Lava Flow

    In 1991 when we traveled to Hawaii for the solar eclipse, Kilauea, the island’s active volcano was erupting.  It was not one of those exploding volcanos that was hurling molten lava high into the air, it was more of a leaky eruption where lava was running down the slope toward the ocean.  We drove to Volcano National Park to take a look.  

    Of course we couldn’t go right up to where the fresh molten lava was flowing, but we could walk out on the black, hardened lava to see some of the what it had done.  The lava had run over part of the residential area and destroyed a community.  We did see the remains of some structure (above) that had been razed by the flowing inferno. 

    There was probably still hot lava flowing beneath the hardened crust in places where we walked ,because once we followed it to the ocean shoreline, we could see steam, caused by the molten lava, where it was pouring against the sea water.  If you look closely at the photo below you can see a small section of orange which is molten lava.

    I find volcanos fascinating and I was gratified to see a tiny bit of Kilauea in action.

You can look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

1991: Seeing A Solar Eclipse

    Early in 1991 we heard that there was going to be an eclipse of the sun in Hawaii and since we had relatives and some past friends from McBride that lived there, we contacted them to arrange a visit.  Our friends lived on the Big Island of Hawaii, which seemed to be the best place for viewing the astronomical event.

    The Big Island, has a wet, jungly side, and a dry desert-like side, and luckily Richard and Diane lived on the dry side at Kona.  They put us up at their home which was located on a long slope with a view of the Pacific.  We spent a couple of days visiting and catching up on what had been happening in their lives since leaving McBride.  They took us sailing in the Pacific in their sailboat. 

    There were of course, thousands of tourists that had traveled to Hawaii to see the eclipse, spreading themselves across the island.  The weather forecast for the event was not good, it predicted rain and cloud over most of the Big Island, However, Richard knew of a perfect place to view the eclipse, telling us, “It is never cloudy there.”

    The eclipse was scheduled to happen 7:30 in the early morning, so we had to start out in the dark in order to get to Richard’s destination.  As the morning began light was slow in coming, because of heavy clouds that blanketed the sky,  We were very frustrated in seeing all of the dark clouds, fearing we would miss eclipse.  As the eclipse began (behind the clouds) the landscape began to get darker, and soon it was like night.

    Luckily, those thick clouds did have a bit of mercy on us, and just as the eclipse was about full, the clouds parted enough to give us glimpses of the event.  We were so relieved and appreciative.  I’m sure Richard was particularly relieved after bringing us to this spot.  

    Above is a photo I took of what we saw.  I think a majority of the other people who had traveled to Hawaii to see it, didn’t get to see anything but cloud and rain.  

    Soon, after daylight returned, I took the photo below of the group of people who had also gathered at “Richard’s” spot to view the eclipse.   Below that is a photo of Richard and Diane, our friends and hosts, all smiles and relieved, after getting to actually see the eclipse.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

Grim

    It is a grim looking day outside and as is usual on such days, I am finding it hard to be motivated about anything, but all I have to do is look south to the lower part of BC to see how fortunate the Robson Valley is to be getting just some rain showers.  The Lower Mainland is still trying to get out from under  unprecedented flooded homes and fields, while two more atmospheric rivers are bearing down on them. 

    Last week’s deluge severed all highway and rail links between Vancouver and the rest of BC, when mud slides and debris flows in the mountains, washed away huge sections of the highways and bridges.  It will be several months before the major travel arteries can be put back together and the incoming downpours forecast for this coming week will no doubt create more damage.  After seeing some of the washouts on news broadcast, I suspect that some rural residents will never get road access back to their homes.

    BC has suffered from extreme heat, extreme forest fires, and now extreme flooding this year.  This follows record breaking forest fires in the province over the last two years.  We even had a mudslide locally last year that destroyed two homes.  The amplified weather that was predicted as the world’s climate changes is suddenly right in the face of the citizens of BC.  

