Northern Mockingbird

There’s been a mockingbird outside my window at work. I’ve sketched it quickly several times, never quite getting it right. At left is this morning’s effort. The bill, the bill, the bill.

At right is my slower drawing of two individuals from the wildlife museum at lunch today. Upside-down… but good again to have the time. Numenius joined me today and drew a dog shark and a hooded oriole, both of which were out on display for the class that was coming in or had just left…

Mourning Dove

Last night Yolo Audubon Society hosted a talk by the young and very energetic John (Jack) Muir Laws, author and artist (and designer and publicist and apparent distributor) of the Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada.

Jack brought along a lot of the original plates for the book, whose main virtue is that it draws together just about anything you might see in the Sierra into one place which is easily back-packable. Of course I was very interested to see his bird drawings; how much more fun that I got to sit next to him at dinner beforehand and shyly show him my bird sketchbook after I told him about Bird by Bird.

He was quite opposed to the idea of using a video camera. Get out and draw the birds, he said, just get out there. We waxed enthusiastic about learning to see again, to find beauty in every bird (he’s particularly fond of female house sparrows). Ask birders what a rock pigeon’s tail looks like, he said. They don’t know, though they can rattle off the minute differences between a Hammond’s and a dusky flycatcher. Why? They don’t SEE it. It gets written off. Dismissed as irrelevant…

Not a rock pigeon, but a mourning dove, above, drawn this morning as it sat on a wire looking down on me. No camera. Just the bird, the pen, and me.

White-crowned Sparrow

The sound of winter: white-crowned sparrow song under the oleanders outside, interspersed with the sound off leaves being scratched out of the way. Oleanders must not be toxic to birds…

Snowy Egret

After yesterday’s rain, it’s clear and gorgeous today, perfect gardening weather. I pulled some weeds this morning, raked over the squash bed for a cover crop, and then Numenius and I rode our bikes in to Mariachi for lunch.

On the way back through the Arboretum I spotted three snowy egrets on the bank, preening, showing their beautiful plumes here and there. I noticed one kept shaking its tongue; a couple of feathers were stuck in its bill and it seemed to be having a hard time dislodging them.

Say's Phoebe

The Say’s phoebe is back! It was preening in our almond tree at lunchtime, all fluffed up and squirming, like it was getting rid of ants or lice or something. We had a good amount of rain last night…

Also some poorly-seen sparrows, which may have been lark sparrows. I’ll try and get a better look at them later…

Northern Flicker

There has been a family group of flickers raucously fighting for goodies around the phone pole at work; they chase each other off the pole, then off the ground, then around the tree, and on and on. I caught few poses for very long, but was able to pull this one together a bit more because he (red whiskers = male) stayed on the ground a bit longer, looking, probing…

The ground is rock hard. We’re all hoping for rain…

Red-shouldered Hawk

I’ve been hearing a red-shouldered hawk calling in the morning and went over to the Raptor Center at lunch again today to draw one.

This individual’s name is Mishka. He was rescued at 2-3 days old in 1996, having been blown out of a nest; they fed him with a glove to try and avoid imprinting, but learned fairly quickly that he had adhesion in his right eye — probably the result of hitting his head when he fell. A one-eyed raptor can’t make it in the wild, so this one does the rounds of schools and so on, teaching the public about hawks.

Hermit Thrush

Sticking with the hermit theme… I went over today to the Raptor Center to see if they might be open late. They weren’t, but I decided just to sit in the shade on the levee and see what I might see.

Right away I saw a lot of activity in the elderberry… at least four hermit thrushes were feasting on berries, hovering in front of them to pick one off at a time, flicking their tails and wings. A fox sparrow scratched around in the dust below the shrub and yellowrumps were active too. I think I’m going to try this more often: just go to a promising place and sit.

I think I’m transforming from a birder into a birdwatcher…

Red-tailed Hawk

I’ve been admiring Zeladoniac’s recent pencil sketches over at Drawing the Motmot from her trip to Panama. I don’t work in pencil much: I like the strength of a pen line, the impossibility of erasing, and when I want color, I go straight to colored pencils or watercolor. Debby’s pencil sketches are very alive, though, and I decided to try it out this morning when a red-tail landed on a pine — the same spot on the pine the magpie landed on yesterday. I’m not happy — the surface I was using is very rough, I think I’d be better with something smoother and a harder lead (I was using an 8B water-soluble graphite pencil which is what I had, but maybe a 2B would work better).

This bird mostly kept its face away from me, so I have ended up with a lot of rotten bills again. But it did stick around long enough for me to get a good look at the feathers on the back and how the dark edges fade toward the middle.

By the time I started on the colored paper, I was no closer to getting the bill right (red-tails are large birds but their bills are surprisingly small — I think I need more Raptor Center time). A freight train went by and scared the bird off…
Update: I did indeed head over to the Raptor Center at lunchtime, definitely easier to get these details right at close range (the bill on the left is closest to what I saw, and it’s the third one I drew).

Yellow-billed Magpie

Amazing how hard it is to see this bird for longer than two seconds even though they’re all over the place. As it was it perched on one of the exotic conifers outside my window at work, looked around, and took off again, hardly leaving me any time to get the feathers right or even the length of the tail. I did get enough of the yellow around the eye, though, to ascertain that it was a juvenile…