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Watercolor, 31″ x 23″, on Legion Special Handmade, rough 300lb:

Price: $10,000

The Mackinder’s eagle owl (Bubo capensis mackinderi)

About MacKinder’s Eagle Owls

The Kenyan, or Mackinder’s eagle owl, is a subspecies of the eagle owl. Mackinder’s eagle owls in central Kenya are generalist predators capable of exploiting an agricultural niche that is devoid of most other

Research by Simon Thompsett of the Kenya Bird Of Prey Trust has shown that the owls consume a wide variety of prey, 87% mammals, 7% birds and 5% insects.  Farming practices are influencing both prey selection and abundance of Mackinder’s eagle owls.  Owls respond to numerical fluctuations in small mammals and may play an important role in controlling farm pests.

Diet diversity of this population of owls is high and this may have negative long-term consequences for owl productivity and some farming practices continue to threaten this population, particularly the poisoning of owl prey with pesticides.

Range Map of the MacKinder’s Eagle Owl

About the MacKinder’s Eagle Owl at KBOP

About the Painting

Reference:

I saw the MacKinder’s on a trip to the trust and was impressed by its sheer bulk and presence, though he was a bit camera shy, so I resorted to Getty images for a stock photo as my core reference.

Paper:

I used Lanaquarelle 300 lb rough, from Legion Paper, after testing 7 different high-end watercolor papers to see which best suited my techniques of large, smooth gradient washes, wet-on-wet, deliberate blooms, seas salt application, multiple layers of glazing and spot lifting.

Paints

I used David Smith Extra Fine Watercolors: Burnt Umber; Raw Sienna; Burnt Sienna Light, Yellow Ochre; Naples Yellow, Alvarro Caliente Grey, Paynes Grey and Prussian Blue, and for eyes, Chromium Yellow Light, Cadmium Orange and Rose Madder. For the deep purple background, Winsor & Newton Artists Gouache: Prussian Blue; Alizarin Crimson; Payne’s Grey and Burnt Umber

The painting took approx. 100 hours over one and a half busy weeks

IUCN Red list

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, a global standard for assessing the extinction risk of species, lists the Mackinder’s Eagle Owl as “Least Concern”, but several Kenyan Owl species are threatened with extinction, particularly the Sokoke Scops Owl (Otus ireneae), which is listed as :Globally Endangered.

Kenya Bird of Prey Trust

Our Mission

Our mission is to secure healthy raptor populations in Kenya.​ To achieve this we need to protect critical raptor habitats, manage and restore raptor populations and educate people on the value and importance of raptors

What we do

The Kenya Bird of Prey Trust strives to work with partners to actively manage raptors in their natural environment, to understand raptor ecology and movements better,, to restore populations through rescue and rehabilitation, and to educate people in order to limit raptor persecution. With the permission and partnership of the Kenya Wildlife Service, we are responsible for the care of  a variety of raptors in two raptor centres.

Our Programmes:

Rescue and Rehabilitation

Education and Capacity Building

Monitoring and Research

More than half of the world’s raptor species have declining populations and nearly 20% are threatened with extinction. The need to monitor raptors and understand the threats they face is therefore as pressing now as ever.

The Global Raptor Impact Network (GRIN) was created by expanding the African Raptor DataBank globally and combining it with The Peregrine Fund’s Global Raptor Information Network—all in an effort to monitor and conserve the world’s raptors. GRIN gives raptor researchers tools to more efficiently conduct their own studies while contributing to a global program. 

The database of raptor sightings held by GRIN already exceeds 200,000 entries, thanks largely to help from raptor researchers, bird-watchers, and bird atlassing projects. It is designed to use all different types of raptor observations, from road counts, foot transects, and static count data through to satellite tracks, mortality incidents, and museum data. GRIN’s database is coordinated through The Peregrine Fund and managed by Habitat Info.

In Kenya specifically the Peregrine Fund focuses on

Cape eagle-owl

Sokoke scops owl

Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS)

As Kenya’s most eminent national wildlife conservation agency, we commit ourselves to providing leadership in wildlife conservation and management.

We manage the fundamentally undiscovered, pristine and undisturbed, Mwea National Reserve – an oasis of calm and tranquility in a populous landscape. 