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Pink Clouds

    This is not a recent photo, in fact it is 15 years old, but I just came across it the other day, and since the current weather has not been inspiring enough for me to even aim my camera, so this is what you get.  I always like unusual lighting and certainly this old photo has captured some.  Its nice to see the mountains peaking through the clouds.  It is surprising to me to be able to see the pond’s dam, now it is totally obscured by trees which have done a lot of growing during the intervening years.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

Playing A Part

    During my life I have spent a lot of time dabbling in the Arts.  At present it is mostly painting, music, and writing, but in the past I have indulged in photography, video, pottery, carving, and even drama.  My first foray into drama happened when I was in high school.  I was a student at a huge high school that offered a lot of extra curricular activities.  It was well known for its musicals and starting in my sophomore year, I began participating in them.  

    I was in the chorus of Brigadoon, then the following year I was again a singer in the chorus, but also started off a song by playing the introduction on the banjo as a character called “Banjo Sam” in the school’s production of Oklahoma.   In my senior year I was in the cast of My Fair Lady, as a singer, a dancer, and a character referred to as “Selsey Man” with one spoken line with an accent.

    When I attended the University of Evansville, which had earned nationwide recognition for it’s dramatic productions, I took part in a couple of it’s offerings.  I played the part of one of the “Guests” in the farcical play, “A Flea in Her Ear”. (If you haven’t figured it out yet, I seemed to seek out parts where I  was on stage, but didn’t really have to do much.)  

    That was the case when I got a part in Marat Sade, a bizarre play supposedly put on by the inmates of an insane asylum.  Type castings made me a natural, as one of the inmates.  It was a really enjoyable part, where I didn’t really have to do much except look crazy while wandering around on the thrust stage close to the audience, staring at them.  

    My part became more important, when one of the major actors, who was supposed to be hung up on a cross during one part of the play,  had to go into the hospital for his leukemia, leaving the play is disarray. 

    The director wanted to continue to use the cross scene despite the absence of the character, and had several time commented to me how much I looked like Jesus, with my long hair and beard.  He decided that when the cross scene came, the inmates would just grab me, and string me up on the cross, hoisting me up above the audience.   This action didn’t make much sense, but the play was fairly chaotic anyway, so it probably didn’t make much difference to the audience.

    It was one of the strangest feelings of my life to find myself tied to a cross, swaying above the audience.   I hung there not really knowing what to think of the situation.

     McBride has had an active drama group that used to put on a play every year until Covid hit.  Although I hadn’t been a part of any of their productions, in 2005, after one of their main actors had to dropped out of their upcoming production of the comical mystery, “Tiptoe Through The Tombstones,” they began to pressure me to take the part.   They urged me to play Augustus, the domineering patriarch of the murderous family that made its living by killing people.

    Augustus was one of the play’s major characters, appearing throughout the play with a lot of lines of dialogue (until he was murdered).  I was of course very hesitant about doing it, being afraid of the responsibility of learning and remembering all of Augustus’s speeches, but in the end, the pressure from the cast, most of which were friends, melted my resistance, and I became Augustus (Photo above).

    Because Augustus was such a domineering person, many times in the play, I had to yell abusively at  the character played by Marilyn Wheeler, a kindly older local woman.  I think I often made her cower when I began my angry diatribes at her, and inside I felt horrible for doing it, but that was the part.

    Being in a play was fascinating, and also a bit scary.  Sometimes during a performance, someone would forget or misspeak their lines, which would really cascading mess in the flow of the dialogue, but somehow things miraculously eventually got back on track.  

    I really didn’t like the pressure of the performances, so after “Tombstone” was over, I shied away from trying out for any of the other plays, preferring to sit in the audience instead of being on stage.

    

You can view my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca

 

Feather Holder

    Throughout my life, whenever I found an interesting feather laying out on the ground, I would pick it up and take it home and lay it down somewhere.  About twenty years ago, I decided to make some kind of holder for the feathers that were laying around the house, and I made this bird-like character to hold them. 

     I made several of the holders and had some for sale at the Whistlestop Gallery.   They sold out, and the one I made for the house eventually suffered a broken foot which was never re-glued, so it disappeared from its place of honor in the living room.

