The Christmas Bird Count

    This time of year, birders in locations around North America are participating in the Christmas Bird Count.  In McBride, we have been doing it for decades.  Volunteers go out, or keep an eye on the bird feeders in their yards, then record the species of birds they see and their numbers.  The survey gives biologists an idea of the ebb, flow, and migration of bird populations on the continent.

    During the count, I am always hopeful of seeing some rarer bird that what is usual.  The usuals in my yard for the Christmas Bird Count Black Capped Chickadees. Red Breasted Nuthatches, Downy Woodpeckers, and Hairy Woodpeckers, which I report every winter.  This year there were some changes; I had no Hairy Woodpeckers, but did have a few new birds.  I saw a White Breasted Nuthatch, which usually don’t live around here, and a Northern Shrike (photo above) down by my pond.

    I have been noticing a pair of Shrikes during the last two summers, but this was the first time I have seen any in the winter. 

    A week ago, I did see a Brown Creeper, a relatively rare bird, that shows up once or twice a year, but unfortunately, never appears during the Christmas Bird Count.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Costa Rica 1992: A Muddy Hike Up "The Mountain"

      One of that first day’s activities included another boat ride, this time to take us to the “Mountain”.  It was a forested 100 meter high “bump” at the edge of a the beach.  The trail up the mountain was extremely muddy and slippery.  We had gotten tired of lugging our “gum boots” all the way to Costa Rica from the Robson Valley, but we were happy we had them on this hike. 

        My wife and I were among the last ones to make it up the slope, second only to the group of Italians, who also spent a lot of time taking photos.  Their interest was all of the various insects and spiders they saw along the way.

    The jungle on the mountain different from the other jungles we had visited.  We saw our first Howler Monkeys and another tiny orange poison dart frog.  There were beautiful tall trees with buttress roots covered with green lichen and vines.  

    During our boat ride back to the lodge, it began to rain.  my wife chose to sit outside in the rain during the trip, wearing the poncho and her hat.  We got back to our room just in time, because suddenly the clouds let loose with the heaviest rainfall I have ever witnessed.  I will never forget the huge gushes of water pouring off of the trunk of some of the palms in the yard.  The torrents of water cascading from the base of the trees looked like the forced flow from a large fire hose with out a nozzle.  

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Costa Rica 1992: At An Eco- Lodge

      During the cruise I went up to the front of the cabin to watch the river in front of us.  The boat captain, a native Indian-looking guy was steering the craft and he ask me where I was from.  In our conversation he asked if I had any Canadian coins he could look at, saying he was interested in foreign coins.  I dug into my pack and showed them the coins I had, and just gave them to him.  I was never sure if he was really that interested in coin collecting or just wanted to add to his income.  Either way, it was okay with me.

    Elin-Elin, the lodge where we stayed provided us with a nice room and serving up delicious food.  Before we went to bed, Claudia one of the nature guides told us we should get up at 5:30 for a bird walk.  She offered to wake us, but we told her we could wake ourselves, which we did, and we were ready to start at 6:00.  Surprisingly by that time, Claudia still hadn’t made the rounds to wake the others, but I suspect it was because of the heavy morning rain that was falling.   Fortunately the rain slowed, and it became very light by the time the group started off.

    Bird and nature walks don’t worked well with big groups as they do when it is just my wife and I on our own.  Big groups make a lot of noise and disturbance, and as a result we saw only a few birds, but were very happy to finally see one of those tiny orange, poison dart frogs.  At one point on our trek, my wife stepped in some mud and sank up to her knee.

    The group was back to our hotel by 8:00, in time for breakfast.  It included:  orange juice, toast, fruit slices, rice and beans, with eggs.  During our breakfast, Claudia made some announcements to the group.  The communications on the tour were pretty bad.  It was very difficult to hear what Claudia says, and her announcements never seem to give all of the details we need to know, like the time of the activity and what exactly the activity is.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

A Snow Day

     I have always loved snow and looked forward to snowfalls.  I assume those feelings have something to do with the “snow days” I experienced when I was a kid.  

    I grew up in Southern Indiana, where we didn’t get a lot of snow during the winter.  We would get maybe five of six snowfalls, a few of which dumped enough of the white stuff on the ground (and roads) to bring things to a halt.  When that happened, a “Snow Day” was declared by the School Board.  That meant that the school buses didn’t run, and schools were open only for those kids that could get there. 

