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PrintThe Rare Birds of Jackson Hole
Local talents Bert Raynes and Greg McHuron produce dazzling coffee table book on winged species
Greg McHuron’s original paintings, including Ferruginous Hawk, offer silhouettes of mammals to focus on birds, yet not exclude the presence of larger fauna.
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If one listens to futurists, books made of paper as we know them, as they have existed for the last half millennium since Gutenberg, are on their way out—paralleling the fates in nature of dodos, ivory-billed woodpeckers, and soon, potentially, sage grouse in Jackson Hole.
Fortunately, Bert Raynes, a curmudgeonly Wyoming watcher of birds, and Greg McHuron, an internationally renowned painter of wildlife who happens to call the Tetons home, are deaf to the predictions of those digital post-Luddite doomsayers.
Raynes and McHuron have collaborated to create a dazzling new natural history book tiered to the American West but with the influence of Jackson Hole infused in every corner of it.
And indeed, what a beautiful, sensuous and traditional volume it is.
Few coffee table books qualify as instant, affordable classics. This one most certainly does, not solely for the way it is packaged, but the two men involved, both living legends, have given us something that feels truly wonderful to clutch in our hands; something of meaning and tangibility, at a time when so much else qualifies as little more than artifice.
Birds of Sage and Scree is definitely more art book than portable field guide, though Raynes’ astute and clever insights into the avifauna that inhabit these less conspicuous ecological niches makes the reader want to set out immediately with binoculars in hand to see if the real feathered denizens match up to the stunning visual portrayals of them by McHuron.
As a key value-added proposition, buyers of the book become instant stakeholders in landscape conservation. All proceeds derived from sales of paperback and hardbound collector’s editions—the latter replete with a pair of signed (and framable) limited edition prints by McHuron—go toward underwriting an unprecedented wildlife mapping initiative in Jackson Hole spearheaded by the Meg and Bert Raynes Wildlife Fund.
Lovers of fine art can behold all 27 of McHuron’s original oil paintings that serve as illustration and already have earned him the title of being “the Louis Agassiz Fuertes” of avian painting in the Tetons. McHuron’s works are on display through August 8, 2010 in the members’ lounge at the National Museum of Wildlife Art.
Fuertes was the legendary ornithologist and artist based at Cornell University though observers say McHuron’s paintings are far more painterly compared to Fuertes’ illustrations.
Birds of Sage and Scree, however, transcends the spirit of those winged denizens more often treated as afterthought in the sea of treeless sagebrush and the rock jumbles—called scree— that reside typically astride mountain slopes. Among the featured species are: black-throated sparrow, brown thrasher, burrowing owl, cliff swallow, common raven, ferruginous hawk, golden eagle, greater sage-grouse, green-tailed towhee, horned lark, loggerhead shrike, long-billed curlew, mountain bluebird, mourning dove, peregrine falcon, Clark’s nutcracker, pipit, prairie falcon, gray-crowned rosy finch, rock wren, sage sparrow, short-eared owl, Townsend’s solitaire, vesper sparrow, Western meadowlark, white-tailed ptarmigan and white-throated swift.
