She was my window into a natural world of ducks. I have watched them hatch (and listened!) I have seen so many now through the whole cycle of life. I paint them like landscapes, with their dots, swirls and stripes. I’ve never seen anything more beautiful. And those eyes. They hold me accountable. I am completely compelled to paint their portraits, although I never can get it quite right, so I have to keep trying.

They tell me this is the way the world is. They say I am not the important part of it. They say it is complicated, rich, lovely. So efficient, and strong, but so fragile. The consistent possibility, inevitability of tragedy lights up the present and brightens all the colors.

I make pictures about them, and Peter writes their stories. I like them to hang on the wall and insist on being read. I use size, patterned borders, and gold to flesh out their stories. To say.

“Pay attention. This is important”.

– Kathryn O’Grady

Hard to say when my interest in channeling the voices of migratory wildfowl first took wing. I spent twelve years cohabiting, even travelling cross-country with parrots (by U-Haul, not by air). Their intelligence, affection, and emotional complexity astounded me. Living and writing in Los Angeles with its access to varied wild environments, I began paying more attention to animal behavior. As a kid I had reveled in the anthropomorphism found in books like “Wild Animals I Have Known,” “The Wind in the Willows,” and “Watership Down,” but now I read Konrad Lorenz, Temple Grandin, and Desmond Morris to get inside. The West also brought me into the fold of the Virginia Avenue Project and its work with very gifted, very young playwrights, unafraid of endowing absolutely anything (animal, vegetable, mineral, conceptual) with feelings, opinions and personality. There’s something about playing a prissy, Irish, step-dancing, sorority ewe (yes, ewe) that changes you.

By the time I yo-yoed back east, after a decade of teaching, writing for young people and writing about film, I still had an itch to understand why animals do what they do. My Maine-based father and I finally bonded over crows, but I was middle-aged, busy and petless. Then, after a decade in DC immersed in the design of youthwork, I met the painter, Kathryn O’Grady. Opening night at an exhibit featuring a photograph of mine, I was wowed by her peering portrait of a peacock. It had the same, assertive, sideways stare I remembered from my parrots. While we waited to swap work, Kathryn and I corresponded increasingly about avian behavior – and she told me all about the ducks in her life.

Fittingly, the pandemic has brought a total shift in my social registry from humans to smaller mammals and birds. The squirrels I used to slingshot off our bird feeders, I’ve now gained the trust to feed daily by hand. Blue Jays (those cunning corvid cousins of crows) come when I do an extremely bad Jay call and eat the peanuts I toss. And a beautiful but temperamental, feral cat now named Miss Lulabelle has somehow decided to adopt us as family.

Animals continue to be some of the most interesting people I know.

– Peter Guttmacher

Division

Right now the world couldn’t be more filled with it. So the call goes out for finding common ground. And what could be more vital than building bridges as we reckon with privilege, bias, and oppression? But as we do, what if we also turn the mirror to our own exclusive club of Homo Sapiens? Since Noah populated the Ark, mankind has made itself official master of the animal world. Sometimes steward, often exploiter, always above and apart. How truly set apart are we, though? Don’t the love and fear, sacrifice and betrayal, reason and lunacy that drive us — also drive other creatures, too? Is our need for belonging — our instinct (and at times our inability) to nurture our young — our quest for survival from birth through old age really unique to our species?

Because empathy, even at an inter-species level, is still sacred stuff. As the old playground song says, “…for a duck may be somebody’s mother.”

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