Sketching On The Run

Our first stop on this past weekend’s birding trip was the Big Morongo Preserve, a riparian oasis in the transition zone between the Mojave and Colorado deserts. I hadn’t adapted yet to the routine of 6 AM morning starts, but Morongo Valley is good for brightly-colored birds, and a spectacular view of a yellow-breasted chat woke me up. Richard quickly went into digiscoping mode, and other trip companions got out their telephoto lenses. I wanted to record the bird too, so I reached for my journal and sketchbook. This got me started doing a fair amount of sketching this weekend.

At the entrance to the preserve there is a set of bird feeders with many different types of food. At right is a sketch of a ladder-backed woodpecker at one of the sugar water feeders normally used by the hummingbirds.

I’m pretty happy with my sketching materials right now. All these sketches were done with a fine size Gelly Roll pen with the color added using Derwent watercolour pencils. Dabbing water on the sketch adds a bit of a wash to the color pencil, and the ink of the Gelly Roll pens is waterproof and doesn’t smear. The landscape at left is looking across the Salton Sea to mountains in the east.

A characteristic of sketching while birding is that one needs to work fast. The group is always moving on to find the next bird, leaving scarcely any time for detail in the sketch. The combination of waterproof pen and colored pencil seems about as efficient as possible for rendering line and color. One can also add color or dab in some water for a wash a little later, such as riding in the car proceeding to the next stop.

My subjects were mostly landscapes, birds, and plants. At right is leaves and fruit of Rhus trilobata, a chaparral shrub in the cashew family which we found in our journey up the Santa Rosa Mountains on the west side of the Coachella Valley.

Carrying around my journal with one hand all the time while birding gets tedious, so today I bought from a local nature gift store a nifty field guide tote that I can put my journal in, as well as a set of pencils and a pen.