Tom Huntington 
David Inglefield's green kingfisher
SHOWCASE
Tropical Wings
Text by Tom Huntington
David Inglefield has learned many things about wildfowl carving since he took up the art form. He received one of his earliest lessons the hard way when he carved his first bird from a block of tough, unyielding mahogany. “It was a big mistake,” he says today.
The president and CEO of a Caribbean-based conglomerate, Inglefield, 58, was born and raised on the Caribbean island of Trinidad (although educated in England) and is now a resident of Barbados. He began carving in the 1980s after he visited Denver and a museum there inspired him with an exhibit that featured carved birds. “The first bird I ever did was a great kiskadee,” Inglefield says. “I did it because it’s a very common bird in Trinidad, a very garrulous, noisy bird that everybody sees in their gardens.” Inglefield figured that no matter how badly he carved it, the kiskadee was such a familiar presence that people would recognize the species anyway.
“I knew nothing about wood, nothing about tools,” Inglefield says. “I had a little X-acto knife set and a friend of mine had just built a house and he had some big mahogany offcuts.” Inglefield took a piece of mahogany and asked a friend with a bandsaw to do a rough cutout. Then he set to work. “I ended up with hands like coal miner, calluses all over,” he says, laughing at the memory. “But I was so proud of the piece because it actually did come out looking like a kiskadee.”
Inglefield’s parents have that first bird. “My mother displays it very proudly,” he says. “When I look back on it, it looks a bit clumsy, rather stiff. But it taught me a lot. It taught me you’ve got to learn more about this art if you’re going to dive into it.” Most of the books he found were about ducks, but he realized he could apply the basic techniques to the Caribbean birds he wanted to carve. He also began researching different kinds of wood and started using basswood and tupelo. “Mahogany is strictly for bases,” he says.
Read the rest of this article in Wildfowl Carving Magazine's Summer 2009 issue!
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