COLLECTING ART TO GIVE IT AWAY

Mona Lisa on a Bicycle (1972) by Ned Cartledge, polychromed carved wood relief donated by Jim and Martha Sweeny to the MFA and shown in the museum’s 2007 exhibit Compelling Visions: Florida Collects Folk Art

By Margo Hammond

Jim Sweeny has collected art for decades, but most of the pieces he’s acquired haven’t ended up over his couch — or even in his home. He prefers to share the art he finds. 

Over 300 hundred pieces that he collected with his wife Martha, who died in 2019, are now part of the permanent holdings of St. Petersburg’s Museum of Fine Arts. Dozens more have been donated to the Leepa-Rattner Museum in Tarpon Springs – and the most recent donations to the Leepa-Rattner were  up on the museum walls as part of an exhibit highlighting African American prints last summer.

Oh, and a glass vase created by a high school buddy and five paintings from Creative Clay that Sweeny donated to Westminster Palms, a senior assisted-living community north of St. Petersburg’s downtown where he came to live in 2017 when Martha fell ill, are on display in the complex’s Royal Palm dining room.

Paintings of palm trees by members of Creative Clay on display in a meeting room at Westminster Palms. The artwork was donated to the senior living facility by Jim Sweeny, a resident there since 2017.

The Sweenys didn’t start out buying art for other people to enjoy.  The first pieces the couple purchased — over 40 years ago — were for their own viewing at home. 

The earliest painting — by contemporary artist Maurice Clifford— still hangs on a wall in Sweeny’s apartment at Westminster Palms.

Jim Sweeny and the catalog for the 2007 MFA exhibit Compelling Visions: Florida Collects Folk Art showing Bill Traylor’s drawling Owl (1947)

A St. Petersburg native, a Northeast High School graduate and a 1965 graduate of Eckerd College, Sweeny bought the Clifford painting while he was working as a chemist at the Coca Cola Company in Atlanta. His wife was administrative assistant to the curator for decorative arts at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. They had met while Martha was also working for Coca Cola (in the company’s wine division, which eventually was sold to Seagram’s). Her new position at the museum had plunged the couple into a whirlwind of art openings, kickstarting their interest in acquiring art for themselves. 

“We went to everything — exhibits of pottery, photography, glass,” says Sweeny. The Sweenys were most touched, however, by the self-taught art they saw. After the Clifford purchase, they started more and more to collect pieces of what is sometimes called visionary art, sometimes folk art.

That art was affordable and often the artists were as unique as their work

Glass vase by Chuck Boux, a Northeast High School classmate of Jim Sweeny who donated the piece to Westminster Palms

In the case of Georgia-born sculptor Ned Cartledge, they became friends with the artist. Every two weeks, says Sweeny, he and his wife would go out to dinner with Ned and his wife Amy. Cartledge, who sold lawn mowers at Sears when he wasn’t whittling his colorful wooden bas-reliefs, preferred the Longhorn Steakhouse, the Fortune Cookie Chinese Restaurant and the Red Lobster. At one of Cartledge’s exhibit, Sweeny overheard someone ask Ned, “Didn’t you sell me a lawn mower at Sears?” Sweeny sighs. “Ned talked about lawn mowers for the rest of the evening.” 

Cartledge, who died in 2002, often mixed political themes and humor in his art. “When people asked him what inspired him,” says Sweeny, “He answered, ‘I’m not inspired. I’m provoked.’” 

I am chatting with Sweeny in his apartment at Westminster Palms. Also with us is Sweeny’s friend Elie Visel, a 95-year-old fellow resident of Westminster who befriended the Sweenys when they arrived at the complex. Visel, Sweeny tells me, has quite an art story to tell herself. Through her brother John Rublowsky, she met Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and other Pop artists who gathered at her brother’s Park Slope townhouse. A musician, her brother was the author of Pop Art, illustrated by Ken Heyman – the first  book on the pop art movement. 

Earlier the three of us had taken a tour of Westminster Palms, to see the pieces Sweeny had donated. The first — a massive glass vase infused with a scene of egrets, palm trees and a setting sun — was posed on a side table in the sprawling dining room on the first floor. The piece was made by Chuck Boux, a classmate of Sweeny at Northeast High School. Boux, Sweeny explains, started out as an electrician but while he was in New York rewiring the World Trade Center in the ‘80s, he saw an exhibit of glass art in a gallery and was inspired to start making glass art himself. In 1991 he founded the Sigma Glass Studio. His glass art is now on display at the Imagine Museum and Florida Craft Art in St. Petersburg.

The second Sweeny art donation to Westminster was located on a wall in a small dinning room beyond the main hall – five colorful paintings of palm trees by members of Creative Clay. The paintings, per the custom at Creative Clay, are only signed by the artists’ initials. Sweeny has been an important supporter of the organization which provides art experiences for people with disabilities and neuro-differences. 

