Young Loons and Hawks

We had a lot of young Common Loons born this year on the Lake.  I was lucky to be able to observe and sketch them going about their business:







Here are studies of an adult Loon as well as a stressed out Chipping Sparrow mom:



And finally, a real treat. We had young Broad-Winged Hawks fledging right in our backyard! We came to call them the "Hawkward Teens", and it was a wonderful thing to get to watch them grow up.

Sketching From "Nature" - "Ireland's Wild River"

It feels like it's been forever since I sat down, watched an episode of "Nature", and drew along with it.  So on St. Patrick's Day, I watched "Ireland's Wild River", a tour down the River Shannon, and drew these sketches.  Click on them to see the big versions at Flickr.







I drew them all in green pencil!  Because St. Patrick's Day!  And Ireland! 

Walking the Hadrosaur Roads - The Lost Continent of Appalachia

Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, Diplodocus, Maiasaura, Deinonychus, Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops.  As a dinosaur-loving child growing up in New England, I learned very quickly that all the really popular, exciting dinosaurs lived in Nowhere Near My Home.  They all lived out west, on the other side of the great inland sea.  Back east, we can claim Hadrosaurus, some tracks... and that, according to the dinosaur books of my childhood, was it.  Maybe Dryptosaurus would get a shout-out, thanks to Charles Knight's "Leaping Laelaps" painting (still one of the greatest works of paleoart ever made).  Maybe there'd be a mention of Anchisaurus because you can't not love a basal sauropod the size of a sheepdog.  But generally, eastern dinosaurs would be ignored by popular culture.

Asher Elbein's Lost Continent of Appalachia aims to fix that.  It's a quick read, gorgeously illustrated, and tells the stories of the animals that roamed the eastern parts of North America during the Cretaceous.  And I love it!  It's what child-me would have given anything within reason to read.  (In fact, I would love to see it as a nice hardcover book someday.)  Make sure you read Asher's companion post at good old Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs too.  He's promised to post more behind-the-scenes material there and I can't wait.

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Art of the Day!

Antpittas!  Look at these adorable little fuzzballs on stick legs!

Inktober Day 9 - Rainy Fairy and Big Ol' Troll

Couple of nature spirits for a rainy rainy day.

It's a Science-Art Tweetstorm!

Do you like science?  Do you like art?  How about when science and art combine?  Heck yeah, you do!  After all, you're reading this blog aren't you?

This week on Twitter, Glendon Mellow of Symbiartic is inviting artists to share their science and nature-related or influenced art.  If you'd like to participate, here are the instructions from Glendon:

Post your art on Twitter using the #SciArt hashtag.
Aim to post a minimum of 3 of your works per day, so 21 for the week.
Feel free to post more, a lot more than 3.
Post anything sciart-related: sketches, finished pieces, cartoons, fine art, bioart, paleoart, medical illustration, nature painting, you name it.
Works do not have to be new. Get out that back catalogue. If there's one thing I've learned about Twitter, it's that your old artwork is always new to someone.
Post the same piece more than once. If you've got an image or 2 you really want to promote, the audience at 2pm Tuesday is not the same as the audience at 2am Friday.
By all means , promote your blog and online store. A tweet consisting of "(name of art), (link to website) #SciArt" + the image itself looks perfect to me.
Try to retweet at least 5 other #sciart tweets by other people per day.We are not policing this effort, so more or less is fine. Whatever you are comfortable with.

The goal of this is to share the variety and importance of art as it relates to science. By posting a huge flurry of tweets all in one week, we hope to reach an even broader audience. We hope you'll be a part of it!

Sounds like fun!  I'll be posting @Babbletrish and hope to see lots of participants.

Update: Nature took notice!

The Birds of 2014

A little while ago, I mentioned that I had been listing all the birds I'd seen in one year for the first time ever.  Since I kept my list in the (reasonably good) Peterson Field Guide iPhone application, it's easy to post the final list as a series of screenshots.

And so here they are, every bird I saw in 2014, from the Song Sparrow to the Brant:

"At Least the Things We're Seein' are a Dream Come True!" - "Rocky Mountain Holiday"

Last year, I watched "John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together" for the first time ever and... well, it was something. "Rocky Mountain Holiday" is several orders of magnitude more enjoyable. This is mostly because it feels more like a Muppets special, and the crew is at the top of their game.

It also doesn't have anything to do with Christmas. Ah well. At times it feels like the middle chapter of a trilogy that doesn't exist, or like that one awesome time you had last summer. Except better, because Muppets!

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Sketch of the Day!

We need more dogs!

My Moderately-Sized Year

It was New Year's Day when it occurred to me, looking at my friend's bird feeder and the birds visiting it, that I'd never maintained a list of all the birds I've seen in one year.

And that, simply enough, is how I started what I came to half-jokingly refer to as my Moderately-Sized (as opposed to Big) Year.  I happened to have an App on my phone that allowed me to make a checklist of birds and I just started right there, over breakfast.  First bird of the year was a Song Sparrow.  I just recently hit bird number 151, an Eastern Wood-Peewee, so I feel like I ought to write something about all this.

First, here are my rules:

1) The bird must be listed in the Peterson Birds Pocket Edition iPhone App.

2) The bird must be alive. 

