#2957 "Singleton Rocky Point and Sheltered Bay"

#2957 "Singleton Rocky Point and Sheltered Bay" 
18 x 14 by 7/8 depth cradled smooth panel (inches)
Started 4:30 pm Monday, June 23rd, 2025

The canoe is the most functional and beautiful craft imaginable. Bill Mason once said: 

"I have always believed that the Canadian Wooden canoe is one of the greatest achievements of mankind." Bill continued: "When a man is part of his canoe, he is part of all that canoes have ever known." Bill was quite right. 

My canoe has cherry trim, but the hull is carbon. The carbon layup by Swift Canoes only weighs about 35 pounds, which has become quite important to me. I am not forty years old anymore and never will be again. Being a meteorologist, I convinced my wife that this was my way to permanently sequester carbon out of the atmosphere. I need to purchase a lot more carbon canoes if I really want to combat global warming. 

There are a few other canoe sayings that resonate with me, and I wish to share them here with another canoe painting. 

• "Love many, trust few, but always paddle your own canoe." -American proverb
• "Everyone must believe in something. I believe I'll go canoeing." -Henry David Thoreau
• "Wherever there is a channel for water, there is a road for the canoe." – Henry David Thoreau
• "There is magic in the feel of a paddle and the movement of a canoe, a magic compounded of distance, adventure, solitude and peace." -Sigurd F. Olson

And finally, my favourite... 

• “A day without canoeing probably wouldn’t kill me, but why risk it?” – Author unknown

Bill Mason also correctly claimed: "Anyone who says they like portaging is either a liar or crazy." I have done some long portages, and they were never very much fun, as I recall. 

This rocky knob on the northwest corner of Point Paradise is a favourite of mine. It was recorded en plein air along with its twin as #2481 Singleton Shagbark Hickory Point; #2482 Hickory Point in March . The Kubota tractor carried me and my gear to the painting location through deep snow on Tuesday, March 9th, 2021. It was at the height of COVID and a most enjoyable experience. There were no biting bugs and certainly no people. Just nature which nurtures us all. 

My canoe took me to the same location in April 2025. 

Inspiration can be found around every corner if we just look with a curious mind. 

‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’ – Henry David Thoreau

So I stay home, paint and look after the forests while surrounded by nature. Happiness, being useful and having empathy for all of nature and the environment is my simple quest.  Life remains good and quite productive. 

For this and much more art, click on Pixels or go straight to the Collections. Here is the new Wet Paint 2024 Collection. 

Warmest regards and keep your paddle in the water,

Phil Chadwick 

#2956 "Spring Shadows Singleton"

#2956 "Spring Shadows Singleton" 
18 x 14 by 7/8 depth cradled smooth panel (inches)
Started 11:30 am Monday, June 23rd, 2025

The paddle around Singleton Lake is about 6.0 kilometres. There is something interesting to be found around every corner. That path is paddled several times a year, and it never gets old. Nature changes with the seasons and the weather. The paddle takes more than two hours if I take my time and investigate everything that catches my eye. I have a very low threshold for interesting stuff. I also use the opportunity to check the wood duck boxes and bird houses that line our shoreline. 

The spring shadows cast by the tall trees that towered behind me climbed the opposite ridge at location 2956 in the above graphic. Patches of bald marble rock peeked out from holes in the toupee of fresh moss. Last season's leaves carpeted the valley floor. The soil was rich. The northwest shore in the distance reflected in the calm waters of the north basin of Singleton. 

I prefer to really "see" the natural world and not just quickly in passing. Many regard the land as a simple commodity for profit in an intrinsically flawed GDP (Gross Domestic Product) Economy. Gross indeed! The GDP does not value either nature or the environment. Enough is never enough, especially if you feel the need to keep up with the Joneses. Simple greed.  

In sharp contrast, we see the land as home, a place to live and learn while caring for essential habitats as stewards of the Earth for future generations. 

A wise meteorologist friend of mine wrote: 

"Some people spend their life seeing the world, others spend their life studying the forest and others spend their life studying one tree. The world needs them all. The canoe slows you down to see it all. It lets you get into all the corners where you can use all your senses one at a time.

I became a Scout leader to help boys with learning disabilities and found how smart and skillful some of the dumb people are. I learned more from them than they did from me. They told me what they wanted to learn and do so I had to find ways to get around shift work as classes were impossible to attend. When I got to my meteoroloigcal posting (a city in central Ontario) most wanted to ski and canoe. After going over 6000 miles in a canoe I started to see what they taught me."

