Tag Archives: vernal pool

The Vernal Pool: Part 3 by Maris Van Vlack (MABA Intern and RISD Student)

This summer the Museum of American Bird Art is thrilled that Maris Van Vlack, a rising sophomore at the Rhode Island School of Design, will be interning at MABA. She will be sketching and painting in the wildlife sanctuary. She will be blogging about her experience. Enjoy her post about a week spent at the vernal pool. –Sean Kent

I have noticed the vernal pool has changed a lot over the past few weeks. The water level has gone down 2 or 3 feet since the beginning of June, the weather has gotten hotter, and the humidity has gone up. I tried to capture the feeling of moisture in the air by painting the trees in the early morning fog. 

Differentiation of value is what gives this painting depth of field. The trees in the foreground are darker and more saturated than the trees in the background. When water is brushed over dry paint, the pigment can then be lifted up with a paper towel, which is how I achieved the light foggy effect in the background. 

I tried to show the change in weather with the two paintings below by focusing on the reflections on the vernal pool’s surface. The one on the left was painted in the direct sunlight. The reflection of the trees in the water was strong and bright. The painting on the right was done a week later, when it was cloudy.  A lot of pollen had washed down from the trees onto the vernal pool’s surface. There was a gray film over the surface of the water, with lots of tiny pieces of orange pollen floating in it. I tried to show these differences by focusing on the abstract shapes and colors of the constantly changing water reflections.

Sunlight reflection vs. cloudy reflection with pollen

I wanted to make sure that this blog series didn’t forget an important member of the vernal pool ecosystem: the frogs! They can be spotted peeking their heads up out of the water or sitting on nearby logs. (NOTE: In my sketch, I wrote that the frogs were green frogs, but I later decided that they were probably pickerel frogs because of the black stripe by the eye.) 

The last drawing for today is a bit of an artistic experiment where the vernal pool plays a more active role in the drawing. For this piece, I used some mud and leaves from the edge of the vernal pool to make a drawing.

Drawing tools

The mark making tools I used for this drawing were a pinecone, a piece of wood, and some muddy leaves. The end of the pinecone was good for making scratchy lines. The wood was so wet that I could physically squeeze water out of it, so I used that like a watercolor paint. The leaves were the most useful to draw with because they were caked in mud and provided most of the “pigment” that I used in this drawing. 

The subject of drawing is some of the maple leaves on the trees above. I thought this was fitting because decomposed leaves were the medium for the work. It is hard to get dark tones from the mud, but I like the light abstract quality that the piece has. 

This week, go out and be creative with the materials around you! Remember how nature is always changing and use that as the motivation for your drawing, painting, sculpting, music, or whatever else you decide to create!

My name is Maris Van Vlack, and I will be blogging for the summer of 2020! I am a rising sophomore at the Rhode Island School of Design, with a major in Textiles and a concentration in Drawing. I used to take homeschool classes at the Museum of American Bird Art and have had my artwork exhibiting in their Taking Flight Exhibit for young bird artists.

I am especially interested in working with unusual materials in my work, and am inspired by plants, animals, and the patterns found in nature. This summer, I will be creating a guide for the MABA trails with sketches and paintings. I will be recording and writing about my observations, and sharing them through these blog posts. Hopefully this will be an educational and inspiring resource, and will motivate you to sketch what you see when you visit MABA this summer!

The Vernal Pool: Part 2 by Maris Van Vlack (MABA Intern and RISD Student)

This summer the Museum of American Bird Art is thrilled that Maris Van Vlack, a rising sophomore at the Rhode Island School of Design, will be interning at MABA. She will be sketching and painting in the wildlife sanctuary. She will be blogging about her experience. Enjoy her post about a week spent at the vernal pool. –Sean Kent

Many different kinds of birds live in the vernal pool area, making it a great bird watching spot! Below is a list of some of the most common species that I have seen there:

Baltimore Oriole– They are black and orange, so are easily seen in the trees above the vernal pool.

Northern Cardinal– the males are bright red, but the females are dull brown and camouflage well in the trees. I typically see them perched on branches that are low to the ground.

Mourning Dove– They are usually seen hopping about on the fallen tree near the back of the vernal pool (pictured below). I’m guessing that they have a nest in that area.

Black Capped Chickadee– They don’t have any bright colors, so they are harder to see. They are found anywhere in the trees or brush by the vernal pool.

