Does anyone know what kind of hawk is medium-sized, all gray on the back, and would be chasing a robin?

I heard a loud THWACK the other day, and went out to my porch to investigate.  I got there just in time to see a large gray bird in the tree beside the porch.  It was about the size of a ruffed grouse, only more slender, and about the color of a mourning dove.  Its back was toward me, and it took off as soon as I walked onto the porch, so I didn't get a good look at it.

But on the ground under the tree was a juvenile robin, dead, its neck apparently broken.  I am guessing that maybe it ran into the window in its efforts to escape being pursued by the hawk.  I expect that if it had been the hawk that had run into the window that the noise would have been louder and the damage greater.

The robin was full size but still had a speckled breast and very little red showing.  It was beautiful, and I was very sad to have a teenage traffic fatality in my neighborhood like that.  I took some careful reference photos of him to draw from, so it will eventually be immortalized in some work of art in my studio. 

Nature notes from the heart of Maine's western mountains:

Maine's sweet but brief summer is in full swing here now.  Ripe strawberries are giving way to mulberries, soon to be followed by wild blueberries.  My mulberry tree has buckets and buckets of mulberries this year.  The tree is full of cedar waxwings, and the air is full of their thin, reedy whistlung voices from dawn til dusk these days. 

The lupines, Maine's signature wildflower, are mostly done blooming now.  The roadsides are colored with black-eyed susans and loosestrife and red clover in abundance.  I have yarrow growing all along my driveway.  This year one of the plants bloomed pink instead of white.  I have never seen a pink one before.  It is not pale pink, but a real deep raspberry hot pink, and it is beautiful. 

I have been learning some new flower names.  We have red campion, and whorled loosestrife, and some kind of tall spike of yellow pea-like flowers that I cannot identify yet.  I found some rough-fruited cinquefoil growing beside the swimming hole up the road a ways.  Its flower petals look like perfect yellow hearts. 

We have a favorite local swimming place in the river where the water has worn great round cauldrons in the rock, and there are waterfalls that you can toboggan down.  We took my granddaughters there this past week.  They chased minnows and tried to skip rocks and generally had a good time.  The water was icy, as usual, and a real treat on a hot muggy day.

We got spring finally, and then BAM, it was summer.  The thermometer jumped about thirty degrees last weekend.  Now it's warm and sunny and summer is in full swing.

The tiger swallowtail butterflies have been all over the lilac bushes the past 2 weeks.  I spent a lot of time chasing them up and down with a camera, and finally learned how to capture them.  I have one in my collection that a friend found and gave to me, too.  I did a miniature painting of a swallowtail last week (see my ACEO currently posted here on eBay) and was really happy with the way it came out.  I am learning a lot about brushwork right these days.

We have had a riot of flowers, with lilacs just finishing and azaleas just starting, violets and buttercups and johnny-jump-ups and forget-me-nots and quince blossoms (I watched a cedar waxwing eating the petals) and lilies and others whose names I do not know.  The irises and columbines are blooming now, too, and I have my garden in. 

I learned the names of two new birds this week.  There were two different little birds that were singing near the garden as I worked, and after days of hearing them I finally got a glimpse of each of them.  One goes "twitter twitter tweet TWEET chew."  That is a chestnut-sided warbler, a really handsome fellow.  And the other sounds like he is saying "free MEal, free MEal," over and over again.  That is an alder flycatcher, and I didn't know we even had them around here.

Where is spring???  It hasn't made it to western Maine yet.  Even my daughter in central Maine says that her daffodils are poking their leaves up above ground.  But all that has happened here is that my compost bin lid is starting to poke up above the snow that still buries it. 

To be honest, the birds seem to know it's spring.  We had a mourning dove singing in the top of the popple tree behind the shed this morning.  That is always a sure sign that spring can't be too far away.  The weather report for this week looks like it will assist the snow in melting some more, too.  It's finally getting up above freezing during the day. 

Spring is going to happen fast and furious this year, all scrunched into about 2 weeks of May.  The composer Igor Stravinsky described spring in Russia like this: "The violent Russian spring that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking." 

I am selling my reproduction ACEO prints as open editions, not limited editions.  I know that this flies in the face of current conventions, but I have some good reasons for it.

For one thing, I am a printmaker as well as a painter.  This means that my concept of what constitutes an "edition" is rooted in intaglio printmaking history.  An edition of etchings or drypoints or mezzotints is truly limited because the metal plate will eventually break down under the pressure as it rolls through the press.  Printmakers choose to deface and discard the plate after a certain number of prints in order to insure that all the prints are of consistent quality.  Most intaglio editions will be less than 100 prints, unless the plate has been steel-faced.  And these prints are not reproductions, they are each originals in their own right.  There will be minute variations from print to print because of the inking and wiping process.

A digital "edition" is not limited in this fashion.  Artists make editions of digital prints of their work and call them "limited" when they choose some arbitrary number of prints to make from a file.  A digital file could conceivably produce thousands and thousands of prints with no variation in quality.  It would only eventually limit itself by the amount of time it would take the file to be corrupted or outmoded or inaccessible because of hardware failure.

So why make a "limited edition" of digital reproductions of any given work of art?  Personally, I would prefer to have the value of my work determined by its beauty and artistry, not by whether your neighbor has one, too.  Please buy my work because it speaks to you, not because it is rare.  I want my art to be viewed by the most people possible, and I am more concerned about accessibility than I am about market value.  For this reason I choose not to artificially limit the number of reproduction prints that I make from my original works.