Point Paradise hold many more treasures that I have yet to record in oils. Something worthwhile takes time... There are many more paintings required to capture that special piece of the Singleton Sanctuary. 

I have always believed that life, like art, is not a competition. We just need to strive to be better than we were yesterday. The world is quite irrelevant. Success with this simple mindset is not about wealth, power, trips around the world, expensive clothing or fine wine and food. Definitely not about the "gold-plated toilet seat" that has been in the news. Mindless and conspicuous consumption is not the signature of success, which also comes with a high and unsustainable carbon footprint to boot.

Success in life and art can be much simpler. Happiness, being useful and having empathy for all of nature and the environment is a simple and admirable quest. This is just my opinion, of course, but I think it is pretty close to that of Henry David Thoreau.

‘An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.’  (Henry actually meant "paddle")

‘Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.’ 

‘You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.’  

‘This world is but a canvas to our imagination.’ 

‘If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.’

‘Be not simply good – be good for something.’  

‘Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.’ 

‘Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.’  

Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau would have been an interesting neighbour. 

For this and much more art, click on Pixels or go straight to the Collections. Here is the new Wet Paint 2024 Collection. 

Warmest regards and keep your paddle in the water,

Phil Chadwick 

#2955 "Singleton Spring Paddle"

#2955 "Singleton Spring Paddle" 
14 x 18 by 7/8 depth cradled smooth panel (inches)
Started 10:30 am Sunday, June 22nd, 2025

This is the western tip of our Singleton property. A finger of 1.2 billion-year-old marble points toward and plunges into the 50-foot-deep portion of Singleton Lake. This point is part of the remains of the "Grenville Mountains".  The red cedars on this point are way older than their limited size would suggest. Point Paradise is a great place to sit and watch the world go by. It is also a wonderful spot to paint. 

There is almost no "tooth" (to grab and bite the oils) on these gessoed, cradled panels. I use this as an advantage to loosen up my brushwork. Just a few brushstrokes are employed to lay the paint on thick, wet on very wet. Art needs to be fun - painting with pools and swirls of oil and pure colour is the answer. My Dad built the stretcher bars, and I aspire to use every one of them before I am done.

The westward-facing rocky slope is the domain of a couple of dozen gnarled and flagged red cedars. They are heavily flagged by the strong west winds. Some red cedars have broken limbs, but they hang on. A grove of towering red oaks, maples and shagbark hickories is found on the east side of the marble ridge. This is a Carolinian Forest paradise on the extreme northern fringe of that unique biogeographic region. 

The Google Earth view from October 2023 (above) provides a detailed view of the shoreline structure.  The rocky ridges run northeast to southwest and are the remains of the Grenville Orogeny. By the way, "orogeny" is a process in which a section of the Earth's crust is folded and deformed by lateral compression to form a mountain range. The ancient Grenville mountain chain extended from the coast of Labrador through Quebec and Ontario and then disappeared under younger rocks of the southwestern United States. That mountain range was likely as high as the Himalayas, potentially reaching nearly 30,000 feet. Those "Grenville Mountains" of the mid-late Mesoproterozoic age existed about 1000 Ma (Million years ago) and have eroded and been washed to the sea since then. The present-day Appalachians remain on the southeast flank of the original "Grenville Mountains. 

I have painted this characteristic point before. 

See the following for links to Fine Art America.

• #1281 "Point Paradise"; 
• #1364 "Point Paradise"; 
• #1541 "Spring Paradise"; 
• #1661 "Misty Paradise"; 
• #1732 "Fog at Point Paradise"; 
• #1776 "Spring Paradise"; 
• #2562 "Singleton Paradise Sanctuary Shore"; 
• #2754 "Singleton Point Paradise After the Autumn Colours" 

Note how unsuccessful I have been at keeping the names of the paintings unique. There are a couple of "Point" and "Spring" Paradises in this list. Thankfully, the chronological numbers are one of a kind. 

I am most fortunate. There is no need or desire to travel to the south of France searching for something to paint. Inspiration can be found around every corner. So I stay home, paint and look after the forests while surrounded by nature. 

