Adult White-crowned Sparrow studies (Zonotrichia leucophrys leucophrys). Watercolor, gouache, and ink on tan paper, 11 x 7.5″, 2011.
by Catherine 4 Comments 
Top image: Four studies of an immature White-crowned Sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophrys, probably subspecies gambelii). Watercolor, gouache, and pencil on tan paper, 11 x 7.5″, 2011.
Bottom image: detail of same drawing.
by Catherine 6 Comments 
Traversing the country, drawing lines of a sort and making scrawls on a geography vast enough to spur both awe and despair, I have been keeping lists. This is a Big Year. It is not a year in which I am trying to break records for numbers of bird species seen, as that would be ridiculous. I have neither the funds nor the willingness to visit a place – as every place is a Place – merely to tick something from it, and then run to the next place, to tick something from that.
Sightings are sightings however, and records are useful. I like to make my records tangible, give my memories a form. I thought I would share some of my lists from my trip in a few posts this week. It isn’t physical here though, is it? Paper is a beautiful thing, in its physicality, for its tactile qualities. All the little scraps I have collected will likely long outlast me, even if they flutter off to sink into a landfill somewhere. This has become something different; everything has become something different this year.
Images, top to bottom (click for larger image):
Studies of Plain Chachalacas, digital sketch (drawn in Photoshop using a Wacom tablet)
List 01 (Summary): Digital image and ink on paper
List 02 (TX): Digital image and ink on paper (detail below)
They are beautiful, those Texas trees, that Texas light. Eastern Texas – not Gulf Coastal Eastern Texas, not Piney Woods Eastern Texas, not Hill Country Texas, but the middle of cow country near Austin near Houston near Dallas but a good distance from all of them Texas – has an identity somewhere between highly local and United States Universal. There are woods amidst all that farmland, running along streams, edging the boundary between the creeping suburbs of a college town and the ranches.
Driving up from the Rio Grande Valley, the plant and tree growth feels as if a gentle transition has been drawn diagonally across regions, between the Northeastern U.S. and the Southwestern. If one goes past the changes in flora (and breaks through the membrane of a certain culture, of human glossing over and homogenization), you reach geology: old rock, older rock, and oldest rock, an astonishing set of bands that tell stories of seas rising and receding, uplifts and erosion of ancient mountains, and volcanism. A lovely map by the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology can be seen if you click [here]. Everything that grows and lives on the surface (some more lightly than others), comes down to those intricate strata and the epics they tell.
The vistas across the East (?) Texas fields were open and Western, but the trees were towering and resplendent as I walked into the woods, leaving my father’s house after another day’s worth of hunching over drawings. I took that walk multiple times over a few weeks, each time hoping for a few more sparrows than the afternoon before. The winter sparrows were not truly in yet, save for a few smug early arrivals (mostly White-throated Sparrows); these seemed to settle in for the night awfully early and long before the sun had set. I surmised that they might have been resurfacing again just after dusk, since they followed that pattern in my father’s yard, but perhaps the yard was different because of the feeders. In any case, their behavior was different than in the New York and New England winter.
Each time I entered the woods, leaving the mental expanses of endless Texas parking lots and cow pastures both, crunching oak leaves underfoot (California style, with the dry leaves and a dusty forest floor), I was also carried through the humid Southern climes and up through the Eastern Seaboard to New England. This sensation was particularly strong when turning back, as the sun set: deciduous branches and twigs entwined against hazy oranges and purples, with the sun making fractals through November tree-bones; it bored into me things past and left behind. New England things. A soft breeze came through, though, too warm for a Northeastern fall and vaguely reminiscent of my teen years in Southern California. I felt as if I could, after years of regarding this town with an attitude slightly nicer than veiled contempt, finally understand this place. It became a patch, a more grounded home.
There was a large pecan tree in the middle of my favorite field, at the last bend in a little deer path. The warm breeze, the things past, the light on that tree made me see how it would be possible to grow up here, in Brazos County, with a deep love for this place and county and country. I imagined a whole different childhood, possibilities. Perhaps the usual – games with other kids in your neighborhood, a first kiss, or a breakup, under that tree – or maybe more along the lines of what I was conjuring: an elusive, non-verbal happiness with who you are and where you come from. These were not my histories, as I stood there, alone with the pecan tree and the breeze, tiptoeing on the skin of the temporary.
Image: 4 sketches of a Barred Owl, ink on paper.
by Catherine 7 Comments
