!
I desperately want to fix it – to make the pain and loss stop!
And yet, no matter how many petitions I sign, letters I write, or impassioned voice messages I leave on the phones of legislators, I still feel helpless.
Powerless.
Writing letters is an imperative, but I am not profoundly moved when I hit “Send.”
Releasing a bird I had the privilege to hand-feed three weeks ago is a different story. We cannot directly help save the suffering albatross who swallowed the bottle caps and plastic toys of Christmases past, but we can go to Morgan’s Finger Lakes Raptor Center and feed an orphaned wren, a robin, a duck, a raven, or, yes, a starling, and no longer feel as helpless as a newborn bird!
Nearly Every Seabird on Earth Is Eating Plastic (nationalgeographic.com)
References and preliminary drawings
Oak trees were prevalent in 19th century Pennsylvania forests and they could get as large as this one I photographed in S. Carolina.
This was identified by a Cornell arborist as an Austrian Pine (Pinus Nigra) which grew in Danby, NY. When deciduous trees began to predominate, the Pine Trees could no longer thrive leaving this "enchanted forest."
Selection of studies of trees from my sketchbook which are indigenous to Pennsylvania and/or Ireland. Top right corner features a Hawthorne tree, laden with superstition in my Cornelius' Ireland and which grows in both countries. If you look at the scene in the animation, you can see the Hawthorne forms the subtle backdrop suggesting vegetation growing on the floor of the forest. Wolves were indigenous to both Ireland and Pennsylvania, but extirpated from both places at various times.
september 27, 2022
A Forest Sounds Like a Ship at Sea
Drawing for my Drawing/Animation/Projection project to be screened at the Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, Ireland in 2023
See previous entries from my blog while in remote residence atUillinn: West Cork Arts Centre (uillinnwestcorkartscentre.blogspot.
One of the things I am enjoying most about this project is drawing non-human beings - plant and animal - and "learning them" as I slowly draw them.
I won't post every drawing here because I want the final work to be a "surprise," but here is a peek at one of the critters - a wolverine portrait!
When drawing most animals one cannot simply step outside and find them and that presents a challenge. Depending on reference photos from the internet risks violating the intellectual property rights of the people who took the photographs - and respecting intellectual property is a priority of mine! For this wolverine, for example, I collected dozens of photographs, including stills from videos. She is a composite of many so I am not ripping anybody off!
I have always been fascinated by these "fearsome" creatures which would have lived in the woods of Pennsylvania where my paternal Irish ancestors settled in the 19th century, but were extirpated due to hunting and loss of habitat. I have discovered that the cantankerous reputation of the wolverine does not always match the creature. They can surely be a fearsome predator, sometimes taking down creatures much larger than themselves (including deer), but mostly they scavenge on carrion and hunt small mammals such as mice.
A wolverine can weigh between 30 and 70 pounds and belongs to the Mustelidae family which consists of weasels. The wolverine is the largest and fiercest member of the weasel family! I was struck by the fact that the wolverine survives in rugged - even subarctic - terrain inhospitable to most. Their coats are so well insulated that when a wolverine lies on the frozen ground, the snow and ice do not melt!
Wolverine | National Geographic
FINAL BOOK BIBLIOGRAPHY:
1) The Overstory by Richard Powers | Goodreads
2) Sacred Trees of Ireland by Christine Zucchelli | Goodreads
3) Wild Woods: The Magic of Ireland's Native Woodlands by Richard Nairn | Goodreads
4) American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation by Eric Rutkow | Goodreads
5) Remarkable Trees of the World by Thomas Pakenham | Goodreads
7) Barclay Mountain: A History Bradford County Historical Society (bradfordhistory.com)
8) The Fir Tree Map of the Beara Peninsula & South West Cork Sheet map folded
9) Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit (goodreads.com)
10) An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
11) Lough Hyne – From Prehistory to the Present – Skibbereen Heritage Centre (skibbheritage.com)
12) Skibbereen: The Famine Story by Terri Kearney and Philip O'Reagan
13) Animation Sketchbooks by Laura Heit (goodreads.com)
14) Baltimore Castle: An 800-year History Bernie McCarthy
15)The Chieftain's Daughter by Marie D Driscoll
16) The Textile Trilogy – Destiny Kinal
17) Wisdom of Trees by Jane Gifford
18) Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard | Goodreads
19)1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann (goodreads.com)
21)Roots of the Iroquois by Tehanetorens (goodreads.com)
22) Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist by Angelica Shirley Carpenter (goodreads.com)
September 23, 2022
Skin
A Forest Sounds Like a Ship at Sea
Research for my Drawing/Animation/Projection project to be screened at the Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, Ireland in 2023
See previous entries from my blog while in remote residence atUillinn: West Cork Arts Centre (uillinnwestcorkartscentre.blogspot.com)
One of the many books I am reading includes The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. Wohlleben compares the bark of a tree to human skin, noting that it serves the same protective function - keeping pathogens and pests which are supposed to remain on the outside - outside - and vital body fluids and internal organs meant to remain inside - inside! Trees contain nearly as much water and other fluids as we do. Without its bark - if it is removed or damaged - a tree would dry out, enabling fungi and other pests to invade without suffocating or drowning.
As a tree grows, it increases in diameter resulting in "wrinkles" just like our faces as we age. The tree's cracks go as deep as the newest layer of bark, but do not go as deep as the sensitive cambium.
As trees grow, they also renew their skin - even sloughing off old "skin cells" as they do so!
I have learned so much about trees while undertaking this project and will never ever look at them the same again!