A door decorated by Tallahassee artist Mary L. Proctor praising the art of quilting

Up in Sweeny’s apartment, visitors are greeted at the door by a collage by Tallahassee-based Mary L. Proctor. Across the room, I spot another Proctor – a full-sized door propped against a window featuring quilt squares and a woman at a loom under the title A Time to Quilt followed by this quirky, run-on sentence, “They sat hours pulled out bags of clothes bow ties that was no longer to be worn quietly they sat and patch together a lovely quilt made out of scrap clothing for peace and love to share with others.”

On the way to showing me more artwork in his home office, Sweeny stops and points out a print on the wall by Brooklyn abstract artist Terry Winters. He bought it at a fund-raiser for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “A lot of people miss that it’s a portrait of Snoopy,” he says, chuckling. In his office, there’s a small Santa sculpture by Cartledge, another Winters print called Marginalia (1988) and two paintings by a 60-something Creative Clay artist known as Karen C.

There’s also a photo of Martha.

The Sweenys left Atlanta in 2001 after a massive Coca Cola layoff forced Jim into early retirement (he was only 58). By then Jim and Martha had put together an impressive art collection, many pieces bought from Judith Alexander who founded the city’s first folk art gallery in 1978.

Rolling Tree Mule (1981) by Nellie Mae Rowe, a Georgia artist who worked as a domestic for nearly 30 years. The Sweenys donated Rowe’s crayon and ink on paper to the Museum of Fine Arts after it appeared in the 2007 exhibit Compelling Visions: Florida Collects Folk Art. It was their first art donation.

In 2002, Sweeny, to associate with other professionals, joined The Academy of Senior Professionals at Eckerd College (ASPEC) — a “life saver,” he says — where he was active until moving to Westminster in 2017, co-chairing the organization’s science and visual art groups. In 2007 at a meeting of the art group (which he co-chaired with local artist Ann Rascoe), he met Jennifer Hardin, then the chief curator at the MFA, who told him that she was putting together an exhibit of what she called folk art. Jim told her he had some pieces that might be of interest to her.

The Sweenys ended up contributing 15 pieces to the MFA exhibit called Compelling Visions, including a 1981 ink and crayon drawing on paper by Nellie Mae Rowe (who picked cotton in Georgia as a child), Owl (1947) by Bill Traylor (an Alabama painter born into slavery around 1853, who took up painting when he was 85), Monkey (1985) by Ralph Griffin (a sculptor from Georgia who had been a janitor for most of his life) and several pieces by Cartledge, including Mona Lisa on a Bicycle (1972), Message to Clinton (1993) and Hillary Clinton (1999). The exhibit ran from March 31-July 8, 2007.

Message to Clinton (1993) by Ned Cartledge, part of the Jim and Martha Sweeny Collection

Hillary Clinton (1999) by Ned Cartledge, part of the Jim and Martha Sweeny Collection

After the exhibit closed, the Sweenys donated the Nellie Mae Rowe drawing to the MFA. It was their first donation, but hardly the last. The museum would eventually be the beneficiary of more than 200 pieces by self-taught artists like Rowe and other African American artists as well as another 100 prints by American women. The latter were the subject of an MFA exhibit called Marks Made: Prints by American Women Artists from the 1960s to the Present which ran from October 17, 2015 through January 24, 2016.

In 2019 the MFA again offered an exhibit featuring the Jim and Martha Art Collection, this time dedicated to the memory of Martha Sweeny who died in March of that year. Straighten Up the World: Self-Taught Art From the Collection ran from May 18 to October 27, featuring works by Howard Finster, Clementine Hunter, Mary L. Proctor, Jimmy Lee Sudduth and, of course, Ned Cartledge. In its program notes, the museum noted that the Sweenys “together had a goal of increasing representation of women artists and artists of color within arts institutions.”

Monkey (1985) by Ralph Griffith, a Georgia sculptor who had been a janitor for most of his life and used tree roots to create art rich in myth, part of the Jim and Martha Sweeny Collection

The current exhibit at the Leepa-Rattner entitled African-American Prints from the Jim and Martha Sweeny Collectioncontinues that tradition. Showcasing Sweeny’s latest donations to the museum, again given in memory of Martha, the exhibit brings “the Black experience to the forefront through vibrant prints inspired by jazz music, quilting traditions and the African diaspora.” Prints from such influential Black printmakers as Romare Bearden and Allan L. Edmunds are on display in the exhibit which will be open through August 29.