Common Grackle– They appear to be completely black, but the feathers on their heads have a bluish iridescent quality. They are often in the mud by the edge of the water.

Grackles at the vernal pool foraging for food, watercolor

Of the birds that spend their time around the vernal pool, grackles are the most prominent because they make quite a lot of noise. They are omnivorous and hop around the vernal pool, looking for insects to eat. I decided that grackles were a good bird to draw because they are willing to get pretty close to me, unlike other birds who keep their distance and are obscured branches.

Drawing from life is a useful habit to form because it will help your drawings capture the movement and 3-dimensionality of your subject. When working on a painting of an animal like the grackle, which holds a position for just a few seconds at a time, I started by observing the bird and doing many quick sketches.

These drawings are all done from the observation of one grackle, which was hopping from branch to branch in the middle of the vernal pool. Each sketch took three to six seconds because I wanted to capture each position in the moment. I kept my eyes on the grackle, not on the paper, so I could draw the lines and shapes that I actually saw, and not the shapes that I remembered when I looked away. The goal of an exercise like this is not to create a beautiful finished drawing, but to quickly sketch as many gestures as I could. Some of my sketches don’t even look like birds! What they are meant to do is capture the shapes of a bird in motion. Here are a few things I learned while doing this exercise:

-You don’t just have to draw birds in profile, like so many drawings do. You can draw them straight-on, upside-down, from below, from above, sideways, flying, and more!

-There is a lot of movement in a bird’s tail. Sometimes it points up, other times it points down. When the grackle was turned sideways, the tail looked like a thin line, but when he turned backwards or was flying, it was fanned out.

-It is useful to draw a line representing the direction of the bird’s spine. It will help show the kind of movement that the bird is making, and will also help you draw the rest of the bird proportionally. This line is usually going to be curved like an S or a C, not a straight line.

This finished piece was painted with gouache. Gouache (it rhymes with squash) comes in small tubes and is very similar to watercolor. The main difference is that it is more opaque, so light colors can be painted over top of dark colors. As I was working on this painting, I was thinking about a dark color scheme that reminded me of the shadowy areas around the vernal pool. I reserved light colors for the highlights on the beak, eye, and parts of the branch. Even though the trees in the background contained a lot of bright yellow where the sun comes through the leaves, I chose to exclude those bright colors to keep the painting moody and dark. Adding little bits of red to the green paint keeps those shades from becoming too vibrant.

Birds are everywhere, so I encourage you to go outside and sketch one this week! Start with a practice exercise to capture basic shapes, and take a photo or two if you need help remembering the colors. Birds occur so often in art, and there is good reason! They have such a variety of colors, sizes, patterning, and shapes that they provide an endless list of possibilities for drawings and paintings.

The Vernal Pool – Part 1 by Maris Van Vlack (MABA Intern and RISD Student)

This summer the Museum of American Bird Art is thrilled that Maris Van Vlack, a rising sophomore at the Rhode Island School of Design, will be interning at MABA. She will be sketching and painting in the wildlife sanctuary. She will be blogging about her experience. Enjoy her post about a week spent at the vernal pool. –Sean Kent

MABA’s vernal pool is a gathering place for lots of wildlife, and is a great place to watch the comings and goings of woodland wildlife. The pool is located very close to the trailhead, and is easy to find on your trail map. The word “vernal” means spring, so a vernal pool is a body of water that forms when snow is melting in the late winter, and it slowly disappears when the weather gets hot in the summer. Even though it isn’t there all year round, the vernal pool is the home to a variety of animals and is a great place to sit and sketch! Here is a list of wildlife I observed when sitting by the pool for only about 15 minutes:

Green Frog
Baltimore Oriole
American Robin
Damselfly
Mourning Dove

The marker sketch above was drawn from the vernal pool overlook right on the trail. Natural bodies of water don’t have a clear outline, so they can be tricky to sketch. I find that it is best to first draw the things around the water that define its boundaries (like trees or patches of grass) and then draw the reflections you can see on the water’s surface. The vernal pool has a lot of big branches resting in it which create reflections, as well as the sun, sky, and surrounding trees.

An interesting branch and reflection

a sketch of a tree on the bank of the vernal pool, split open and full of shelf fungi

The light by the vernal pool is very captivating because it comes through the leaves overhead and then bounces off of the water’s surface. One day, when I was beginning to sketch, I noticed an interesting pattern of shadows on my paper:

As a drawing experiment, I tried to trace the shapes of the shadows on the paper. This was difficult because the wind kept blowing the leaves back and forth. This was the result:

I find the lines of the drawing interesting, and I think they capture the feeling of the wind blowing leaves back and forth.