    I discovered this photo of the feather holder yesterday and that has now motivated me to re-glue the bird’s foot, so I can put it back on display.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

Some Warmth For Uncle Bill

    My 96 year old uncle doesn’t have access to the internet, but he is now visiting for Thanksgiving with his daughter’s family in Tennessee.  I was texted a photo of him yesterday, iPad in hand, reading through my blogs.  After seeing all my snow pictures, he jokingly remarked, “Doesn’t he have any from Florida, where it’s warm?”

    Well no, I don’t really have any photos from Florida, but I went looking for shots from other warm places that I could put on the blog to warm him up.

    Above is a beach photograph from Isla Mujeres, an island across from Cancun, Mexico.  Next is a picture I took in 1991 when we travelled to Hawaii to view an eclipse.  At the very bottom is a photo of the salt flats in Death Valley.  Hopefully these pictures will help neutralize the chill Uncle Bill got from all my snowy photographs.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

A Slice od Light on Beaver Mountain

    I came across this 2004 photo the yesterday, showing Beaver Mountain in the sunshine, while the rest of the landscape is cast in shadow.  I am always looking for interesting lighting, and had forgotten about this photo until I saw it again.  

    The area in the foreground is locally referred to as the Stag Ranch.  I took another photo at the same time, zooming in on the Stag Ranch cabin and then used it as the basis for one of my paintings.  You can see my painting “Stag Ranch” below.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

Kona's Snowball Leggings

    When the temperature is hanging around the freezing point it may be in prime condition for building a snowman, but it sure makes dog maintenance more of a hassle.   Kona loves to romp around in the snow, but the snow clings to the fur on her legs then begins to build snowballs there.  Every time she goes outside (many times a day) when we get her back into the house, we have to march her into the shower and melt all of her snowballs with warm water.  Luckily, she doesn’t mind and goes into the shower stall willingly.

    When the temperature is colder her snowball manufacturing ceases.

 

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

The World in Gray Scale

    I am a very color-oriented person and one of the things I miss most about winter is the lack of color.  We do, of course, sometimes get sunny days with intensely blue skies, but we get an awful lot of gray, overcast skies above our white, snow-covered landscape.  

    The photo above, which is in color, shows what it looked like when I peered out of the window this morning.  Not much “color” to be seen.  As an experiment, I imported the photo into Photoshop and eliminated the “color” by changing  the photo into a black and white (more accurately, Gray Scale).  The gray scale photo is below, not much difference is there.

You can view my colorful paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

Measles

    I didn’t expect to ever write a blog about measles, especially when so much attention these days is focused on Covid, but I read a fascinating and enlightening article about measles on the BBC website and thought it had some an important information to get out there.

    Anti-vaxxers tell you that they are relying on their immune system to protect themselves from diseases, and certainly the immune system is usually able do protect you from a lot of diseases, but scientists discovered in 2012 that when a person gets measles (one of the most contagious diseases there is) it will erase all the information stored in a person’s immune system.   Information about every cold, flu, bacteria, virus, and vaccination you have had will disappear, leaving your immune system with a blank slate (except strangely enough, immunity to measles). 

    Your body becomes once again, susceptible to all of those things you thought you were immune to.  Your immune system then has to start all over fighting things from scratch.  It takes about 3 years for it to regain all of those immunities.  Studies have shown that children who have had the measles vaccine actually live longer, because they have kept their immunities intact, and not lost them by getting measles.

    Here is a link to the article, so you can read it yourself:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211112-the-people-with-immune-amnesia

See my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

Certainly Looks Like Winter

 

    Officially winter is still a month away, but you couldn’t really tell it by looking around.   The landscape has turned pretty white in the Robson Valley.  I guess there is not guarantee that it will last, Nature seems to have changed her rule book lately, but I guess it doesn’t really matter, we will have to take whatever we are given.

    All of our usual winter activities have begun:  My new snowblower has now been initiated and ready for any new snow, so that is one less worry.  Walking the dog has gotten more complicated because of limits as to where we can walk, and Kona now has to have the snow build-up on her feet showered off, whenever we get back to the house.  We now have to put on and take off our winter coats, gloves, and boots whenever we go out or come in.     

     Firewood has to be constantly carried into the house and fed into the wood stove.  Road spray has to be constantly cleaned off of the little camera on the back of our car, so we can view where we are backing.  Now that we have re-acquainted ourselves with all those little chores, I guess we are in the winter-mode. 

