Adventures at Wilder Farm

(Written by Dave)
Not being a native New Englander, I’ve never before been to a Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park. But I finally got there this week and watched the Red Sox get clobbered 14-5. Lita had suggested I staple some red sox to my shirt to show my team support, but I never quite got around to that plan. It was a beautiful, warm, fall night and the fans seemed to get more into the game as the other team (Tampa Bay Rays) scored more and more runs — even the Kazoo Man (who had stapled sox to his hat and/or ears) came out late in the evening. Unfortunately a lot of people had already left by that time and didn’t get the opportunity to hear his rallying calls…

But it was such fun to see Fenway Park after Lita had done so much visual research into how it looked in 1914 during the Pennies for Elephants story. Here’s how things look now from the bleachers just past the right fielder:

And here are a few pictures (from the Library of Congress and Boston Public Library photograph collection) during the 1912-1914 time period:

In Pennies for Elephants, the kids of New England raised the money to buy three retiring circus elephants for the Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo. To introduce the elephants to the city, there was a huge event at Fenway Park. Here’s the newspaper headline, and a cartoon of the elephants from the Boston Post, and a newspaper image of Elephant Day at Fenway:

One of Lita’s images of the elephants at Fenway Park has been used for the 2010 Keene Children’s Literature Festival poster.

In fact, we also just heard that Keene State College gave a framed version of the Festival poster to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan when he passed through Keene, New Hampshire last week. Pretty cool!

So September is here and Lita’s event schedule is starting up again. She’ll be at the New England Reading Association Conference on Wednesday night (September 22)  at the Smorgasbord of Authors and then she’s presenting at the early riser’s morning session on Thursday, Sept 23. Then on Oct 9-10 we’ll be opening up the studio for the 15th Annual Monadnock Art Open Studio Art Tour. We hope the fall color is out and at its best by then!

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I  just returned from a fantastic Moran-related trip to Yellowstone! I instructed a painting workshop (called Painting Moran’s Yellowstone) through the Yellowstone Association Institute — it was an amazingly fun experience! The Yellowstone Association puts on some incredible classes, teaching about the wildlife, botany, and the land. I was honored to be a part of it this year.

We stayed at the Lamar Buffalo Ranch which is the place where they regenerated the existing Buffalo herd from just a few survivors back in the 1920s. It’s a rustic place with a couple of classrooms and a kitchen in the main Bunkhouse, and small cabins for the students, instructors, and volunteers. Each night the Buffalo herd migrated from lower in the valley, through the camp, to higher ground. In the morning, we painted as the sun rose and sand hill cranes called from nearby. Coyotes howled and yipped at night and we saw nine bears!

We felt so lucky to stay in this enchanted place within Yellowstone, and so immersed in the land and surrounding wildlife. Dave and I have already decided to return next year, to teach and spend more time in a place that we love.

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(Written by Dave) We just received a shipment of F&Gs for Lita’s next book—Strange Creatures: The Story of Walter Rothschild and his Museum. This book is with Disney-Hyperion Books and is scheduled for release on Feb 1st, 2011.

Here’s a short description of Walter’s story:

Walter was born in 1868 and was the son of Lady Emma and Lord Nathan Rothschild. The Rothschilds were a family of bankers and Walter was expected to someday take over the bank. But Walter wasn’t interested in the bank. Instead, he loved every creature that crawled, slithered or flew. He began collecting bugs and butterflies at the age of seven. The family also knew explorers who traveled the world to bring back animals for the London Zoo, and soon Walter started collecting more exotic creatures like kangaroos and kiwis. From there his collection grew and grew, until it threatened to take over the Rothschild estate. Lord Rothschild eventually lost patience with Walter’s hobby and insisted that Walter become a banker, like everyone else in the family. Reluctantly, Walter obeyed, but his dream couldn’t be dimmed.

Eventually Walter created the largest zoological collection gathered by one man and was respected throughout the world for his contribution to science. He wrote 1200 books and scientific papers and named 5000 new species. Animals that now bear the name Rothschild include butterflies, fish, a millipede, a fly, a lizard, a porcupine, a wallaby, a bird of paradise, and even a giraffe. The painfully shy boy who never made a good banker forever changed our understanding of the world’s diversity of creatures.

Lita actually has a strange connection to Walter. Lita’s grandparents, Fran and Frederick Hamerstrom, were ornithologists who cared for birds of prey. One of their scientific mentors was Ernst Mayr, who began his career on an expedition collecting for Walter Rothschild. Later he became curator of Rothschild’s collection of birds, now housed in New York’s American Museum of Natural History.

The picture above is Ernst Mayr with Sario, one of his Malay assistants, in the former Dutch New Guinea in June 1928. The picture below is Lita at Walter Rothschild’s Tring Museum in June 2009.

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Lita’s last event of the 2009-2010 school visit season was on May 19th, and on the 21st we took off for a vacation in England and Scotland. We flew into Edinburgh and drove down to the Lake District (about 3 hours) where we had rented a lovely cottage near the village of Hawkshead. The cottage was built in the 1600s and was just above the village.

Also just above the village, through the sheep pastures on the path of our walk into Hawkshead, sits a beautiful old 17th Century church.

Hawkshead is the home of The Beatrix Potter Gallery, which is in a building that was once the office of the local solicitor William Heelis, who married Beatrix in 1913. They lived at Castle Farm in Near Sawrey, a couple of miles down the road. Beatrix’s Hill Top Farm is also open to the public and is a fun place to visit.

The main activity in the Lake District is walking. One of our favorite hikes is in the Borrowdale Valley.

And another beautiful walk is in Grasmere, the home of William Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage.

We ended up in Edinburgh — here just below Edinburgh Castle — and the weather turned dark and stormy…

The other main activity in England and Scotland is visiting pubs. Up near Edinburgh Castle we found a pub called The Jolly Judge, a good place for a pint of beer and a cup of soup!

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We’re so excited that the release date for Born to be Giants has arrived, so we’re rolling out our new Born to be Giants mini-website!

Lita has produced an expanded group of dinosaur coloring pages (download them from here) , based on the images in Born to be Giants and her earlier D is for Dinosaur.

And we have some pages that show the sketch to painting process for this book, and some pictures from Lita’s first dinosaur dig with the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology.

Here are some snippets from the reviews for Born to be Giants:

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(Written by Dave) It was a humid 85° three days ago in New Hampshire, but last week Lita visited schools and libraries in Berlin, Gorham and Randolph, New Hampshire, and it snowed several inches — on April 28th! I haven’t been up that way for several years so I decided to come along.

On April 27th, Lita’s new book Born to be Giants was released, and she signed a few copies at the White Mountain Cafe and Bookstore in Gorham. Below is a picture of Lita with the first book store copy sold.

The community was so welcoming — there were signs for Lita all over:

The kids at Berlin Junior High School made a fantastic poetry circle, with poems written on the foot tracings, that emphasized what it’s like to be in other people’s shoes around the world. It was really well done!

This was Lita’s last group of March and April school visits. She did more than 40 presentations during the last three weeks of April. Here she’s in the Library at Berlin Junior High School.

And at the the Randolph Public Library — shown a beautiful drawing of a turtle.

Everything was wonderfully organized by Yvonne Jenkins, a super librarian at Berlin Junior High School and at the Randolph Public Library, and by Ingrid Graff, another super librarian at the Edward Fenn Elementary School in Gorham. Thanks Yvonne, thanks Ingrid! And thanks to all the librarians who organized Lita’s school visits this year, it was a great season!

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