A Bumpy Year

In the movie All About Eve, actress Bette Davis famously tells some party guests, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” Had I foreseen what 2020 had to offer, my toast on New Year’s Eve would have been something similar. It has been a bumpy year indeed. I hope everyone out there is doing okay during this very challenging time.

While we have seen most of our favorite carving shows get cancelled in 2020, one bright spot was the third annual Wildfowl Carving Magazine Online Carving Competition. This year we had 56 entries, a substantial increase from the first two years. We had three levels this year instead of two, and we donated all of the entry fees to the United Way’s covid-19 relief fund. The winners were:

Expert

1. Sunset Flower (American Kestrel) by Ronnie Zint
2. Summer Oldsquaw (Long-tailed Duck) by Laurie J. McNeil
3. Silent Solitude (Common Kingfisher) by Ken Stuparyk
   HM. Royal Pintail by Bill Casto

Advanced

1. I’m Bad to the Bone (Western Meadowlark) by Carmen R. Luna
2. American Woodcock by Robin Warburton
3. Western Grebe by Joe Tamborra

Beginner

1. Rojo (Ruddy Duck Drake) by Arturo Ramirez
2. Harmony (Tui) by Wayne Herbert
3. Doc’s Gobbler (Eastern Turkey) by Justin Smith

Our congratulations to the winners! We’d like to thank everyone who participated.

We had many really tremendous carvings this year and that made the judging especially difficult. I’d like to give a shout out to our tremendous panel of judges—Lynn Branson, Tom Christie, Pat Godin, Greg Pedersen, and Peter Palumbo—who put in a lot of time and effort to examine all the entries.

You will get a chance to see all the entries yourself when you get your copy of Competition 2020 sometime around February 1 next year. All the cancellations are creating some challenges with Competition this year, but we have some surprises in store.

In the meantime, have you ordered your copy of Rich Smoker’s Counterfeiting the Counterfeiters yet? It’s the latest in our Workbench Project series, and one you won’t want to miss. The best way to ensure you get Competition and all our books first and at the cheapest price is to join our book club.