Illustration Friday: The Zoo

The Illustration Friday topic this week is The Zoo, so here is another sketch from our trip to the zoo at the beginning of the month. I sketched this giraffe with a fountain pen and a marker pen.

Release

I opened the blue box on the beach.

Just like that.

The female scoter panicked, turned back, turned forward, then bolted out toward the open water. There were already at least ten of her kind out there, in the middle of Tomales Bay.

It’s hard to think how much care, energy, time, and, yes, money has been spent on this one bird, getting it to fly and sit on the water again after the horrors of the past two-and-a-half-weeks. It defies thought. But I can tell you, from here, today, it was worth it. All of it.

A Triad of Owls

This evening when I was getting ready to come home there was a pair of barn owls flying around my office, clicking away. The great-horned owls have been singing at night too.

The other night I’m almost certain I heard a screech-owl: it could have been an odd horse whinny from across the road, but I don’t think so…

Tertials and Telescopes

Pica finally had a day off oil spill duty (she goes right at it again tomorrow, having to shepherd a national media crew around the Cordelia center at 8 in the morning) just in time for us to attend the Central Valley Bird Symposium down in Stockton. This event has the usual mix of field trips and indoors workshops, but we went down for two reasons — to attend Keith Hansen’s workshop on bird sketching, and for Pica to buy a new spotting scope.

Keith starts his bird sketches with two circles (or ellipses), body and head. In pencil, with eraser. I don’t even generally bring pencils when I go sketching, preferring to be bold in ink. I do see the point though. Keith worked up to an excellent overhead pencil view of a red-tailed hawk, done completely from memory. I decided maybe I should have brought the Derwent Graphitints.

Then to the optics question. It is surprisingly hard to properly compare optics when contemplating a purchase, for in general places that have a wide selection of binoculars and telescopes are few and far between. The best store in Northern California for this task (Out of This World) is way up in Mendocino. This is why one waits for events like the birding symposium because the dealer from Mendocino came down to our neck of the woods with assorted goodies. Pica quickly confirmed that the scope she was investigating was the one she really wanted (the 50mm Nikon ED Fieldscope), but tested out eyepieces before going with the 13-30x zoom instead of the 20x wide angle. She also learned to expect lots of comments saying “oh, what a cute scope!”

Once we got home, I practiced with the Graphitints a bit, but not on a bird, see above.

Baseball note — the new Stockton Sheraton where the symposium was held is right by the ballpark for the Stockton Ports, which is the Single-A minor league team for the Oakland A’s. A nice little stadium — it would be fun to go to a game there next year.

Bird-Proofing Windows

Dave Sibley has conducted an experiment to see what will keep birds from colliding with windows. It’s a simple highlighter, almost invisible on glass to humans, but apparently very visible to birds.

Lots of Swainson’s thrushes hit our windows this spring. I’m definitely going to try it.

Spill news: some grebes (Westerns and Clark’s) will be released at Half Moon Bay tomorrow, out of the way of oil. These birds don’t do well at all in captivity and are best released as soon as possible, but I’m amazed it’s THIS soon.

For the sound of a loon at Cordelia, see this (scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click on the audio file).

Brush Pen in the Zoo

Every time we go on a sketching outing we are always faced with the crisis of what art materials to pack. Not having to carry the materials on a week-long backpacking trip means the luxury of porting drawing implements one never ends up using. Of course I try to guess what will be most useful, but the guess is usually somewhat off.

My experiment yesterday at the zoo with the waterbrush loaded with ink was interesting — I like the technique, but the particular waterbrush I had was leaking too much ink onto my hands. I ended up using mainly a sepia Faber-Castell brush artist pen together with watercolor wash. The red pandas were simply crying out for lots of rich burnt sienna. At left is one of them being fed bamboo leaves. I also drew lots of the big cats — at right is a tiger I sketched just before we headed out.

Alert To Campus Pigeons

One of my colleagues this afternoon came in the office and said he had just seen a female peregrine falcon flying overhead south of Wickson Hall where I work. He had never seen a peregrine before on campus. He later checked with Marcel upstairs who confirmed that the perry has been around campus for several weeks, and frequently roosts on top of one of the water towers on the south side of campus.

Animeme

Well, folks, on the recommendation of two readers I’ve immersed myself in War and Peace. I may be a while and blogging may be sporadic.

Rana tagged me for this one a while ago, sorry to delay. To tell the truth I haven’t been very inspired by it. But here’s a go.

An interesting animal I had

Not so many interesting animals. The usual budgie, dog, cat, hamster, guinea-pig. But Numenius and I do name all kinds of critters that live near us (many of these names are on our ketubah, forming two domes over our marriage vows). I suppose the most interesting was a pair of hooded orioles that nested in a banana tree in the cabin we lived in above Santa Barbara. We called them Horace and Sally.

An interesting animal I ate

A goose. Not just any goose, a goose that had been force-fed and whose liver had been engorged to the point of bursting and was then served as a delicacy on New Year’s Eve in Paris. For the nth time, the collected French guests deplored this barbarity and then tucked in with gusto. I became a vegetarian that night.

An interesting animal in the Museum

Oh, without question, the Labrador ducks at the Museum of Natural History in New York. They have over half the specimens known to exist anywhere.

An interesting thing I did with or to an animal

I buried a sparrow. Alive. I was four. It still haunts me. I became a birder that day.

An interesting animal in its natural habitat

The male wild boar that surprised me as I was crouching behind a bush in the shadow of a moorish castle in Spain. “Natural habitat” is stretching it a bit, but then it often is. There are lots of animals I could insert here but this one was especially memorable…

Next up? Anyone who’d like to be…

Raven

I was out in the garden this morning, noting that the pocket gophers have now developed a taste for green beans (in addition to tomatoes, garlic, okra, any kind of squash, etc.) and wondering how best to deal with this next year when I heard the unmistakable croak of a raven.

We’ve lived in this house since 1999; this is the first raven recorded as a “yard” bird…

Tracking Wildlife

Walter “el jefe” wandered into my office this afternoon and alerted me to Tracking of Pacific Predators which is a very sophisticated effort to bring tracking data to the public.