After several days that featured heavy thunder showers, Saturday morning opened clear and bright. I had a feeling that this would be a special day and it didn’t take very long to be proven right. In less than five minutes I had my first memorable encounter of the day below the fixed wier dam.
Running along the shoreline, investigating every nook and cranny was this mink! Please excuse the exclamation mark, but this was the first one I had ever seen at the Falls. It’s been over twenty years since I first visited this place. There have been times I thought I came across their tracks, but I’m no expert in this area. This mink kept moving which made it difficult to photograph. It ran right up the sloping concrete wall of the dam and I lost it in the underbrush!
Bird life was plentiful today. I was scolded by wrens and laughed at by chickadees as I sat in my outdoor studio surrounded by the materials I have gathered to make my sculptures. I watched orioles and blue jays, catbirds and grackles, and a pair of eastern kingbirds courting and chasing away every other bird to enter their territory. I also watched the herons and decided to try to make one from my poor materials. The bird above is the Black-crowned Night Heron and there were many out fishing today.
When I reached my “studio’, I could see that the site had been visited. Most of the sculptures that I had made over the previous weeks had been damaged or destroyed. As I have mentioned before, this is an experiment in human nature…albeit one without a hypothesis. For the most part, I want to believe that people are good…until I’m proven wrong beyond a shadow of a doubt. One of the many services my art seems to perform is as an outlet for unfocused aggression. Naturally, I would have liked it better if instead of destroying these figures, new ones were created by other hands than mine. I leave all the materials I’ve gathered on site for others to use if they feel so inclined. I’m also alright with the idea that if someone liked a piece…they can take it home with them. Whatever is left behind nature eventually claims anyway. I remind myself that it’s also okay to let this stuff go…it’s liberating and besides, I’ll just make more.
Since today’s action was happening near the wier dam, I photographed the Styro-heron I made near this area. This bird is primarily polystyrene foam, driftwood, plastic and that’s it. I have no idea what the object serving as tail feathers is, but it’s made from Styrofoam too. The eyes on my bird are tiny, plastic fishing bobbers. The blue herons around the Falls are very difficult to approach, but they do love it here. Through spotting scopes, I’ve seen as many as fifteen birds fishing together from the fossil rocks on the Kentucky side. World wide, this is a very successful species.
An alternate shot and one that shows the other side of the sculpture. I’ll end with an image of a real Great Blue Heron taken at the Falls a few weeks ago during a time of high water.
Artist at Exit 0 Riverblog 