Courting Pigeon Guillemots
Title: Courting Pigeon Guillemots
Artist: Tony Angell
Date: 2014
Materials: Bronze, basalt
Location: NW Maritime
Acquisition: Donated by Robin Ornelas and Jan Halliday
Two Port Townsend women, Robin Ornelas and Jan Halliday spent more than two years raising money to commission and purchase the sculpture of Eleanor Stepps' favorite seabirds, and then presented the sculpture to the City of Port Townsend.
Ornelas had interviewed Stepps for the Jefferson County Historical Society and is a member of the annual Eleanor Stepps Environmental Leadership Award Committee. Halliday first met and interviewed Stopps for a series of newspaper articles in the late 1970s when Protection Island nesting sites were being crushed under developers' bulldozers.
Stopps died in April 2012, her favorite time of year, when 17,000 pairs of rhinoceros auklets were burrowing into the sandy ground and cliff sides to lay their eggs, and seabirds, such as guillemots, cormorants, puffins, oystercatchers and gulls, were gathering sea grasses and sticks for their nests.
More than 70 percent of Puget Sound's seabirds nest on 364-acre Protection Island. Because of Stopps' patient diligence, the island became a protected National Wildlife Refuge in 1982. Boats must remain 200 feet offshore, and nobody, except for a caretaker, is allowed to set foot on the island.
