Thwarted by the Bullock's Oriole

I’ve been waiting to get a long enough (even 30 seconds would be fantastic) look at a Bullock’s oriole in order to be able to sketch it. The male is whistling and squeaking all over the place — at home and at work — and something that bright shouldn’t be able to disappear so easily into green. But he does.

The female helpfully perched briefly on the oleander bushes today at lunch. I caught a glimpse, then she disappeared too.

Bird artist Julie Zickefoose has been running a fantastic series on her trip to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the work of her hero, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, displayed around the library (I am sorry I didn’t pay more attention to Fuertes’ work when I worked at Harvard). Fuertes’ granddaughter reminds Julie — and us — that Fuertes didn’t have the benefit of a camera to figure out wing angles — he had to sketch from life. It’s a great reminder that it can be done. We can’t all be Fuertes, but we can all sketch!

John Muir Laws has kindly linked to Bird by Bird from his techniques page. I took a class from Jack last year and I have to say he’s one of my own heroes. Hard to meet someone more enthusiastic than Jack, for sure. If you’re visiting here from Jack’s page, welcome, and I do hope you’ll try sketching birds regularly. Certainly check his book out on the nature of the Sierra Nevada if you want to be inspired both about the Sierra and about the wonder that can be found in rendering that nature in two-dimensional form.

Back From Texas

We’re back. I sketched my heart out. I saw my 700th ABA area bird (the Colima warbler). We saw Western and Eastern bluebirds using the same snag as a perch. We saw Montezuma quails coming to water (there wasn’t much, anywhere, which made finding birds difficult).

I’ll be posting lots of the sketches in the next few days, but just wanted to say we’re home….

Changeover

The sparrows have gone apart from a few stragglers. The orioles and kingbirds are in; we’re just waiting for the ash-throated flycatchers and blue grosbeaks for the summer crew to have arrived.

These scrub-jays were feeding each other yesterday. A lot of the oleander bushes were cut down by a progressively more zealous gardener (and have provided a lot of light onto a patch that didn’t get much, which is great) but I’m wondering if any nests were victims of the chain-saw. Maybe not: it was still quite early.

The turkeys have returned. This tom was strutting around, his tuft of chest feathers bobbing with each strut.

Turkey Vulture over the Ridge

From a picnic on a very cloudy (but alas not very rainy) Saturday…

Red-legged Partridge!

I got called out of my office by my boss just now — what’s this bird, what’s this bird in the parking lot? I snagged my pen and some paper and began to draw. It allowed me to get very close…

Red-legged partridges are not native to the Americas. This one obviously belongs to someone. We tried to catch it but it flew onto the roof. If it isn’t careful, it’s going to belong to the red-tailed hawk that’s been flying around all day, calling…

Belted Kingfisher

On my way back to work from lunch, I heard it — the slightly manic cackle of the kingfisher. I stopped my bike on the bridge and whipped out my notebook and pen. Two lightning-fast sketches before it moved off downstream…

A Trip to the Coast

I went on a Yolo Audubon trip yesterday to Bodega Bay and Point Reyes. Fall migration is in full swing. It was good to see birds that have become very scarce, like wandering tattler, along with my old friends in Bodega Bay, the pelagic cormorants; the single willet along the bay shoreline, the single red-necked phalarope in the rail pond where Kevin found the prairie warbler; the startling blackpoll at Diekman’s. Point Reyes was not windy and we saw lots of yellow warblers and a smattering of other warbler species, but mostly this was the first “organized” bird trip I’d been on since I started Bird by Bird. I sketched, as Richard might put it, my brains out.

A few feet away from me a fox sparrow scratched in the thistledown at Nunes ranch, across the street from the tricolor blackbird flock, a bit uphill from the clay-colored sparrow and willow flycatcher. Beautiful light bills, these birds have…

Nuttall's Woodpecker