Looking at a Nighthawk

I'm running again, have been since late June, doinky arthritic toe and all. It's fine. It hurts sometimes when there's a big weather front coming in. I'm careful not to stand on tippytoes, wear flip flops, roll it under or push off on it too hard. You do what you must. I'm almost pathetically grateful to be able to run at all, and never a morning comes that I fail to count my blessings.

Some blessings are a little odd. This one made me very sad. It's the height of common nighthawk migration (early September) in southeast Ohio. And I was so, so sad to find one car-hit, head bowed, in the gravel of my beloved road as I chugged along. This is the position it was in when I found it. Almost didn't see it, but there was a bird where there had been no bird before. 

Still of the nighthawk

Merciless chunk of metal

Bird angel struck down

Come, look at this miracle with me. The most interesting roadkill yet on my running route. After two years, the count is three American toads, a black rat snake (get your tissues out for the post about that one); an immature American robin, a female box turtle (waaay too sad to blog about), and a big male opossum (also too sad). 

 I see right away that it's an immature bird, because it's got reddish flammulation running all through its facial plumage. And the throat patch, which would be bright white on an adult male, is buffy, too. Probably a young female born this year on a city rooftop somewhere.

Nighthawks lay two white eggs on gravel or sand, and most now nest on flat gravel rooftops--they're relatively free of predators but for the occasional rat, I'd expect. 

I'm fascinated by its enormous gape. The better for snagging dragonflies, moths and June bugs.

The last thing a giant silkmoth sees.

She's got no rictal bristles to speak of, which is an interesting factoid about nighthawks. The closely related whip-poor-wills and chuck-will's-widows (all caprimulgids like the nighthawk) have giant rictal bristles coming out like whiskers. Go figure. Still thinking about that discrepancy.

Such gorgeous liquid eyes. When I found her they were perfect and rigor mortis had yet to set in. I think she'd been killed within a couple hours of my finding her, probably in the pre-dawn "rush hour" on my country road.

I hadn't noticed these cool white headlights on the leading edge of the wing, but I mean to look for them on the next migrating flock that floats over.
How about that herringbone underwing covert action?

Ahh. The pectinate (comblike) middle toenail. Used in preening. And you can see a filoplume hanging off it. So poignant, to think of her running through her feathers with her toes perhaps just before she fluttered into a truck grille. Well, as you can see, her tiny hooked bill isn't much good for preening. So she has a comb on her toe. I would so love to see how a nighthawk uses its pectinate nail.

I have often thought it would be handy to have a built-in hairbrush somewhere on a digit.

The right wing. Those white slashes are diagnostic for common nighthawk.

Were this an adult male, it would have white slashes in the tail, too. 

Beautiful underwing. In flight, common nighthawks look like drunken terns, zigging and zagging side to side up and down in pursuit of erratic insect prey. Or just because flying a straight line bores them.

I know the feeling.

So into the freezer with a date and place label she'll go, and thence to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, whose Zickefoose specimen collection is well over 100. I'd much rather be looking up at her than down. But she will not go to waste.

Days Three and Four

I've started a male bay-breasted warbler, boreal forest breeder and champion long-distance migrant. These little guys may breed in the Yukon and winter in Venezuela. Imagine flying that long and far every spring and fall with only your own two wings to power you. And much of that flight is over open ocean! Egad. We make a big deal about driving for a day or two, and we're just sitting there, burning fossil fuel. These tiny guys are doing it on fat and muscle, and a bay-breasted warbler weighs less than a first-class letter. If you stop and think about it, birds can make you feel like a total slug.

Here's a nice closeup of the paper, to show the quiet but present tooth that it has. I work on Winsor & Newton cold press 140 lb. watercolor paper. Sometimes I stray to other papers but I always come home to it. I've long since shaken my addiction to W&N's overpriced watercolor paints and brushes in favor of Daniel Smith's wonderful paint and synthetic blend brushes. But Winsor & Newton's paper is consistently great and worth the price.

I love working in grays. They're fun to mix and go on smooth as butter. He's a snap to paint, and the best part is tricking in the little black streaks and spots. I chose the bay-breasted warbler as an ambassador from the threatened boreal forests.
The ruddy turnstone was my emblem of a bird with a vulnerable spot in its migratory route--the horseshoe crab beaches of New Jersey and Delaware.
The bobolink stood for vanishing native grasslands, and the hooded warbler for habitat fragmentation and cowbird nest parasitism. (You can see all that in the painting, right?) No? Hmm. You must not be looking at the clouds hard enough.

Once again, the peach is strategically located to pick up this warbler's fabulous designer color scheme.

Whoops, where did that black-headed grosbeak come from? What can I say? It was a day of fast painting. I wanted at least one exclusively Western bird in the painting, so it couldn't be said to have an Eastern bias. I also like their flash. Considered a rose-breasted grosbeak, but decided on a black-headed because it would speak to Western birders. Ooh, it's starting to look like a painting now.

Little Charles is dying to peel the masking film off the nighthawk now. Those mischievous eyes! What if I just...peeled this off...just starting at the corner...dum de dum dum dum, la la la...

Soon enough, dearest tatty bird. But you don't get to do it. You might get carried away.

Part of the reason I started working at the bottom of the sheet is that it gets harder and harder to reach my work as I paint up. I know, I should use an easel so I can stand in front of it. But old habits die hard. I like to work flat, and wreck my back as I crouch over my work, sometimes on my elbows and knees. Maybe I'll try an easel for the next big painting. I can hear Debby Kaspari, who built an easel on her dining room wall for crying out loud, groaning. Zick! Just do it!

Instead, I turn the thing sideways and twist my body around so I can see what I'm doing. I have reference photos torn from magazines all over the painting, and my laptop, with reference photos cued up, is on the drawing table along with the palette and HUGE painting and patter-footed macaw. Note that I have my painting water (normally in a big plastic jar) in a small, heavy tumbler to reduce the chance that I'll tip it on the painting or laptop.
The nighthawk's wings. When painting a bird with lots of bars and stripes, I try to make them a bit messy so the bird doesn't look fake. Too messy, and you lose the sense of the pattern. Too neat, and the bird looks like a carving or paint-by-number model.
And he's done. A bit of an all-day sucker, that one, between the contortions and the size of the image, and all those little stars and bars. I chose a nighthawk because they are just about my favorite fall migrants. I always drop everything and stare at them until they're dots on the horizon. They're so vulnerable, too, because the gravel-topped flat roofs they prefer to nest on are being replaced by cheaper asphalt, which isn't a suitable nesting substrate at all. And it appears they are quite susceptible to West Nile virus, how awful. It seems that everything beautiful is in peril in some way.

But I'm still having loads of fun painting, even as I mull over why each bird has earned its place in my flock, and looking forward to my dessert. Hint: It'll be strawberry gelato. Definitely saving the best for last.
So glad you're enjoying this. It's really fun for me, too. Sometimes I sit back and think about how much more fun life is with a camera. I still can't think of myself as a photographer, but I take a whole lot of pictures, and my camera makes it possible to share moments in time with you. Anybody see the lady in the clouds?
Happy birthday, R, wherever you may be.