Let's Paint an Eight-foot Duck!

 I'd like to give you an up-close look at the process of painting a common merganser, about eight feet long.

I found some cool videos online of mergansers underwater. Things happen to colors underwater, as you can see...everything goes gray and dull and silvery. So there's a lot of lying here about the clarity of the water and the lighting, too. There's a push and pull between wanting to show it as it really would look and wanting to give it the detail and color that will make a satisfying image for people to enjoy.

My sketch, which got blown up with a digital projector. I have a hazy idea of how the feathering would go.

I started slapping paint on this the same afternoon I finished the Problematic Otter. It felt so dang good to be painting a bird at last. It didn't matter that it was bigger than me. I was just so happy to be out of the mocha mud of fur. Don't get me wrong--I'd be glad to paint more otters. 

But birds are where I live and breathe.

I blocked out the colors and markings. It went very fast. As you can see I am wearing one of my finest T-shirts, the better to get paint all over it.

photo by Sarah Arnold, courtesy clutchmov.com

Within a couple of hours, it looked like a merganser. And then all the light was gone and it was time to go home. We painted in the tunnel by natural light only, and it was quite a challenge in the middle of the passage. Much more fun to paint at the ends!

 I took this photo of it (below) to take home and ponder, because something about it was bugging me. It's an enormous boon to be able to take a digital photo and look at something very large, reduced to very small. When I was doing a lot of illustration, I used a reducing glass to look at my drawings to see how they'd look when reproduced. Same deal here. Things jump out at you that you can't see when you've got your nose to an enormous duck on an enormous wall. 

And what jumped out at me was that it looked flat. The shadow running along the bottom wasn't relevant to the overall form. And the feather tracts divided the form up into sections that kind of lifted off the form, and distracted from its overall shape. Hmm. After sleeping on it, I had the solution. I came in the next morning, fresh, and decided to define the overall form of the bird with feathers. Everyone around me was painting scales.

 I decided I would paint some feathers, even though you can't see individual feathers on a diving merganser. I had to round out that form, and the feathers would travel over it and tell of its shape. I sought out some photos that would tell me the size and direction of the feathers, because none of that was  evident in my blurry video grab of a diving bird. 

And when the feathers traveled over the surface of the bird, it was suddenly more rounded, solid, more beautiful to my eye. Not only that, but I could reach most of it without a ladder! Heaven! I'm painting a huge bird, and I can reach all of it without risking a fall! (I'm storing away these observations for future mural projects. The others were all painting at eye level--it seemed like my stuff was mostly huge and high up!)

photo by Michelle Waters, courtesy clutchmov.com

Add some silvery bubbles, and that duck is paddling underwater. I added a little eelgrass, too. 

As you enter the tunnel from the south, this is the scene to your left.

I was happy with my merganser, and looking forward to finishing with a bang--painting a diving belted kingfisher nabbing a chub! 

The Winter Gulls

In a tough winter, the cool big gulls from the Far North come down to our ever-so-slightly warmer climes to find open water and food. King of them all is the hulking glaucous gull, shown here absolutely dwarfing herring and ring-billed gulls. They can be larger than the great black-backed, and they have a distinctive look, with a big puffy head and, by proportion, a small-looking dark eye. 

They also have the grace to be nearly all white, even down to the primary flight feathers. So it's not tough to pick a glaucous gull, like this immature bird, out of a flock of sleeping herring and ring-billed gulls. Herring gulls have the red bill spot, while ring-bills have a black ring around the bill tip. The chocolatey gulls in this shot are young herrings. By this time of winter, young ring-bills, like the bird on the left edge of the photo, look much like adults, with a lot of gray mantle feathers showing. That's because a ring-bill is a two-year gull, while the herring takes four years to attain adult plumage. 

Every once in awhile, the glaucous gull would spread its wings and hop a few feet, then settle down again. Wow.

A few dozen birds over, an immature Iceland gull rested. It's dead center, with the black bill tip and the white primaries. Icelands are smaller than glaucous gulls, but their plumage is similar.

All around, rafts of diving ducks floated. Two beautiful drake white-winged scoters joined the greater scaup and common goldeneyes. I love the white eye crescent (actually feathers behind the eye, whose iris is also white). At a distance, it looks like they're winking at you.

A female common merganser arrows by. The clean white patch beneath her chin and the spotless breast, contrasting with a clear-cut sienna head, differentiates her from a red-breasted merganser. There were easily 1,000 common mergs in a single raft out there. Whoo.

I lucked into four long-tailed ducks in the two days I birded Dunkirk Harbor. This is as close as I could get. Two have hauled out onto the ice at the rear right of the photo. You can see their dark round cheek spots. I absolutely love combing through flocks of waterfowl, looking for the new and different.

I mentioned the abundance of death in my first post. When you get this many birds crowded into one spot, some of them are going to die. Disease and starvation take their toll. Some haul out and freeze right to the ice. It must be an awful way to go. When the temperatures hover around zero F for weeks at a time, somebody's going to die. 

I have heard recently that great black-backed gulls around Cape Cod have been observed this winter, holding diving ducks underwater until they drown, then eating them. This is probably slightly outside the normal GBBG foraging behavior, especially at the frequency with which it's being seen. But cultural trends travel like wildfire in birds. As a bird rehabilitator, I know that if you want to get a bird to do something, put its cage next to that of a bird who knows how to do it. Birds learn largely by copying what their neighbors are doing. This is why, in late summer, I'll see young scarlet tanagers, common yellowthroats and orioles (insectivores for the most part) coming in to investigate seed feeders, wondering if there's anything there for them. Everybody else seems to be finding food there. Let's give it a try.

