Unlimited edition. 18 x 24 inch, museum-quality poster on matte paper.

The cinnamon teal is one of my favorite waterfowl species here in California. I suspect this admiration owes much to once-long-distance yearning, an eastern childhood spent pining for much-admired western bird species. I recall sitting at the “phone table” in my Virginia home, paging through the worn hardback field guides that resided on the small bookshelf above the rotary dial phone. Wonderful eastern species abounded just through the adjacent window, but I wanted what I couldn’t have. Fast forward thirty years, and the cinnamon teal spices up my West Coast life. (Naturally, I now pine for eastern birds – absence, as they say.)

This May, as I walked a levee road in the Napa-Sonoma Marshes, a pair of cinnamon teal winged in from the southwest and pitched into an abandoned salt evaporation pond. The bird is aptly named – at least, that’s the case for drakes in breeding plumage. In full sun, the male teal was a mix of cinnamon, mahogany, and burgundy, with wings that dramatically flagged a bright azure and jade. When the duck’s wings are folded against its body – anytime it’s not in flight – the blue and green aren’t always apparent, but often they peek out and cooly complement the cinnamon warmth. In this color column, the blue and green bars represent a small percentage of the total color, but *not* the smallest; that belongs to the intense red of the drake’s iris.

Note: These archival poster prints feature rich, appealing colors. I encourage customers to take care in handling them until they are framed/protected for display; the darker colors on the matte paper can be scratched. They ship rolled, so customers need to flatten them before framing (or have their framer do so).

Charitable Sales Model: Whenever one of these poster prints is purchased, a charitable contribution equal to 10% of the print’s cost (or $3.60) is made to a nonprofit working to tackle environmental or social challenges. Read more about my charitable sales model here.