Such an approach also keeps my carbon footprint pretty low. Geothermal energy is found in the ground. Solar energy is delivered free to the doorstep, providing both electricity and our domestic hot water. The Earth and the Sun provide everything that Singleton really needs, and it is very much appreciated. 

I was in the Studio because of the tropical heat and humidity outside. It would have been like standing in a blast furnace to be painting en plein air. This is Global Warming and a direct result of the release of 16 million years of sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere in just a couple of hundred years. 

The following graph of atmospheric carbon dioxide sums up the last hundred million years. The "Grenville Mountains" of my painting were formed near the top of the pink Proterozoic layer in the time-frame inset. If drawn to scale, the two hundred years of the Industrial Age, which tragically upset the atmospheric balance, would be a microscopically thin wafer at the top of the mountain of time and not the size of the truck as sketched. 

Bust of Solon,
copy from a Greek original

Humans have discovered so much since the time of the Greeks, but still remain unenlightened. We are just one species within nature, but greed or arrogance motivates the consumption of 16 million years of sequestered carbon in just a few lifetimes. A lack of empathy for everything else allows this tragedy to unfold. What could go wrong? Life on Earth will reinvent itself without humans and try again soon. 

Like Solon, the Greek philosopher (c. 630 – c. 560 BC), when he mused:

"I grow old learning something new every day" 

Learning is a continuous process, not limited by age or circumstance. Art and science are worthy things to occupy one's time and efforts. There is something new to discover with each painting. Just my opinion...

Life remains good if I remain focused on the positive and ignore the news. It is interesting that the word "news" originated from the Middle English word "newes," in the 14th century. Being the plural of "new", the word means "new things" or "new information". There are common misconceptions that "news" is an acronym for "North, East, West, South" or "Notable Events, Weather, Sports". The acronyms make sense, but are wrong. 

For this and much more art, click on Pixels or go straight to the Collections. Here is the new Wet Paint 2024 Collection. 

Warmest regards and keep your paddle in the water,

Phil Chadwick 

#2954 "Scarlet Tanager Song"

 

#2954 "Scarlet Tanager Song" 
16 x 20 by 3/4 depth stretched canvas (inches)
Started 9:00 am Tuesday, June 17th, 2025

Heat warnings were encouraging me to seek the air conditioning of the Singleton Studio. As a result, I returned to the ample and generous supply of inspiration provided by my friend John Verburg. Scarlet Tanagers enjoy the Carolinian forest on the property, and this bird was singing to me. 

Art is another opportunity to continue to learn. There is still much to learn about nature so that it might be there for future generations. Together, art and learning are science and a wonderful way of life. Not such a great way of making a living, but still satisfying for the soul. 

Scarlet Tanagers are spectacular songbirds, and we hear them more often than we see them. Males arrive early in spring to defend loose territories that include mating, nesting, and foraging areas. Territorial singing battles sometimes escalate into confrontations, where one or both males spread and droop their wings and raise their tails in threat. If neither backs down, the standoff culminates in one male chasing another. Scarlet Tanagers are monogamous within each breeding season but switch mates from year to year. 

Scarlet Tanagers eat mainly insects along with some fruit and tender buds. The insect diet is wide and varied. While searching for these tidbits, they walk along branches high in the canopy. Scarlet Tanagers perch or hover with fast wingbeats to grab insects from leaves, bark, and flowers, and they catch flying insects like bees, wasps, and hornets from the air. They swallow small larvae whole, but they kill larger prey by pressing it into a branch. 

The female chooses the nest site, usually selecting a shaded spot within a cluster of leaves at a juncture of small branches. Nests are typically quite high (50 feet or more from the ground) on a nearly horizontal branch well away from the trunk. The female prefers an unobstructed view of the ground and open flyways from nearby trees. Scarlet Tanagers tend to nest in mature deciduous trees such as maple, beech, and oak, but they also nest in eastern hemlock. 

The female gathers nesting material from the forest floor and builds a flimsy nest in 3–4 days, spending relatively little time on it each day. She drops material onto the nest, hops in, and moulds it into shape by pressing her body against the sides and bottom. She then gets out to weave in any loose ends. The nest is a loosely woven saucer of twigs, grasses, plant stalks, bark strips, rootlets, and pine needles. It has a shallow and asymmetrical interior space, lined with grass, fine plant fibres, vine tendrils, and pine needles. 

Parents feed their young for up to two weeks after the birds fledge, and then the family disperses before migrating. 

