Who is that masked bird? Day 1

This masked bird is the Green Magpie (Cissa chinensis). Found in India, China, Malaysia, the green magpie is a corvid. They're green in the wild, but their color tends to fade to turquoise in captivity. Like most corvids, the green magpie will eat anything it can find - an omnivore's omnivore.


This drawing doodled from a photo on Jhuebner's Flickr photostream.

Turdus migratorius: American Robin

A set of robins... very common birds that have given me fits this week, especially in weird postures (top right - that one definitely belongs in the "meh" category). The one on the upper left is a baby... just out of the awkward "I'm all quills" phase and just before the "I've grown into my feet" phase. It's my favorite of the bunch.



Crazy.

Spinus tristis: American Goldfinch

So, a couple of weeks ago I found this great book, How to Keep a Naturalist's Notebook. In it, the author actually recommends drawing from photos to get a feel for the shapes of the critters you're observing in the wild.

One of the exercises she recommends is finding several photos and sketching them quickly for shape, posture, shadow forms, etc. I love it.

Goldfinches are frequent visitors to our yard, so this was an exercise in doodling old friends. My favorite doodle of this group is the seed-bearing goldfinch:

Dicaeum trigonostigma: Orange-bellied Flowerpecker

Another of the birds of Thailand.

"The flowerpeckers are very small, stout, often brightly coloured birds, with short tails, short thick curved bills and tubular tongues. There are 44 species worldwide of which ten occur in Thailand." ~ Wikipedia

Doodled from a photo on the Flickr photostream of Mike (No captive birds) in Thailand.

Picoides borealis: Red-cockaded Woodpecker

Native to the Southeastern United States, the Red-cockaded woodpecker is the only North American woodpecker to nest in live trees. The male's cockade, a series of red feathers under the crown, isn't visible unless the male displays, so it is, apparently, difficult to tell the males and females apart. Ornithologists suggest this is a good thing, since they're cooperative breeders and a less obvious display makes aggression less likely.

The red-cockaded woodpecker has been on the endangered species list since the 1970s.

I saw a video on The New York Times web site about military installations becoming de facto wildlife preserves. As species are pushed out of their habitats, they move to areas that are less developed and/or more carefully managed. Military bases fit the bill. Today, many bases are working with the the US Forestry Service and the Nature Conservancy to manage their lands - turns out well-managed land is good for both wildlife conservation and military operations. This kind of cooperation seems like a very good thing.

Doodled from a photo in Woodpeckers of North America.

Dacelo novaeguineae: Laughing Kookaburra

From the children's song:

Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree
Merry, merry king of the bush is he
Laugh, Kookaburra! Laugh, Kookaburra!
Gay your life must be

Related to kingfishers, the laughing kookaburra is a carnivorous bird native to Australia. Common prey: mice, insects and lizards. They're apparently not all that bothered by human company and have been known to eat from hands.

(Kingfishers, by the way, have an interesting body type. Their heads seem very large for their bodies, and their feet are very, very small. I guess that makes all the sense in the world for a bird that kills prey with its bill.)

Doodled from the Flickr photostream of Ian Sand.

Remiges & Rectrices

When B molts, it's an excellent time to study her feathers.

The one on top is a remex (pl. remiges), a feather from B's right wing. You can tell because the feather is asymmetrical, with the leading edge being narrower than the trailing edge.

The middle is a contour feather, most likely from somewhere on her front.

The bottom is a rectrix (pl. rectrices), from her tail. It's more symmetrical and has a more square appearance.

Feathers are so specialized... it's really pretty amazing. Even more amazing is the fact that B seems to be able to control each of her feathers individually.

Flight feathers are actually very stiff. Lilo (the dachshund) likes to chew on feathers when she finds them. Thankfully, Lilo finds individual feathers more interesting than the ornery strong-beaked cockatoo from whence the feathers came.

Buteo regalis: Ferruginous Hawk

Bit of an experiment today, with the white on black... only marginally successful, but an interesting project. (And hey, if you can't experiment on your blog, where can you?)

The Ferruginous Hawk is large (eagle-sized) American hawk. They can summer around this neck of the woods, but live year-round in the Southwest.

Doodled from an image posted at Wikipedia.

Aquila chrysaetos: Golden Eagle

A portrait of the Golden Eagle, the bird we saw on our drive through the Gorge (at least we think that's what it was... giant... eagle-like... eating something that was formerly alive...)


Doodled from a photo on the Wikipedia entry for the Golden Eagle.

Sialia sialis: Eastern Bluebird

I finally figured out a holiday card... would have been a Christmas card, but guess who just couldn't get her act together until now? So New Year's it is... hey, the New Year is still a holiday.

It's an Eastern Bluebird, or in my world, the bluebird of happiness (notice the smile).

Whee!

Picoides villosus: Hairy Woodpecker

So, I'm at the park on Friday doing a lap to get some exercise, and I stumble across a Downy Woodpecker working over a tree limb looking for bugs. As I turn to continue on my way, another bird, this one bigger, swoops over my head and chases the little Downy away.

It's this guy, a Hairy Woodpecker. These birds look identical, except the Hairy is a little bit bigger and it looks like his beak is a tiny bit longer.


According to the Wikipedia article about the Hairy Woodpecker (where I got the photo for this doodle), these birds aren't closely related, and the similarities of appearance are the result of convergent evolution (defined as "the acquisition of the same biological trait in unrelated lineages").

After I left that tree and as I was rounding the final curve in the path, I heard another woodpecker. I looked up to see where he was - directly overhead working on a pinecone.

These birds are very common, but I've never seen live specimens, until now. Very, very cool.

Aphelocoma californica: Western Scrub Jay

Another bird from my Portland trip: the western scrub jay. Portland doesn't have the Cyanocitta cristata Blue Jays (the most common ones... the ones with a top knot). The only jays I've ever seen in PDX are the scrub jays.

"Not to be confused with LL Cool J," says my husband Dana. Jays, magpies, crows and ravens make up the corvid family. They all have similar personalities: fairly intelligent, but noisy, scrappy and generally unrepentant. They're kind of pretty, even if they are butt-heads.

Doodled from a photo at Wikimedia Commons.

Encounter with a Baby Owl

My fabulous and talented brother was walking home from the train when he stumbled across a baby owl. It was just sitting on the sidewalk and didn't seem at all concerned that he was watching it. Just after he decided to watch it for a while to make sure it wasn't hurt, one of his neighbors came by. The neighbor's girlfriend works for a veterinarian, so he gave her a call. And then they called the humane society. And then the Audubon Society. Nobody was available to come out to make sure the owl was OK.

Just as they were giving up hope, a drugged out dude came by and tried to touch the owl, which caused the owl to take flight to the nearest tree.

We figured out that it was probably a Northern Saw-whet owl. They're tiny, and they freeze when they're being observed. (Remember Jurassic Park, where the scientist tells the kid to stay still so the T. Rex won't see him? Sort of like that... news to the owl: we can see you.)

Doodled from this photo. (I liked the hand as a size reference.)