Drawing birds

I’m sitting in the garden looking out at. the plants. Beans in flower. Basil that needs to be harvested. Ripening tomatoes and squash. All easily see from the tble on the deck. But my mind wanders to birds.

A House Wren singing behind the fence. Red-winged Blackbirds and doves overhead. A Great Egret, Trumpeter Swans and Killdeer on the pond. They represent no only the present, but also remind me of the past.

For so many years I wrote about and showed people birds. The Upper Peninsula, Ontario, the Canadian Maritimes, Texas, Mexico and Costa Rica, places I traveled with people seeing birds and photographing a lot of them.

The above Gyrfalcon was photographed on the Sault Power Plant, and later turned into an illustration. Gyr’s are amazing birds. They are larger than peregrines, and in direct flight faster than any bird on the planet. For a couple of years in the 1980s I worked on a project “Great Lakes Birds of Prey.” The project never reached fruition, but this illustration would have been part of it.

But I sketched, painted and illustrated birds for years. Sometimes this was for projects, other times for my own need to create, and the pleasure of doing it. The Ruby-throated Hummingbirds are a perfect example.

This little painting, smaller than the actual birds was a quick watercolor sketch done in the field. We were on vacation in Wisconsin and had a hummingbird feeder set up. This male would feed and perch on several nearby twigs. Each sketch was the length of time that the bird would perch near the feeder. Drawing and writing about birds while watching them allowed me to collect and remember more details than quickly grabbing a field guide or taking a photo.

While most of my drawing and illustrations are the result of sketching or photographing in the field the Harpy Eagle is an exception. This eagle was the bird that I had most wanted to see in Mexico and Central America.

I studied specimens at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, photographing and sketching. Finding all of the reference material I could I was finally able to bring this bird to life.

It would be another 30 years before I finally saw one in the wild in the Darien of Panama. It was a young bird at a nest.

So today I sit and write about one of the smallest and some of the largest birds that I have seen and drawn. One day I’ll write a post about warblers, woodpeckers or ducks – other projects that I have worked on. Or perhaps the day I sat and sketched moths.

But for now I’ll continue to write and draw. More later.