Scarlet Tanagers fly across the Gulf of Mexico between their breeding grounds in eastern North America and their wintering grounds in South America. They usually migrate at night. Scarlet Tanagers winter in mature forests and forest edges, mostly on hills and mountains. They range south as far as the Bolivian lowlands. Scarlet Tanagers join up with other species in foraging flocks. 

The following summarizes the four different tanager species.  

The good news is that according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey, Scarlet Tanager populations have held steady between 1966 and 2019. Scarlet Tanagers are an interior forest species, so changes in land use have been slower to influence their populations. Nests are in greater danger of being parasitized by Brown-headed Cowbirds in fragmented landscapes. To safeguard the Scarlet Tanager population, researchers recommend preserving and restoring mature forest habitat for breeding, migrating, and wintering birds. 

This was a fun painting, and nature continues to inspire. 

For this and much more art, click on Pixels or go straight to the Collections. Here is the new Wet Paint 2024 Collection. 

Warmest regards and keep your paddle in the water,

Phil Chadwick 

#2953 "June Morning Daisies and Red Clover"

#2953 "June Morning Daisies and Red Clover"
10 x 8 by 1/4 depth canvas panel(inches)
Started 10:00 am Monday, June 16th, 2025

I needed to loosen up my brushwork, and the daisies were in bloom. I set up my field easel in a thick patch of daisies and started throwing paint around. It is easy to get lost within a bouquet of flowers, and there was no desire to be absolutely botanically accurate. I simply wanted the colours and the feel of the foliage. Red clover also dotted the landscape, although those flowers were more purple in colour. 

An orange and dark brown butterfly flitted in as I was finishing. It landed on a daisy, and a few strokes later, it was depicted in the oils - on the upper left of the panel. A little research and my new friend was identified as a male Pearl Crescent butterfly. When this painting was published on Fine Art America, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) that they employ actually picked out the butterfly, although not the exact type...

Female turtles wandered around while I painted, looking for the perfect spot to lay their eggs. Every nest that we identify gets protected from the very persistent raccoons. There are typically a dozen nests protected every year. The turtles do an excellent job of hiding their efforts from my eyes, but they are no match for the nose of a hungry varmint. 

The following collage from 2025 summarizes the turtle nest protection program at Singleton. I want to build more of the very effective (and much lighter) 5.1 protectors, but time and materials are in short supply. Heavy steel grates and shipping palettes are still employed along with the early 2x4, nylon mesh boxes. The snapping turtle nests required large palettes for full protection. 

Raccoons predate the nest the first night after laying if it is not adequately protected.
Scattered turtle shell casings reveal if I missed the nest. 

I stepped away for a drink of water and returned to find an Eastern Phoebe perched right at the top of my easel. The zen of vertical posts scattered around the property might not be positive to people, but the birds sure appreciate them for hunting insects. 

For this and much more art, click on Pixels or go straight to the Collections. Here is the new Wet Paint 2024 Collection. 

Warmest regards and keep your paddle in the water,

Phil Chadwick 

#2952 "Apple Blossom Bumble"

#2952 "Apple Blossom Bumble" 
16 x 20 by 3/4 depth stretched canvas (inches)
Started 9:30 am Monday, June 9th, 2025

"No mow May" is standard practice in the Singleton Sanctuary. That first crop of flowers is vital for all of nature. The trees are among the first to produce blossoms - in this case, an apple tree. There are some very old apple trees on the property. They need much more care than I have time to give. This photographic inspiration was taken by my friend John Verburg. 

The American Bumblebee is an important pollinator of native plant species. Bumblebees typically fly during inclement weather conditions, while other insects stay home. The Bumblebee is considered one of the most determined nest-defending bumblebee species, likely because it nests at or above ground. Bumblebees generally visit flowers up to 2 km from their colony. They tend to visit the same patches of flowers every day, making only enough honey to satisfy their needs. Luckily, we see them in abundance every day. 

American Bumblebee queens spend the winter underground, employing decomposing organic material like rotting logs and compost. 

The American Bumblebee is threatened due to:

• pesticide use 
• habitat loss due to agricultural intensification
• pathogens spillover from domestic bees 
• American Bumblebee might have a low genetic diversity, possibly contributing to its decline, while increasing the production of sterile male individuals

Southern Ontario is the northern edge of the American Bumblebee's distribution. Sadly, the American Bumblebee was added to the Species at Risk in Ontario List on January 25, 2023. 

