Unlimited edition. 18 x 24 inch, museum-quality poster on matte paper.

One summer morning, I watched a western kingbird hunt from atop a valley oak near Pepperwood Preserve’s eastern edge. Kingbirds belong to the tyrant flycatcher family, a group known for “hawking” behavior – that is, jumping from a perch to capture prey on the wing. On this particular morning, a great many insects were taking flight from the pond and creek bed below the stand of valley oaks. The kingbird launched itself from the upper branches of its go-to oak, flew fifteen or so yards out, grabbed an insect in its beak, and returned to its perch to enjoy a bit of breakfast. Then again. And again. During the ten or so minutes I watched the kingbird, it never stopped taking advantage of the plentiful prey. Several acorn woodpeckers waka-wakaed their way to the same oak and began hunting in a similar hawking fashion. It made for a satisfying sunrise show!

One curious observation about the western kingbird’s color column: if you were to place the top half of the column, with its wooly white, cadmium yellow, and smoke grey, next to the column’s bottom half, with the raw umber, sage, bistre, and other darks, you’d basically have the bird represented in profile, head, breast, and underbelly alongside back – I’ve not seen that result before.

Note: These archival poster prints feature rich, appealing colors. I encourage customers to take care in handling them until they are framed/protected for display; the darker colors on the matte paper can be scratched. They ship rolled, so customers need to flatten them before framing (or have their framer do so).

Charitable Sales Model: Whenever one of these poster prints is purchased, a charitable contribution equal to 10% of the print’s cost (or $3.60) is made to a nonprofit working to tackle environmental or social challenges. Read more about my charitable sales model here.