The Sweenys’ initial donation to the Leepa-Rattner was the subject of a 2017 exhibit called Fall Into Greatness: Contemporary Prints from the Jim and Martha Sweeny Collection. That show was held in the Lothar and Mildred Uhl Works on Paper Gallery. A fellow print collector, Lothar had been a friend of the Sweenys. The 14 prints on display included works by Louisa Chase, Donald Sultan, Brad Davis, Terry Winters, Hung Liu, Howardena Pindell and Thornton Dial.

Jim Sweeny has been a major supporter of St. Petersburg’s Museum of Fine Arts, from 2007 when he and his wife contributed 15 folk art pieces to “Compelling Visions: Florida Collects Folk Art” to his sponsorship last year of “Derrick Adams: Buoyant.” Here are the catalogs to those two exhibits. A door decorated by Tallahassee folk artist Mary L. Proctor can be seen in the background in Sweeny’s art-filled apartment

Although for the past year COVID and an eye infection (which hampers his ability to drive) have cut back on Sweeny’s participation in ASPEC, the 77-year-old’s contributions to art institutions has continued unabated. In 2020 he sponsored an exhibition of Louisa Chase’s prints at the Leepa-Rattner entitled Louisa Chase: What Lies Beneath. The display of Chase’s prints ran at the museum from January 25 to April 19. He then sponsored the exhibit Derrick Adams: Buoyant at the MFA from September 12 through November 29. He was also a major force behind the MFA’s acquisition of the mammoth  2011 Leviathan Zodiac (The World Stage: Israel) by Kehinde Wiley, best known for painting President Obama’s official portrait.

Sitting with Jim — and Elsie — surrounded by such vibrant art, I am reminded how much I enjoyed seeing Sweeny’s pieces in that 2019 exhibit at the MFA  Straighten Up the World: Self-Taught Art From the Collection. I chuckled over Ned Cartledge’s wood carving depicting Diogenes, the Greek philosopher who railed against hypocrisy, in front of a mailbox labeled 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. with the caption, ”Diogenes in his search for an honest man goes to the wrong address.” 

I admired Clementine Hunter’s fresh look at the scene of Jesus’ birth in her painting Nativity where the Madonna, her child and all three wise men are painted Black. I saw the exhibit a month before that fall’s presidential election and a few months before the pandemic and Black Life Matters protests after the killing of George Floyd turned the country upside down.

Jim Sweeny was the major financial force behind the MFA’s acquisition of Leviathan Zodiac (The World Stage: Israel), this mammoth 2011 painting by Kehinde Wiley, best known as the painter of President Barack Obama’s official portrait

The exhibit’s title  — “Straighten Up the World” — came from a quote by Florida artist Purvis Young, a self-taught artist who used found materials to depict scenes and portraits of people from his gritty Miami neighborhood of Overton. “I paint them all kinds of ways. . . some people protesting, some happy, some white, some are black, green or purple,” Purvis said. “People that think like me. Different kinds of people trying to straighten up the world.” 

I am struck now by how well that fits Sweeny’s lifelong collecting philosophy. By sharing with all of us the art he has collected, raising our awareness of artists who have been overlooked, he too is among those trying to straighten up the world.

Nativity by Clementine Hunter, donated by Jim and Martha Sweeny to the MFA

Jim Sweeny in his office. On the wall is a photograph of his wife and fellow collector Martha.

Jim Sweeney’s office, decorated with a Terry Winters print called Marginalia (1988), a Santa sculpture by Ned Cartledge and two paintings by a member of Creative Clay who signs her work Karen C.

Untitled by Terry Winters, a lithograph bought by Jim Sweeny at a fund-raiser for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Sweeny explains that it is a portrait of Charles Schultz’s Snoopy.

     This article originally appeared in Arts Coast Journal on June 14, 2021 by Margo Hammond

THE ART OF REPETITION

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My obsession with birds continues...

  Ergo Sum: A Crow a Day, an exhibition at the James Museum which closed last month, featured 365 original works of art by Canadian-born artist Karen Bondarchuk. It was an exercise in repetition — for the artist, who painted a crow a day for a year to honor her mother who was suffering from late-stage Alzheimer’s, but also for me. 

    I went to the exhibit four times. Each time was a revelation.

    Repetition isn’t my usual modus operandi. I very rarely re-read books, for example. There are too many out there that I want to delve into to have time to retrace my reading steps. Likewise, when I see an exhibit, I usually move on to the next best thing.

    Not this time. At first I thought I was returning merely to share the experience with others. But I eventually had to admit that it was the repetition itself that was catching my attention. The artist repeated the images to recapture the passing of time that her mother could no longer notice, but the repetition itself became a healing ritual for me not unlike the repetition of a mindless mantra — and I imagine for the artist as well.