The sketch above is drawn from the vernal pool overlook on the main loop path. This view is not as close up as the other place directly on the bank of the pool, but you won’t scare away the wildlife and can watch all the birds fly about! There are often common grackles that hop around the edge of the pool, making quite a racket. I have also seen cardinals, black-capped chickadees, mourning doves, and orioles from this view.

Remember, the vernal pool is quickly shrinking! Even just a week later, I noticed that the water level had gone down about a foot. Go visit! It is a great place to sit, draw, and observe nature.

My name is Maris Van Vlack, and I will be blogging for the summer of 2020! I am a rising sophomore at the Rhode Island School of Design, with a major in Textiles and a concentration in Drawing. I used to take homeschool classes at the Museum of American Bird Art and have had my artwork exhibiting in their Taking Flight Exhibit for young bird artists.

I am especially interested in working with unusual materials in my work, and am inspired by plants, animals, and the patterns found in nature. This summer, I will be creating a guide for the MABA trails with sketches and paintings. I will be recording and writing about my observations, and sharing them through these blog posts. Hopefully this will be an educational and inspiring resource, and will motivate you to sketch what you see when you visit MABA this summer!

Where’s Milly? At the Vernal Pool

Milly at the Vernal Pool

Milly is super excited to get out on the sanctuary to see how spring is springing. Owen and Milly have seen dozens of spotted salamanders in our vernal pool. They have also seen wood ducks, mallards, and wood frogs too!

Wood Duck Trail Camera Video from the Vernal Pool on March 25, 2020

Where’s Milly on a Rainy Spring Day???

As the vernal pool thaw, Milly is gearing up to start searching for spotted salamanders and wood frogs. Look for Milly at the Vernal Pool tomorrow.

Vernal Pool in February
Wood Frogs being Wood Frogs
A Spotted Salamander being a Spotted Salamander

Nature in a minute…The restorative power of Spring

Although it remains mysterious to science how nature calms and restores our brain, it never ceases to amaze me how a brief respite walking through a garden to watch seedlings emerge after a long winter or sauntering through a woodland and hearing the songbirds sing for the first time in many months revitalizes the spirit.


Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit
on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds,
until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost
unhearable sound of the roses singing.


― Mary Oliver, How I go to the Woods

The woods and meadows at the Museum of American Bird Art are alive with sounds, sights, and spirit of spring – renewal and rebirth.

The wood frogs and spotted salamanders have come and gone from the vernal pools, leaving tens of thousands of eggs that will soon hatch. The young tadpoles and salamander larvae that emerge are tenacious. In their struggle to survival and transform, their tiny bodies expend so much energy that the pond is constantly full of tiny ripples that are visible only when you slow down, look closely, and remain still. Oh, what joy these splendid little puddles in the woods bring after a long winter.

Wood frog male calling on April 1, 2019 in our main vernal pool on the main loop trail at the Museum of American Bird Art

Spotted Salamander in our main vernal pool on April 1, 2019
A wood frog playing peek-a-boo in an interior vernal pool at the Museum of American Bird Art
A few amphibian eggs on a leaf in our wildlife sanctuary on April 1, 2019. I still wondering if they hatched when we had a few good rainfalls…

While the vernal pool awakes, it’s bounty will nurture the nearby woods and the Barred Owl eagerly watches and waits…

Barred Owl watching over the vernal pool on the main loop trail. April 17, 2019

Nature in a minute…wood duck selfie from our trail camera

Nature in a minute to start off the week of April 9, 2018. We’ve had wood ducks spotted at the vernal pool 4 times over the past week. Here are a few wonderful new trail camera videos showing the wood ducks. They spent over three hours in the vernal pool on Saturday morning, April, 7, 2018. If you listen closely to the black and white video (it’s take at dawn ~5:15 am) you can hear the wood ducks talking to one another, it sounds a little bit like zippers opening and closing. Enjoy the following three videos.

 

 

Wood ducks in our vernal pool…Nature in a minute

Our vernal pools have been bursting with life this spring. Spotted salamanders and wood frogs have migrated into our vernal pools in the last week or two.

Wood frog in our main vernal pool calling and looking for mates.

