Bird Painting 101: Wire-tailed Manakins Part III

I left you hanging over the weekend. I am sorry. So much weeding to do, so little time. The burning question: what's going on here? Well, let me paint in some tail wires and I'll tell you.

The right male is tickling the face of the left male with his tail wires. He's swishing his tail rapidly back side to side and swatting the other bird in the face. In response, the left bird blinks and shakes his head but doesn't move. This is a pantomime of the courting dance of the wire-tailed manakin, performed between two males, presumably to demonstrate to watching females what they could be enjoying. 

I have yet to key up the darks and lights on these birds, hold on. 

Manakins in this genus (Pipra) do a lot of buttcentric dancing. The moonwalking red-capped manakin shot to viral Internet fame when the dance it has perfected over millenia was videotaped and set to Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean." I have mixed feelings about this, as you might expect.

This is a nice National Geographic video of dancing red-capped manakins. I'm not sure why there's a singing eastern wood-pewee in the sound track. Maybe pewees sing just before they head north. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt there. And please ignore the inane macho LCD commentary about dating (sigh, grrrr, eyeroll) and just look at those moves. What thighs. 

Manakins are magic; they seem to move without visible means of propulsion, sliding and popping along their perches faster than the eye can follow. They're smooth little characters and can be hilariously funny, too. I tried to capture some of that spirit in these paintings.  For reference, I used videos from ARKive.org. You can see how the wires are used in the first video. 

I feel unbelievably lucky to have such material at my fingertips. Sitting here in Whipple, Ohio, painting a bird I've never seen, and able to get it right. That is a miracle. This is the voice of a career illustrator, who started in 1976, having to dig through library stacks hoping there might be a tiny blurry black-and-white photo of the bird somewhere that I could use for reference. The chances of finding photos and video of wire-tailed manakin displays and nests then were zero to none. The digital revolution has changed all that, and I am humbled and thankful. 

Here's that flying male again. On the videos, the birds just appear and disappear, so fast do they fly, so I had to construct this bird from a photo of a hand-held bird with one wing stretched out.

The finished dancing pair.

And the finished plate. Thanks to Brandt and Julia Ryder for their support in commissioning this painting. 

Bird Painting 101: Wire-tailed Manakins, Part II

I got a wee bit ahead of myself with that flying bird. There is still lots to be done on the plate overall. I draw the female and her nest, using reference photos gleaned online. I'm amazed at the teeny tiny nest, made of leaves seemingly stitched together with cobwebs.

Many Neotropical birds build such tiny nests, barely noticeable among all the hanging doo-dads in a humid forest. They're trying to make the nests look like something other than a nest. This is because there are so many predators waiting to raid them.

Painting a nest is a lot like building a nest. Painstaking. I marvel at the artistry of the bird as I work. It really looks like a bunch of leaves stuck in a spider's web, nothing that might hold a tasty treat.

The other thing about tiny tropical nests is the tiny clutches of eggs laid in them. Many Neotropical birds lay only two or at most three eggs at a time. Once again, predation pressure is to blame for this. But the flip side of that is this: It's so difficult for tropical birds to fledge young in this snaky, rodenty, monkeyey, coatiey environment that many of them have astonishingly long lifespans. They need to, to be able to replace themselves. They try year after year, putting comparatively low investment in each nest. Manakins, for instance, may live into their thirties!

Whoops, forgot her tail wires. Females have them too. 

This gives them plenty of time to mature and work out awesome dance routines to lure that mate into tossing her hat into the ring. More on those later.

Here's a subadult male wire-tailed manakin. As I was painting this, I thought I might call this bird's portrait "Molting Sucks."

He's got a ways to go before he gets his crayon colors. Males start out looking like females, and gradually get nattier.

In watercolor, you paint the lighter, brighter colors first, then add the darks. Even though I'd like to save the reds and yellows for dessert. You can see I've tackled the poor molting male first. Get him out of the way, him and his pinfeathers sticking up like curlers in his hair. Poor kid.

Just starting to lay in the blacks on one male. 

You might fairly wonder what is going on here. 

Two male manakins doing whaaat?

Next time.

Bird Painting 101: Wire-tailed Manakins

Got myself a commission this past winter to paint wire-tailed manakins for an ornithologist who studies them. I love painting for ornithologists. I love it because it makes me ever so careful to get every particular right, and that appeals to the Science Chimp in me.

He wanted something that would look like a field guide plate, with a couple of behaviors, the varying plumage stages of the  male, the female and nest included. Why, it would be a pleasure! I adore manakins, and have painted a few of them and even gotten to ogle some at length in the wild, in Brasil, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras and Belize. I was stoked!

First, a draft.

It got reshuffled a bit.

Pencil drawings, in detail, of each bird on the watercolor paper. A map to follow. 

You have to paint the light bright colors first.

Laying in the blacks. I decide to use a true black (Lamp Black) rather than mix one. There is no brown in this bird, no blue...he's unequivocally black, white, yellow and red. Crayon colors. Great fun to paint. 

My reference for this bird is a photo of a bird, hand-held, with its wing stretched. I have to improvise on the far wing and everything else. But I think he looks fairly convincing. Now some darks.

Add his wire tail processes. I'll explain about those in a future post. (What are they for??) And some highlights, with Chinese white. Now he pops and shines, like a real bird. Or a slightly surreal bird. Manakins are nothing if not slightly surreal.

Next: Displaying males, and a female on her nest, all falling under the Zickbrush.