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| Original ink brush painting by Lynne Gerard |
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| Assorted Crane studies / ink brush paintings |
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| Sandhill Crane and Interessado on the Ravenseyrie Sorraia Mustang Preserve |
I have not yet gotten most of them paired with my calligraphic poetry and matted and framed as the tourists have come (yay!) and I am spending my days working on keeping the gallery well stocked with my cards, prints and oracles. When things slow down a bit, I can get back to putting the finishing touches on these ink brush paintings.
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| Sandhill Crane mates /ink brush painting by Lynne Gerard |
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| Sandhill Crane and Redwing Blackbirds in our driveway |
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| Sandhilll Crane ink brush paintings by Lynne Gerard |
Cranes and their exquisite forms have populated North America and other parts of the world for millions of years and have surely enchanted the imaginations of ancient artists and modern ones, too.
This brief description of the from the Iain Nicholson Audubon Center at Rowe Sanctuary in Nebraska:
Cranes are among the oldest living birds on the planet. A crane fossil found in the Ashfall Fossil Beds in northeast Nebraska, estimated to be about 10 million years old, is the Crowned Crane, a close relative of the Sandhill Crane. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the earliest unequivocal Sandhill Crane fossil, estimated to be 2.5 million years old, was unearthed in the Macasphalt Shell Pit in Florida. Migration between wintering grounds in the south and breeding grounds in the north has likely taken Sandhill Cranes across what is now Nebraska for many thousands, if not millions, of years. Thus, the link between Sandhill Cranes and the Platte River is believed to date to the river’s origins some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, following the end of the last ice age.
I do not know where the Ravenseyrie cranes overwinter, whether they migrate south to Florida or west to Nebraska, or have some other favourite place but I do know that when they return to the preserve here in mid-to-late March, it is a time of much rejoicing and our lives are greatly enriched by their presence.
“Our appreciation of the crane grows with the slow unravelling of earth history. His tribe, we now know, stems out of the remote Eocene. The other members of the fauna in which he originated are long since entombed within the hills. When we hear his call we hear no mere bird. He is a symbol of our untameable past.”
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, p. 96