From our March/April 2025 issue
Wildlife artist Adam Grimm lives in a tiny town in eastern South Dakota surrounded by some of the best waterfowl habitat in the country. He credits much of his success as a painter to countless hours observing birds behaving naturally while he’s been hunting in waders with decoys, a full ghillie suit and a telephoto lens.
Grimm’s devotion shines through in the photo-realism of his acrylic painting of a pair of spectacled eiders that won the 2024 Federal Duck Stamp Art Contest this past September. Bathed in the low-angle Arctic light of their native Alaska, the birds’ plumage pops with detail amid a stunning landscape of tundra and mountains.
The painting will become the 2025–’26 Federal Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp—the Federal Duck Stamp—which will go on sale in late June. It is Grimm’s third Duck Stamp, he having won his first contest in 1999 at the age of 21 (the youngest artist ever to do so) and his second in 2013.
The US Fish & Wildlife Service administers the art contest to create the Federal Duck Stamp, from which 98 percent of the revenues go to helping acquire and protect wetland habitat and purchase conservation easements. The stamp raises approximately $40 million each year. Since its inception in 1934, the program has raised more than $1.3 billion to conserve more than 6 million acres of wildlife habitat.
The stamp or its digital equivalent must be carried afield by migratory-bird hunters 16 and older. Duck Stamps can be purchased at many national wildlife refuges, sporting-goods stores and other retailers, US Postal Service locations or online at fws.gov/service/buy-duck-stamp-or-e-stamp.
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