    Since we relied on the school bus, we didn’t have to go to school, and with all that fresh snow on the ground, we would bundle up in our warm winter boots, gloves, coats, and hats and pull our sleds over to nearby Clearcrest Country Club, to spend hours zooming down the best hills around.  Being a golf course, the snowy fairway hills were bare of trees, but outlined with small groves of tall pine trees along the edges. 

    On one particular snow day when I was in the sixth grade, a group of all my neighborhood friends headed for the golf course with our sleds.  After many of runs straight down the best hill at top speeds, we got bored and sought more adventurous runs.  We continued to start down the hill from the top, but then mid-slope, we would swerve to the left, over toward the fringed edge of the grove, where we began weaving back and forth between the scattered trees on its edge.  It was probably dangerous, but we found it exciting fun.

    The next day when the snow day ended, we were anxious to get back to school to tell our friends and  brag about the exciting day we had sledding.  However our sledding stories fell flat when we heard the much better stories told by those kids who had made it to school on the snow day.  Since there were so few kids that had come to school, instead of having to go to their regular classes, they were allowed to go down to the gym and play basketball all day.

    I was green with envy, having missed the fun of getting to play basketball all day in the gym.  I made up my mind that on all of the upcoming snow days I would find someway to get to school, instead of staying at home.

    Following that, whenever we had a snow day, I would ride with my father when he drove to work, and get out at the school, so I could spend the day playing basketball.  Snow day, after snow day, I made sure I got to school, but every single time, instead of spending the day playing basketball, we had to spend the day in our regular classes.

    I was a fool clinging to the never occurring hoop dream, when I could have been outside at the golf course on my sled, zooming down the hills. 

View my paintings at:   davidmarchant2.ca

I Often Don't Know What It Is That I Am Painting

     The other day I read a news article about “secret things” in famous paintings.  One of those “secrets” was the image of the artist in the reflections of a shiny object in the painting. “Wow,” I thought, “I have done that.”

    My paintings are based on photos I have taken.  I download the photo onto my computer, then place a 2 by 2 inch grid over that image.  I paint just one of those squares created by the grid at a time, and so when I am going to paint that square, I zoom in on it on my computer, so I don’t see anything else.  I then just try to paint the corresponding square on the canvas (that also has a grid of two inch squares) what I am seeing in that square on my computer screen.  

    Because I have zoomed in on just one square, I often can’t tell what it is that I am painting.  I just paint what I am seeing in the square.  Later on, when more squares have been painted, I am often surprised at what it was I was painting.  This happened to me the other day, after painting a couple of squares with different shades of blue.  I discovered it was some mountain slopes.

    The photo above is taken from my painting “Chrome” which shows the chrome vertical strip on the side of the grill of my old 1977 GMC truck.  If you use a bit of imagination you can make out my distorted reflection on that strip.  (photo above).

     The flesh-colored blob in the top is my head, and the blue color below it is the blue shirt I was wearing.  The two vertical areas in the middle are my hands, which are holding my black camcorder.  The darker blue in the lower section are my jeans.  Can you make all that out from the distorted reflection on the side of the truck’s grill?

    Below is the whole painting.

View my other paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Costa Rica 1992: A Cruise Down a Jungle River

      The bus then took us to a river, where we boarded a nice-sized river boat with a large enclosed cabin for passengers.  The vessel took us on a comfortable and interesting voyage down a 70 kilometer long tropical river to the resort.  

    At the beginning of our voyage we had passed through recently cleared pastures with the odd dead naked tree, remnants of the jungle that had once occupied that space, but once the boat got to Tortuguero Park, the scenery we were passing through became even more jungle-like, with the thick growth of plants and trees forming a thick wall of green that came straight up from the river.  We could not see any river “bank”, just a solid solid wall of tropical foliage. 