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Alpenglow With Snow

    The Cariboo Mountains were aglow from this morning's sunrise when I looked out of the front window this morning.  All of the trees are still heavily laden with snow from the other night’s snowfall.   The combination of those two things made for a beautiful winter scene.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

Snowy Pond Shots

    Well we got our snow.  It fell yesterday and through part of the night, leaving about 5 inches (12 cm) covering the ground.  It was enough for me to finally be able to try out my new snowblower, which worked great.  

    Meanwhile the weather in the lower part of BC has been horrible, in fact access between the Lower Mainland and the Interior of the province has been completely cut off after an atmospheric river of rain, caused severe landslides and flooding.  The town of Merritt has had to be evacuated because of flooding in the waterworks facility contaminated all of the town’s drinking water. 

    Two hundred travelers on one highway got trapped between two big mudslides and had to sleep in their cars overnight until they could be rescued by helicopter yesterday.  It is still unknown if any cars where washed away by the slides.

    I am thankful that the weather we got has so far been normal.  All of these extraordinary weather events happening all over the world are scary and don’t bode well for the future.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Smells Like A Dead Mouse

    For a few days, every time I got close to our hoosier (photo above) I started smelling what seemed like a dead mouse.  Every once in a while we catch a mouse in a trap and don’t realize it.  Eventually when the corpse begins to ripen, it lets us know by its odor.  That same smell was what I was emanating around the hoosier.  I didn’t remember putting a mouse trap in the area, but I checked all around on the floor under it, but found nothing.

    Yesterday as the odor intensified, I knew that the source had to be found, so it could be eliminated.  I had never noticed any mice up in the hoosier cabinet, but who knows, maybe some adventuresome mouse got up in there and couldn’t get out, so I started emptying all of the items from the upper shelves of the hoosier.

    It was then we spotted what I assumed was a mouse cadaver inside one of the glass containers stacked on a shelf. 

    “Ah, haw,” I thought, “We found the problem.”  Yes we did, however the problem turned out not to be a dead mouse, but a rotting sausage, and boy did it stink.  I could hardly pick up the glass coffin of the putrid sausage, because of the powerful stench.  Holding it as far away from my nose as I could, I took it to the wood stove in order to cremate the sausage.

    I guess what happened was that the sausage was put into the glass container to be refrigerated, but was left on the counter, never making it to the fridge.  Instead,the container was seen sitting on the counter and assumed to be a clean one ready for storage, so it was stacked with the other containers in the hoosier.  That turned out to be a mistake with odorous consequences.

    Below is a Photoshop-created photo of the sausage in the container.  (The sausage smelled so horrific I couldn’t make myself pause to take an actual photo of it at the time.)

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

All Dressed Up With Nowhere to Go

    Last winter my old snowblower broke just before we got a couple of big snowfalls, leaving me to clear my long driveway with a snow shovel.  I hauled the broken machine down to a local repair shop to get it fixed and it is still there, waiting for a part that is backordered.  Having given up hope that it would ever be fixed, when I saw a snowblower on sale (including delivery) at Costco online, I bought it and when it arrived, assembled it, then parked it just inside the garage doors of my shop, ready to go.

    So there it sits.  We’ve gotten a couple of dustings of snow, but nothing deep enough to justify trying my new machine out.  I confess I am anxious to give it a go.  I do have a nagging thought that maybe after spending all this money on a new snowblower, that maybe, with all of the crazy weather we have been getting over the last few years, this will be a year of very little snow, but  I hope this winter will be a normal one.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

Forgotten Fatherland by Ben Macintyre

Forgotten Fatherland: The True Story of Nietzsche’s Sister and her Lost Colony

By Ben MacIntyre

    I found this book was in the library’s biography section, but I was surprised when I started reading it because, besides focusing on the life of Elisabeth Nietzsche, who I thought was the subject of the book, it  dedicated a huge number of pages on the life of her famous brother, Friedrich Nietzsche, and was also part travelogue, documenting the author’s excursion to the jungles of Paraguay.

