birdspot

In a field guide, a pattern on a bird has a name and an easily understood concept – a stripe, for instance.

In a photo, a pattern on a bird appears as a shape, or a group of shapes, with varying levels of focus but also occurring in a frozen, monocular space.

On a bird specimen, or skin, a pattern reveals itself to be comprised of feathers of differing size, structure, and coloration.

In life, a pattern on a bird has fluidity, moving and morphing according to situation and need. It is a thing in time, defined by physical characteristics but open to visual interpretation.

In art, of course, a bird can be anything.

I visited the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, NY, a couple of weeks ago, as part of the homework I have been undertaking since mid-July. I have been looking rather closely at a number of bird skins: analyzing, learning, unlearning, and whatnot. “Looking rather closely” might be a bit of an understatement, because I was transfixed by this process, and had a tendency to sit down to a drawing and a heap of dead birds, and emerge eight hours later, fuzzy in the head from mothballs and the sheer volume of Things I Did Not Know But Wanted To Learn. A can of worms, I tell you. I believe I may have used that phrase before. Like about a thousand times.

Collections of bird specimens will whisper very interesting things to you, but they are coy and mislead and befuddle. A skin is not a bird, any more than a photo is. Firstly, there is no reliable shape or structure to a skin – all bones are removed during processing, save for the legs, the bones in the wing, and varying bits of skull. It is then stuffed with an amount of cotton and pushed into an astonishing variety of shapes, even within one species. Even the length of a prepared bird is unreliable.

Next, there is the issue of a collection. There are so many variables here that I could probably write a whole book just on that! One of the issues that comes up: how many specimens of one species are there, and from where, and when? Are you under the impression that molt progression is a simple matter? Then, take an overstuffed tray (or 5 or 6 trays) of Short-billed Dowitcher subspecies, and compare that to the succinct information presented to you by an artist and a field guide writer. You begin to realize that science, that “fact”, involves a hefty amount of decision making, the kind of decision making that is neither sexy nor public, but that very heavily influences how one birder speaks to another in the field.

Lincoln’s Sparrows??

There are things you can learn from a skin, if you stretch your mind around some variables and ask questions (and boy, did I ask questions) and read as much as you can get your hands on. Feather pattern and coloration, for instance, change very little over time, even between a hundred year-old specimen and a five year one. Of course, you might want to know a few things: feathers, and therefore patterns, are often quite mussed, out of place, and at times confounding. Many birds have dark under feathers on the breast, even a pure white breast. This makes things a bit muddy. Oh, and some colors do fade, actually.

Stripes: on a sparrow’s back, those so neatly illustrated by people who are rapidly becoming the people-I-have-the-most-gratitude-towards (sorry, Mom and Dad), are, um, a little hard to discern. Are there four stripes or five? Are they symmetrical, or is one planted in the middle? Are all striped-back sparrows consistent in the number of stripes? Are they even really stripes? The specimens look at you with their vacant cottony eyes and laugh. You check the field guides and find that sparrows are mostly illustrated from the side. You search every photo you have taken and every decent one on the internet that actually shows a clear sparrow back, and you discover, within Swamp Sparrow, for instance, that those stripes move around a lot, changing with irritating frequency. You realize you have to refer to your own field experience – but have you ever actually counted the stripes/not stripes? Or did you look and say, hopefully rather quickly and with birder élan, “Oh, it’s a Swamp Sparrow,” and truly have no idea how many stripes there were. Now, try and draw a recognizable SwSp without knowing such things. If you are half a human being, your respect for bird illustrators has grown by leaps and bounds, even if you already held them in high esteem.

This is lengthy, and that is just one example, so I shall leave this here, for now. My trip to Cornell involved a lot more than sitting with skins, so more to come. May I thank some people? I have never met individuals in a field more willing to share hard-earned knowledge, and with such humility and patience. I have been working on drawings relating to this for four months (which means I have been asking a lot of questions). If you are one of those people, are reading this, and find yourself embarrassed, please let me know if you would like your name removed, or if you have a doctorate I have missed. In the meantime, my deepest gratitude to all:

Dr. Morgan Tingley, Paul Sweet, Scott Haber, Charles Eldermire, Hugh Powell, Dale Dyer, Andrew Vallely, Jim Coe, Guy Tudor, Michael Digiorgio, Barry Van Dusen, Dr. Kim Bostwick, Dr. Tom Schulenberg – their work, artistic and scientific, is worth looking up.

Images: Melospiza studies, ink and watercolor.