Human conceit encourages the false belief that we know it all. Nature employs not just temperature but also sunlight, gravity, magnetic fields and even quantum effects to manage daily, seasonal and annual activities. We can't possibly fully understand nature, which is tremendously complex and interconnected. 

Uneven global warming has created temperature variations that are out of step with solar radiation. Fragile interconnections between symbiotic species that took thousands of years to tune have been broken seemingly overnight. Insect populations appear to be crashing... 

For example, the blossoms of the apple tree are triggered by a combination of factors: temperature, light, hormones, nutrients and water. Temperature is a strong factor influencing bumblebee foraging. The bumblebees become inactive at both very low and very high temperatures. 

The weather is also changing and driving bigger modifications in the climate. Earth is in the initial stages of verifying the 1970s calamities predicted by the continued exploitation of fossil fuels. We are now just witnessing the tip of the melting iceberg, fueled by greed and the lust for power.

Bumblebees remain safe with the Singleton Sanctuary. Humans seem to think that they have all the answers when they don't even know a fraction of the questions. This encourages a toxic combination of arrogance and ignorance that has resulted in decades of dithering and inaction. Open minds, fresh thinking and wisdom are urgently required to come to the rescue of all species on the planet. May I kindly recommend any book by Diana Beresford-Kroeger. 

For this and much more art, click on Pixels or go straight to the Collections. Here is the new Wet Paint 2024 Collection. 

Warmest regards and keep your paddle in the water,

Phil Chadwick 

#2951 "Smokey Monet Sunrise"

#2951 "Smokey Monet Sunrise" 
10 x 12 by 1/2 depth MDF panel (inches)
Started 9:00 am Sunday, June 8th, 2025

The barred owls actually woke me up before dawn. Multiple owls were carrying on quite a conversation. I eavesdropped in... even though I do not know "owl", I do give a hoot. 

The sun was just cresting above the Singleton forest. Crows were alerting the rest of nature about my movements around the home. A trumpeter swan flew low overhead and bugled a greeting. Bluebirds were starting their day of feeding their chicks. One Bluebird had already fledged out and was waiting for breakfast on a branch of the Shagbark Hickory. The Eastern phoebes were also busy. It was an idyllic start to a day, but the sky told the story of tragedy. 

I also needed a break from painting bird portraits. I decided to record the colour of the sun as seen through the smoke encircling the northern hemisphere. The Smoke Advisory had been officially ended, but it still influenced the colour of the sunrise. This view looks east at 5:52 am Sunday, June 8th, 2025. Perhaps the smoke was getting too much media coverage. Maybe it would go away if everyone stopped talking about it? 

Climate change has forever altered the Boreal forest. A carbon sink has been transformed into a big source. A combination of drought and insect infestations has transformed the coniferous trees into matchsticks loaded with flammable resins. A warming atmosphere is also hungry for more water vapour, further parching the landscape. The Boreal Forest Fire season used to run from April to October, but now it never stops. "Zombie fires" smoulder all winter, waiting for spring to begin anew. 

John Vaillant's fine book "Fire Weather" is actually a textbook on the science and sociological aspects of climate change disguised as an action tale about the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire. As I wrote in 2024, please read Chapter 20. Those pages summarize a couple of centuries of science and explain a crucial five lost decades of action due to corporate greed and political pandering for power and profit. "Fire Weather" is an important and factual read... worth reading twice or even three times. 

The year 2023, when "Fire Weather"  was first published, also set records for fires within the Boreal Forest. The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) monitors the locations and intensity of fires. CAMS also tracks emissions and forecasts the impacts of the resulting smoke on the atmosphere. The following graphs summarize the sad story of 2023. 

Sadly, the carbon emissions from 2025 are on track to at least match those of 2023. The following are some images of Canadian smoke around the world... there were too many to include. 

But now back to art...

Much has been written about "Impression, Sunrise" painted by Claude Monet in 1872. Most missed the point in the early days of coal and mankind opening Pandora's Box of carbon. That same sun can be witnessed in 2025 through the smoke generated from torching the Boreal Forest. Monet claimed that he hastily titled the painting due to his hazy painting style. 

