Oprah's Book of the Week: The Bluebird Effect!

Tooty, toot, toot. Rooty, toot, toot. Sometimes I grab my little horn and toot it. This is one of those times.

The Bluebird Effect is Book of the Week at Oprah.com.

As in Oprah's Book Club. My book got the Big Point from the Fickle Finger of Fate.

What is a bird book doing there, in the first place, and what is a bird book written by me doing there?

The gods must be crazy.

Bill's been saying he's the Steadman of Whipple. All four of us went to Bar-B-Cutie in Marietta yesterday and ate a celebratory meal of fried okra. I drank a quarter of a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc that night, then quit. I'm a cheap date.

I try not to obsess about it, about what it might mean for book sales. I only check its Amazon sales rank about four times a day. That's not neurotic. It had been hovering at around 6,000, and now it's right up around 1,000. Meaning there are only 1,000 other titles selling better than it is. Which feels pretty good, for a book about raising baby hummingbirds and chimney swifts. There are an awful lot of books in this world.

This is pretty arcane stuff, the brass tacks of dealing with orphaned and injured birds. I think it's interesting; most of you think it's interesting, but would the general public?

I wonder. Maybe it's all just bizarre enough to get someone's attention, or maybe it's the 320 paintings and drawings that did it. Maybe it's the insanely beautiful production Houghton Mifflin Harcourt lavished on it.

Maybe it's just luck.

I think about it all as I grub in the dirt, pulling creeping Charlie off my asparagus shoots and throwing wads of weeds over my shoulder. I wonder if I may have written and illustrated a book that will sell well at long last.

 A book that has crossover potential from the usual suspects (birders and nature enthusiasts) to Oprah's Book Club people. I know that Letters from Eden has that potential, but Oprah didn't bite when my publicist, Taryn Roeder, sent it last time.

I'm just grateful, that's all.

Fielding pre-order requests at the Midwest Birding Symposium in September, 2011. Finally got them all sent out!

All it makes me want to do is write more, and that's the best feeling of all.

If y'all want to go over to Oprah's Book Club page and leave a salient comment, I'd be much obliged. Don't worry. They don't send you a bunch of emailed stuff when you register.  As always, nice reviews on the Amazon page for The Bluebird Effect help, too. There's a lady who docked it a star because one of the chapters is about ivory-billed woodpeckers, and everyone knows they're extinct!  Hmmph. And another lady who said, "If you want my opinion, her husband is a saint to put up with it all!"

Well, howdy-doo to you, too.

That's not neurotic, to worry about that stuff, right? Whoops, slipped to 1,500. All right. I'm going to go pull some weeds, plant some peas. Uniform: Round House overalls, workboots and a sports bra. It's a look. And no, there are no pictures of it.

As always, you can hit the order buttons on the right sidebar if you want to buy a book personalized by me. I can't meet Amazon's prices, and I don't even try. As long as you have the book, I don't mind where you got it. It just makes me happy that you like it. I'm thankful for your patronage, thankful for this wonderful life lived amongst birds. The blue-gray gnatcatchers got in today, and a yellow-throated warbler was singing from a creek valley as I drove home. It's all beginning again.

ABA Bird of the Year, Part Five--Finis!

See why I was so excited to paint the male evening grosbeaks?

Here are their ghosts...

By now you’ve gathered that most of the work of doing a bird painting, at least for me, is putting the bird in a believable setting. For me, painting the birds themselves is dessert, because it’s effortless and fun. Well, I shouldn’t say it’s effortless, because male evening grosbeaks are tricky to paint. I’m really excited to move on to the males, knowing what impact their colors will have on the whole piece.

The key to painting male evening grosbeaks is laying down a bright yellow underpainting and letting it dry completely. When I then stroke burnt umber over top of the dry underpainting, the yellow shines through. The final effect should conjure a good golden-brown honey mustard, with touches of pure hotdog-ready French’s on the coronet, rump and flanks. Mixing the two colors would give mud, which I don’t want; I want an overlay of burnt umber and sepia with glimmers of yellow shining through, because that’s what I see in the plumage of the study skins I’m working from.

Here, in the upper left corner, is the male I thought would work for the “iconic bird of the year,” but the general consensus at ABA HQ was that the pose was a bit odd. In the end, the pose was deemed too outré for use on a sticker or patch, so I drew another male (also from the same batch of life sketches) in a more typical and easily interpreted pose for this application.

