Taita Thrush
Watercolor, 31″ x 23″, on Legion Special Handmade Rough, 300 lb: $200,000
Taita Thrush (Turdus helleri)
About Taita Thrushes
A typical thrush with a dark gray back and breast, a black head, and a white belly with rufous sides. Also note the orange bill, eye-ring, and legs.
A scarce bird that is endemic to the Taita Hills of southeast Kenya. recent assessments suggest dramatic and rapid decrease in population – which probably ranges between 500 and 1,000 individuals, and is restricted to just four forest fragments, two of which support only 2-3 pairs each.
Taita thrushes prefer the understory of remnant scraps of montane forest, where it is shy and retiring. Distinctive within its tiny range. It has a typical thrush song, and its “chk-chk” and thin “tseeep” calls often reveal this understory specialist.
The Taita thrush is a very rare bird, and its habitat recedes year by year, due to draughts, climate change, encroachment by farmers and deforestation by illegal loggers.
Range Map of the Taita Thrush
About the painting:
Like 99% of bird watchers and 99.9% of bird painters, I have never laid eyes on this most elusive subject. Very few photos (around a dozen in total) have been taken so I had to combine reference images with the olive thrush, the Taita’s nearest relative in appearance. I wanted to offset its striking plumage and capture its elusiveness by showing it in flight, flitting across a typical Taita Hills rainforest rock face, the whole image accented by typical rainforest leaves, dappled in dew. The cast shadow took a lot of thought and even some 3D modeling and light-casting to get right, but it adds a sense of movement and dimension to the piece.