Elisabeth Nietzsche is someone who very few people know about, even though she was very influential in the rise of Nazism in Germany.  Her famous brother, Friedrich Nietzsche was elevated to a place of admiration by the Nazis, but it was his sister Elisabeth, a Nazi supporter, who had rebranded Nietzsche’s work and his philosophy to fit Nazism.  Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher, was neither an anti-Semite or a German Nationalist, in fact, he really didn’t love his native Germany all that much.

Elisabeth and Friedrich had a close relationship growing up, and Elisabeth was very proud when Friedrich’s scholarly writings began to get some attention.  All of this was in the late 1800’s.  

Elisabeth married a man of little note, except for is virulent anti-Semitism, something she also had come to believe in.  Friedrich, hated the anti-semitism of his sister and had little use for her husband, Bernard Foerster.  Foerster, along with Elisabeth, concocted a scheme to create a German racist and vegetarian utopia in the jungles of Paraguay, called “New Germany”.  

They talked it up, raised money, and in 1877 with a few a dozen or more like-minded anti-Semites, crossed the Atlantic to South America, boated up rivers, to the jungled area where Foerster had made arrangements with Paraguayan officials to set up his German colony.  Friedrich refused any part of the scheme and remained in Germany and thought the whole idea was crazy.

The German settlers struggled.  As the leaders of the colony, Foerster and Elisabeth ended up with a big fancy house, while the other Germans settlers struggled on their allotted land holdings, living in small shelters, trying to survive on the farms they hacked out of the jungle.  Foerster and Elisabeth, who were under the gun financially to the Paraguayan government, sent glowing reports back to Germany, about their new German colony, hoping to solicit more funds and more settlers; both of which were in decline.

Foerster, began to suffer under the pressures of the failing experiment and moved to a nearby city, with the excuse of raising funds, while Elisabeth did her best to keep New Germany functioning.   Foerster fell into alcoholism, then committed suicide.  Elizabeth swallowed her pride and returned to Germany.   

       By this time Friedrich was fairly well known for his writings and spent a lot of time with the composer Richard Wagner and his wife.  Elisabeth was also happy to hobnob with the Wagners and continued to be, even after Friedrich and Wagner parted ways.

Friedrich contacted syphilis which slowly led to insanity.  Elisabeth took care of him and after his death in 1900, she took over his works, and began to write anti-Semite and Ultra-Nationalist works which she attributed to him.  She began a public relation campaign to make Friedrich more famous, she fund raised and established a museum dedicated to him.  Her stringent anti-Semitism didn’t prevent her from accepting money from Jewish donors.

Her publicity and works attracted the attention first of Mussolini and thshe was a very old lady.  Their power encouraged Elisabeth to turn out more racial and nationalistic writings which she attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche.  When she died, Hitler organized a big Nazi funeral for her.

The German colony which she and her husband started in Paraguay slowly collapsed under the lack of funds when the reality of the South American German colony, filtered back to Germany.  The settlers were trapped in the jungle, too poor to pay for a return to the “Fatherland”.  

       Today all that exists of “New Germany” is an overgrown, impoverished area, populated with light haired, blue-eyed, residents, stubbornly marrying among themselves to maintain racial purity.  The interbreeding is contributing to a collapsing gene pool which is beginning to cause physical problems.

Forgotten Fatherland was certainly a well-researched book, and I learned a lot of history about something I wasn’t aware of.  I enjoyed reading about the author’s horrible-sounding jaunt through the Paraguayan jungle to discover what was left of Elisabeth’s racist utopia.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

Smooth Cloud Over the Cariboos

    If you were in the Robson Valley, you would know that I didn’t take this photo today.  Today is grim with rain and gray skies.  We had a wild night of wind.  When we walked our loop trail, I was surprised at all of the branches and limbs that had come down on the trail.  Our trail only constitutes a small fraction of the total wooded area that we walk through, so if what came down on the trail was a sample, and you took the time to extrapolate the total amount that came down in the woods, it would be quite a volume.

    We were supposed to get snow last night, but all night I could hear the rain pounding on our metal roof, accented with the periodic percussion of branches that were blown off of the trees.  We get a lot of strong wind storms that blow in from the Pacific during the fall, so last night was not that unusual, but still, the force of the wind is always surprising when it is happening.