    Creating an image of a crow every day for a year may seem like a limiting restriction but, but by offering variations on the same theme the artist gave herself — and eventually me — the freedom to explore a universe of memories. Not unlike the years of our own lives, the panels were filled with death and humor, joy and sorrow, the ordinary and the extraordinary repeated day after day. Viewed isolated, each portrait held some interest. Seeing them together was mesmerizing.

    The first time I went to the Ergo Sum exhibit, I was by myself. I viewed the display of crows at random, walking back and forth, lingering over the images that spoke to me. I immediately took a picture of my “favorite”:  a crow with his mouth full of letters. But soon I found myself taking dozens more, each time convinced that, no, now this was my “favorite.” I seemed to be particularly attracted by the canvases that included letters and words (am I more drawn to words than images?). Two included quotes by Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese writer I admire greatly. Another featured a crow with a cartoon word bubble over his head filled with a jumble of letters, a haunting reminder of how wordless and incoherent our thoughts are, even when we don’t have Alzheimer’s.

     I was struck by how unique each painting was. Bondarchuk used a variety of painting techniques and colors. Every crow had its own personality — at times angry, at times humorous, at times friendly, at times menacing, at times contemplative, at times industrious. Some of the crows were very dead (literally on their backs with feet in the air) while others were very much alive.

    The second time I saw Ergo Sum, I was with my husband. It was our anniversary and I thought he would enjoy seeing the exhibit. One of his first comments was to wonder why the curators had decided to hang the paintings as they did. Two groups of the paintings — small 7 3/4” x 5 3/4” panels — were mounted to the left and right of an opening to a long gallery space where more groupings of canvases were hung on either side. Were the panels displayed at random or in the order Bondarchuk had painted them? my husband asked. We pondered the question but came up with no answer so, like the first time I viewed the exhibit, we just wandered back and forth eventually taking them all in.

     I pointed out my “favorites,” but my husband who is the rare combination of an intellectual and a handyman, was especially drawn to the crows with tools: one walking along toting a hoe, another with a hammer in hand. He also was intrigued by the crow that looked like he was trapped in Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo. Always more attentive to details than I, he also noted how often the artist posed her crows with ordinary objects falling from the sky: a drumstick, a frying pan a book, a chair, a shoe, a nose plier. What was she trying to say in those portraits, we wondered. Neither of us had any answers, but thoroughly enjoyed their mixture of the wry and doom.

    At my third viewing of Ergo Sum, I was with a couple — Art and Peggy Silvergleid — who had gone through a lot of strife these past months: Art just was emerging from grueling treatment for liver cancer, which seemed, thankfully, to be successful at last. Both were exhausted from the ordeal but ecstatic about the positive outcome. Both seemed happy to be out and about.

     Peggy looked carefully at each painting, noting the different styles the artist used: texturing of paint, gold leaf. Art asked a familiar question: Which order do you think the works were painted in and were they hung in that order?  I laughed and said my husband had asked the same thing.

     Peggy, determined to find the answer, stepped back and began to study the display, as if seeking a hidden order. Then she suddenly exclaimed, triumphantly:  “Look. They’re laid out like calendar months.” Looking at the pattern of each section, they indeed looked just like monthly wall calendars with the small paintings in place of the white square spaces of each day of the week. “All we have to do is find the one that has 28 panels and that will be February,” she said. “Then we can figure out the rest.”

    At that moment a museum visitor who was reading the exhibition’s wall text at the entrance to the long gallery space offered another clue. The text, she reported, says that Bondarchuk started her project in August. August 1, 2014 to be exact. “So this first group of paintings must represent August,” she said. Excited, we all walked down the long gallery space, counting down the five sections along the left wall. September, October, November, December, and January fell away like the calendar pages in an old time movie. Across from the January section on the opposite wall was a section with 28 panels. As Peggy said, here was clearly February. So moving back up the walkway we counted March, April, May, and June, arriving back at the entrance. The section hung at the right of the entrance was obviously July, the end of Bondarchuk’s year of crows. All the months had clicked into place. Peggy had cracked the code of the paintings’ order of execution.

    My final visit to Ergo Sum, with my friend Carolyn Nygren, took on a particular poignancy. Carolyn’s own mother had died of Alzheimer’s. The first thing Carolyn noticed was the varying hues of the paintings: Some were full of color while others were dark and muted. Did the brighter canvases represented Bondarchuk’s happier moments with her mother and the darker reflect the harder days she had dealing with the loss? 

    Carolyn also pointed to the many times Bondarchuk had chosen to include more than one crow in a painting. Did any 
of them represent mother and daughter? One clearly appeared to be a mother crow berating her offspring. My friend reminded me that as we grow older, often the child, tasked with caretaking, has to become the adult as the parent reverts to childish behavior. “My mother was very difficult at times,” Carolyn confided.

