Atlantic Puffin: Sketches

Chestnut-backed Chickadee: Getting to Know You

Cooper's Hawk: Getting to Know You

Northern Cardinal: Getting to Know You

Man, I feel like I haven't been to the gym in a while. Doodling is like that; if you don't do it for a little while you get rusty. And since I've been off from school, working and traveling I haven't doodled in a couple of weeks. Ouch.

Doing "Getting to Know You" sketches is a good way to get back into it. No pressure to do something beautiful, just trying to get an idea of how things work.

For the cardinal, I messed around in the sketchbook until I started seeing the shape of the bird. Cardinals, with their crests, make a distinctive teardrop shape if you catch them at the right angle.


The thing to remember about cardinals, or any crested birds for that matter, is that the crest will obscure the actual shape of the head (which is, I suppose, the point of having a crest). I'm not sure I'm getting it just yet, but it's something to be aware of.


Tomorrow: a line drawing.

Accipiter striatus: Sharp-shinned Hawk

It's been a blockbuster at the feeders over the last few days... I guess a foot of snow will do that for you.

Yesterday morning we had all the usual suspects, plus a Northern Flicker that huddled up to the house to try to keep warm (seriously, right there on the top step).

And then everybody cleared out, and fast, because a juvenile Sharp-shinned Hawk showed up looking for some breakfast.


Sharpies are pretty common in this neck of the woods, especially around feeders where the pickings are anything but slim. This morning's hawk let me take a good look while he perched in our tree. He was a small hawk with dark wings and a barred tail, with yellow eyes. After he flew away I went looking through the guide books and Cornell's Birds of North America web site, and learned that juvenile Sharpies have yellow eyes and light eye stripes.

The hawk wasn't the only predator we had in the yard yesterday. Right after he left, Ghost the neighbor cat came to stay a while - I had to flush him out from under one of the chairs.

Phoebastria immutabilis: Laysan Albatross

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology sends a quarterly magazine to its members, Living Bird Magazine. The latest issue's feature is about the albatrosses of Midway Island, also known as Gooney Birds.


Did you know that there's a giant mass of plastic in the Pacific Ocean?

Well, there is, and these albatrosses, who scoop their prey from the surface of the ocean, are known to take plastic instead of squid. Then they take the plastic and feed it to their young, who are in danger of starving to death because their stomachs are so full of plastic junk that they don't have room for food.

Photo by Flickr user angrysunbird.

That, friends, should be all the impetus we need to cut down on our consumption and usage of plastic.

Gooney bird doodled from a photo by Stephanie Batzer.

Sketchy Chinstrap

This is just a prep doodle for a bigger version of the Chinstrap Penguin... the bigger version didn't pan out (to put it nicely).


... sometimes I can draw things that look like things... Sometimes, not so much. That's OK, it's still a fun way to spend the evening.

Notebook #2

I finished my second birdlydrawn notebook yesterday. Whee!

Here are some of the sketchy bits that didn't make it to the blog...



You can sort of tell it's a waxwing... right?


Pinecones are endlessly fascinating... even if they're not birds.


I was working on this motmot's bill -- notice the jagged edges, like "teeth." The bill turned out okay, but the rest of the head... not so much.


Bernini, Bernini... always Bernini.


Bernini with a brush pen.

Who is that masked bird? Day 4

The Masked Booby (Sula dactylatra) is a large waterbird of the tropics. It catches its prey by plunge diving into schools of fish, sometimes from 100 ft. in the air!

P.S. Happy Earth Day!

Who is that masked bird? Day 3

The cedar waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum) is a wide-ranging songbird that travels in large flocks. You often see them eating red berries (the ones that are still around during the winter).

This one is a baby. Doodled from this photo on Wikipedia Commons.

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:

Taking Notes

I wish I had figured out, many years ago, that my favorite note-taking device would turn out to be an 11x14 sketchbook.


Sure, it's kind of bulky, but there's nothing better than a HUGE sheet of paper to help you get stuff down.


Lesson learned.

Sketchy Doodles

My phoenix explorations are making something painfully clear: I don't do enough drawing from memory or imagination.


After taking a gander at these two doodles, you know why: I suck at it. But that's no reason not to do it, I suppose. (If tonight's dinner was any indication, I also suck at making spaghetti carbonara, but that's not going to stop me from trying it again...)

There's nowhere to go but up.

Hummingbirds!

Things I learned from watching Nature:

• Hummingbirds have to keep feeding and keep moving to ensure they don't just run out of energy and die... sort of like sharks.


• That may be why they're so aggressive. (I read an article about hummingbirds in Smithsonian magazine several years ago that quoted a researcher who said that we're all pretty lucky hummingbirds are small, because they could do some damage to us if they were any bigger. Having been buzzed by a hummer, I'm pretty sure he's right.)


• Hummingbirds have the ability to go into a near state of hibernation when the temps drop at night. When the sun comes up, they come out of it.


• Hummingbirds live only in the Americas.


• There is a group of black-chinned hummingbirds (?) in the West (?) that builds nests in eye-line of a Cooper's Hawk nest. The hawk eats the hummer predators but leaves the hummers alone because they're too small and too fast. How's that for an example of "The enemy of my enemy is my friend"?