You can take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

Oh Good, More Carbon in the Air

    While a worldwide gathering is taking place in Scotland to try to come up with ways to slow the existential situation our earth is facing because of global warming, the BC forest industry was showing us how much it really cares about that, by burning huge piles of “waste wood”, just to get rid of it.  This is a common forestry practice.  

    They put waste wood into a big pile and then set it ablaze.  Anyone who has ever been around commercial logging knows the tremendous amount of trees that are cut down then never used for anything, just burned, so that it is not in the way.    Pile burning is better than what they used to do; burning the whole area that was logged, but pile burning is still putting a lot of carbon into the air, needlessly.

    I was appalled a couple of decades ago when I was employed by the Forest Service, and the BC government put out a special report trying to justify the burning of waste wood, stating that it was not adding to global warming, because wood was “renewable” and more trees would grow and suck up the carbon.

    Of course, when a tree is cut down, the carbon in it will eventually go somewhere, but if left to decay on the forest floor, it’s carbon could take a century to go somewhere else; some into the air for sure, but a lot the carbon would be held in the rotting log until it was slowly taken up and used by fungus, insects, and other plants.  When the waste wood is burned, the carbon immediately goes into the atmosphere all at once, and sits up there creating the greenhouse effect that is devastating the earth.

    Some of that atmospheric carbon would eventually get taken up by a new trees, but it may take a hundred years for that to happen, meanwhile that rapid accumulation  of carbon is causing our only home planet to get hotter and hotter.

    There were two slash burn piles releasing carbon yesterday; one east of McBride, the other west of McBride.

     You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Costa Rica: Jungle Tree Trunks

    In most places trees seem to be just individual organisms, although science is beginning to show us that they are tightly a part of an integrated community of other trees, and fungi.  Walking through the rain forests of Costa Rica it was pretty obvious that trees were more than just individual plants.  I’m sure there was a lot of underground things going on with fungus, but above ground, trees became a platform for a myriad of other plants to grow on.  Just look at all of the different plants growing on the tree trunk on the photo above.

    The photo below show a tree growing in the Monte Verde Cloud Forest.  You can’t even see the bark on the trunk because of all of the mosses growing on the tree.

    On the bottom photo you can certainly see the trunk of tree and it’s pretty clear that this tree likes its privacy.  You wouldn’t want to get to close to it because of all of the dangerous-looking long spines that keep other living things away

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

Exploring the Coast Rican Jungles

    In 1992 we took a vacation in Coast Rica.  We had read a lot about how Costa Rica was saving a many of their jungles by turning them into nature reserves, thus encouraging Eco-tourism.  We were two of the Eco-tourists that were attracted.  Costa Rica is an admirable country in many ways, not only was it very environmentally minded, but unlike many other Central American countries, it is a stable democracy that doesn’t  even have a military.

    Because Costa Rica is located in the junction of North and South America, it has a lot flora and fauna, from both continents, so it is a wonderful place to see widely diverse species of wildlife and exotic plants.  We basically explored the country by striking out on our own, traveling by bus with a guide book in our hands.

    Costa rica has a lot of jungles and rain forest nature reserves with hiking trails through them and walking through the jungles was not only an education, but an experience for all of your senses;  with their colorful exotic flowers and plants that were growing on top of one another, the wild sounds of birds and the terrifying growls of howler monkeys, and the damp earthy smell of the deep primal forests.

    Here are a couple of photos from the jungles we visited.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca 

 

Stellar's Jay

    While I rarely see them for most of the year, during the fall I begin hearing the raucous, “Shaak, Shaak, Shaak” call of the Stellar’s Jay, as it shows up, wondering why there are no sunflower seeds in my bird feeder.  The Stellar’s Jay is a beautiful bird which can be found across the western end of North America.   I suspect that its beautiful blue and black coloration was one of the reasons that in 1987, by popular vote, it was chosen as BC’s Official Bird.

    Like most jays it can come off as being a bit audacious, especially around campgrounds and picnic areas.  So far around our place, the Stellar’s Jay haven’t caused any problems, and I sure enjoy seeing their beautiful blues and blacks darting around the yard. 

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca