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

The rich blues, greens, and browns of the Lesson’s motmot color column may call to mind a Caribbean reef, but this striking jewel is a creature of forests, fields, and inland waterways. I met this motmot species when I worked in Costa Rica as a teen, and the bird’s behavior and look seemed to me a mashup of jay and kingfisher. It turns out those associations weren’t off the mark; motmots belong to the bird order Coraciiformes, which also includes the kingfishers, and the order name translates as “corvid-like,” a reference to the Corvidae family, which includes jays.

If the bird’s palette is undersea, its habits are underground – they nest in hillsides or river bank burrows. A creation story of the indigenous Bribri people of Costa Rica relates how the motmot came by its characteristic pendulum tail and burrowing behavior. When the god Sibú, a king vulture, asked all the other creatures to help him create the world, only the lazy motmot refused. He dug a hole in the ground and hid from Sibú so he wouldn’t have to work. Alas, his long tail remained in view, aboveground. When the hardworking animals spotted the tail, they were irritated, and plucked off all but the tip. After the world was completed, the motmot emerged from his hiding place and boasted about how much of the labor he’d done. Sibú saw the plucked tail, however, and deduced what had actually transpired. Furious, he cursed the motmot to live in a hole in the ground.

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.