Autumn Alarm

Giclée Art Print by Archibald Thorburn

The echo of a distant shot rings out crystal clear across the rolling hillsides and alarms the covey of Blackgame, quietly feeding this autumn morning in the shelter of a heathery hollow. Hurriedly they rise and wing their way across the slopes, heading for a distant clump of birch trees behind which they swing and dip into a welcoming shelter of their moorland retreat, there to hide until danger passes.

A relatively early work, painted at the age of forty, this picture clearly shows the painstaking attention of the artist to bird and background at this stage of his career.
From fronds of bracken to twigs and trunks of birch, the whole scene is painted ‘tight’ with relatively dry brush, the work contrasting markedly with much freer technique employed almost thirty years on with his outstanding Danger Aloft.

Blackgame are mainly vegetarians, though occasionally they will take beetles and ants. Their staple diet, however, consists of a wide variety of buds, fruits, and shoots, including bilberry, heather, birch, larch and pine, small grassland plants, and, of course, grain from the stubble and stooks in late autumn.

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