birdspot

Things change, and I ruminate over them, watch them change, sometimes pretend I have some control over them. I have been through a lot in the past couple of years, but who hasn’t, really, and in any case I have reached an age where I am thoroughly not fascinated with myself. All that said, I am about to embark on an enormous change, albeit potentially a temporary one, since I am really a chicken all in all and, to be honest, if someone offered me an interesting job tomorrow I would seriously take it and give up all these silly notions of freedom and adventure and new things to see and learn.

In short, I am going on a road trip. On this trip I am going to look for birds, talk to people who work with or look at birds, and as I go along I am going to make drawings of everything. Birds, people, and places. I guess that doesn’t quite account for “everything” in my vision, but it does provide me with a focus and a starting off point. I will be blogging with alarming regularity (a big wink to anyone who still reads this blog despite the, er, dearth of posts), and will be updating via our love/hate of this century, Facebook. My Birdspot page on FB can be found here.

In sum, here are the salient points of this post:

1. It is likely that I have lost my mind. Please do anything (cross fingers, pray, whatever) to help me to avoid hitting a large mammal in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere with no cell coverage.

2. This lovely but overpriced Manhattan studio apartment will be available as of Nov. 1. This probably should be #1, but whatever, I’m more worried about hitting a deer.

3. If you have an interesting job lurking somewhere that you think I might be perfect for, now would be a good time to pipe up. Especially if that job involves birds in Central or South America. Benefits would be a nice change, too, but perhaps I shouldn’t push it.

The image above is watercolor on paper, on a 15 x 11″ sheet, and is a study of baby shorebirds. Do you want to know what they are? Clockwise, from bottom left: American Avocet, Short-billed Dowitcher, Willet (Eastern, for those of you who are finding loads of Westerns here on the East Coast, but more on that in a future post…), and Long-billed Dowitcher. Precocial, all of them. The Short-billed had been on this planet a mere 12 hours before expiring. So much life, so little time. Detail below.

As I write this, they, the nefarious “they”, are breaking ground in the lot behind my building. I mostly spend the days of summer working in studio, insulated from heat waves and humidity, and avoiding the putrescent swirl of vapors oozing out of every nook in the city. I still love New York, I promise, and I am grateful that my studio has been blissfully (relatively) quiet and blessed with open, South views and astonishingly good light. These are things you only luck into or pay for exorbitantly in Manhattan. That open lot has been a beacon of hope, a fount of stifled dread, and a dream of wishful denial since the day I moved in. I only would have loved it more if it had been unpaved and I could have peered in for birds, bugs, and weeds. Oh well, so it goes (singsong voice, skipping off into an unknown future). Here is a toast - with tea, this time around, since I have just been awakened by the rending of concrete and earth - to change, and to riparian and boreal forests that exist someplace firmly where I am not.

Ovenbird Studies, ink and watercolor on paper, 2010

I have been having people into studio to rummage through my sketches, instead of organizing a bona fide open studio this year. In case anyone is interested, for the time being I have my boxes of preparatory, half-finished or fully finished drawings out and available.


Chicken studies, plus details, pen on grey paper, 16 x 9″

Sketch of a Northern Saw-whet Owl, ink on paper. Many thanks to Dr. Glenn Proudfoot of Vassar College, Christine Guarino, and Luke Tiller for an amazing evening of watching owl banding research in action. For a nice writeup on the experience, see Luke’s blog Under Clear Skies. Below, a detail, so you can kind of see what the ink lines look like.

halloween sketches, scratchboard, 8 x 11″

The temperature has dropped, seemingly all at once and surprisingly, though in actuality it has been creeping downward rather steadily. I, too, am crawling out of this season, counting days as the hours shorten and bird migration slows, meandering when I might prefer to be beelining. Enough of slow changes and floating between seasons. I stamp my feet (figuratively and literally - now, in my favorite Converse, my toes are cold), and my impatience borders on impertinence. Bring on winter and get it over with.

Last week I spent a day in Central Park with three esteemed bird photographers, combing through Sparrow Rock and Maintenance Meadow in an altogether different fashion from my usual fall migration mania. David Speiser kindly invited me along to photograph with him, Lloyd Spitalnik, and Harry Maas. The sheer heft of serious photography equipment has kept me from sacrificing everything else I own in order to buy 800mm lenses and flashes and video tripod mounts, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t drool over really nice optics and gadgetries when I see them. I chose my own 300mm Canon lens (amazing within its range) for its mobility and hand holdability (is that truly a word?). The gear that these guys trot around the park commands a different respect, and demands a certain level of physical deliberateness. Add to this the Sisyphean challenge of trying to get amazing shots of tiny, active migrant songbirds, and you start to get the idea that this endeavor requires a level of patience and intuition not possessed by many.

I had a sneaking suspicion that these three characters might make up for hours of grey chilly weather and the near-useless, half-blurred warbler photos I would inevitably produce in such circumstances. I had the idea that witty banter would be flying, and I sincerely hoped that at least they were the sorts to have a nice sit in the Boathouse, because generally when I stay in one place for a long time the only thing I really want to do is eat. They do eat (and banter), of course, and then some, and the day I spent with them was fantastic. I didn’t pester them too much with questions on technique or exposure settings (they offer excellent classes for such things), but I did watch. I took about a hundred photos of this first-year Blackpoll Warbler, in between repartee and Central Park folklore.

Like all migrating birds, this warbler was hungry, but in this obvious fact, there are degrees to hungry. There is hunger, and then there is hunger tinged with desperation. As we clicked away (unobtrusively, I would like to state), I began to feel like this bird was experiencing the latter. It spent an unusual amount of time out in the open, along a wooden and wire fence. It returned to the fence over and over, even when it seemed impossible that any tiny living creature could possibly be left on it. This drew growing sighs of exasperation from the photographers, because if the Blackpoll were to alight on the stunted pine tree nearby, the shots would take on an instant, almost Japanese beauty. It did not prefer the pine, however, for the simple reason that there were more insects to be found on the fence. I took many partially obscured and strange rear view shots. The bird flew well, but held its wings drooped slightly, and after maybe ten minutes I realized that the left wing was drooping lower than the right. This was consistent the entire time we viewed the bird (like 16 hours, judging by how cold my feet were. well OK, not really 16). It was definitely favoring its left wing. This was a subtle observation, not an obvious tragedy in the making, but one I may have missed from a shorter encounter. The bird did, finally, fly in to us at the pine tree, the sun broke out a bit, and good photos were had all around. Followed by hot soup and coffee.

Two studies of a Blackpoll Warbler, pencil on paper, 11.5 x 11″
David Speiser’s photo of the same bird: http://www.lilibirds.com
Lloyd Spitalnik’s photo of the same bird: http://lloydspitalnikphotos.com

A wise person does not walk around Central Park barefoot, it is just not safe. There are things in the grass that might pinch you.

Like crayfish??? I first realized there are crayfish in the park by watching a Hooded Merganser on the reservoir wolf one down, as voraciously as one might wolf something down that has claws and an exoskeleton. Since then I have seen them in the streams of the North Woods (they were fighting at Glenspan Arch on Tuesday) and at the Harlem Meer.

For a list of birds seen Sept 15-16, click (more…)