HUNGRY DUCKS

 

We've just spent a week in a log cabin in Surrey, England.  There was a pond on the site with several families of mallards who came every day to beg for food.  The tiny ducklings were so adorable but moved so quickly, following their mother, that I had to copy their markings from the photos I took to be able to colour my sketches!

Black-bellied Whistling Duck

This is another preliminary study for a larger work;  is very useful to perform this type of paint because we recognize aspects of expression, color and shape that can be highlighted in the final painting.

Technique: watercolor and gouache on  moleskine. 

Birds on the Lake

©2011 Carolyn A. Pappas, Birds on the Lake (9-12-11). Pen in large handbook sketchbook.

I was lucky enough to see some water birds when we were taking our last boat ride on the lake for the year. There is a family of three swans (two adults and one juvenile) that I've been noticing swimming around the lake. After doing some reading, I think these are mute swans because they have a knob on their forehead. At the bottom of the page, I sketched some ducks, which look like little blurs because they were moving so fast.

I also spotted a heron on the water's edge (lower right). This particular heron likes to walk along our shoreline and fish from our dock. Before we took the boat out of the water, I spotted it climbing onto the boat to fish! Even though he moves very slowly, I was still only able to make stick figure like sketches of it (see below).


©2011 Carolyn A. Pappas, Heron on the Move (9-13-11). Pen in large handbook sketchbook.

Quacking and Squawking - Maree

You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.
- Chinese Proverb


Duck sketches in Moleskine Watercolour sketchbook 8" x 5.5"

As I was filling the bird feeders yesterday morning, I heard a terrible raucous and as I looked up, six ducks came flying over, quacking and chatting, sounding like a busy freeway in the sky. I managed to identify some South African Shell ducks and some Mallards. Peculiar that they were all flying together, but given the Mallard's tendency to mate with anything and anyone, it's probably not that surprising. But there again, what I thought was the Shell ducks might have been female Mallards.


Duck sketches in Moleskine Watercolour sketchbook 8" x 5.5"

This is done in my Moleskine Watercolour Sketchbook, which, when opened, is too long for the scanner to cover both pages, therefore the two pictures.

Dead Duckling - Maree Clarkson

Death--- the last sleep? No the final awakening.
---Walter Scott


"Carolina Duckling" pencil sketch in Daily Nature Journal

This little Carolina duckling (Wood Duck) was very weak when it hatched and it also had a cripple leg. Despite all my efforts, it didn't survive and died 3 days later. This is from a sketch I did in an old Nature Journal and during the time when I was still breeding with these wonderful little ducks.

Wood Ducks - Maree Clarkson

Being in nature and allowing ourselves to absorb both its gentle beauty and fierce power is a healing act. We do not have to travel far to open ourselves to this gift.

"Carolina Ducks" (American Wood Ducks) watercolour

I've got a pair of Carolina ducks (American Wood Ducks) and a few weeks ago I found the male dead in the pond. I've no idea what happened. He showed no signs of being sick and he wasn't old, younger than his female. As usual, he's the more colourful of the pair, with the female being beige and brown.

I did this painting of them in May this year, but the tree branch was added for interest. Doing a quick sketch of them was fairly easy, as they stood in one place for quite some time, keeping an eye on me sitting on the garden bench close-by. Getting the colour was another matter, because once they moved off, it was constant motion and I would only get glimpses of colours as they swam to and fro on the pond, wondering when I'm going to be leaving them in peace again. This was the last pair I had left over from my breeding stock before selling all the ducks when we moved from our previous smallholding to where we are now in 2003.

I bred with these ducks for a number of years, always had about 10 pairs, each pair raising approximately 10 ducklings at any given time, or should I say, I would be raising about 50 ducklings at a time - they are very delicate and fragile when small, and have to be removed from the parents within the first day otherwise more than half usually don't survive due to various factors like getting cold, wet or picking up some disease. I housed about 5 to a box, with a light to keep them warm and water in water-drinkers impossible to throw over, sometimes having 5 or 6 boxes to tend to. They would be pinioned within two days of hatching, otherwise you would have ducks (and then not indigenous at that), flying all over the neighbourhood. Then, when they were about 12 weeks old, they would be released to the pond area, waiting to be identified as male or female at about 5-6 months old, when I could sell them as pairs.

Each one had to be tagged with birth date and from which parents, so that one doesn't pair a female with a brother, but made sure she was betrothed to a neighbour to keep the strain pure.

In America these ducks nest high up in the trees, and then the babies plummet from the nest onto the soft leaf litter below, amazingly surviving such a long fall. When they nest at the top of tall buildings, the journey down is far more hazardous.