"They asked me for a title for the catalogue, it couldn't really be taken for a view of Le Havre, and I said: 'Put Impression.'" Claude Monet 1872

In terms of "economic value", the painting was initially bought in 1874 for 800 francs and sold again in 1877 for a loss at a mere 210 francs. The value of 210 francs in France in 1880 equates to about $2000 USD in 2025. Monet's "Impression, Sunrise" is now estimated to be worth $250-350 million USD, but it will never come on the market... 

The term "Impressionism" had already been used for some time to describe the effect of paintings from the Barbizon School. The details of all of those facts will left for the art historians. I will focus on the science. 

The influence of smoke and fog on the scattering of light is distinctive. "Smog" is defined as a fog made heavier and darker by smoke and chemical fumes. The term was first used at a 1905 Congress when Dr. H. A. des Vœux, hon. treasurer of the Coal Smoke Abatement Society read a paper on 'Fog and Smoke'. 

"He said it required no science to see that there was something produced in great cities which was not found in the country, and that was smoky fog, or what was known as 'smog'."

These thoughts were all bouncing around in my mind while I painted, but they are secondary. The only thing I can do is try to remain positive and happy. It is easy to be perpetually angry, witnessing what greed and the human economy have done to Paradise Earth. Nature is not part of the equation or the artificial balance sheet of wealth. Simply, nature has no voice.

I also thought that "Monet" sounded a bit like "morning" so the title makes some sense for a sunrise painting. "Monet" also sounds like "money" but for me, art has nothing to do with the contrived, unnatural currency of the human economy. 

So I stay home, paint and look after the forests while surrounded by nature. Life remains good if I focus on the positive.

For this and much more art, click on Pixels or go straight to the Collections. Here is the new Wet Paint 2024 Collection. 

Warmest regards and keep your paddle in the water,

Phil Chadwick 

#2950 "Eastern Towhee Sing On"

#2950 "Eastern Towhee Sing On" 

20 X 16 inches by 3/4 profile in depth.

Started at 9:00 am Wednesday, June 4th, 2025

I start all of these bird portraits with the eyes and the beak. It is essential to get these perfect; otherwise, the painting will fail. Sometimes it comes with the first brush stroke. Sometimes it is a job requiring several visits. 

The Towhee is a strikingly marked, oversized sparrow of the East, feathered in bold black and warm reddish-browns. It is heard far more than it is seen. The Eastern Towhees spend their time rummaging in the undergrowth. They scratch at leaves using both feet at the same time, in a kind of backwards hop while making a lot of noise. The Eastern Towhee is mainly seen when it climbs into low trees to sing, like this one. 

Towhees eat many foods: seeds, fruits, insects, spiders, millipedes, centipedes, and snails, as well as soft leaf and flower buds in spring. They also eat seeds and fruits, including ragweeds, smartweeds, grasses, acorns, blackberries, blueberries, wheat, corn, and oats. 

Eastern Towhees usually nest on the ground, the nest cup sunk into the fallen leaves up to the level of the rim. Sometimes the nests are constructed in shrubs or grape, honeysuckle, or greenbrier tangles, up to about 4 feet off the ground. 

The Eastern Towhee and the similar Spotted Towhee of western North America used to be considered the same species, the Rufous-sided Towhee. The two forms still occur together in the Great Plains, where they sometimes interbreed. This is a common evolutionary pattern in North American birds – a holdover from when the great ice sheets split the continent down the middle, isolating birds into eastern and western populations that eventually became new species.

Eastern Towhees are common victims of the parasitic Brown-headed Cowbird. Female cowbirds lay eggs in towhee nests, then leave the birds to raise their cowbird young. In some areas, cowbirds lay eggs in more than half of all towhee nests. Towhees, unlike some other birds, show no ability to recognize or remove the impostor’s eggs. Female cowbirds typically take out a towhee egg when laying their own, making the swap still harder to notice.

Eastern Towhees tend to be solitary, using threat displays to tell other towhees to back off. Studies have shown that male towhees tend to defend territories many times larger than needed simply to provide food.

The oldest known Eastern Towhee was at least 9 years old when it was recaptured and rereleased in South Carolina. It was originally banded in the same state in 1937.

Eastern Towhees are numerous and commonly seen throughout their range, but their numbers declined by an estimated 1.4% per year for a cumulative decline of about 53% between 1966 and 2019. A study by the Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) in Canada showed a 47% decrease in numbers since 1970.