    Bondarchuk doesn’t provide much in the way of explanation of what was going on in her mind when she painted all these crows as if she prefers to let us fill in our own memories and experiences of loss. Only a few of her comments were included in the exhibit’s wall text: 

     “The series is simultaneously a marker for my mother’s lost time and a constant and acute reminder of my own days, my life, and an attempt to signal visually the preciousness and individuality of each day,” she says. “Although the project seemed sober to me at its outset, quirky cheer and serendipity came to inhabit many of the panels.”

     All the gessoed canvases in the exhibit were handmade by Bondarchuk. Preparing the canvases, she says, fittingly evoked for her the overwhelming labor and repetitious activities of motherhood. She had to cut the wood, prepare her own gesso from gelatin and powered limestone, build up layers on the canvas and sand between coats — and then, of course, actually create a new image each day.

     She says she was marking the passage of time that her mother no longer seemed to recognize, but she also ends up reflecting our own relentlessly repetitious days. Bondarchuk has often turned to crows in her artwork — usually depicting them in large scary sculptures lying immobile on the ground or looming at you from enormous canvases. For her, crows represent both the quotidian and the extraordinary – akin to the Buddhist notion of “ordinary magic.”

     I wish I could have gone to Ergo Sum a fifth time with my friend Karen Pryslopski. I think Karen, who died earlier this year, would have loved this exhibit. She had a thing for crows, even once commissioning a large-scale painting of a crow from her friend and Time Bay Times colleague Patti Yablonski. I always thought her interest in crows was odd because she was such a cat lover. But after my repeated visits to Ergo Sum: A Crow a Day, I realize that Karen’s embrace of both crows and cats had a kind of symmetry to it, representing the yin and yang of life.

      Karen was the most balanced person I ever knew. She understood the importance of taking all of life, the good with the bad. On one hand, she recognized that life wasn't always going to go smoothly. When she was mad at her boyfriend and I asked her what annoyed her most about him, she would joke, “It’s all that breathing in and out…in and out.”  On the other hand, she never failed to celebrate what she called her  “crummy little life,” filled with small reoccurring pleasures like cooking and eating ice cream. 

    Repetition can be both exasperating and comforting.

    After seeing Ergo Sum four times, I realize that its theme of repetition — and my repeated viewings of it — offered me a well-needed solace during this year of loss. It helped me gain an acceptance of loss along with an appreciation of what has not been lost: the day-by-day ordinariness of a crummy little life composed of both joy and sorrow, death and humor, toothbrushes, drumsticks, books, chairs and tools falling from the sky. No matter whether we are conscious of our passing days or unaware of them, like the artist’s mother, we never know how and when and why death will hit us, do we? We just have to keep on keeping on, one crow a day at a time.  

NOTE: This piece originally appeared in Arts Coast Journal, the online journal of Creative Pinellas on September 8, 2021.

UPDATE: After this was published in Arts Coast Journal, the journal sent the piece to Karen Bondarchuk and received this email in response:

"I am quite taken by Margo Hammond’s “The Art of Repetition” that you shared with me yesterday. I’ve had several pieces written about the exhibition, and this one stands above most others in its insights and sensitivity to the aspects of the work that are most important to me (the powerful salve of repetition, the need for others to make their own sense of the work, Fernando Pessoa’s powerful writings, etc). It moved me to tears.

I am so grateful to Margo for her thoughtful writing about the work, for her repeated visits to the exhibition, and to you for sharing her work with me. I am planning to provide a link to her piece on my website. 

An aside: I just shared Margo’s piece with my partner, Art Winslow, and he knows Margo from bygone days on the National Book Critics Circle. A small world, indeed. Please feel free to share this email with Margo. "

Karen and I exchanged emails after that. Needless to say, I was thrilled at her response -- and amazed at the less than six degrees of separation between us. I hope she and Art visit Florida one day. Birds certainly have a way of bringing people together. 

WRITING ABOUT THE THINGS WITH FEATHERS

This article was originally posted on August 16, 2021, in Arts Coast Journal, the online journal for Creative Pinellas. The archives of my articles for Arts Coast can be found here. 

-- Margo Hammond

The most attentive people I know are birdwatchers.
They are less sleepy as a whole than the general population.

— Anne Lamont in Dusk Night Dawn

Florida Scrub Jay – Creative Commons License

 

This article is for the birds.

No, I’m not writing something trivial or meaningless. I mean, literally, this article is about avian creatures. Or as ornithologist, professor and poet J. Drew Lanham put it in an online talk offered by The James Museum this summer, “I write about birds, for birds and to birds.” 

Unlike Lanham who wrote passionately about his fascination with birds since childhood in The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, I never paid much attention to the things with feathers when I was young. I did have a pet canary named Tweetie when I was 12 but when he died I swore I would never cage another creature again. 

