CRANE HABITAT AND LAND ART

Last month, four women went to Qili Hai Nature Preserve north of Tianjin, China, to create a “land art” project that would draw attention to wetlands and their importance.

The women were Elsie Gilmore from Baraboo, Wisconsin; Julia Gilmore, Elsie’s daughter, and Lynn Gehlen, Elsie’s granddaughter (15 years old), from Niederbachem, Germany; and Madeleine Suidman from the Netherlands and now Wiesbaden, Germany. Two of the women, Julia and Madeleine, are artists who studied at Alanus University near Bonn.

Your first question may be, “What is land art?”

The simplest answer is that “land art” is art made in nature using natural materials such as stones, grass, leaves, earth, sticks, and whole trees. It can enhance the beauty of a specific area, make us more aware of the importance of nature, give us a different angle or view on a theme, or draw attention to an area such as a wetland. It can have many other intentions depending on the artist doing the work.

Land art is generally photographed and then left in the environment to decay or be otherwise changed by the forces of nature. Sometimes the work of art is then photographed over a period of years or months.

Early “land art” was usually very large, but now much “land art” is on a small scale. If you are interested in seeing good examples, look up the artist, Andy Goldsworthy from Scotland.

At Qili Hai in China, we travelled to our “land art” work site on foot and sometimes in this “rabbit” (bouncing/hopping) cart.

Also, at Qili Hai in China, we did not see any cranes nor very many other birds, but we did see their habitat. Hopefully Julia’s and Madeleine’s land art brought attention to and a new look at the barren and beautiful wetland area of late winter and early spring. These pictures may help you look at the landscape in a new way, too.

On our first day at Qili Hai, we looked at the land. It was bare, expansive, and brown; only the sky had color.

We saw straight lines: the land, the road, the river, more land, and the sky. We also saw dirt/clay, rocks (small ones), stacks of dead reeds, a few trees, stacks of dried cotton stems and bolls, and weeds.

The reed was the main feature in the landscape. It was long and straight, too. So we dug a copy of the reed into the ground beside the river. Then beside the reed we dug, we piled up its negative form.
Can you see both parts on the landscape? The reed and its negative form followed the line of the land, the road, the water, the horizon.

We divided the reed in the ground into chambers just as you see inside a real reed if you split it in half. We gave the negative mound of the reed sections, too. Our reed had four chambers or sections.
We filled the four chambers with the materials from the area: with rocks, with vegetation (more dried reeds), with signs of animals (feathers and a dead magpie), and with signs of people (the cotton bolls, painted bright red and yellow). We made four holes in the negative mound and filled them with the same materials from the area.

As you can see, we wove mats out of dried reeds and cut a window in each mat. These mats partially hid the contents of each chamber from the eye. The reeds offered us only a glimpse, a small window of insight to their value. In the summer time, reeds do the same thing. They partially hide the activities of the wetland from our view.

After finishing the mats, we learned that the dam would release water and the river would flood the art site. We then “planted” reeds along the bank to welcome the water. We painted red cotton boll “flowers” and tied them to the reeds to invite the water to come and play.

Overnight the water came. The water caused three reed mats to float; the one covering the rocks did not float.
Finally, we wove more reed mats and cut holes in them to view the scene: the land, the water, the sky. Each mat stood between two posts overlooking the art site. One mat focused on a surprise, a growth of green, the coming of spring.

Students, teachers, and reporters came to view the land art. They only saw what was left: the shadows of the reed and its negative form in the ground, the floating mats, the welcoming “flower” reeds, the viewing stations of land, water, and sky.

The water had caused great change. The lines of road and land and sky were no longer straight and orderly. The water had created more irregular and chaotic patterns. The water played with our art and prepared the land for new growth. Our land art project involved a lot of people. It became “social art” as well as “land art.”

Perhaps such land art projects will make us all aware of the beauty and importance of wetlands even in their brown and dormant season. Julia will create a second part of the land art project this summer in Wisconsin. Look for the companion part of this project when you return to school in the fall. The “land art” photos will be displayed in the downtown Ringling Gallery in Baraboo on July 25 this summer. It will be shown later in Bonn, Germany, and in China.

Maybe you too can create land art. Look for ways to see the land, especially the wetlands and habitats for birds, around you with new eyes.

All four of us would like to thank all the wonderful people around Qili Hai and Tianjin for participating in our project.

Spring Migration

Like our Whooping and Sandhill Cranes in the eastern United States, the Siberian Cranes along the east Asia flyway have started their spring migration north. Since March 27 more than 1,000 Siberian Cranes have been observed in central Liaoning Province (Liaoning Province is located northeast of Tianjin, one of our Three White Cranes project sites along the Bohai Sea in eastern China). On March 31, a banded Siberian Crane was observed in a flock of over 800 cranes in this area. The bird was banded as a chick in Yakutia, Russia in August 2005. The Siberian Cranes will migrate over 3,000 miles from their wintering grounds in the Poyang Lake Basin to their breeding and summering grounds in northeastern Russia.

Siberian Cranes in Liaoning Province. Photos by Zhou Haixiang

Tianjin

The following posting by Zhang Juan describes her visit to a Tianjin wetland with Masha Vladimirtseva, Three White Cranes educator and researcher from Russia, this past fall. The Siberian Cranes along the east Asia flyway are migrating through this region now (see the Spring Migration posting for news and images from the migration). Click here to download a fact sheet and PowerPoint presentation on Tianjin (the second of our spring 2008 field updates for Three White Cranes classrooms).

Most wetlands in Tianjin are coastal wetlands. But, this time, we observed a wetland in an urban area. Guided by a taxi driver who is very interested in watching birds, we went around the wetland. Our companion from Green Friends of Tianjin (an environmental organization in Tianjin) told us that they arranged a successful photo exhibition on coastal wetlands in Tianjin last year. Environmental organizations like Green Friends of Tianjin are the leaders in environmental protection in Tianjin and are flourishing day by day.

Ignoring shivery winds in winter, Masha frequently got out of the car and watched birds in the wetland. The observation took almost a half day. Except for several grebes, we did not find many kinds of birds. But, one common hoopoe rejoiced Masha deeply, since she had never seen this bird in Russia (click here to view an image of a hoopoe). Oh! What an enormous world we are living in! What biodiversity we have!