    The boat traveled slowly along the river which snaked its way through the visually exciting jungle.  A lot of exotic birds flew from their perches on the tall trees that lined the river as our boat approached, and monkeys gave us the eye as we passed by.  A girl on the trip who had lived in Brazil told us the scenery we were passing through looked just like an Amazon River trip she had gone on.  Floating down a tropical river was sure a relaxing and memorable way to view the jungle.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Costa Rica 1992: A Banana Factory

      While back at Infotur in San Jose, we booked ourselves onto a group tour, something we had never done on a vacation before.  Generally we just take buses to the places we want to go, then wander around on our own.  This tour was to take us to Tortuguero s to watch sea turtles crawling out from the ocean up to the beach at night, to lay their eggs.  The tour included transport (bus and then a cruise on a boat), meals, and a room at Hotel Ilan-Ilan (an eco-resort) for three days and two nights.  It cost $189 each plus $40 a night.  

    We had to cash some more Traveler Cheques to pay for the package tour, and while we were flush with money, my wife bought a new umbrella, another big one.

    We began our Tortuguero Tour outside a McDonalds at 7:30.  The bus drove us through pouring rain, which caused the planned stop at a jungle park to be cancelled, and then a planned tour of a banana plantation to be cut short, although we did make a brief stop at the banana factory to watch the workers wash and put stickers on the bananas. 

        We were surprised (and somewhat dismayed) to discovered that when the bananas start to form on the trees, the whole growing bunch is enclosed in a pesticide-infused plastic garbage bag-sized sack, where they will continue to grow.  When the green banana bunch is starting to ripen, the sacked bunch is cut from the tree, suspended on a moving cable, which ferries them to the factory where the bananas are washed.  In the photo below, on the right side, you can see a woman removing the sack from a bunch of green bananas.

        We found the whole pesticide-laden sack thing rather disturbing.  Every day when we cut up a banana for our cereal, we never visualized that they were grown in pesticide bags.  I guess sometimes its better not to know how commercial things are grown.

    View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Costa Rica 1992: Last Day in the Cloud Forest

      At one point along the trail, we could hear fruit or nuts falling through the trees.  That excited us, making us think there was some exotic bird up there.  We scanned the foliage eager to see what was doing it.  We were deflated when we discovered it was just a squirrel.

    As we plodded on down the trail, my wife in the lead, I heard a flutter of wings, then she began cursing.  A blue and green bird had been on the trail in front of us which my wife hadn’t seen until it flew off in a rush.  It was a Resplendent Quetzal.

    When we got to the hummingbird gallery we were again fascinated by the unbelievably colored hummers, fighting and darting around at the feeders.  A heavy rain began to fall, so we paid $5 to stay and watch a fascinating slide presentation about animal coloration.  The leaf-shaped moths were hard to believe.  Some other moths looked like wasps and bees to avoid being eaten.

    By the time the slide show finished, the rain had also stopped, so we walked the three kilometers back to our hotel, watching the yellow sunset over the mountains.

    When we got back to the hotel we got a surprise.  The clerk informed us that InfoTur, back in San Jose had called us, and we were supposed to contact them when we got back to San Jose, because we had won a prize.  We were quite excited by the news, remembering being told that some of the prizes were tours.

    We forced ourselves out of bed at 5:00 AM the next morning, to organize ourselves before catching the 6:00 bus to San Jose.  We carried our luggage to the cheese factory where we caught the bus.  The road was again full of hills, twists, and turns, but much smoother than the one we had taken us to Monteverde.  There were a lot of beautiful views of the sun hitting the clouds as we traveled. 

    My wife was in a bad mood in San Jose.  The bus driver had broken our black umbrella which she had strapped to her bag.  We weren’t able to get the room we wanted at the hotel, and then when we walked down to InfoTur to claim our “prize”, it turned out to be a flimsy-thin T-Shirt, instead of a free tour.

View may paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Costa Rica 1992: A Palm Viper and Morre Jungle

      Continuing on our way to the Reserve, we came upon a meter-long, slender snake with a cream-colored underside.  It had just started to cross the road in front of us, but then turned around, went slithering through some grass, then up a tree.  I struggled to get the telephoto lens onto my camera, but it was already up in the tree by the time I did.  I managed to take a photo of it from below, as it strung out across some branches above me.  

    When I described it later at a slide presentation, the naturalist thought it sounded like a palm viper, which is toxic.  I was happy it didn’t drop down on me when I was taking its photo.   We also watched a three inch lizard that seemed to hop instead of crawl.

