Lesser Yellowlegs by Robert Fishbone

Painted: 10/22/25 

About the Mural: Along the noisy Landmarks Boulevard that winds into downtown Alton, Illinois, drivers will now be greeted by a colorful sight: three painted Lesser Yellowlegs wrapping around a small cement building, each shorebird standing over 10 feet tall. “You can’t miss it,” says Kenneth Buchholz, center director at the Audubon Center at Riverlands, who helped organize the project. 

In the mural, the Lesser Yellowlegs wade through reeds against a vibrant orange, pink, and purple sky. When the sun sets over downtown, the mural “spills over to the actual sunset,” says Robert Fishbone, the artist behind the mural. 

The mural was created through a collaboration among the National Audubon Society, Audubon Center at Riverlands, and Alton Main Street. It highlights the city’s location along the Mississippi Flyway, an important migration route for hundreds of bird species, and sits facing the 3,700-acre Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary across the Mississippi River. There, hundreds of yellowlegs land each year to fill up on insects and crustaceans before continuing their journeys.

On top of adding color and beauty to Alton, Buchholz hopes the mural will evoke a sense of responsibility in viewers and make them wonder: “What can I do to help ensure that that bird arrives safely here every year as it passes through?”  

At the mural’s unveiling at the end of October, a dance class from Principia College performed a dance to honor the project. The piece was choreographed by Erin Lane, associate professor of dance, in collaboration with her students, one of whom designed the costumes. 

To create the dance, the class researched Lesser Yellowlegs, first focusing on their physical traits and behaviors, then on conservation concerns. The piece starts off with movements imitating yellowlegs tremors and paces. Gradually, the mood shifts from joyful to more frantic. In the middle of the piece, all of the dancers squat to the ground and look up, as if anticipating hardship coming, Lane says. In the end, most of the dancers fade into the audience, but some are left behind, as if frozen in place in front of the mural. 

It was one of the darker pieces Lane has worked on, “but that was the point,” she says. She and her class wanted to evoke an emotional response from the audience: “We need to have something shift the way we see and experience the world, to hopefully make a shift in our actions.” 

The mural is Alton's second artwork in the Audubon Mural Project, joining a piece painted in 2023 to feature the range of birds that pass through the flyway. “We're distinguishing Alton not only as a place of beautiful historical architecture, but it’s a place where there is an appreciation for nature,” says Penny Schmidt, advisory board member for the Audubon Center at Riverlands. It’s also the third in a series of Lesser Yellowlegs murals that will outline the bird’s migratory path, from Alaska and Canada to South America. 

About the Bird: The Lesser Yellowlegs is a small shorebird best known for its bright legs. It strides with high steps through shallow waters, sometimes swinging its head back and forth as it forages for insects, small fish, and crustaceans. 

The birds are most often seen throughout the United States during migration, when they land in wetlands, marshes, and mudflats to rest and refuel. In stopover sites like Alton, “we're food, shelter and safe passage for them,” says Buchholz. 

Lesser Yellowlegs have lost more than 50 percent of their population in the last 50 years in the United States, according to the 2025 State of the Birds report. One major challenge is their reliance on wetlands, which are disappearing due to development and sea level rise. If global warming continues at current rates, Lesser Yellowlegs are projected to lose 96 percent of their summer range, according to Audubon’s Survival By Degrees report. But taking action to limit warming can ensure the birds can thrive in a wider range of habitats. 

About the Artist: Robert Fishbone, a St. Louis-based artist, has painted more than 200 murals. Also a musician, Fishbone wasn’t trained in fine art, but has become an expert through experience. He and his late wife, Sarah Linquist, began painting murals as a team in 1974. They painted everything from abstract skies to giant frogs to scenes depicting the history of St. Louis. “Every mural that we did was totally different,” Fishbone says. Today, he often collaborates with his daughter. 

For this piece, he brought on another muralist, Norm4eva, who painted all three of the Lesser Yellowlegs. In each of his murals, Fishbone likes to add some surrealism—in this case incorporating into the landscape a colorful and geometric arrangement he calls the “Burning Man temple of reeds.” Otherwise, he made sure the painting was accurate to the bird and its habitat. 

This mural marks his second in Alton—he also painted the city’s first contribution to the Audubon Mural Project. While not a birder, “I'm in awe of the living world,” Fishbone says. When people see the mural, he hopes they feel “enlivened”—and then think about “how fragile our environments are and how easy it is for one thing to decimate or incredibly decrease a bird population.”