Partners in Flight estimates a global breeding population of 29 million and rates them 11 out of 20 on the Continental Concern Score, indicating a species of relatively low conservation concern. Numbers of these birds rose in the mid-twentieth century as people stopped farming and their fields returned to nature. Expansion of subdivisions made the landscape less suitable. 

"Special Concern" means the species lives in the wild in Ontario and is not endangered or threatened, but may become threatened or endangered. Special concern species do not receive any species or habitat protection. Shame. 

For this and much more art, click on Pixels or go straight to the Collections. Here is the new Wet Paint 2024 Collection. 

Warmest regards and keep your paddle in the water,

Phil Chadwick 

#2949 "Wood Thrush Love Songs"

#2949 "Wood Thrush Love Songs"  
16 X 20 inches by 3/4 profile in depth.
Started at 9:30 am Friday, May 30th, 2025

My friend John Verburg started finding all kinds of singing birds to inspire me. What could be more positive? The world certainly needs more birds and their melodies. This wood thrush was putting everything into his song. 

The portrait went well from the first brush strokes on the eye and beak. The Thrush was positioned on the canvas so the song emerged from the upper right intersection of the thirds. The bird was singing in a colourful Cucumber Tree  (Magnolia acuminate), which is the only native magnolia species in Ontario.

The Wood Thrush is one of the first songsters to be heard in the morning and among the last in the evening. The male sings his haunting "ee-oh-lay" song from an exposed perch in the midstory or lower canopy. He uses the song to establish a territory that averages a few acres. 

Within days, a female initiates pairing by enticing him to chase her in silent circular low-level flights only feet above the ground. The prospective mates share a perch between flights. After pairing, the female helps defend the territory from intruders. Low-level threat gestures like breast puffing, crest raising, and wing and tail flicking are usually enough. They give a distinctive, sharp machine-gun-like sound as an alarm call. 

Wood Thrushes forage by hopping through leaf litter on the forest floor, tossing leaves to expose insects or probing for litter-dwelling prey. While foraging, they frequently bob upright for a look around. Foraging is largely solitary, though they may form mixed flocks on their wintering grounds, where they sometimes cautiously feed at the periphery of an army ant swarm. Pairs are socially monogamous, though extra-pair copulations are common. New pairs form each year.

The wood thrush lives in mature deciduous and mixed (conifer-deciduous) forests. They seek moist stands of trees with well-developed undergrowth and tall trees for singing perches. They prefer large forests, but will also use smaller stands of trees. The Singleton forest is perfect for them. 

They build their nests in living saplings, trees or shrubs, usually in sugar maple or American beech.

The wood thrush is a medium-sized songbird slightly smaller than the American robin but similar in shape. Males and females have a similar appearance. Young birds look similar to adults, but have tawny streaks and spots on the back, neck, and wings. 

The wood thrush flies south to Mexico and Central America for the winter. Twice a year, Wood Thrushes cross the Gulf of Mexico in a single night’s flight. The north-bound spring route is further west, along the Mississippi Valley. Males arrive on breeding grounds several days before females. The fall route heading southward follows the Atlantic coast.

Quick facts

• The wood thrush may nest and raise young two and occasionally even three times in the course of a single season.
• The wood thrush has a loud, flute-clear “ee-oh-lay” song. For the last of the three sounds, this bird sings pairs of notes simultaneously, one from each branch of its Y-shaped voice box.
• While many male songbirds answer a neighbour’s song with the same song, the male wood thrush will almost always answer a rival’s song with a different one.
• The brown-headed cowbird sometimes lays its eggs in the nests of wood thrushes, which then raise the young cowbirds. Brown-headed cowbirds lay eggs in the nests of more than 220 species of birds.

Major threats to the Wood Thrush are:

• loss or breaking up of the bird’s forest habitat resulting from urban, suburban and cottage development
• over-browsing by white-tailed deer in some locations decreases the number and type of plants and trees in the forest, including the number of saplings, where the wood thrush nests
• parasitic behaviour from brown-headed cowbirds, which lay their eggs in the nests of the wood thrush (and other birds), and whose young are fed by the host thrush at the expense of their own young
• loss and the breaking up of forests in the bird’s winter habitat 

"Special Concern" means the species lives in the wild in Ontario and is not endangered or threatened, but may become threatened or endangered. Special concern species do not receive any species or habitat protection. Shame. 

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Warmest regards and keep your paddle in the water,

Phil Chadwick