Last week, I placed a trail camera on the edge of the vernal pool trying to record spotted salamanders visiting the pool during big night, which is the night – usually after or during a rainfall – that most salamanders migrate to the vernal pool to mate and lay eggs. I didn’t capture any video of the spotted salamanders, but I was able to photograph spotted salamanders in the pool the following morning.

 The trail camera did pick up some really really exciting activity, a pair wood ducks on April 2 and April 3 using the vernal pool and checking out the wood duck. Enjoy the videos. I really love the one from 4:50 am on April 3 because of all the beautiful bird songs, fog, and serene sense of solitude that dawn always brings in the spring.

Wood Ducks on April 3, 2018

Wood Ducks on April 2, 2018

 

Wood frogs of our vernal pool…Nature in a minute

As winter ends, low lying areas and woodland hollows fill up with snow melt and rainwater to create temporary isolated woodland ponds called vernal pools. The wildlife sanctuary at the Museum of American Bird Art has 5 vernal pools on the property with our largest vernal pool only a 5 to 10 minute walk from the museum’s parking lot. These pools provide critical breeding habitat for several amphibian and invertebrate species with life cycles that have adapted to these rich, temporary phenomena.

As winter slowly turns into spring, I eagerly anticipate walking up the first hill on the main loop trail. Before the vernal pool is visible, I know spring has arrived when I hear a characteristic “quacking” that isn’t from ducks, but from the wood frog (Rana sylvatica). When they emerge from their winter slumber, they quickly make their way to vernal pools to breed. I heard the first wood frogs in the vernal pool on March 26, 2018 and was able to take the first pictures today.

Characteristic dorsal-lateral ridges on the back of the wood frog.

This masked frog looks somewhat like a much larger spring peeper, but look for the ridges running down the sides and no pattern on the back.

Notice the characteristic eye mask right next to the eye

True to its name, it lives in forests, breeding in temporary, or vernal, pools. It attracts mates with a quacking call, and the female lays large masses of eggs.

Listen carefully for the characteristic quacking coming from the vernal pool right next to where this wood frog is sitting.

Learn even more about vernal pools in the Spring 2018 issue of Explore.

Spotlight on our Spring Homeschool Classes

To learn or sign up for our spring homeschool classes, click here.

In an environment infused with science, nature, and art, our homeschool classes are exciting and filled with laughter and fun. Each class is thoughtfully designed to foster confidence, awareness, and curiosity for the natural world, science, and art. Homeschool classes are designed by Sean Kent, a dedicated field biologist, curious naturalist, accomplished photographer, and passionate science educator with has been teaching science for 15 years. Furthermore, he has conducted ecological research in Massachusetts, Arizona, and Belize on native bees, the monarch butterfly, interactions between plants and animals and much more. This spring we are offering classes in field biology, nature journaling, and photography, including a build your own camera digital photography course.

This spring we will be offering

  • Pottery, ceramics, and sculpture
  • Drawing Owls from life
  • Spring Ecology and Art
  • Nature Journaling
  • Build a digital camera and learn the art of photography

To learn or sign up for our spring homeschool classes, click here.

This spring picture your homeschool student:

  • Conducting experiments in our native plant meadow, near our vernal pool, and throughout our wildlife sanctuary. Check out this wood frog that was heading to our vernal pool on March 28, 2018.

  • Looking closely at wood ducks, wood frogs, and fairy shrimp in our vernal pool and learning more about their ecology and biology

  • Recording and analyzing scientific data that they collected
  • Creating art inspired by science and nature

Check out these pictures of homeschool students actively involved with conducting research and setting up our experimental native plant meadow.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

  • Conducting surveys of amphibian populations that thrive in our wildlife sanctuary
  • Getting up close with wildlife and possibly holding yellow-spotted salamanders, turtles, or wood frogs that live in our wildlife sanctuary

Check out a few photos of homeschool students closely observing wildlife

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

  • Increasing their confidence by creating art infused with science and nature
  • Focusing and closely observing nature

Check out a few pictures of homeschool students sketching and observing nature closely in the field

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

  • Making friends in a warm and caring environment
  • Exploring different art mediums

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

  • Observing and learning about all the amazing wildlife we have living in our 121 acre wildlife sanctuary

Check out a few of the animals and plants that have been observed over the past year in our wildlife sanctuary

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

To learn or sign up for our spring homeschool classes, click here.