    We paid another $10 each once we got to the Reserve entrance and took the el Camino, a 2 kilometer old road.  We saw a flock of birds the size of crows, that were blue like a Canada Jay, but they had a powder blue “cap’ on their heads.

    We were eager to go to the “Mirador” (overlook), but unfortunately but the area around it was totally clouded in, so we couldn’t see much on the self-guided trail.  It was however, very beautifully lush with all of the leaves of the jungle plants dripping with the condensed water from the clouds that surrounded them.

    We met some girls who also happened to be from BC.  They asked us where we were from and when we told them McBride, one said, “Oh, that’s where they are having the forests fires.”   That was not something we wanted to hear, but since they had just left Vancouver two days earlier, we could only assume that the Robson Valley was still having problems during our first week of being away.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant.ca

Lucifer: "Where is the Good Stuff?"

     The photo above shows our cat Lucifer looking me in the eyes, questioning when will her special supper be served.  You can se in the photo, she already has a bowl of kibbles there, and twice a day she gets wet canned cat food, but she is waiting for something with taste, that she can eat throughout the night. 

    We feed Lucy upstairs on my desk.  That is the only place we can safely do it so that Kona doesn’t get to it and scarf down all Lucifer’s food.  Right before bed, I am scrambling around downstairs in the kitchen, trying to come up and prepare some kind of special treat food for Lucifer.  While I am doing that, she up on my desk waiting patiently at her feeding station, ready to be served.

    Her special food is made up of something relatively fresh;  like strips of cheese, little chunks of chicken or turkey left over from our meals, or maybe just a small puddle of milk or cream in a plate.

    We readily admit to spoiling our pets, but a year or so ago, I was sure Lucifer was about to die.  She was incredibly thin and urinating very frequently, making us think her kidneys were giving out.  That’s when we started really spoiling her with the special food.  While she is still incredibly thin, now she is more motivated, energetic, and healthy.

    Looks like she is getting cheese strips tonight.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmaarchant2.ca

I Loved Those Paper Drives

     During the 1950’s when I was a kid, local community organizations periodically held “Paper Drives” as fund raisers.  At our church the Boy Scouts would do it, and the elementary school’s “Community Club” would do it on the school grounds.  A big truck freight trailer would be pulled in and parked, with the rear doors unlocked, so people could bring in their old magazines, and stacks of newspapers to throw onto the paper pile in the trailer.

    Back in those days, there were plenty of newspapers.  Our middle-sized city had both a daily morning newspaper and evening newspaper, with a thick Sunday edition.  People would save stacks of the old newspapers, to donate to the paper drives when they happened.

    There were a lot of magazines around also.  My parents rarely got magazines, but being a Cub Scout, I did monthly receive “Boy’s Life”.   My grandparents often had copies of Life magazine, Look magazine, and Saturday Evening Post.  All in all, there was a lot of old publications that could be recycled to make more paper.

    My love of those paper drives had nothing to do with recycling paper, although that seemed like an intelligent thing to do.   What excited me was some of the other publications that could sometimes be found in the giant pile of paper:  Comic Books!  

    Although my sister and I loved to read comic books, my father took a dim view of them, and discouraged us from buying them.  “Don’t go wasting your allowance buying comic books” was a line we often heard.  We still did buy a few, but when I discovered that paper drives could be a readily available source of comics, I was excited every time I saw a paper drive trailer in our community, and could hardly wait to go rifling through the giant pile of newspapers and magazines looking for comics.

    I found comics of cartoon characters (Donald Duck, Scrooge McDuck, etc), super hero comics (Superman, Batman, etc), mythical character comics, like The Phantom, Turok, (Son of Stone, an Indian who fought dinosaurs),  and I always really treasured the Classics Illustrated Comics I sometimes found, that featured the classical stories by Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and Robert Lewis Stevenson.

    At one point in my paper drive searches, I came across a Mad Magazine, and when I got home and started reading through it, my life changed forever.  I loved the amazing comical art, the really clever humor, and the satirical social comment.  Mad Magazine put an end to my desire for comic books, and set me looking instead for more Mad Magazines.  Unfortunately, they were an extremely rare commodity in paper drive trailers, so much to the chagrin of my father, I started to spend my money buying new ones, as they were printed.

