animals

Whiterock Conservancy Journal 1

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On my first day here, I unloaded my car which I had packed with art supplies, groceries, my bicycle, and a small suitcase. I’m staying at the River House, which is a very nice three-story house filled with art and books. I then headed over to Liz Garst’s house - she is the founder of the Whiterock Conservancy - and spoke with her and a couple members of her family for a while before heading back to the River House and testing out the Gator UTV.

The second day I met two of the groundskeepers here, and one - Amanda - took me on a small tour of the prairie loop, the abandoned log cabin and turtle pond loops, and discussed with me some ideas on good pigmentation and animal sighting opportunities. I shared with her that I have had a deep desire to see a wild tree frog for the past few months, and she replied that she sees them occasionally and will keep an eye out. I also rode my bicycle on the main trail loop that goes down through the campground and out past the turtle ponds, and met a couple of very nice women camping on the way! I spotted a number of turtles from afar as well as some frogs, geese, and dragonflies. I also harvested some plants and soil samples with the intent of doing some new chromatography artwork. In the evening, two of my friends joined me as my guests for about a week of my two-week residency!

On the third day, my friends and I ate breakfast together and then took the Gator UTV out for a spin, and I taught one of them how to use it. Then I biked the turtle pond section while they Gatored it, and we met at the top of the hill and hiked the Bluebell Trail together. It took us about 4 hours to get back to the UTV, but that was at a very leisurely pace and we collected a lot of chromatography material along the route! On the way back home, I passed Amanda and stopped to say hello; she remarked that she had seen a tree frog as well as a toad about five minutes previously near a tree and pointed it out. I hopped off my bike and went to search the radius, and I miraculously found the tree frog! He even held really still on the branch he was on while I took him out of the brush and permitted a decent amount of photos before he got froggy on me. That evening we were all invited to cocktails at Liz’s house where she shared more about Whiterock’s mission of conservation and sustainable agriculture as well as her family history - including a visit from Soviet Union premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cold War to learn about hybrid corn from her grandfather!

Cerdeira Village Residency Journal 4

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Most of this residency has been studio time; I have done a couple other things, though!  The first was a quick evening outing to Lousã with a part-time employee named the Portuguese variant of Juan which is João, which I can't easily pronounce.  He didn't know it, but there was actually a celebration in town that evening honoring Nossa Senhora da Piedade in a procession that took her from her white church atop a cliff near town into the town itself.  Apparently in a few weeks, they will celebrate as she makes the return trip as well.  I had a fartura, which is a Portuguese variant of a churro (without chocolate), while Julia and João had ice cream.  João then grew jealous of my fartura, however, and we got in line to get him one as well!

We also dropped by Lousã the next day to get a few more groceries; I also wanted to get packing materials to ship my very fragile turtle sculpture - the branches and lichens needed something really special!  Luckily, we found it at a "Chinese shop," which is just as it sounds - a large shop run by Chinese families that has lower-quality goods at cheap prices but has an enormous variety.  I found an area that had pillows and pillow stuffings, including little styrofoam balls used in bean bags and travel neck pillows.  I am hopeful they will be the perfect packing material to go around the delicate parts of my pieces, and supplemented them with bubble wrap and some fiber fluff as well.

Apart from that, every day has been a studio day up until Wednesday, May 31st.  This day, Julia and I decided that we would go see the Parque Biológico (Quinta da Paiva) at the nearby town of Miranda do Corvo.  It's basically a small wildlife sanctuary/zoo, run by a group that provides disability services and has an interesting take on our universe (that we are one of a multiverse and that there is definitively alien life in our own).  Nuno was going to take us as a tour guide, but that plan fell through - instead, Kerstin dropped us off at the Parque Biológico entrance and told us to walk back into town when done to take a bus to Lousã and then a taxi from Lousã to Cerdeira Village.

The Parque Biológico started off somewhat disappointingly with fairly common animals like pigeons, ducks, and geese, and then their bears seemed to be kind of stressed, so I was not sure what I was going to think of the place.  But then we saw some very expressively nosed boars and then happened upon a beautiful group of spotted deer.  We noticed one making a weird noise.  When we came upon her, we saw that she had a little baby deer with her!  We ended up seeing some employees who told us the baby was nine hours old.  It was so cute, and still hadn't quite worked out how its legs worked.  Julia and I felt quite lucky, as we had considered going the day before and would have missed seeing it.  We later realized that if we had come even an hour or so later, too, the mother and baby had moved inside to get shade and we wouldn't have seen it then, either.

We next saw some lynxes, and then realized we had skipped the fox enclosure and doubled back.  When we got there, I noticed there was a kit near the fox we spotted, too!  The mother fox was in pretty rough shape (missing part of an ear and with a non-functional front limb), but she still had a beautiful face and was clearly acclimated to humans.  After a while, she seemed to decide she could trust us with her kit and moved back while we oohed and ahhed over it.

The fawn and the kit were by far the best highlights of the Parque Biológico, but we also saw a wolf, some llamas, a very small reptile house with bearded dragons, spotted salamanders, and snakes, and a number of birds of prey.  There was also a section small mammals like mongoose, badgers, and martins.  There also happened to be a gerbil hut, which was kind of funny, and the gerbils had just had a litter, too - they were clearly also maybe hours old if that, as they were still little pink, blind, writhing creatures.  Finally, at the end there was a domesticated animals area.  Due to the fawn and the kit, I found the Parque Biológico to be a great experience!  Afterward, we walked into the town center, eventually found the bus station, and then stopped for a quick brunch (vegetable soup, grilled cheese, and decaf coffee for me; grilled cheese and coffee for Julia) before catching the bus back to Lousã.  In Lousã, we stopped at a pastelaria to buy some dessert and more coffee (decaf and with milk for me, this time) as well as some take-away dessert.  Then we called a taxi and rode back up to Cerdeira!

Aside from these outings, all of my time has been spent in the studio.  I'll share what my second project has been shortly!

 

Animal Autonomy Is Becoming More Academically Accepted

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I feel like there's a new groundswell of acknowledgement regarding animal sentience and intelligence happening lately in the academic arena, and I'm digging it.  Here's Dr. Frans B.M. de Waal discussing his perspective in "What I Learned From Tickling Apes," published in The New York Times.

Carl Safina’s Beyond Words Is on My Reading List

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I've recently placed an interlibrary loan request for Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel by Dr. Carl Safina based on both the Jezebel interview and the New York Times review; I've always felt that while there may well be alien life in outer space, there's certainly alien life here.