Yellow-billed Magpie

Lots of corvid activity in the newly-mown alfalfa, close to the house. This magpie kept landing and taking off into the fierce north wind…

Birds in Flight: White-tailed Kite

Caught two kites hovering over our alfalfa field on Saturday morning. Their body position is almost vertical, with their beautifully-marked long wings gracefully keeping them stationary. I want to do a lot more kties in flight. It’s getting to be a good time of year for that.

Western Bluebirds

When I spoke with Keith Hansen back in August about tools for sketching birds, he raved about the digital video camera. His point was that you could take footage of the bird and then stop it at the point the bird was doing exactly what you wanted. Keith does a lot of multi-species compositions and getting the right angle on each bird is very important for this kind of work.

I’ve been pondering his approach. I don’t want to draw from photographs, which is essentially what this would be, but it’s fascinating to see exactly what happens when a bird raises its wings then pushes down with them, or when it flies “backwards” as it’s landing, as these bluebirds were doing yesterday.

I’m still thinking about whether such a tool would be helpful for me, or more helpful than other tools, but I did get some footage yesterday just on the digital camera. The resolution was terrible but that was almost a plus, in that I wasn’t focusing on detail but rather on the complex structure of the bird in flight and the sequence… there were about five bluebirds, joined by about 20 yellowrumps, a mockingbird, two or three scrub-jays, and a couple of flickers…

Morphology in Flight

The purple ones are barn swallows, sketched this morning over the alfalfa field as they congregate before heading south, soon. The brown ones are Forster’s terns at the Berkeley Aquatic Park, sketched this afternoon after a lovely lunch.

These are slim, graceful birds with long, forked tails. They’re swift flyers and their tails give them extreme maneuverability, handy when you need to turn quickly to catch a flying insect (swallow) or a just-glimpsed fish (tern). They’re skittish and sitting still does not come easily to them…

Birds in Flight I: American Crow

It’s hard to draw birds while they’re flying: there’s the problem, usually, of foreshortening, and you have to get the relative angle of the wings to the body right, and worst of all, the birds are on the move, so you don’t get very long to resolve the first two issues.

A bird I see a lot is the American crow. We live on the edge of a field where they feed; we live on the flight path to and from their roost site in Davis; I see them often from my window at work. A challenge is always to get the correct amount of tapering in the wing as it joins the body, the slightly spread primaries. The “hunchback” look of a crow as it flies.

Last night while we were at a baseball game a partial albinistic crow flew over. The tips of the wings were sliver, making it look a bit like a jackdaw gone wrong. I sketched it quickly in ballpoint on the scorecard I was using, but missed the opportunity to sketch a huge flyover of crows on their way to roost…