    Mad Magazine did have a profound affect on my life.  Not only did it give me a more cynical  and questioning view of the world and introducing me to a higher form of humor, it was in trying to draw some of the characters I saw in Mad, that I later in life, ended up as a local cartoonist.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Costa Rica 1992: Monkeys and Blue Morpho Butterflies

     I grabbed both these photos off of the internet, because they were too quick for me to get photos.

      Our next stop was the souvenir shop.  While there, the clerk indicated that there were some white-faced monkeys outside, and did we want to see them?   Of course we did, and raced outside to see one in the low branches just across the parking lot.  The primates just kept moving, no sitting around for those guys.  We followed them from tree to tree, hoping to get a good photo.  

    We were pretty exhausted from our hike.  We had been on our feet from 6:00 to 3:00, so back in our room at the El Bosque Hotel, we rested, showered, and then snacked on banana whole wheat muffins, then our tastes deteriorated, and we devoured taco chips, and a Coke.  Being in the heat and humidity of the Tropics drive us to drinking two or three cans a day.

    At the El Bosque Restaurant, our evening meal consisted of a big helping of Creole Chicken.  It cost us $11 CND.

    The next day we didn’t get such an early start, because our funds were starting to get very low (only $3 CND), so my first order of business was to get some more money.  That meant making the 6 kilometer hike, up and down the steep hills back to St. Elena where there was a bank.  With our funds topped up, I hiked back to join my wife at the hotel, then together, we made the three and a half hike up to the Nature Reserve.

    On my way back from the bank, I saw a large Blue Morpho Butterfly, another sight we wanted to see in the jungles.  The Blue Morpho is big one, with a 12 cm (4.7 inch) wingspan and is incredibly beautiful with it deep iridescent blue wings.   When I told my wife about spotting one, she was very envious, but her envy didn’t last long, because as we hiked up to the Cloud Forest Reserve we spotted another one fluttering by.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Costa Rica 1992: Beautiful Hummingbirds

             It’s s little embarrassing to title the blog “Beautiful Hummingbirds”, then show some terrible blurry photos of them, but hopefully you can imagine how they colorful they looked.  Among all our memories of Costa Rica, the many exotically colored hummingbirds we saw certainly hold a prominent spot.  Now back to our hike through the Monteverde Cloud Forest: 

        We could hear a myriad of birds, but couldn’t actually see many of them.  We did spot some teal-green hummingbirds, and some big black guinea-hen-looking fowls with a red spot near the eyes.  Three “amigos” who we had met on our bus trip to Monteverde, pointed out an Ornate Hawk Eagle sitting on a tree.  They told us the bird was quite rare in the Preserve.  Their guide had pointed it out to them.

        One of the jungle critters I was hoping to see in Costa Rica was a “Poison Dart Frog”.  This is a group of very tiny (half an inch) brightly colored and patterned frogs that can be highly toxic.  Their colorfully designed exterior advertise unpalatability to predators.  Some species were crushed by natives onto the tips of darts and arrows to make them more effective in hunting.   This explanation is leading up to the fact that I did finally see my first poison dart frog along a trail at Monteverde, however the one I spotted was not very spectacularly colored, it was a boring hue of beige.

        A less spectacular sight, although totally unexpected was a mouse running under some plants.  I had never associated mice with jungles.  While I was looking to see more of the mouse, I came upon a powder blue mushroom.  Although I didn’t know anything about this mushroom, its coloration led  me think it must be pretty toxic.

        I had an interesting experience on the path overlooking a waterfall.   We found ourselves on a jungle trail that snaked its way beside a river valley.  I stopped to take a photo of a waterfall.   At the time I used a 35mm camera and had several lens for it.  As I stood beside the barrier that was erected to prevent people from falling down the slope, I fumbled around trying to put the telephoto lens on my camera.  I got the lens on, but when I removed the lens cap, it slipped from my hand, and bounced over the edge of the slope.

                I could see where the lens had landed; it was only about 10 foot (3 m) below me, on a ledge.  It didn’t seem like it would be too dangerous to retrieve it, so I climbed over the barrier, and carefully made my way down the steep slope to get it.  

