With the tolling of the last class bells at Guilford High School (GHS) the fate of a 32-foot long painting located in the school’s media center/library is now secure, thanks to the efforts of Carl Balestracci, Jr., who spearheaded the mural’s rescue plan, and four volunteer tradesmen who, like Balestracci, are GHS graduates.

While the half-century old high school will be razed this summer to make way for the opening of new $100 million high school this fall, the 36-year-old shorebird mural will survive the coming of the new.

The mural was painted in 1979 by David Allen Sibley during his senior year as part of the “Volunteers in the Community” program in operation at the time, according to Dan Cinotti, retired teacher and Science Department chair during Sibley’s high school career.

According to Cinotti, it was retired banker and former Guilford Land Conservation Trust President Richmond H. Curtis who ran the volunteer program at the high school, and it was Curtis who took the shy, teenaged Sibley under his wing and inspired the young artist to paint the mural as a gift to the community.

Measuring 32’ by 7’-2” the mural captures a scene of rocks located off Guilford’s shores and features about two dozen herring gulls and great black-back gulls.

While the mural has garnered comments of praise since it was first completed, the extra value of the painting rises from the fact that its humble artist, who was only 17 or 18 at the time, went on to become America’s “most gifted contemporary painter of birds,” according to the publisher (Knopf) of the definitive The Sibley Guide to Birds, the flagship birding guide of the National Audubon Society.

Published in 2000, The Sibley Guide to Birds is the bible for serious birders throughout North America, and the book, now in its second edition, is both a critical and commercial success.

When it as decided that the town needed a new high school, a number of people who knew of the Sibley mural approached Balestracci, a town selectman, to see what could be done about saving the painting. As both a former principal and first selectman in Guilford—and an avid birder and carver of shorebird decoys—Balestracci approached both the school administrators and the school building committee.

A fee of $10,000 was proposed to the building committee, but that expense was voted down when the company offering to remove the mural—which was painted in acrylic right onto the wallboard of a non-weight bearing wall—could not guarantee the painting would not be destroyed while removing it. Balestracci was back to square one.

After further discussion—in which First Selectman Joe Mazza, Guilford High School Principal Rick Misenti, and Superintendent of Schools Dr. Paul Freeman all acknowledged the value of the Sibley painting—funds to pay for a less expensive team of local carpenters was approved by the building committee.

To Balestracci’s pleasant surprise, however, the contractors to whom he reached out instead volunteered their time and skills the evening of June 22 to skillfully cut the wallboard down from the wall and remove the mural in six, four-foot sections.

That team included Mike Donofrio of East Guilford Construction and his two assistants Tim Cox (whose grandfather was Guilford’s first school superintendent) and Joe Malatesta, and Chris Frohlich of Frohlich Painting and Wallpaper.

Sibley was deep in the Alaskan wilderness sketching birds while the mural rescue occurred and therefore unable to comment, but his parents, Fred and Peggy Sibley who now reside in Alpine, New York, expressed their surprise and delight that the painting will be saved.

“I did not know the high school is being torn down,” stated Peggy Sibley over the phone, “but I’m so happy the painting is so loved.”

Fred Sibley, a retired ornithologist at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History and the artist’s earliest inspiration, commented that his son began drawing birds in earnest before he was a teenager.

“David would count and draw every feather even at a young age to get each bird just right,” Sibley said, adding, “Who knew he’d go on to become so famous.”

The hope now is that the mural will find another venue in town—preferably in the new high school—in which to hang for public viewing for the next hundred years.

“We are going to be known in the future for what we value,” Balestracci said. “The work of our students saved for the future is very, very important.”