Later while living in France I made the acquaintance of a parrot named Coco whom I tried to teach English. Coco, however, had totally embraced his adopted land and would only speak French. One day when he began repeating “J’en ai marre, J’en ai marre” (Translation – “I’m fed up. I’m fed up”), I thought with some excitement that he was having an existential crisis á la Jean-Paul Sartre. But his French owner set me straight. “He’s a parrot. He’s just repeating what I say when I have to clean up the bird seed that he scatters across my kitchen floor.” 

No, my current infatuation with birds is a recent phenomenon. It began during last year’s lockdown, thanks to my new routine – daily walks through the Pink Streets, my neighborhood in south St. Petersburg. Hiking along the narrow stretch of Pinellas Point Park, which runs along Tampa Bay, I saw — and heard — tiny warblers chattering furiously as they flitted from tree to tree (probably warning each other that a very large creature was passing by), graceful seabirds soaring across the water, splashing into Tampa Bay as they dive-bombed for a fish meal and red-feathered creatures peck peck pecking away on pine trees in search of a tasty snack of insects or maybe building a new home. 

I didn’t have scientific names for any of them (those peck peck peckers were no doubt some sort of woodpecker species), but I began to think of them, thanks to Emily Dickinson, as symbols of hope. 

 

Red-Bellied Woodpecker – Creative Commons License

 

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops – at all –

 

I also discovered that I am living in a state that is a birder’s paradise.

For decades ornithologists (those who study birds) and birders (those who seek them out, listen for their calls and check their sightings off a list) have been, well, flocking, to Florida to view the more than 500 bird species that have been spotted here. Some birds — the Florida Scrub-Jay, the Mangrove Cuckoo, the Snail Kite and the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow — can be seen only in Florida. 

The Florida Scrub-Jay is the only bird endemic to Florida – that is to say, native and not found anywhere else in the world.

“Pinellas Point Park” by Lori D. Collins is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

 

In 1951 the Pinellas National Wildlife Refuge, a breeding ground for herons, cormorants, egrets, endangered brown pelicans and many more bird species, was created on small islands off the coast of St. Petersburg. The birds nest peacefully on these islands in sea grass protected from interference by motor boats (which are forbidden to approach). One of the islands of the refuge — Tarpon Key — hosts the largest brown pelican rookery in the state of Florida.

Nowadays, however, all is not so hopeful in Florida birdland. Many bird species that were plentiful here up until the last century are now extinct. The last Dusky Seaside Sparrow, held in captivity, died at Disney World in 1987. The Carolina parakeet, the only parrot species native to the Southeastern United States, was last observed in the wild in the ‘20s. Its last known nesting location was near Gum Slough within Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park.

Other bird species are in serious trouble, with the Florida Scrub-Jay heading that list. According to the Audubon Society, as of the early 1990s, the total population of Florida scrub-jays was estimated at about 4,000 pairs, probably a reduction of more than a whopping 90 percent from its original numbers. 

 

John James Audubon, “Florida Jay” (1827)

 

Human development has nearly wiped out the bird’s only natural habitat – scrub land. Florida scrub, which once could be found in 39 counties, is now only found in a handful, threatening the scrub-jay’s survival.

In a new book out this year, Florida Scrub-Jay: Field Note on a Vanishing Bird, Mark Jerome Walters chronicles just how dire the situation is for what might be the world’s most friendly bird. To assess the scrub-jay’s chances for survival, Walters, a veterinarian, journalist and professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, travelled up and down the state to seek out the sandy upland regions where scrub-jays still can be seen – on the Atlantic Coast on Merritt Island (home of the Kennedy Space Center and the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge), on the Gulf Coast near Sarasota, on Lake Wales Ridge and in the Ocala National Forest.

In Florida Scrub-Jay: Field Notes on a Vanishing Bird, out this year from the University Press of Florida, USFSP professor of journalism Mark Jerome Walters, at right, tracks the history and survival chances of one of the world’s friendliest birds

 

Taking his readers back and forth in time (we even get to ride with his grandfather in a car in 1925 along the St. Johns River, then lined with scrub and thick with scrub-jays), Walters tells the story of the bird’s remarkable natural history. Arriving in Florida about 2 million years ago from the west, the songbird settled in the sand dunes in the central highlands of Florida. When it was cut off by rising waters from its former western habitats, the scrub-jay developed here into a unique species – a bird with a long, graceful tail, blue feathers and an amazingly friendly disposition.

At Cruickshank Sanctuary in Marion County, one even landed on Walters’ head. 

Which is pretty remarkable when you consider that the Florida Scrub-Jay is a direct descendent of the seven-ton T-Rex (almost 100 million years removed, according to Walters, but still). 