        When I got down to the spot where the lens ways lying, I reached for the lens cap, and got a surprise.  Just a couple of feet (60cm) away from it, sat another camera lens cap that someone else had evidently dropped from exactly the same outlook spot.

        Once we got off of the trail we went to the Information Center where we were mesmerized by the huge variety of colorful hummingbirds that were busy at the feeders that were hung there.  They were larger than what we get at the Robson Valley, and unusually colored.  There were teal-green ones with a white stripe at the eye, showing off their iridescent violet throats, and another one with a long, slightly curved beak.  My favorite was a very large iridescent violet one—beautiful!

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

The Amazing McBride Horse Rescue

     “The Renshaw” is one of the largest snowmobiling areas that exists.  Thousands of snowmobilers travel  to “sled” in this vast alpine area every year.  In December of 2008, one of those snowmobilers came across two starving horses, trapped in 5 to 6 feet of snow and near death up in the Renshaw.  The word of his discovery slowly traveled through the McBride “grapevine” and eventually it was heard by some of the “horse” community in the Robson Valley, who became both outraged and concerned.  They needed more information.

    One of them, Birgit Stutz, took it onto herself to do something.  She contacted Matt Elliott, a local snowmobiler (and World Champion) and after explaining to him that more information about the horses’ condition, he volunteered to sled up to the Renshaw to find the horses.  Matt with three other sledders who were horse people carried with them some “flakes” of hay for the horses if they were still alive, and a gun to put them out of their misery, if they were too far gone.  

    Birgit told the sledders to look into the horses’s eyes and if there was still a bit of a spark there, they still had a chance to survive.  When they found the horses, “despite the sad state of the creatures, there was a glimmer in their eyes” (quote taken from “The Rescue of Belle And Sundance” a wonderful  book by Birgit Stutz with Lawrence Scanlan).

    Having determined that the horses could survive, plans were then made to rescue them.  The first thing that had to be done was to slowly feed them so they would gain enough strength to walk out.  Only a small amount of hay could be fed to them each day, because in their condition, large amounts would kill them.

    Daily feeding visits were done via snowmobiles, and plans were made to dig a trench leading to a groomed snowmobile trail where the horses could walk without the trench.

    As word spread in the community, a dedicated group of volunteers began to make the trip up to the Renshaw to help dig.  Just getting there was an ordeal.  It meant getting up in the dark, then making  a twenty kilometer drive from McBride to the end of a logging road, then there was a long, bumpy, frigid, 30 km snowmobile ride up to the Renshaw alpine and the horses.

    The snow was about 6 feet deep and the 3 foot wide trench had to be dug for about a kilometer.  The group worked out a system; first volunteers would dig down two feet, they were followed in that trench by another crew, who dug down a further 2 feet, then a final group would dig down for the last two feet.

    Slowly over many days the conditions of the horses improved, as the trench lengthened.  Additional  volunteers started digging the trench from the other end, and at 1:30 in the afternoon on Dec. 23rd, the trench was completed, and figuring it was too dangerous to leave the horses overnight, now that a trench might give a pathway to predators, the volunteers started to lead the horses out of their captivity.  

    “It took half and hour to get them through the trench, seven hours to walk them down the logging road, done in the dark.  the temperature was -30°C (-22°F).  It was a long, cold, walk, almost 30 kilometers (18 miles).  They finally got the two horses to the horse trailer at 10:00 PM.   They were then driven to a nice stall in a cozy barn.  Once they had recovered both Belle and Sundance gained 600 pounds.

    The rescue of the two horses made international news.  It was a heartwarming news story during the Christmas season.   It remains an amazing story of compassion, sacrifice of time and money, and hard work in very very uncomfortable conditions, in order to save the lives of two horses that had been abandoned, and would have slowly died of starvation, had nothing been done.

    The whole story of the rescue can be found in “The Rescue of Belle And Sundance” the very touching and well-written book by Birgit Stutz with Lawrence Scanlan.  (in print or as an eBook)

    You can watch a video showing photos of the rescue at:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDNbxbmMlqY

    The photos on the blog were taken from the video.

    There was a fictionalized full length made for TV movie made called, “The Horses of McBride”, but  it was very fictionalized, but sort of based on the rescue.

View my painting of the rescue and my other paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca