Wrangell turns into birders' paradise

The more visible aspects of the Stikine River Birding Festival start this evening, but festival elements had already started Monday.

Guest artist Elizabeth Kunibe has been teaching students in Wrangell about art using bird cutouts and paints. Their work goes on display this evening in the Nolan Center.

Students were given wooden templates mounted on driftwood and received a lesson about color. They then painted their silhouettes and attached eyes, Kunibe said.

She was putting the finishing touches on the bird templates last week when interviewed for this article.

“I’m working on all this stuff right now, and woodworking and talking don’t mesh,” she joked.

The students will also fine-tune their pre-carved templates using sandpaper and shaping tools under careful supervision, Kunibe said.

“Their main task will be painting,” she said.

Of all the possible feathered friends to portray, Kunibe chose long-legged wading birds for her templates because they’re ideally sized to be replicated many times for teaching materials, she said. The primary emphasis will be on detecting the colors within colors that saturate the natural world, Kunibe said.

“When a student goes to paint a tree...they’ll color the tree brown,” she said. “But in reality, if you really look at that tree bark, sometimes there’s green in it, grey in it, three different shades of brown, and it depends what light is on it.”

“That’s what I was going to do with mixing the paints and having the students select paints and broaden their knowledge of colors, so they’re not just thinking red, green, brown, blue,” she added

She’ll also use a pheasant feather to illustrate the point.

“They can look at the pheasant feather and see: it looks gold, it looks brown, it looks black, it has all these different shades on it,” she said.

Students will trace the template and try different drafts, after which, they’ll paint the wooden template itself.

The templates will go on display at 6 p.m. today, followed at 6:15 p.m. by the Bird “Tails” Contest, where local outdoorsy folks will compete with tales – tall and otherwise – of bird-brained behavior.

At 7 p.m., guest speaker and author Noah Strycker will deliver a presentation entitled “Bird World: Insights for Humans From the World of Birds.” Strycker will also deliver a presentation about his time researching penguins to Wrangell school students.

While some might gravitate to nature’s more photogenic birds, like the scarlet tanager or indigo bunting, Strycker’s favorite bird is perhaps best known for being a villain in Disney movies and a constant menace in old Westerns.

“My favorite bird in the whole universe is the turkey vulture,” he said.

When he was a high school student, Strycker saw a David Attenborough film in which Attenborough attracted vultures in a rainforest with a piece of beef. He tried to replicate the experiment at home.

“So I ended up going out and getting a full-sized roadkill deer carcass and bringing that home,” he said. “I had like 25 turkey vultures sitting on the roof of my house the next morning.”

His enthusiasm for birds started in the fifth grade, when a teacher put a bird feeder on the outside window of a classroom. The teacher would interrupt class whenever a new bird showed up, and while other students found it tiresome, Strycker said he grew to love the birds he saw there.

“I went home, and my dad had an old pair of binoculars and an old bird guide, and on my own I just started trying to figure out the birds in my own backyard,” he said. “You never know where that spark’s going to come from, and it just snowballs from there into a complete and total addiction.”

The study of birds and their interaction with the natural world is, in part, a lesson on human behavior, Strycker said.

“I think that birds do fascinating things all around the world, and you can take almost any bird and start watching it, and pretty soon it will do something interesting,” he said. “When you study how birds do what they do and why they do it, I think ultimately we can even learn a few lessons for ourselves, as humans. I kind of have this belief, when we’re studying other animals like birds, in the end, we’re kind of studying ourselves as well.”

Copies of Styker’s latest book, “The Thing with Feathers,” will also be on sale after his presentation.

Friday will feature a 6:30 pm presentation about falconry at the Nolan Center by Juneau falconer John Eiler and gyrfalcon Mirage. On Saturday, a free continental breakfast will be provided at 7 a.m. at the Muskeg Meadows Golf Course and the film “The Meaning of Wild” will be screened at the small theater in the Nolan Center.

The festival will conclude Sunday with the Spring Live Music show (formerly known as the PianoFest).

A full list of events is available at http://www.stikinebirding.org.