Swordwhale Walking: Illustration, scrivenings & photography

I've wrangled barfing vultures, baby tigers, otters (they bite!), and participated in the Great Emu Roundup (yee-hah!..and it's hard to rope one, they're shaped to shed lariats) volunteering with local wildlife rehabbers. I've also had the honor of volunteering with a local county park/nature center whose mission is to educate people about the environment. I've also had the honor of them allowing me to smear paint over their walls (they actually pay me for this). Here are a few examples of murals (portable, permanent and transitory), cartoons and other illustrations that hopefully give kids an insight onto dirt, bears, oceans, forests and other wonders of Planet Water.

As part of its educational mission, Nixon Park's visitor's center has a "touch room" full of hands-on activities for young kids and their parents. Murals, games, "design-your-own" forest (or ocean or bird...) wall, dress-up chest, puppet theater. For "Under the Sea", I did a wall mural (how do you fit a life-sized blue whale into a twenty foot room? Perspective), and cartoons of sea animals illustrating fact sheets. A cousin contributed a surfboard (the same size as the dorsal fin of a male orca, "swordwhale".

The purpose of the Nixon Park visitor's center is education, connecting people with the natural world they are part of. 3D displays on the North Woods, the Arctic, Africa and others incorporate taxidermy, habitat and murals. The wall by the restrooms became a focal point for educating people about the watershed they live in: the east branch of the Codorus Creek (which the park is also part of). A water meter measuring park use sits to one side. I started by looking at maps and aerial photography of the area, but interpreted the spaghetti maze of visual information, simplifying it into a landscape hopefully everyone can relate to.

Naturalist Jodi was sitting on the floor surrounded by a pile of paper, printed with an encyclopedic volume of information about dirt.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"A display about dirt."
"Sounds exciting."
Yeah. How can we get people to look at this and absorb information about that stuff under their feet. Ah, cute cartoon characters. Someone else had done something with an earthworm. Worms are hard to cartoon, to anthropomorphize. Perhaps because they don't have hands..or arms or legs or any other recognizeable body parts. We thought about what lives in soil and came up with salamanders. They're kind of cute; they have big eyes and bright colors, "hands" and can be anthropomorphized. Voile soiley! And here they are...

"You will know more about chipmunks than you ever imagined." The park director said something like that as he handed me a pile of books about this small striped ground squirrel. I absorbed facts about chipmunks and their burrows, doodled in my sketchbook, ran it past the naturalists and park director and went to work on eleven feet of brown craft paper with crayons, pastels and Prismacolor pencil. It was laminated, and serves as a portable mural about the hidden lives of chipmunks.

Every year or so, the touch room gets a makeover. It's purpose is to engage kids in physical/visual/hands-on learning about the natural world. At the top of the page are some samples from Touch Room: Ocean. This was painted over, displays were changed, new activities installed, new murals painted. This is the wall I did: a scene in a white oak forest with a dozen of its denizens. The brown tags cover part of the critter and have clues to the animal's identity. Lifting them reveals the whole critter and the answer. First I did a watercolor sketch in my sketchbook. Armed with photos and illustrations of the critters, I tackled the wall. Chalk often works well to sketch, but this wall has a rough texture: paint on a pointy brush worked better. In the fox sketch, you can see the blue paint I started with: a very rough sketch. That was refined with black.

Wildlife rehabbers care for orphaned and injured wildlife; native animals are protected by game laws, you need a permit (and a lot of training and experience) to care for even orphaned bunnies (highly sensitive and prone to dying suddenly). I was one of many volunteers who helped Mitzi Eaton (raptors) and Barb Gregory (mammals, waterfowl, and the odd exotic) care for wild things. I learned a few things: vultures barf when upset (stinky! and it distracts predators from eating the vulture), a three pound great horned owl can handcuff you quite effectively to a perch (one foot on your glove, one on the perch...there you stay), owls have 1000psi per talon tip... and they have eight talons, otters can bite through 6 mil dive gloves, a four month old tiger can encompass my ample thigh with its jaws, don't lasso an emu, the rope just slides off their aerodynamic shape, owls and hawks in the buteo family (redtail, broadwing) will tolerate a classful of screaming third graders but accipiters (sharp-shinned, Coopers) and falcons will dive off your glove and hang there like the Great American Batbird. They make awesome falconry birds for the expert. Here are a few illustrations I did as T-shirt designs, coloring book pages, and one illustration of my own mustang adpted through the BLM's Adopt-a-Horse (wild horses) program. (This appeared in a book of Nancy Springer (Connor)'s poetry: Stardark Songs).