By Seth Rowe
December 15, 2020
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A new critter has arrived at Westwood Hills Nature Center, and it’s a big one.
Artist Nicholas Legeros, of Edina, helped install a bronze sculpture of a chipmunk he created Dec. 3 at the St. Louis Park nature center. The woodland creature stretches about 5 feet from tip to tail and rests atop a 3,000-pound slab of stone Legeros transported from a quarry with a trailer.
“The chipmunk is much more svelte,” Legeros quipped in an interview. “He’s only about 205 pounds.”
The rock-dwelling rodent will receive a similarly larger-than-life companion in early 2021 as Legeros is continuing work on a 5-foot chickadee that will perch upon a birdhouse made of Alaskan yellow cedar, the same wood used in a new interpretive center at the nature center. The big bronze bird will sit on a post made to look like a pencil in a nod to the writing utensil’s typical composition of cedar wood.