More Birds Again...and SNOW!

It got cold enough to snow last week, and guess what?  It did!  Luckily, it didn't amount to much, but still, I want SPRING!

There is a 60+ degree day in our forecast this coming week, and the rest in the 50s, so we are headed in the right direction.  Whew. 

During our recent recrudescence of Winter weather, I somehow managed to get outside and see birds, even though I had no intention of doing so in the 25-30 degree days.  What happened on one of those days was this:  a rare gull had been seen atop the Columbia Park marina roof, and it's easy to just drive by there slowly, check with the binoculars from the car, and move on.   As I happened to be over that way for an appointment, afterwards I decided to swing by the marina.  No joy on the gull.  Well, I was in the park, which has a lot of spots where gulls enjoy hanging out, so next I decided to just drive slowly through it, checking as I went.

No rare gull.  However, I did spot this bird atop a sycamore tree:

Juvenile Bald Eagle!

So that was swell.

I continued my slow drive through the park, and then headed back to the marina, where I noticed the gull flock there becoming agitated.

They took off and scattered, thanks to a visit from that very same eagle.

I did not see any gulls being snatched up by the eagle while I was there.  But since I was there, even though it was only 27 out, I decided to get out of the car and walk a short ways over to Bateman Island to see if anything else interesting was going on.

During my brief (very brief) sojourn, I spotted some lovely Common Mergansers:

The above birds are the males, and the one below is the female:

Then the eagle made another pass over the area, and scattering of mergansers happened.

And then my fingers froze, so I hightailed it back to the car and home.

It just so happened that the very next day I had another reason (art supply shopping) to be near that same marina...so guess what I did?  Yes, I popped by simply to take a quick look, or so I told myself.  It was still far too cold, as you can tell by this photo I took from the marina of Rattlesnake Mountain:

The first thing I saw when I arrived was a flock of America White Pelicans.  Hurrah!  They spend their winters in warmer climes and their appearance is a harbinger of Spring.  

This pelican seemed to be having a tete a tete with a cormorant:

The next fun bird I found was one that I heard before locating -- the distinctive call (more like a croak) of the Common Raven.  I located it easily enough, as a flock of crows was busy chasing it away.  As you can see in the one pic I managed to snap, the raven has a wedge-shaped tail, which, along with its call and slightly larger size, distinguishes it from a crow (fan-shaped tail).

Finally, I spied a few Common Goldeneyes paddling about (this is a female):

Lots of good birds to see!  I never did find the rare gull (but I'd already seen another rare gull there a few months ago, so I wasn't that disappointed).  However, I did run across the birder who keeps tabs on the marina rooftop gulls on a regular basis, name of Elke, and she said the one I'd been looking for had most likely moved on.  Oh, well.  So it goes!

That was it for me for cold-weather birding efforts.  

Thus, I spent a lot of the past week indoors, and got some more artwork done.  For one of our sketch group sessions, we did this oddly shaped building (from the Netherlands, I believe), which had what I dubbed the "ribcage door":

Next, I tackled a complicated Italian street scene -- this was a separate effort from the group sessions.  For this I used toned paper and dark brown ink, and then did most of the painting in gouache, which is an opaque watercolor medium.  The gouache paints were part of my recent art supply purchase, and they worked out quite well!

Our second group session piece was a weird landscape with strange rocks -- I have no idea where this is or even what it is, but I did enjoy painting it (using watercolor this time):

Okay, on to the Hounds!

Pippin had his first-ever dental cleaning this past Monday (he is four).  The vet expected a few extractions, but we lucked out -- he wound up not needing any!  Total opposite of poor Truman's experience.  Whew.  He still wasn't very happy about the whole thing -- here he is that evening:

He perked up by the next day.  And not long after, he felt cheerful enough to romp in the snow!

That's all from here -- and that was plenty!

Have a good week out there, everyone!

A Birdy Blog Today

Photos of birds!  Drawings and paintings of birds!  Some other stuff, too, like the dachshunds, of course.  All the best blog posts have wiener dogs in them.

The first good bird was a Belted Kingfisher we got to admire during a walk by the marina.

The bird looked as if it wanted to swoop down to the water to snag a fish, and I waited ever so patiently with camera poised in case this happened, but the Hounds refused to stay in one place that long.  I had to give up on my vigil and walk the dogs.

Of course, no more than ten seconds after I made that decision, the kingfisher swooped down to the water to grab a fish.  Except that it didn't catch the fish, and zipped back up to its perch, looking faintly perplexed.

The second good bird sighting of the week happened out at Columbia Point, a natural area with a lot of sagebrush and some lovely views of the spot where the Columbia and Yakima rivers meet.

A flock of coots was hanging out there, and something startled them, sending them scurrying across the water in typical manic coot fashion:

That wasn't the good bird sighting, though.  Nope.  That happened a bit later on, when I spied a kestrel flitting from tree top to tree top.  When I got close enough to zoom in, I was startled to see that the bird was grasping its breakfast!  

It looked like a vole, as far as I could tell, and must have been a fresh kill, since the falcon hadn't started chowing down yet.  In fact, it kept flying from tree to tree trying to find a quiet place to eat, away from prying humans with cameras.

So that was an exciting morning!

