A self-taught artist working mainly in gouache and watercolour, my primary focus and interest is painting birds. All my work starts in the field…I’ve been a serious birder since about the age of ten…and NO – I’m not going to tell you how many years ago THAT was!

Let’s just say – there are grandkids in the picture and leave it at that.

Wherever I’m living, I’m regularly found trekking about looking for birds to observe. Most of the locals think there’s something odd about the woman who hangs around ‘down at the lagoon’.

For the uninitiated, the ‘lagoon’ is the local cess pool where the sewage waste gets piped. I suppose it’s understandable that a person might get a bit of a reputation from hanging out in such places. What can I say – some things really must just be ‘in the bone’.

From the rich riparian woodlands of the South Saskatchewan River Basin, rising up through brush-filled coulees and rolling hills to the short-grass uplands typical of the vast Canadian Prairie the area offers an astounding diversity of habitat. Just to the East lies another geographic anomaly – the Great SandHills with it’s miles of shifting dunes and unique flora.

Combine that with numerous sloughs ( rhymes with whose ) the local name for the many ponds that dot the landscape, miles of rolling fields where trees and shrubs stand out rather than being the norm and a strategic location bang smack in the middle of the Central North American Flyway and you end up with a pretty amazing place to birdwatch.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, this area also boasts a strange cross-over of Eastern and Western species ( who’d have thought Eastern Blue Jays would be year round residents this far West ) and an unusually high percentage of endangered species .

Having lived in a number of countries on three continents, this is the best place I’ve ever lived from a birders viewpoint. The only thing missing are the sea birds, although we have shorebirds and gulls aplenty.

http://mybirdart.com