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<\/a>\nPlumage: The Majestic Art of Birds<\/em>,\non now at The Robert Bateman Centre, is a celebration of natural\nbeauty in the form of birds, created by artists JJ Audubon, Fenwick\nLansdowne, Allan Brooks, and Robert Bateman. Also on show is a\ncollection of carvings, prints, and dioramas, as well as Venables\u2019\nhighly detailed photographs of hummingbirds, ducks, and herons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe had bird feeders\nfrom the time I was little, and had bird books. It\u2019s one of those\nneat things that kids can do\u2014you look out the window at the bird\nfeeder and then you get the book and you go, ‘Oh, that\u2019s a junco,’\nor, ‘Oh, hey, look\u2014there’s a woodpecker,\u201d says Venables. \u201cIt\u2019s\nquite incredible because there it is, it\u2019s right outside your\nwindow. It\u2019s kind of mysterious, but it\u2019s right there in your\nyard and all around and people don\u2019t even notice.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Canadian painter Robert\nBateman has spent his life carefully watching and meticulously\npainting birds. Like Venables, Bateman started his career in the arts\nand as a naturalist while still just a child.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll little kids love\ndoing art\u2014and nature, for that matter\u2014but most of them grow up\naround the age of 12 and go on to more grown-up things, and I just\nnever grew up,\u201d says Bateman. \u201cThat\u2019s when I got serious\u2014when\nI was 12 and I painted every hawk and owl in North America. By the\ntime I was 16, they were just little paintings and I did them in a\nseries.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Coming of age in the\n1950s, when contemporary art was ruled by the expressionists\u2014painters\nlike Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell\u2014Bateman was convinced\nthat bird art was finished, until one afternoon at the Royal Ontario\nMuseum when he experienced an epiphany. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe third floor was the\nnatural history floor and they had a rotunda at the middle of it, and\nthen a kind of a very large alcove where they had rotating exhibits,\u201d\nsays Bateman. \u201cWe were all just hanging out, and here was this\nexhibit and this young pipsqueak Fenwick Lansdowne, who was better at\npainting feathers\u2014by far\u2014than I was. [Lansdowne] did these\nwonderful bird paintings; I thought, the last five or 10 years,\nthere\u2019s nothing more to be said, and he came along and he had a new\napproach, so he influenced me to eventually going back into bird\nart.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bateman, who is now 88,\nhas travelled the world in search of bird sightings, but it\u2019s an\nearly memory from his teen years in Toronto that comes to mind when\nhe thinks about spectacular sightings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was in the\nwintertime, and I was sort of crunching through this frozen cattail\nmarsh and I scared a pheasant up,\u201d says Bateman. \u201cIt burst into\nthe air like an explosion, and then out of nowhere came a peregrine\nfalcon. The peregrine falcons attack by striking with their feet and\nstunning their prey, and it hit the pheasant with its feet, so the\npheasant squawked even louder. But it didn\u2019t fall or anything\u2014it\nchanged direction and went off squawking. The peregrine was startled\nby seeing me there. That moment with the peregrine and the pheasant,\nit was quite an encounter.\u201d \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bateman is a positive\nperson who, when asked about the threat to biodiversity on this\nplanet, refers to the Serenity Prayer, which calls for serenity to\naccept what can\u2019t be changed, courage to change what can, and\nwisdom to know the difference between the two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBirds\nare like the canary in the coal mine,\u201d says Bateman. \u201cThey used\nto, before they had instruments, bring a canary in a cage into a coal\nmine and the canary would collapse or maybe die before the people did\nbecause they\u2019re more delicate\u2014if the canary is in trouble you\nbetter get out of the mine. Birds are an indicator, because if the\nbirds are dying, we\u2019re next.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n