About the paintings…

These were the first four paintings I did when I started using watercolor! I started painting because I wanted to pay tribute to these animals: The birds that haunted my beautiful tree-lined street in the Abell neighborhood of Baltimore. In a time of great loss in my life, I began watching what the birds were doing every day out my third-floor window, and found a whole world of distracting bird-beauty. The mourning doves sat sleek and deer-like on my fire escape at mid-day, cooing; the crows amassed in enormous flocks in the evening, thousands strong, cawing overhead; the chimney swifts rocketed out of their homes in the neighborhood’s chimneys at dusk to hunt bugs on little jet-fighter wings, tittering in the higher air; and a berserk-looking Cooper’s hawk careened chaotically around the rooftops in buffeting winds, terrifying everybody. I sometimes saw her perched on a weathervane in golden afternoon light, shucking a starling like a cob of corn. On my most grieving days I climbed onto my rooftop to watch the birds and found it impossible to be sad under all that sky. That rooftop and those good animals saved my life, I think, so I painted them.

Chimney swifts are omnipresent in the cities of the mid-Atlantic. At end of day listen for high-pitched descending twittering far above your head, and look up to see their little bodies almost impossibly high. Manage to follow them and you’ll find them dive-bombing into people’s chimneys, for they nest on the chimney walls. They have much in common with bats and can be hard to tell apart in the evening when both fly moth-crazy chasing bugs. Despite their being seemingly everywhere throughout Baltimore and DC, the chimney swift’s population is dwindling fast; first we lost the old-growth trees they once lived in, and now we’re losing old chimneys to gentrification. A portion of the proceeds from these postcards will go towards building new nest sites for swifts. I want to save them the way they saved me.

Postcard Details:

This postcard set contains (8) 4.25″ x 5.5″ glossy-front cards printed on sturdy 230 gsm cardstock. The set includes:

☽ 2 Mourning Dove cards
☽ 2 American Crow cards
☽ 2 Cooper’s Hawk cards
☽ 2 Chimney Swift cards

All postcards are lovingly handmade and printed at home in my little apartment in Washington, DC, and packaged in compostable, plant-based eco-clear bags for shipping.

A portion of the proceeds from your purchase will be donated to the Maryland Bird Conservation Partnership to build nesting sites for threatened chimney swifts!

Ordering Info:

☽ Free shipping to the continental US. International orders will receive a Paypal invoice via email for additional shipping costs.

☽ Please allow up to two weeks for printing and shipping.

☽ At this time my website only supports payments through PayPal. If you are unable to use a PayPal account, please email me at orders@mammal.fish to inquire about alternate payment methods.

☽ Multiple postcard sets may be sent in multiple shipments. All shipping materials are recyclable or compostable.

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