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| On March 28, 2007, UK artist Pollyanna Pickering and her daughter/manager Anna-Louise Pickering departed for Bhutan sketch and paint the rare flora and fauna of this largely undisturbed region of the Himalayas.
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| Pollyanna Pickering announces expedition to study endangered Ethiopian Wolf |
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In April Pollyanna Pickering will set off on a 8,000 mile round trip to the most mountainous and desolate parts of Ethiopia in an attempt to track down the most endangered species of its kind on the planet.
For many people Ethiopia may be most associated nowadays with the 1984 famine, but Pollyanna has been drawn to the country by it's unique willdife. Abyssinian wolves are an elegant, long-legged species of wolf found only in a handful of scattered remote mountains in Ethiopia. Around 500 survive today in small populations, threatened by loss of highland habitats, disease and persecution. Listed as endangered by the World Conservation Union, the species is considered the rarest wolf in the world. "In 2004 Rabies took a deadly hold among the wolves of the Bale Mountains National Park, which could have entirely wiped out this fragile popultaion and a state of emergency was declared" Pollyanna told us "So through my charitable Foundation I raised £5660.00 to support a vaccination programme organised by the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation project. The EWCP tranquillises, inoculates and re-releases the wolves. To date the project has been a great success, with no known problems or mortality amongst the vaccinated wolves." Since then Pollyanna has been hoping to travel to the Bale mountains to meet some of the dedicated conservationists who are working to protect the wolves. She is hoping to be able to observe some of these elusive creatures in the wild, and sketch them to provide her with reference for future paintings. "I am currently working on a book about wolves, mainly centred around my travels into Transylvania to search for European wolves" Pollyanna explained "But it would be wonderful to be able to include paintings of the Ethiopian wolves as well."
The paintings inspired by the expedition will be used in future exhibition to continue raising funds for the wolf conservation project.
In her quest to paint endangered species in their natural habitats, Pollyanna has traveled from the frozen wastes of the High Arctic to the suffocating heat of the central American Rainforests, from the extreme altitudes of the Himalayas to the desert wastelands of sub-saharan Africa – but she has never before traveled back in time! However when she flies out on her forthcoming expedition to Ethiopia next month, she will leave her Derbyshire studio in 2009, and land in Ethiopia halfway through 2001. "Ethiopians use a 13-month Coptic calendar that began its third millennium the September before last" Pollyanna explained "So when they claim to enjoy 13 months of sunshine they are not exaggerating!". |
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