A Trip to Maine

I went away last Wednesday to visit family. Not much time to bird (or sketch) but it was fun to see the blue jays, cardinals, chickadees, and white-throated sparrows at my mother’s. It was even more fun to see a snipe flying through downtown Portland, being chased by a gull — I had no time to whip out the sketchbook for that one, though.

My eight-year-old nephew, in addition to a precocious interest in cooking, has started drawing birds. He wants to know what falcon Horus is based on. (I thought probably Peregrine, but who knows? If you have an idea, please leave it in the comments…) Here is his Horus-falcon along with an armadillo and rattlesnake. I think he’s hankering for the deserts; they got a lot of rain in Maine this summer.

Arboretum at Lunch

Golden-crowned sparrows are much harder than their white-crowned sparrows to get on for long enough to draw — they skulk a lot. I did manage to get on this one.

A nasal “pank, pank, pank” alerted us to this red-breasted nuthatch.

Commotion across the creek: a red-shouldered hawk chased this juvenile Cooper’s hawk into a tree.

Mourning Dove

It’s very windy at the moment but the mourning doves are somehow hanging on to the wire…

Lunchtime Birds

Orange-crowned, yellow, and yellow-rumped warblers, Hutton’s and warbling vireos, and the remains of a hapless scrub-jay. I’m enjoying these Thursday lunches with campus birders…

Black-throated Gray Warbler

A group of us has started birding at lunch on Thursdays on campus. Today we found a sprinkler that was attracting a lot of activity: a large flock of bushtits, orange-crowned and black-throated gray warblers, and a Hutton’s vireo.

It’s still warm during the day and the birds looked to be having a good time in the water.

Warblers: My Biggest Sketching Challenge

As sketching subjects, gulls are tops. They’re not very scared of humans, they hold the same pose for hours. They’re tough to ID in their multiple variable molts, but if you just want to sketch them, they’re fantastic.

American wood warblers, the flying jewels of this hemisphere’s avian life, are not so cooperative. They never stop moving, and most of that is behind leafed-out part of trees — always the most leafed out, always the densest.

A MacGillivray’s warbler (or possibly more than one) has been hanging around our yard for a few days. I finally sat outside yesterday, determined to sketch it. These birds are skulking even for warblers. It was impossible. You’d get a tail, a bill, that diagnostic half-eye ring, but never the whole, and never for more than a second or two in any case.

I came inside and tried to recreate what I’d seen on paper. It looks wooden. Lifeless. The pen sketch at least has life.

Then, this morning. I heard a warbler chip I didn’t recognize. It turned out to be a Townsend’s. These winter along the coast; I hadn’t seen one yet for the Bigby, and we had opted not to go to Point Reyes birding for the day to catch up on other things.

Same thing: a tail, a head, a wing bar. What does the yellow do? I started to annotate my sketches, trying to make sure I got what I needed. I wasn’t in a hurry. The bird would move off somewhere else but seemed to return to a favored section of the walnut tree.

This one, I felt I had enough to be able to recreate. I did check the field guide (it would have been much better to go to the museum and study skins, but not on a Sunday afternoon). I took a piece of YUMMY Ampersand Pastelbord and worked into it with Derwent Coloursoft pencils.

The key? Always draw a warbler as though it’s about to take off for somewhere else. Because that’s exactly what it’s about to do.

White-tailed Kite, Preening

Coming back from work at lunch, there was a kite perched in an almost leafless eucalyptus. I got off my bike and sketched it, ignoring the yellow and orange-crowned warblers closer by but impossible to catch…

White-faced Ibis

A couple of weeks ago a bunch of us were given a piece of plywood, 8“x8”, and asked to do something on it that could be auctioned off for a fundraiser.

I don’t really paint and I really don’t paint in acrylics, but it seemed like the thing to do if I wanted to get it done in time. Really wish I’d done egg tempera and oil, but that will have to be next time.

There are about 18 glazes on that ibis. I know: you can’t tell, and it doesn’t seem like it looks very different than it would if I had just glommed paint on there in one go. But live and learn.

Chasing One Bird but Finding Others

We got a call about a possible green-tailed towhee along Putah Creek. We decided to head out for it after tacos but went first through Willowbank Ditch, where we found a little clump of warblers.

It has been brutally hot the past few days and has cooled down a lot, but after lunch it was still hot enough in the sun that any self-respecting towhee would be resting under a coyote brush. We found a fat carp and two black phoebes.

On the way home, though, I came across a major roost of turkey vultures in a eucalyptus patch in Willowbank. They were a little too high for me to do good foot studies, but it was fantastic to watch them, sitting and moving from perch to perch.

American Crow

They flooded the field. Lots of crows mooching through the flooded alfalfa. This piece is done with oil pastels, sgraffitoed (scratched through).