“Modern birds such as the Florida scrub-jay are not like dinosaurs,” he writes. “They are dinosaurs — every bit as much as T. rex. a member of the dino group from which birds descended.”

A Florida Scrub-Jay at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Roughly 300 Florida scrub jays reside in the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. Credit: NASA/Dan Casper

 

It’s a story of survival but it’s also a sad story as massive land-reclamation and canal-building projects in the 20th century destroyed most of the ancient oak scrub heartlands that the Florida Scrub-Jay depends on.

Walters still has hope for the scrub-jay though. He introduces us to a number of people fighting for its survival. Some have been tracking the remaining birds for decades, meeting for annual counts of the species in the small areas of scrub still left. Others are purchasing land to create wildlife refuges where the scrub-jays can thrive and in some cases are relocating the birds in an effort to increase their numbers. 

In Ocala National Forest forest rangers routinely mimic forest fires through prescribed burnings in order to recreate the sand pine scrub the birds need to survive. Scrub-jays hate Smokey the Bear, Walters points out. Natural forest fires, after all, are what created the bird’s habitat in the first place.

“There is no reason this bird has to suffer the same fate as the Dusky Seaside Sparrow and so many other birds,” Walters says in an interview posted on the Newsroom site at USFSP where he teaches journalism. “But it won’t happen on its own. People will have to help.”

Lanham agrees. “Conservation is activism,” he told us in his online James Museum talk. “If it’s done right, conservation is not conservatism – you don’t sit back and let things remain the same.” 

For example, what should be the legacy of such conservationist icons as John James Audubon, who owned slaves, and John Muir, who characterized Blacks as lazy “sambos” and Native Americans as “dirty”? Lanham addressed this question in a provocative piece that was published this spring in none other than Audubon Magazine. In “What Do We Do About John James Audubon?” Lanham lauds the Sierra Club (Muir was its first president) and the Audubon Society for denouncing the racism of these men whose names are so linked to their organizations. 

 

Ornithologist J. Drew Lanham in The Thicket, his side-yard writing shack filled with bird art and objects from nature, during his online talk for The James Museum entitled Coloring the Conservation Conversation

 

“Yes, they were “men of their time,” says Lanham, but they “could have been men ahead of their time and judged accordingly.” 

As for the possibility that Audubon may have been Black himself, Lanham says, “Audubon may have passed as white, but most importantly, he passed on the chance to be a better human being.”

Seated in his side-yard writing shack, a converted storage shed that he calls The Thicket, Lanham talked poetically about his interest in wild places and his adoration for birds. A native of South Carolina, he was Zooming in from that state where he is now a professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University. The Thicket, not surprisingly, was decorated with antlers, a marionette of environmentalist Aldo Leopold (his hero) and artwork depicting an Ivory Bill Woodpecker, a Carolina Parakeet and a Swamp King Warbler.

In his memoir, Lanham describes his ancestry as “mostly black” but also “an inkling of Irish, a bit of Brit, a smidgen of Scandinavian, and some American Indian, Asian, and Neanderthal tossed in, too.” Although he fits most of labels usually associated with birders — middle-aged, middle-class, well-educated and male — as a man of color, Lanham is well aware that he is an anomaly in the world of birding (something another Black man was painfully made aware of last year in Central Park). “The chances of seeing someone who looks like me while on the trail are only slightly greater than those of sighting an ivory-billed woodpecker,” he writes in The Home Place.

In Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts, published this year by Hub City Press, J. Drew Lanham — a poet, ornithologist, college professor and birder — counts himself and other humans as “lesser beasts.”

 

In 2013 Lanham famously wrote an essay called “Nine Rules For The Black Birdwatcher” which appeared in Orion magazine. It began “1. Be prepared to be confused with the other black birder. 2. Carry your binoculars — and three forms of identification — at all times. 3. Don’t bird in a hoodie. Ever.”

That essay is reproduced in his delightful new book out this year, Sparrow Envy, which includes dozens of his bird poems. In “Octoroon Warbler” he renames birds who were named after “self-serving white-supremicist men with the self-serving penchant of naming things after themselves.” In “No Murder Of Crows” he rejects the bloodthirsty word usually used for a group of those birds – 

They were silent as coal,
headed to roost, I assumed,
a congregation I refused to call a murder
because profiling ain’t what I do.

Birds, of course, don’t care what you call them. But we can learn a lot by observing them, Lanham says. In all his time wandering in nature, he points out, not once did a wild creature question his identity.

“Not a single cardinal or ovenbird has ever paused in dawnsong declaration to ask the reason for my being,” he writes in The Home Place. “White-tailed deer seem just as put off by my hunter friend’s whiteness as they are by my blackness. Responses in forests and fields are not born of any preconceived notions of what ‘should be’; They lie only in the fact that I am.”

