A northern cardinal carved into a boulder in Phippsburg, Maine. Photo by Kevin Sudeith, via Atlas Obscura.

Around the Center Pond Preserve in Phippsburg, Maine, an artist has spent years carving birds into boulders, each one the size of the real animal.

Kevin Sudeith was a gallery painter in San Francisco and New York until he carved a petroglyph on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and, as Down East tells it, was hooked. Since then he has gone rock to rock around the world, making what he calls an environmental portrait of a place at a moment in time. In Phippsburg, at Center Pond and the trust’s nearby Ridgewell Preserve, that means birds: eider ducks, a belted kingfisher, a tree swallow, a red-winged blackbird, a loon, a hermit thrush, a northern cardinal, a great blue heron. His method is unhurried. He chalks the design on the stone, works up detailed drawings, then cuts shallow relief with diamond-composite saws. The cardinal in the photo above is painted red.

Many of the birds are carved mid-motion. His reasoning: “Will there still be eider ducks and herons here in 1,000 years?” The Phippsburg Land Trust approved the project, and the carvings began about 2019.

A correction to the find. It put a Mars helicopter and a Navy destroyer at this site. The helicopter, NASA’s Ingenuity, is documented in Down East on a boulder at the Ridgewell Preserve, near a heron and an eider. The artist’s own listing for Center Pond mentions a Mars helicopter and a Zumwalt-class destroyer along the trail, but we found no independent confirmation of either here.

To go, park at the Center Pond Preserve lot on Parker Head Road, 4 miles past the Center Store on Route 209, then 0.6 mile along Parker Head Road. The trust’s land is free and open year round from dawn to dusk. The preserve has about nine miles of rocky, rooty trails, with some steep sections, and we could not find a map that marks where the carvings sit, so plan to wander. Autumn leaves, as in the photo above, suit them.