Ingrid Erickson

Both photos courtesy of Hannah Miller.

From the time she started walking the Massachusetts woods with her grandfather as a child, Ingrid Erickson never met a bird she didn’t like. Over the years, she added art to her interests, and after a year in China, where she was impressed by paper-cutting, she began making cutouts from her sketches of live birds. In the bitterly cold winter days of 2015, she’d appear at Carolina Raptor Center in Huntersville, an EnergyUnited affiliate member, in woolly ear flaps and with sketchbook in hand.

After presenting a show of those towering cutouts — 4 ½ x 8 feet in size — she went small for 50 cutouts of NC birds made for CSA shareholders. They’re attached to 8 x 10 (inch) paper, and she used an X-Acto knife for the intricate spaces between feathers. She’s a scholar as well as an artist, studying bird biology via internet from Cornell University. She heads this year to Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland to help just-hatched whooping crane chicks learn how to swim and eat.

Learn more at ingrid-erickson.squarespace.com