Lammergeier: Gypaetus barbatus

Another vulture, a cousin of the Egyptian vulture, only this one eats bone instead of carrion. How awesome is that?


The Lammergeier is an old world vulture with feathers on its head. 1) it lives at high altitudes and has to stay warm, and 2) doesn't eat meat so sanitation isn't the issue that it might be for other vultures.

The Lammergeier looks for other vultures and then waits for them to finish before swooping in to take the bones. If they can't swallow them whole, they fly with them and drop them until they break. It can take a young Lammergeier years to learn exactly how to break the bones.

The vulture's digestive system is really acidic, allowing it to dissolve the bone and take advantage of the marrow.

Check this out:

Lappet-faced Vulture: Torgos tracheliotos

If yesterday's vulture was the wizened elf of the vulture world, this guy is its fierce giant.

Lappet-faced vultures are large, roughly 4 feet tall, and they're a more aggressive vulture. Their size and (relative) ferocity means that most other birds scatter when they come to feed... not necessarily a bad thing because lappet-faced vultures have very strong beaks capable of tearing at carrion that other birds (or mammalian scavengers) might not be able to manage.


Lappet-faced vultures are old-world vultures (Asia/Africa), related to hawks and kites; their feet are strong enough that they could conceivably use them to kill, even though they're primarily carrion eaters.

By the way, according to Mirriam-Webster, a lappet is a fold or flap on a garment or headdress or a flat overlapping or hanging piece, and in this case it refers to the flaps of skin on either side of the lappet-face's head/neck... Attractive... NOT.

Doodled from this photo at Wikimedia Commons.

Egyptian Vulture: Neophron percnopterus

I'm way into vultures at the moment. They're ugly, sure, but they fill a unique ecological niche that's kinda cool... they eat dead things. They're carnivores who (usually) don't kill their meals.

The Egyptian Vulture is one of the smaller old world vultures, and frankly, one of the more attractive.


Smaller, more attractive, and fairly intelligent... it uses rocks to break into ostrich eggs.

Cool, right?

By the way, Egyptian Vulture's are also known as Pharaoh's chickens, they have their own hieroglyph and this one was doodled from a photo at Wikimedia Commons.

Ballpoint Pens are Evil... but Fun

My habit, of late, has been to find a wildlife photo and try to draw its subject... using a ballpoint pen. The other trick? I can't spend more than about 30 minutes on it.


There are people who are brilliant at drawing with pens. I'm not one of them. I like them because they don't smudge (well they do, a little, if you dampen them... see the crow from my last post). But they do nothing for my self-esteem.


On the other hand, they're really easy to critique because none of the lines go away. I got the owl's beak all wrong, for instance. And the swift's shading isn't all that. Easy to see once you step away for a minute.

More Doodles

Doodling with a pen is a different experience for me than doodling in something less permanent.


I tend to start with the eyes and then draw everything else in relationship to them, especially with birds. With horses, or kinkajous, not so much... not sure why. Or maybe I am.


Birds don't have expressive faces, but they do (or can) have expressive eyes. Windows to the soul? Maybe not (word has it that an owl's eyes are so large that there's just not that much space left over for the brain in the skull), but it sure makes them interesting.

BBC Wildlife

A couple of years ago I pulled BBC Wildlife magazine off the shelf at my local Barnes & Noble. I've been shelling out the $7.99 to buy them ever since... they're what I want National Geographic to be. That is, it's the perfect magazine to carry around with you if you like to practice drawing animals from photographs.


The magazine features animals I wouldn't see here, like this crane photographed in Sweden.

The articles are informative as well.


Did you know, for example, that the house sparrow (Passer domesticus) is in decline in the UK? Maybe they'd like some of mine, although it would mean slimmer pickings for the neighborhood hawks.

The best thing about it is that it's easy to pull a magazine out of your backpack at an airport Starbucks and have a go at whatever strikes your fancy. I also tried a harp seal pup and a portrait of a fox this month. Drawing from photographs doesn't usually yield terrific artistic results -- and because selling or exhibiting any drawing based on a photo from a magazine would be copyright infringement, it's not a great idea to invest too much time in trying to make a masterpiece. But doodling from photos is a good way to figure out the anatomy of the thing without having to work in split-second increments... because, you know, wild animals move around a lot.

Delinquent

Believe it or not, I'm drawing more than I ever have... and a lot more in pen... but most of it's crazy prep drawings that aren't really fit for human consumption.

Some of the nicer ones from recent days:


Dana came home with a popular men's magazine, and Matthew McConaughey was on the cover. Fine, great, whatever. BUT. The photo spread inside the magazine also featured a Cinereous Vulture. Awesome!

A random macaw:


A fern front surreptitiously plucked from the side of a tree:


The head of a Downy Woodpecker:


Dandelion bits, sketched "in the field" at the Union Bay Natural Area... actually, sitting at the side of a raised bed and plucking bits of dandelion plant to observe and draw. Not very exotic, granted, but I don't feel badly about dismantling dandelion plants, for one. And from a botanical drawing standpoint, they're good to observe because they tend to do everything (bud, flower, go to seed) all at once.


I'll try to be better going forward, but the next four or five weeks are going to be harrowing. One of my classmates said that she made a list of everything she has to do, and for the first time ever, it didn't make her feel better.

Hmmmm.....