We also had birds for our Zoom art practice sessions this past week.  One of them was a tad wacky:

I did a very fast (20 minute) sketch with ink and watercolor brush pens, just for a fun, slightly exaggerated picture:

Then I spent a bit more time, about an hour, painting this Northern Red Bishop (a bird I had not heard of -- seems to be mostly African) using watercolor:

A third practice piece had no birds in it whatsoever.  It's my favorite from the past week, as I really like the reflections in the water and the textures I got on the rocks.  This one took about an hour and ten minutes, and I used brown ink and watercolor:

That's all for now.  Have a lovely week out there, wherever you are, and may you see good birds!

It's All in the Timing

 Last Monday, when it was over 50 degrees and sunny, I decided to visit the McNary wildlife refuge to look for Snow Geese (which spend the winters here).  Initially I planned to go after lunch but the weather was so nice before then that I just couldn't wait, and headed off at 10:30 instead.  

When I got there, a large flock of Snow Geese were hanging out quietly in a field.  I parked, got out, aimed the camera at them, and thirty seconds later, this happened:

The birds scattered in huge waves, madly flying every which way.

Then they all headed away from the field and over towards the refuge's slough.

Why had they suddenly erupted in flight?  Because of this bird:

This is a Red-tailed Hawk, which had swooped down at the Snow Geese flock.  I drove over to the slough, where the birds had landed on the water.  I walked down towards them, spotting that hawk in a tree on my way.  About ten minutes later, the hawk took off and dove at the geese again, and I got another nice look at irritated Snow Geese taking off again in search of a calmer location:

They headed away from the refuge, out of of view.  I spent another hour or so walking walking the refuge trails, and didn't see another Snow Goose in that time.  Now, it's entirely possible that had I stuck to my original plan and arrived there after lunch, that the geese would have returned, and the hawk, too, to put on another show.  But who knows?  As it was, I don't think I could have timed it much better!

The Hounds came with me:

Truman is feeling much better now after his recent dental ordeal.

Here he is looking so much more at ease now that the extraction areas have healed and the sutures are gone.  Yay!

Okay, on to last week's art.

This is a place called Shiprock, NM.  After several frustrating weeks using hot press watercolor paper, I finally got my beloved Arches 140lb cold press paper and I'm so much happier now.  It's just so much easier to use wet-in-wet blends, as you can see:

I don't know the location of this second one -- the photo was just titled "foggy mountains."  I did a lot of wet-in-wet blending on this one, especially in the green hilly area.  Quite a challenge to finish this in an hour and 15 minutes, but so much easier on the GOOD paper!

So hooray for having the right supplies to work with.  

That's it for now.  The weather is turning warmer and it's looking a lot like Spring.  I'm able to go out for longer walks, and have even done some garden prep work.  Hope you are heading into Spring weather wherever you are, too!  

Unless, of course, you're in Australia.

Happy Monday out there!

It's Always Something

Poor Truman.  Don't worry, he's fine.  But he is missing some teeth.  Quite a lot of teeth, in fact.  

This is Truman last Wednesday morning, before I dropped him off at the vet's for a dental cleaning, when he looked calm and unsuspecting:

Pippin gave him an encouraging send-off:

A few hours later I got a call from the vet informing me that poor Truman needed TWELVE extractions!!   TWELVE!!!  Mostly in the upper front, with a couple in the back.  This was not expected by any means -- he had shown no signs of bad teeth other than some tartar buildup, and even the vet was surprised by the X-rays.  I felt so badly for him!  

This is poor Truman shortly after he returned home that evening:

Such a sad face.  Sigh.  He had lots of pain meds and nothing but soft food and now, five days later, he is feeling more himself but he definitely misses his upper front teeth.  Poor little guy.

Next month it will be Pippin's turn.  Yay.  I do hope his teeth aren't that horrible!

Well, onward to the art portion.  This past week we had fun with birds.  One of our sketch group members shared some fabulous photos of many colorful birds, and I had a good time with them.  We found this purple and white bird quite attractive, if a bit improbable:

I drew it in pencil and then painted it with watercolor:

The color bothered me enough that I went to Google to search for purple and white birds, and discovered, as I suspected, that someone had used Photoshop to change the color of a non-purple bird.  This bird, in fact -- an Azure Tit.  They just flipped this pic and altered the hue.  For shame!

I mean, really -- that's a perfectly lovely bird with its original coloring, if you ask me.

The American Kestrel is a perfectly lovely bird too, and its coloring, unaltered, is quite striking:

Having recently seen a kestrel out and about here, I decided it would be fun to do a sort of "extra credit" bird painting on my own, and tried tackling this in acrylics:

It was a bit rushed -- I only spent about two hours on this painting, and I didn't really enjoy working with the acrylic paint, but it turned out okay.  

For our other group art session, we opted to do this very fun bird with a bug, which I felt had a lot of character:

I had a blast with this one.  Back to my favorite medium - watercolor.  I was especially happy with how the eye turned out, and how pleased this bird looks about snagging that bug.  

So that's it from here.  Too much doggie dental work, lots of fun birds to draw.  I also got out for a 2-mile walk on Saturday, when it got above 50 -- whee!  Soon I hope to be complaining about it being too hot instead of too cold.

In the meantime, as it's still officially Winter, I bought some fake flowers to make the patio more cheerful:

Pippin gave them his seal of approval:

Have fun wherever you are and may Spring be just around the corner!