American Goldfinch

I’m backdating a couple of entries to the day I actually drew the birds.

As Numenius said, we spent the afternoon looking at butterflies with Art Shapiro at the UC Davis Arboretum. I spotted a couple of American goldfinches feeding on stalks of dead sunflowers…

Yellow-rumped Warbler

Well, they’re back too. There were at least twelve flitting around outside my office this morning, sharing the tree and the pole with two phoebes, two Nuttall’s woodpeckers, and two bluebirds. Several of them would drop to the ground right outside my window, giving me great looks at bill structure and the funny eye ring. There were at least two myrtles among the throng of Audubon’s yellowrumps…

At lunch I scanned one of my sketches and used it as a basis for this drawing, left. It’s the first time I’ve used the Ampersand Pastelbord that arrived from Blick (I used colored pencils, Derwent Colourfasts, the ones I keep at work) and I’m completely sold on this ground. Powdered marble is part of the surface along with gesso and clay. I’ll be experimenting a lot more with it; like Katherine Tyrrell and others have said, you can layer and layer and layer and it holds everything. It’s like magic.

Western Bluebird

A pair of Western bluebirds was flitting around the phone pole this morning, checking out holes in the wood. Odd to see this kind of behavior in September. I made a few quick sketches then whipped out the Kohinoor watercolor wheel stack I keep in my desk drawer to add a bit of color to the male, who was very splendid. (The female was very splendid too but requires more subtle, and therefore lengthier, watercolor treatment…)

Northern Flicker

They’re back! These past few days have seen a switchover of summer visitors to winter ones. Flickers often work close to buildings and are very tame and I’m expecting to be doing quite a few drawings of them, maybe even paintings, over the next few weeks.

Here’s yesterday’s bird, a black phoebe perching in the peach tree outside our kitchen window…

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…

Snowy Egret

They finally irrigated the field today; I got home after lunch to a large flock of cattle egrets pouncing on worms in the mowed alfalfa just outside the kitchen window. I started sketching: this was much closer than my cattle egrets from Tuesday.

I quickly noticed a snowy egret in with them (whiter, sleeker, taller, black bill, yellow feet). After a couple of sketches in color I tried this black and white. The bird moved out of view quickly but I was able to finish the shading because of all the cattle egrets still there, whose plumage is almost identical…

Anna's Hummingbird

The Anna’s has been feeding in the California fuchsia out front for over a month. I caught it today as I was about to leave to come back to work — it’s the same bird, different angle. This plant is the perfect shape for feeding hummingbirds and it blooms heartily late in the summer when almost nothing else is… but I’ve ordered a hummingbird feeder for when it finally stops.

A friend has asked what all the little owl images are: they’re a link to my reporting of bird data on Spotter. Since I’m going to be drawing a bird a day, I might as well report what I see. Click on the owl and you’ll get a slice of apparently unintelligible code which nevertheless can be interpreted by a reader as “data.”

What I’ve learned today about Anna’s hummingbirds: when they hover, their tails can curl up very high as they maneuver around, “tipping” the bird’s head the correct amount toward the flower.

White-tailed Kite

There’s a kite that’s been hanging around the eucalyptus trees west of the bridge over Putah Creek at lunchtime. (I think it might be the same bird Richard took a photo of when he came over for dinner; the east side is its preferred afternoon/evening perch.) I headed over there today. The sky was the same color as the bird, a storm having come through yesterday and this morning.

The kite fanned its tail a lot as it called: four white tail feathers each side, blackish-gray in the center. I’ve never noticed this before. And Numenius and I spent a winter on a kite study in Santa Barbara in 1997 or thereabouts….

Black Phoebe

Lots of flycatcher action these days…

Cattle Egret

They flooded the alfalfa field just south of the house today. When it got light I saw dozens of cattle egrets (probably, by the time I’d finished, 200 birds) flying toward the flooded part. I rigged up my binoculars onto the tripod and snuck up on them (not so necessary; one of the field workers walked right through them and they shifted a token amount and returned to their spot).

Most of these birds are either young or no longer in breeding plumage, but I did find one (right) with a good amount of pinkish-orange on the head and back.