It shelters two rare bird species; Pel’s fishing owl and the white-backed night heron. It is the only protected reserve in which the globally threatened and Kenya-endemic Hinde’s Babber is found.

The Owls Trust

While not based in Kenya, The Owls Trust is working with SOFAfrica in Kenya to raise awareness about owls and their role in pest control. 

 
 

The male Mackinder’s rescued by Kenya Bird Of Prey Trust was discovered tangled in horticultural plastic and had poked its eye out. It is comfortably housed next to some verreux eagle owls in their Naivasha sanctuary, and is begrudgingly tolerant of human interaction (as opposed to a verrueax, raised from a chick, which has become part of the human family at the trust.

Roy is an African chimpanzee

(Pan troglodytes): great apes found across central and West Africa. Along with bonobos, they are our closest living relatives, sharing 98.7 percent of our genetic blueprint. Humans and chimps are also thought to share a common ancestor who lived some seven to 13 million years ago.

Threats to survival:

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has declared the chimpanzee an endangered species—and the booming human population is primarily to blame. As humans move into more and more of the chimp’s geographic range, they clear away the ape’s forest habitat to make way for agriculture. Logging, mining, oil extraction, and new road and highway projects threaten to further degrade and fragment the chimp’s habitat.

Roy has been at Ol Pejeta since December, 2009, when he was only a few months old. Ol Pejeta, in their “Meet The Chimps” section of their website have this to say about Roy.

“Gender: Male

DOB: 2009

Origin: Democratic Republic of Congo
Roy was rescued from Rumbek, southern Sudan on 2nd October 2009, where he had been living in a 2ft by 2ft steel cage. and was housed at the KWS quarantine facility for health monitoring and observation. He was then transferred to the Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary on 14th December 2009. He is believed to have originated from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, probably orphaned by the illegal bushmeat trade and illegally transported to southern Sudan. He was confiscated by the Wildlife Conservation Administration of Sudan and handed over to volunteers who cared for him while a sanctuary was identified to transfer him to.

Roy has adapted wonderfully at Sweetwaters and is a happy and healthy chimpanzee. He is undaunted and this has elevated him to the position of a senior male within a very short time, very playful making friends easily and is extremely good friends with Romeo.”

About the painting:

This is for me, a rare multimedia piece, in which I used pen and ink to define facial wrinkles, watercolor to lay in the basic painting, with wet-on-wet bleeds and multiple coats of glaze, aquarelle colored pencils to highlight the minuscule pebbled wrinkles of his face and gouache to pick out individual hairs.I have been planning this work since 2017, when I took the reference photo of Roy during a visit to the chimp sanctuary at Sweetwaters, operated by Ol Pejeta. Roy had been sharing food with his friend Romeo, and was enjoying a quiet moment of repose.
I liked the lighting and was captivated by his pensive expression.He has a penetrating, almost judgmental gaze when you catch his eye, as if he is assessing your character for threat or opportunity. I tried to capture this expression in the painting so viewers would feel an emotional connection to this magnificent ape.

The painting won the Medal of Excellence at the 2022 Artists for Conservation juried exhibition, and was one of 12 artworks selected for the 2023 AFC calendar.

Make a statement in any room with this framed poster, printed on thick matte paper. The matte black frame that’s made from wood from renewable forests adds an extra touch of class.

• Ayous wood .75″ (1.9 cm) thick frame from renewable forests
• Paper thickness: 10.3 mil (0.26 mm)
• Paper weight: 189 g/m²
• Lightweight
• Acrylite front protector
• Hanging hardware included
• Blank product components in the US sourced from Japan and the US
• Blank product components in the EU sourced from Japan and Latvia

How to attach hooks on 24″ × 36″ horizontal frames:
Place each of the mounting hooks 1 inch (2.5 cm) from frame corners when hanging horizontally.

This product is made especially for you as soon as you place an order, which is why it takes us a bit longer to deliver it to you. Making products on demand instead of in bulk helps reduce overproduction, so thank you for making thoughtful purchasing decisions!

Age restrictions: For adults
EU Warranty: 2 years

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