That’s OK. I’m used to having my better ideas not work out in the end. Like having a flock on the cover…

 

I'm always saving something back for dessert. In this case it's the pink apple blossoms.

The painting's almost done, with pink apple blossoms painted in. I’ve done a bit of glazing of Chinese white on the birds to give their plumage a sheen, and shadowed the whites in their wings as well. They’re eating apple blossoms, something grosbeaks like to do in spring.

Here's a more saturated photo of the piece. Juicing up the blacks usually helps any painting.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this walk through the process of creating Birding’s new cover and its Bird of the

Year.

Stay tuned for information on purchasing this painting! No fooling! Proceeds go to evening grosbeak conservation.

New Bird Species in North America!

The newly described Dun Mountain Warbler, Pseudoseiurus monochromis, as painted by ME!

Gentle readers:

I’ve been holding this story in for weeks. I’m about to burst with excitement. How often does a bird painter get asked to depict a newly discovered species—in North America?? It’s every bird painter’s best dream. But enough of my yakkin'. I’ll let the paintings and the press release speak for themselves:

Ornithologists from the National Bird Observatory (NBO) in Osprey Chalk, Connecticut, are pleased to announce the discovery of a North American bird species that is new to science. The dun mountain warbler (Pseudoseiurus monochromis) was recently discovered by bear hunters on all-terrain vehicles trying to reach forested habitat on the far side of a 10,000-acre mountaintop removal site in southern West Virginia. The species was described by ornithologists from the NBO, who were alerted to its existence when the West Virginia bear hunters (who were being filmed for a reality television show) remarked on camera that "it was the only thing we seen that was alive for miles around."

"This species has apparently moved into the expansive wastelands left behind by mountaintop removal (MTR), and is thriving there," said Patrick Fitzmichael, director of the NBO and chairman of the E. R. Hare Citizen Science Endowment at the NBO. "We found more than 35 nests in southern West Virginia in just one weekend of searching. We think that this population grew out of remnant bands of birds that were living and apparently breeding above the treeline in the Appalachians on scree slopes where no one in their right mind would ever go for birding or anything else."

The natural history of the dun mountain warbler is most unusual. It nests on barren, rocky ground in mountaintop removal sites, laying its eggs among the stones and exposed clay. It flips rocks and pebbles looking for invertebrates, colonizing recent MTR sites, scavenging prey from reptiles and amphibians to insects, even following earth moving equipment with an alert expression and pertly wagging tail, waiting to see what is stirred up by the digging.  

The plumage of the dun mountain warbler is described as dirt-brown and gray—or dun—which helps the bird and its cryptically colored eggs to blend in perfectly with their surroundings. Little is known about the dun mountain warbler's courtship, but field researchers were able to catch a short recording of its song, which is described as "a loud beeping tone similar to a piece of heavy earth-moving equipment backing up."

A spokesperson for the Consolation Coal Company reacted this way to the announcement: "We've known for years that our efforts to turn unusable tree-choked mountain habitat into nice, flat, open areas would be good for the environment. If a bird lays a egg on a mountain, what happens? It rolls to the bottom and breaks. The baby bird dies. We're happy that nature is finally realizing that our mining operations not only mean jobs for the local community, but they also make good places for birds to nest. Now THAT's family values, which is what we've always stood for."

Thus far, the dun mountain warbler seems to find its center of abundance in southern West Virginia's coal country, and NBO is mounting expeditions to neighboring states of Kentucky and Tennessee to survey MTR sites there. The future looks bright for this specialized but opportunistic species as mountaintop removal proceeds apace. The Obama Administration has recommended a study to determine if the species needs more breeding habitat. "We're ready to approve more than 150 MTR mine site permits if it means we can help this rare warbler survive and even thrive in the future."

 The birding community reacted with great enthusiasm. Jeffrey Giordano, president of the American Birders' Society said. "This is AWESOME! A new bird for our members to chase after. This will certainly be our Bird of the Year for 2013!" (And I'm hoping I'll get to paint it then, too! I mean, not to be a Bird of the Year hog, but...who you gonna call, right?)

Bill Thomas III, editor of Birders' Watching Digest said, "This is the feel-good birding story of the year! More habitat for an endangered species--and a NEW one at that!"

The Old River Birding Festival in Oak Harbor, West Virginia, will be offering customized tours to see the dun mountain warbler from now through September. Contact the festival at www.birding-wv.com.