Trip to the East Coast

I haven’t been back to the northeast during spring migration since I left in 1996. Last week was a blur of warbler song and color.

I didn’t manage to sketch the gorgeous male indigo bunting that sat in a bush at eye level for over ten minutes, but once I got over my dumbfoundedness at all of it I started sketching fast. I should know to do this, but I’m going to blame jetlag.

Mount Auburn, Plum Island, coastal Maine. Blackburnians and parulas and yellow warblers and black-throated greens. I can still hear them…

A Sketchcrawl in the Arboretum

Pete Scully has been very diligent about organizing regular sketching outings in Davis. Today we dodged rain showers in the UC Davis Arboretum. About 8-10 of us spent four hours wandering around sketching.

I took the opportunity to do quite a bit more bird sketching than I’ve been doing of late. A cormorant was very cooperative (apart from when dogs went by) and I got several chances to have a turn at drawing it.

Marlene and I snuck off for a quick mocha at around 2 pm, which took us past the Australian section. There was one bush in full bloom with red blossom, where hummingbirds and orange-crowned warblers were frantically feeding.

great day; I haven’t done this much sketching in a protracted way for a while.

A Trip to Bodega Bay

Took a quick trip to Bodega Bay today, since it was a holiday for us at the university, to check on my mother’s house. Took a walk on the Head and saw Pacific loons, guillemots and pelagic cormorants; the bay was teeming with ducks and grebes, including a black scoter which I managed to sketch fairly poorly. It was a beautiful day with no wind, an extreme rarity.

Critters at a Wedding

Numenius and I were at a wedding in Oregon this weekend. The setting was gorgeous — out in the forest south of Corvallis, in the Alsea Thyme Garden. Western tanagers and Swainson’s thrushes were singing during the ceremony. I spotted this cedar waxwing beforehand but was unable to see the dipper I was sure was working the creek that ran alongside the garden.

The pond was home to rough-skinned newts, swimming around lazily. And a young garter snake made me very happy. I spotted a raven overhead during the ceremony which seems particularly auspicious since the bride is the bloghoster of Frogs and Ravens. (No frogs, at least not that I heard, but hoping a newt and a garter snake make up for that.)

Pennsylvania Birds

Back from a calligraphy workshop. I failed to identify warbler chips but there were lots of birds I did catch up with, including this grackle.

Delighted in seeing a robin with some green to be in instead of parched brown.

This eastern kingbird was flycatching from a tall stalk.

Notabird, but a fun thing for this westerner to see nonetheless. This woodchuck is apparently living under the shed at Sheila’s.

Trip to the Zoo

Saturday June 5 was World Drawing Day. We took a trip to Sacramento Zoo, a small zoo on a completely manageable scale. It has been such a cool spring but it’s warming up now and we didn’t stay too long. I used only my Derwent Sketching watercolor pencil (Dark Wash, 8B on paper — and worked much larger than I usually do. It was fun and made a change from pen.

I started out around the pool containing waterfowl and the noisy and raucous flamingoes which are being somewhat shielded from the public during breeding season (it didn’t stop a lot of people trying to get them to “do something” loudly, which always gets me more upset than I think it will).

The greater hornbills have been doing well at the zoo, this male having been bred in captivity. I am always astonished at the protruberance on the head and find it difficult to draw to make it look different from the feathers.

Birds in cages: not my ideal, nor theirs. I draw these birds with respect and hope that what is learned about them here can help their populations in the wild.

Jackrabbit and Magpie

I had lunch with a colleague and had a little time after she got on her bike to head back to her office to do a little drawing. There are several grazing jackrabbits and a magpie got in front of this one and looked my way. Trying to get the effect of shady dappled grass is hard…

The Fortuitously Delicious Paper

I recently moved offices, a chance to toss a lot of stuff that had been lying around and not touched for months or even years. One casualty of my zeal was almost a full ream of a metallic black paper whose name I forget entirely along with its provenance but which I sadly concluded was not going to work for anything.

But I retrieved it from the recycle bin, because I just felt so guilty. Good thing, too. It takes prismacolor and, I have just discovered, pastel like a dream. I don’t have a white version of either one of these to hand to test but I think this could lead to some very dramatic drawings. The paper has a very fine tooth which takes these media superbly well. I just wish I could remember the name of it, I’d buy different colors.

At right, a white-tailed kite in Prismacolor (French Gray); below, a starling and jackrabbit in pastel pencil (Cream). Watch this space.

My Birdathon

A bit about how the day went can be found on Feathers of Hope, but here are a few of the sketches from this memorable weekend:

List of birds that made it into the sketchbook:

Wood duck
Mallard
California quail
Great egret
Snowy egret
Cattle egret
Green heron
Turkey vulture
White-tailed kite
Northern harrier
Red-shouldered hawk
Swainson’s hawk
American kestrel
Common moorhen
American coot
California gull
Rock pigeon
Mourning dove
White-throated swift
Anna’s hummingbird
Belted kingfisher
Nuttall’s woodpecker
Downy woodpecker
Black phoebe
Ash-throated flycatcher
Western kingbird
Warbling vireo
Western scrub-jay
Yellow-billed magpie
American crow
Tree swallow
Northern rough-winged swallow
Cliff swallow
Barn swallow
Bushtit (including nest, found in Arboretum in acacia grove)
Bewick’s wren
House wren
Blue-gray gnatcatcher
Western bluebird
Northern mockingbird
European starling
Cedar waxwing
Yellow-rumped warbler
Wilson’s warbler
Song sparrow
White-crowned sparrow
Golden-crowned sparrow
Red-winged blackbird
Brewer’s blackbird
Brown-headed cowbird
Bullock’s oriole
House finch
American goldfinch

This can’t be right, because I have counted 52 birds and I know I have 58 (because there are 60 pages and all but the last one is filled). But I have blisters and a ravenous appetite for a burrito, so I will leave you here. Thank you for sponsoring me if you did. Next year, please join me! It was a blast.

Common Eider

Back from Maine. We went out to Pemaquid to sketch; here’s my eider…