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.

Yellow-billed Magpie: Skull

The walnuts are falling to the ground outside the kitchen window, and it’s a race to get them before the various squirrels do. I was out picking up walnuts yesterday and came across this skull, which looks to be a yellow-billed magpie’s.

Definitely interesting to see the bill at its attachment point to the skull… and good, also, to have a bit more time to work on the drawing. I am really enjoying these pastel pencils (CarbOthello).

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…

Hermit Warbler

I just spent my lunch hour in an Aladdin’s cave, the Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology on campus.

I wanted to study warblers. I was given a drawer of hermit warblers and chose one, a brightish male, to work on. I didn’t really do any pen sketches, which I think I should do first (and plan to next Friday: in fact I plan to spend every Friday lunchtime there for a while, since Fridays are mellow for them and sort of mellow for me). I did a couple of pencil sketches I colored in and then did the drawing above.

Great place for studying anything bird-related. I learned, for instance, that warbler bills are really quite broad at the base, kind of like tiny flycatchers, which makes sense, because that’s what they are…

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…

Western Scrub-jay

It’s acorn-burying time. I saw several different scrub-jays today with acorns in their bills, looking for places to put them. One was in the tub of fuchsias at work, having a good go but ultimately going onto the roof of the lab to look for a better spot…

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…

Common Raven

Another trip to Point Reyes… the yellow warblers of last week had been almost entirely replaced by yellowrumps, which means that migration’s almost over. We did see Vaux’s swift and a number of violet-green swallows, but the day was more spectacular for mammals (elephant seal, humpback whale, harbor seal, harbor porpoise, gray fox, mule deer) than for birds.

I did have a chance to sketch this raven at the Mendoza Ranch, a tribute to the Raven King I’m reading about in Jonathan Strange Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, and nearly finishing… The bill’s way too big in relation to the head, and the tail was obscured by cypress branches, but it was fun to go dark dark with crosshatching…