Birds from a Moving Train

Numenius and I went to Berkeley on Monday to visit his family, and also for me to meet up with an old chum from boarding school. This was a wonderful experience, made more so by the incongruity of it (the last meal we ate in the same room was on wooden benches and no doubt involved suet along the way, Hogwarts-style; this one was in a house owned by Rickey Henderson) and the joyful discovery that we were now really different people with a shared, hilarious (from this vantage-point) past.

I didn’t want to drive to Berkeley: New Year’s Eve is not the time to be on the road. So we took the train. Having resolved to do a Big Green Year (BIGBY) I started drawing what birds I could see from the train window.

Richard Hall is my inspiration for local birding by bike; the Boothroyds are my inspiration for an environmentally-responsible big year. I have started a list of self-propelled BIGBY species seen in the sidebar of this page.

Northern Harrier

A thud, a horrible sound, against the window: the huge bird settled, stunned, into the pile of leaves. Sat there gathering its wits. Then, presently, it began to dismember something in its talons we hadn’t spotted earlier.

The hapless something turned out to be a pocket gopher: love it when the native predator catches the native prey that just happens to be eating my native poppies. Go Harriers.

Two Sides of the Same Sheet

A Lincoln’s sparrow has been in our herb garden for a few days. It’s a smaller sparrow than the white-crowns and house sparrows, and it tends to get picked on, but it deals with this by scuttling off into the rosemary and hopping into the lemon verbena when the coast is clear. I’ve tried to sketch it several times, but this morning I had my best shot: it was alone and unharrassed.

Encouraged, I decided to head over to the Yolo Bypass today and try and get some colored pencil sketches of birds. I have been finding that the second I get a Prismacolor in my hand the “sketch” impulse goes away and I feel an obligation to get things more finished. I’m trying to fight this. The bill on this cinnamon teal is too long but I left it in anyway, in the spirit of full disclosure. The upended duck is a female cinnamon teal in case you were wondering.

But in the end I couldn’t help myself. I spotted this cin-teal pair with their heads tucked under their wings, perched on the tule rushes facing the sun, bracing themselves against the strong north breeze.

We have a number of days off now. I’ve finished His Dark Materials, I’ve finished War and Peace, and though there are several planned day trips in the offing, I think this means I’m going to have lots of time to sketch birds… I hope your week is restful and sweet also.

Rhode Island Red

I drew this chicken yesterday at Tilden’s new Cow Barn. It really is yesterday’s bird of the day, but I’m posting it today.

Ring-billed Gull

Lots of bird drawn yesterday; I’ll get around to scanning them later. But this lone ring-bill was on the lake outside the campus administration building, the place almost deserted.

There were reports from the Sacramento Christmas Count yesterday of Kumlien’s, Thayer’s, and glaucous gulls up at the Yolo County Landfill… if I’m feeling really ambitious I might head up there over the break and start drawing gulls seriously.

Savannah Sparrow

A flock of savannah sparrows has taken to flying up noisily into the almond tree, which isn’t where you expect to see grassland birds. This one spent some time checking me over.

A Drab Yellowrump

American Crows in the Rain

We’ve had quite a bit of rain in the past 24 hours, all of it welcome. The crows have been loving it: they are congregating in huge numbers, gobbling worms, flying into the wind, twisting and turning, and generally being raucous, which is part of the job description if you’re a crow.

Wrentit

Not so often do we get into the chaparral where wrentits live. We saw lots yesterday during our Christmas Bird Count hike up Thompson Canyon. They are like balls of fluff with no apparent distinction between head and body with a long tail which they swish about from left to right as they move through dense vegetation.

I was able to watch them for some time as I rested my feet while Numenius did a final trek up to a spring to see if he could find a pileated woodpecker (no luck). My sketches don’t show the different subtle color changes from head, back and wings (grayish brown) to chin and belly (reddish brown) or the yellow irises. I may try and head back to some chaparral over the holiday break and do more of a “portrait” — taking along some watercolors and perhaps a camera to get some reference shots. I balk at the camera but for a bird that spends short 10-second bursts out in the open it might be useful.

A Morning at the Raptor Center