‘Alabama sunshine~ Yellowhammer & Trumpet Vine,’ copyright Susan A. Walton

Image size: 16 x20 in

Paper size: 20 x 24 in

Edition size: 200

The Yellowhammer is also known as the Yellow-shafted Flicker, and Northern Flicker. Unlike most woodpeckers, flickers often feed on the ground, because ants are a preferred food.

Their white upper tail coverts distinguish them in flight as well.

Like many of my paintings, this one began as a botanical painting of flowers, in this case, the flowers on a native plant called the Trumpet Vine or Trumpet Creeper, a vine often seen on telephone poles near watercourses in the Eastern U.S. and clambering up short leaf pine trees like this one on a family farm in southeast Missouri, a tree which attracted my eye one morning when the sun fell on the broken limb and set it aglow. But it needed the addition of the vines to frame the stub of the broken branch. The short leaf pine can also be found in southern Illinois and further south in northern Alabama and Mississippi.

Trumpet creeper has nectaries, glands at the leaf bases which produce sweet nectar to attract ants, and the ants act as defenders against other insects as they protect this food source.

Around this time a friend coincidentally found a flicker deceased and gave me a call to come see it if I wanted to study it in person for reference purposes before they buried the poor thing. So I did, marveling at this most beautiful, exotic-looking bird, and its stunning yellow shafted wings. In the west, an otherwise similar species has equally striking red-shafted wings. One California Indian tribe was so enamored of the feathers that they made elaborate head dresses of them much different than the eagle feathered war bonnets stereotyped in the movies. Fortunately for the flicker, no one these days is coveting and taking them for their plumage.

When I returned to the studio and saw the floral painting of the trumpet creeper and short leaf pine, I realized it was a perfect match for the elegantly dressed flicker I had just seen and photographed for future reference. So I made several sketches and cut them out, superimposing them over the painting to see which one completed the scene best.

Flickers and will often frequent these vines, and I envisioned one darting off through the opening in the foliage in the soft peachy-yellow light of dawn.