WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

From time to time a Steller's Jay will wander down from the forests of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and visit one of my bird feeders

- JOHN O'HERN

Its color and harsh, scolding call remind me of the Blue Jays that were everyday visitors back east. The Steller Jay's blue wings and tail and black body with a crested head are startlingly beautiful, standing out among the less grand visitors to my feeders.

Joe Garcia lives in a forested mountain town in Southern California, familiar with the nuances of light and the characteristics of changing seasons. In Winter Blues, blue shadows on snow and the black stems of shrubs nearly hide a Steller's Jay taking off in flight. Garcia's composition emphasizes the forward motion of the jay on the wide horizontal canvas, with minimal shadows on the left, building up to the intense shadows and shrub from which the bird emerges into the light.

Jeremiah D. Welsh compacts the depths of the watery world of a stream into his low relief bronze sculpture, Northern Torsion -Pike and Bull. The pike, emerging from the lily pads, commands the center of the composition with the frog propelling itself away by pushing a foot against the pike's open mouth.

Welsh writes about the intimate scene of danger presaging a more global disaster. "With a swirl of dark water, the trajectories of two extraordinary predators-invasives and cannibals alike-collide and entwine. Then with a splash and an undulation of ripples, the watery curtains close with seeming resolution. Yet all is not well. Whatever the outcome of the encounter, ecological balance is evidenced as being skewed one small step further from center and the narrowing of species is made manifest. The slope that we have set our world upon is a slippery one and Nature harkens to us to heed its signs of warning..."