“As we develop some empathy towards one another and nature, we can come together,” Lanham told us from his perch in The Thicket. “That’s the only way we can survive and thrive.”

–  –  –

Birdwatching in Tampa Bay

ERGO SUM: A CROW A DAY

One of 365 paintings of crows at the Ergo Sum: A Crow a Day exhibit at the James Museum, on view through September 6

 

Now through September 6, 365 panels of crow paintings are on display at The James Museum in an exhibit sponsored by Bayfront Health St. Petersburg, Bayfront Health St. Petersburg Foundation and USF Health Byrd Alzheimer’s Center and Research Institute. 

In 2010 Canadian-born artist Karen Bondarchuk’s mother was diagnosed with dementia. Four years later Bondarchuk decided to paint a crow a day on small hand-cut panels for a year.  “The series is simultaneously a marker of my mother’s lost time and a constant reminder of my own days, my life, and an attempt to signal visually the preciousness and individuality of each day,” she explains. 

“Bondarchuk’s series is a touching tribute that reminds us that time is fleeting and beautiful,” says Emily Kapes, curator of art at The James Museum. “I think this exhibition will resonate with anyone who has experienced the decline or loss of a loved one.”

Details here.

PEAHENS AND SCREECH OWLS

In a feature last spring entitled “Birds of a Feather,” two “eagle-eyed readers” answered The Gabber’s call to send in wildlife photos. They sent pictures of birds to the Gulfport-based independent weekly newspaper. 

“Phyllis Marcum snapped a shot of a peahen – that’s a lady peacock – strutting down Beach Boulevard on an early morning walk, and Robert and Kasara Barto got friendly with a small screech owl hanging out in their Ward 4 backyard,” The Gabber reported.

 

WOOD IBISES, WOOD STORKS AND COMMON GALLINULES

A new interactive sign in Gulfport’s Wood Ibis Park provides information on local birds, including the park’s namesake – photo by Cathy Salustri for The Gabber

 

The city of Gulfport has placed a new sign in Wood Ibis Park at 58th Street South and 28th Avenue that identifies and gives information on three local bird species – the Wood Stork, the Common Gallinule and the park’s namesake, the American Wood Ibis. 

Designed by Kristin Ossola, Gulfport’s technical event specialist, the sign was suggested by Gulfport resident Margarete Tober. Park-goers can scan the sign’s QR code on their mobile devices which will take them to the Ibis Wood Park Bird Guide on mygulfport.us, the city’s website where 18 pictures of birds found in the area are posted. 

Click on a photo of a bird and you will be directed to the audubon.org site which provides detailed information about the bird, including the effect of climate change on its survival chances.

WARBLERS, VIREOS, THRUSHES, FLYCATCHERS, TANAGERS, ORIOLES, SHOREBIRDS, HAWKS, DUCKS, SKIMMERS, TERNS, PLOVERS, EGRETS, HERONS, GULLS AND MANY OTHERS

“Grey sky, great egret” by wolfpix is licensed under CC BY 2.0

 

Fort De Soto Park, located along the Gulf Coast, is a popular stopping place for birds during their spring and fall migrations. It has become internationally famous as one of the premier birdwatching locations in the Eastern United States.

The Fort De Sota Park Checklist for Birders is based on documented bird sightings in the area over the past 60 years. It tracks the overall status of these bird species in the park as well as on the Pinellas Bayway and Shell Key, a county-owned preserve just south of the park. The three locales cover more than 2,000 acres.

During spring migration — from March through mid-May — thousands of birds migrating north across the Gulf of Mexico en route to their breeding grounds in the U.S. and Canada, stopover at Fort De Soto Park. The heaviest concentration of birds usually pass through in spring from the second week in April to the first week in May. Fall migration takes place from August through November. 

“Wilson’s Plover” by shell game is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

 

During both the spring and fall migrations, families of wood warblers as well as vireos, thrushes, flycatchers, tanagers, orioles and many more can be spotted.

Wintering birds, including shorebirds, hawks and ducks, start arriving as early as late July and can usually be found at North Beach and the end of East Beach. Check for puddle ducks at the pond a half mile before reaching the park entrance. Occasionally, sea ducks, gannets and jaegers can be seen from the Gulf side of the park.

The lowest diversity of species is seen during the summer season. The Mangrove Cuckoo, Black-whiskered Vireo and Prairie Warbler no longer breed in the park, but thanks to local Audubon Society volunteers the breeding areas for species like Black Skimmer, Least Tern and Wilson’s Plover are still protected. Wading species like the Reddish Egret, Great Blue Heron, Great Egret and Snowy Egret are plentiful. 

Gulls and terns are in the park all year round.