With the number of birds freezing to the ice or dying from starvation here, I doubt this young great black-backed (black tail) or glaucous gull (mocha-white overall) had to drown the red-breasted merganser to get a meal. A herring gull picks at a dead shad in the next booth at the Macabre Cafe.

The glaucous gull dipped its merganser breast filet repeatedly in harbor water, then flew off with its prize.

Despite the death of the merganser, it made me feel good to see everybody eating on such a frigid day. I dug into a jar of almonds and thought about how nice it was to be in a heated metal capsule, swaddled in goosedown, eating almonds instead of frozen merganser. I remain in the thrall of birds, who have no such place to retreat, and routinely survive conditions that would kill me in a matter of minutes.

A Living Building

The Lab of Ornithology appears to me to have been designed around two major aesthetic concerns. First, the trove of bird art, like that in the Fuertes library and the Fisher’s Island panel, which have been beautifully integrated into the space. A second goal was to showcase the natural wonders in the wetlands just outside, visible through huge windows all around. It’s like the biggest blind you’ve ever seen.

Though my time was limited, I was determined to take in just a bit of the gorgeous swampy bit of Sapsucker Woods immediately around the building. It’s truly another world, quiet, laced with mulched paths, swarming with birds. Canada geese were living their lives, getting it on, preening


and making a general honking ruckus. One pair has claimed ownership of a part of the path near the bird feeder, and challenges passersby in a quiet way. I saw several toddlers try to pet this bird. Not recommended.Does this goose look intelligent to you? It does to me. There's really something going on in those eyes. It hisses and intimidates people who come too close. You don’t want a bite from that bony, serrated bill. There were a couple of geese with permanently injured wings, making a good living, mates by their side, at the pond. One bird acts as an unofficial greeter, hanging out right by the entry. It's neat to see birds the second you pull into the parking lot of the Lab.

Mallards kept bombing over and dropping in, and I played at photographing them, with some pretty cool results.As a young bird painter, I devoured a book called Prairie Wings, by Edgar M. Queeney. Using the rudimentary black-and-white equipment of the time, he captured amazing photos of ducks in flight. If only I could go back in time and hand Mr. Queeney my little Digital Rebel. What fun he'd have.
A mushmouse swam by a resting hooded merganser (the white spot directly back of the rat).

A pair of common mergansers. When they hauled out on a log, I could see the bulk of their bodies. They’re like icebergs. Note the wood duck nesting boxes, which common and hooded mergansers may also use. The place is set up for birds, and the resident geese know and exploit that.

I had to chuckle when the black-capped chickadee I photographed turned out, on closer inspection, to be color-banded. This is the Lab of Ornithology, after all. Who knows what secrets these birds have revealed?

The incandescent glow of a mallard’s head. His mate hides in shadow.

I was stunned to see a big brown bat flying in daylight, dipping down to drink. I never thought my photos would be acceptable, but they aren’t bad, considering that I was focusing manually, and the bat was dipping and diving like, well, a bat. This is a really neat shot, and it's even, finally, in good focus.
I hoped he wasn’t ill; bats all over the Northeast are turning up with “white-nose syndrome,” a disease of apparently fungal origin that is killing them by the thousands, and sending them out of their hibernacula much too early. Please be well and travel safely, brown bat.
This ends my sojurn at the Lab. The "Letters from Eden" show hangs through mid-July. Please check it out if you're in the area.

Merganser Surprise

On my solo birding day on Sunday, I checked out two peninsulae that project out into Lake Superior. One is called Bark Point, and it's long and narrow, with sloughs along the east edge. The sun was hitting beautifully off the rounded lake rocks and pewter water. You can see how far behind the trees are in this frigid lakeshore place--they're just coming out. Ours in southern Ohio are almost at full Juneness, even with the April cold spell that froze their first set of leaves right off.

A pair of common mergansers, which breed in large cavities in sycamores, usually, were paddling close into shore. This is the only duck in which the female sports a crest and the male doesn't. He does have a puffy pompadour on his hind neck (kind of like BOTB's).



I moved slowly closer to the mergansers as they paddled away. Got one more shot of the drake, lovely bird that he is.
I stepped out onto a little wooden dock and two different ducks burst right out from under it. From the intricate pattern of their wings, I knew I had red-breasted mergansers this time! I fired away as they pattered off into the lake. I felt so at one with my camera, so happy to be recording them to look at later. The moment was so fleeting, and I knew I was capturing something gorgeous. Beautiful, beautiful, and just about as much fun as I know how to have. Thank you, mergansers; thank you, Canon image-stabilizing lens!These two mergansers--common and red-breasted-- are among the largest ducks in North America. All the more amazing that they're cavity nesters. Red-breasted mergansers nest in Wisconsin, too, though I'm so used to seeing them on salt water in winter that it was strange to see them in summer on fresh water. They're almost tanklike--look at the proportion of head to body. The other thing I think is cool is their indeterminate number of tail feathers. Most birds have a determinate, even number--ten or twelve, and that doesn't vary. If I count right, these birds have something like seventeen tail feathers. You'll find this trait in grouse and turkeys too. Some have a dozen, some have 16, some have 19...I don't understand why that should be, but it is, and it's one of the things that bird painters need to know. Ah, birds.