September 10, 2022 PRACTICE! PRACTICE
A Forest Sounds Like a Ship at Sea
Practice for my Drawing/Animation/Projection project to be screened at the Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, Ireland in 2023
See previous entries from my blog while in remote residence atUillinn: West Cork Arts Centre (uillinnwestcorkartscentre.blogspot.com)
I am still learning how to animate my drawings and paintings, but I have already learned quite a lot!
The underlying painting is a detail from the quadtych "All the Pink Monsters" overlaid with some "old school" drawings of one of the big cats that used to roam the woods of Pennsylvania. The extirpated cougar moves their head to gaze directly into the viewer's eyes. No filters, no AI!
The original sequenced drawings of a big cat moving their head.
This is one of my first experiments using a painting I did ten years ago of Ted Nugent - this one using filters, fooling with opacity, layering, etc.
Base of a Box Elder (tree), photo taken on Catharine Valley Trail, Montour Falls, NY, Summer 2022
DAY 2: Remote Residency at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, Ireland, 7/18/22 to 8/13/22, checking in from New York State
"Trees mirror in many ways the life cycle of human beings: they are born from seed, they breathe and drink, they grow to maturity, reproduce and eventually die from age or disease. Their branches, roots, and the veins of their leaves resemble human blood vessels, and certain species even ooze a reddish, blood-like sap when damaged." from Sacred Trees of Ireland by Christine Zucchelli | Goodreads
In addition to Sacred Trees of Ireland, I've been reading the glorious book, Overstory, in which the author, Richard Powers - who writes with the beauty of a poet and the precision of a scientist - anthropomorphizes trees in a way that is very self-aware and with solid scientific basis. While I have surely always adored trees, I never actually "related" to them past the age of 10 - or, perhaps I should say I never would have felt comfortable relating to them - until reading Overstory.
Imbuing animals, trees, and other natural entities with "human" qualities has been the practice of our species for millennia. Surely Native Americans as well as the Celts recognized that we have more in common with non-human beings than not. Still, many in the contemporary world who adopt a more detached "scientific" view of the world eschew anthropomorphism because it can lead to misinterpretation of animal - or in this case - plant "behaviors." This can be innocuous or it can be dangerous; thinking a bear wants to be friends, for instance, when she just wants her RDA of recommended vitamins and minerals can even be fatal.
However, seeing the "human" in the "non-human" can also make it more difficult to regard the natural world as existing almost exclusively for human utility!
It is my hope that A Forest Sounds Like a Ship at Sea serves to assist in rousing feelings of connection with non-human beings. I believe these feelings are innate, but have historically been "educated" out of us. New scientific research, however, provides confirmation for what many of us intuitively knew even as children; that sentient, sapient, "social" life forms are all around us.
More on this - and, yes, drawings - to come!
A Forest Sounds Like a Ship at Sea
DAY 1: Remote Residency at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, Ireland, 7/18/22 to 8/13/22, checking in from New York State
(Photo: "By the Time you Cut Teeth You Are Already Ancient," Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ, 2/22/20.)
Four years ago I travelled to Ireland for the first time. It ignited a passion for discovery – of both my own ancestry and the history of Ireland – particularly West Cork. And so began my body of work By the Time you Cut Teeth you are Already Ancient, described as one part “meta-genealogical investigation, one part spiritual quest, one part cautionary tale.” I did many drawings for that project (some of which were to happen during my Uillinn: West Cork Art Centre residency originally scheduled for summer of 2020!) which have been exhibited several times in solo exhibitions at galleries and universities. The photo on the left was taken at Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ in 2/22/20. You can learn more about that project here… www.mariadriscollmcmahon.com and here By the Time You Cut Teeth You Are Already Ancient.
My new work in progress is an “offshoot” (pun intended!) of the former, but rather explores the habitats – particularly the trees - of my Irish paternal ancestors – both before and after emigrating from Ireland.
Surprisingly enough, my wild curiosity about the habitats was aroused, in part, during my daily walks on my own tiny plot of land which turns out to be only 25 miles from where Cornelius O’Driscoll – weary scout from Ireland – and my original paternal Irish ancestor to come to America in the mid 19th century, built his log cabin in Ridgebury, Pa. It was there, in the “unbroken Pennsylvania wilderness” where “Cornelius commenced his clearing,” as reported by the Reverend David Craft in the tome, History of Bradford County, Pennsylvania, 1770-1878. Four years later, he would return to Ireland to bring his family and friends to join him in the new frontier.
In sum, the little forest I enter every day without fail has become my "ship" connecting continents, centuries, and the living and the dead.
In addition to drawing in preparation for an animation/projection (the process of which I am learning), my research during this residency will entail contacts with natural scientists, conservationists, historians, the priests serving "Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church," in Ridgebury, Pa. (which my own ancestors helped to build in the mid-19th century), visits with descendants of the original immigrants who established the "Irish Settlement" in Ridgebury, Pa., internet articles, and lots of yummy books, including:
1) The Overstory by Richard Powers | Goodreads
2) Sacred Trees of Ireland by Christine Zucchelli | Goodreads
3) Wild Woods: The Magic of Ireland's Native Woodlands by Richard Nairn | Goodreads
4) American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation by Eric Rutkow | Goodreads
5) Remarkable Trees of the World by Thomas Pakenham | Goodreads
7) Barclay Mountain: A History Bradford County Historical Society (bradfordhistory.com)
8) The Fir Tree Map of the Beara Peninsula & South West Cork Sheet map folded
Many thanks to all the folks mentioned above who have helped me already. I will be sure to name names at a later date! I could not do this research without you!