Corollary to Rule 2: This means captive birds are fair game. Somebody call the ABA police.

If I check off the name of a stuffed specimen, it best be an extinct/nearly extinct species (some of which are listed in the PBPE because why not?  If you're wondering, this hasn't come up yet.)

3) I must either see the bird or hear it. 

Corollary to Rule 3:  The "Red-Eyed Vireo Corollary".  I am allowed to check an unseen-but-heard bird off my list as long as I or a companion can I.D. the call with reasonable accuracy.

I picked a heck of a year to start doing this.  I've been traveling quite a lot, mostly for family events.  This has, as you may have noticed, kept me off the Internet but has kept me in nature.  The world is more alive when you pay especial attention to the birds.

Now, a few thoughts on the Peterson Birds Pocket Edition App: It's... okay.  At this point I'm using it as a checklist mostly.  It's convenient more than anything else, and is not at all a replacement for a good dead tree edition field guide, especially if you're a beginner.  Being able to listen to recordings of the birds is kind of nice, but the Audubon Nature Guide apps are far better in that respect, as they have a wider variety of sounds.

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Sketch of the Unspecific Length of Time! I'm going to go ahead and say that this Bald Eagle was a highlight.

"Jungle Eagle" Sketches

It's a new year, and over at Flickr, I started the customary yearly Sketch of the Day folder.  These are the first drawings I uploaded to that folder.  I'd wanted to watch the "Nature" episode "Jungle Eagle", about a team of biologists who go through a lot to record the life-cycle of a family of Harpies in Venezuela, for years but I always managed to miss it.  Thankfully, it and a bunch of other episodes of "Nature" have appeared on Netflix Instant.

These are all ballpoint pens on recycled Sketchbook paper.  A warning to all Tyrannosaurs I draw from now on: this is going to be my modern-day model/inspiration for you.  That crest!!!

"See Why We Call Them ANIMALS!" - The 1992 "Trials of Life" TV Ad!

Frequent readers probably wouldn't have to be told about this, but just in case, you all need to be watching the three part "Attenborough's Life Stories" miniseries on "Nature". Your PBS station may vary, but the final episode should be airing tonight, with the previous episodes being rerun through the beginning of this month.

As we all know, anything Sir David Attenborough is involved in will probably be very good, but this series has been particularly fascinating since it focuses on the man himself and his career. Science and technology have changed very dramatically in the past sixty years, and Attenborough has been around to see many of these changes firsthand. The first episode is particularly good, as Attenborough explains how new photography techniques essentially changed his entire career.

Indeed, this is such a lovely, poignant series centered on such a wonderful, sweet person, that this advertisement from the early 1990's comes across as even more batsh*t insane than it did the first time I saw it:





Okay. So the old (and, honestly, tired) joke about the 90's is that they were the X-TREEEEEM Decade. Everything was Darker and Edgier (tm), as well as raunchier, more violent, and too hot for TV. I tend to protest this (the 90's was also the decade of Beanie Babies, Barney and Friends, everyone suddenly being into angels, and "The Rosie O'Donnell Show" for cryin' out loud) but things like this make it hard.

I remember seeing this ad very often during TNT's reruns of "The Muppet Show" and classic cartoons. You can imagine the confused look on my face when I finally got the chance to watch the series years later (the late, lamented chain Buck-A-Book had some of the videos on sale). Really, the only segment in the series that fits the histrionic ad is the footage of chimpanzees hunting -- and evidently that's "safe" enough to show on the PBS series now.  Yeah.

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Art of the Day! Witness the relentless struggle to continue the bloodline!!!



Awww...

"Awwwww...!" - "Animal Odd Couples" Sketches

How about some more sketches I drew while watching "Nature"?  These are all from the episode "Animal Odd-Couples", with a couple of bonus sketches from "Magic of the Snowy Owls".

"It's So FLUFFY!!!" - "An Original Duck-umentary" Sketches

Longtime readers were probably expecting this one.  Without further ado, here are the sketches I drew during the "Nature" episode "An Original Duck-umentary":







If you missed it, this episode was nearly as excellent as "My Life as a Turkey".  Speaking of, that episode should be repeating tonight depending on your PBS affiliate.  This weekend is all about extant theropods anyway, so check both episodes out!

From Up On Hacker's Hill - Part Two

More watercolor studies of the views from Hacker's Hill - and some of the wildlife too!







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Make sure you tune into TCM this Sunday night for some rarely seen early animation goodies!

And next week, I will hopefully be writing one lengthy post, since I am waiting on something very interesting to be delivered. If all goes well, we'll be catching up with an old friend...

From Up On Hacker's Hill - Part One

The last run of posts have been very wordy, haven't they?  So this week, let's chill out a bit.  I'm going to share some watercolor sketches from a trip to see the incredible views from Hacker's Hill, one of the best-kept secrets of the Sebago Lakes region.  You get a fantastic view of the entire Lakes Region as well as, on a clear day, the White Mountains. 

I was a little overwhelmed by the views but I gave it my best shot. This run of paintings was a little abstract, just to get comfortable:

Yet more Sketching from "Nature"!

Drawings I did while watching the "Nature" episodes "Revealing the Leopards", "A Lemur's Tale", and "Born Wild',  You know the drill by now. :)