a fallen jewel

Hummingbirds are the hardest bird to draw from life --- they just move too fast! The bird drawings in my previous post were sketched from a couple of field guides.

Unfortunately, this sketch was sketched from 'life'. Bill found this dead hummingbird in his woodshop. We aren't sure why it died.

The colors are iridescent green or black, depending on how the light hits it -- very hard for me to depict in watercolor! This is a female black-chinned hummer; the black chin or hood appears only on the males.

Hummingbird Migration--Vickie Henderson

This is the best time of year to watch hummingbirds!  Migration is in full swing in Tennessee with males migrating from the north and the first nesting juveniles out of the nest making feeder activity in backyards and natural areas very busy.

Juvenile hummingbirds look just like the females before the young males develop their red gorget feathers.  But if you spend time watching, you can identify some of the juveniles by behavior.  

Tentative and slower in flight initially, juveniles investigate everything, including you and every colorful flower.  In only a few days, they show the aggressive temperament that hummingbirds are so noted for.  The chasing and conflict we see in our gardens is practice for survival on wintering grounds in Central America where they will compete for nectar and insects with other hummingbird species. 

Visit Vickie Henderson Art for a fun look at Knoxville's Wonder of Hummingbirds Festival and see how hummingbirds are banded.  At Vickie's Sketchbook find more information about hummingbirds and the above sketches.   

hummingbirds

When we moved here to central Texas, there was a wee wooden sign posted in one corner of our property reading "Lake Forest Wild Bird Sanctuary". It has proven to be fact!

At our small 1920 apartment building in Kansas, we saw lots of house sparrows and, rarely, an occasional blue jay or cardinal. A year or so ago an unknown raptor nested in our old elm tree, scaring away all other birds (except those silly, brave sparrows).

Here in the woods, we have identified over 30 types of birds in our yard in the past 7 months, many more in the neighborhood. And they keep on coming! Of course, when I chose to sketch as many as I could see on Thursday, none showed up except the constant hummingbirds . . . . We have both ruby-throated and black-chinned hummers.

(Who knew they actually SQUEAK like a dog's squeaky toy?!? I knew you could hear the "hum" of their wings but our hummers perch in a nearby crepe myrtle and squeak at us!)

Fun with Hummingbirds!

My favorite morning activity this time of year is to take my cup of coffee out on the patio and watch the hummingbird activity.  I added new flowers to my hummingbird garden in the spring and the rewards are plentiful!  More hummingbirds nectaring flowers to photograph and paint!

Above you see one of my most recent hummingbird sketches--a hummer nectaring monarda.  In Knoxville, TN, USA, my bird club hosted its hummingbird festival last Saturday  For the event, I combined this image with "hummer with black and blue salvia", and my "male hummingbird study" into a boxed set of note cards. It is a treat to see my images displayed on art items and talk about art with people who walk up to admire them! At the same time, I get to promote a bird I love--hummingbirds!

Above, a juvenile ruby-throated hummingbird visits black and blue salvia.

For more hummingbird images, visit:  Vickie's Sketchbook.  And for a glimpse of the fun we had at the festival visit:  The Wonder of Hummingbirds Festival.  I enjoyed seeing my hummingbird art as the logo art for this festival!

Hummingbird and Black and Blue Salvia

This is one of my favorite times during the summer months. The first brood juvenile hummingbirds are out of the nest and the hummingbirds at my feeders have increased more than three times.

I planted a hummingbird garden earlier in the summer looking forward to this occasion. It hasn't been easy to maintain. I've also had plenty of other wildlife--voles, chipmunks and moles! They've up-end plants and tunneled beneath them taking away the earth from the roots. As a result, many had to be transferred to containers! The hummingbirds don't care and there are plenty of blooms, so I guess that makes us all happy. 

Visit the Hummingbird Days of Summer at Vickie's Sketchbook to learn more about how we are celebrating hummingbirds in Tennessee.  Also visit Hummingbirds and Pollination to see the relationship between hummers and pollen in action!  

Hummingbird Sketch Bookmark!

Check out this exciting book mark!

I love working with a great graphic designer! Actually, there was no work involved on my part. Just a nice fit with Melinda Fawver,  in Knoxville, TN, fellow member of the Knoxville Chapter of the Tennessee Ornithological Society (KTOS). Melinda designed this beautiful bookmark as a promotional tool for the
2012 Hummingbird Festival:  

The Wonder of Hummingbirds.

My hummingbird watercolor, the focal point for the bookmark was a fun experiment with color and light, in an effort to capture the movement and energy of hummingbirds.  I am delighted to see it promoting these wonderful birds that are so amazing to have in our yards.

Hummingbird migration season will be cranking up soon as northern breeding birds begin moving south and the broods of local hummers begin to fledge.  I am already seeing increasing visits to my feeders.  In our area, as in many others, it is especially important to keep nectar feeders fresh because of the extreme temperatures and drought.  In Knoxville, east Tennessee, we had 107 degrees F last Saturday in the middle of a string of three-digit days.  We are all, birds included, eagerly waiting for our next full day of steady rain.

To see the original sketch for the bookmark on Sketching in Nature visit:    Hummingbird Studies.  Also click this link to see my attempts to capture hummingbirds in flight.

For more information about our Hummingbird Festival and hummingbirds visit:  2012 Hummingbird Festival, Knoxville, TN and to see more of my hummingbird sketches, visit hummingbirds at Vickie's Sketchbook.  You cannot watch these birds without falling in love with them!

Happy Independence Day, USA!

Sketching Hummingbirds in Flight--Vickie Henderson

I have had the exceptional pleasure of enjoying the largest seasonal migration of hummingbirds I have witnessed in recent years.  Almost a week ago, as a cold front was moving in, I arrived home from the office to find more than fifty hummingbirds converging on my feeders all at once, eager to drink and take advantage of the front.  

With plenty still moving through last weekend, I sat outside with them for a while and tried sketching them.  A fascinating experience.  Hummingbirds move their wings at a speed of 40-80 beats per second and their flying speed ranges from 30-50 mph.  In addition they are hot-tempered and territorial when it comes to their nectar source which they need for their high-energy life styles, so trying to sketch them in flight is a considerable adjustment for your visual memory.  

What was nearly as fascinating as watching the birds, was noticing changes in my focus and perception.  How my mind began to adjust, simplifying and searching for specific shapes, such as the line of the back as they hovered, the shape of the main body, the distance between head and shoulder, the way that beak comes out of the face.  Without looking at the paper, I visually tried to grab a shape, just one.  It was like experiencing the short-hand version of both memory and drawing.   

After about an hour of sketching, I snapped some images of the same flight positions I had been trying to sketch outside and put about six of them in a digital slide show on my laptop.  I tried sketching again while the slide show was in motion.  This was amazing. Sketching seemed effortless at this speed!  Not what I would have experienced without the attempt to sketch them in "real time".

The sketch above was my favorite even though it was sketched from the slide show.  It was in creating this sketch with such ease that I realized how much I had learned from my efforts!  

To see more about this sketching experience, visit:  Sketching Hummingbirds in Flight at Vickie's Sketchbook.
And to see amazing numbers of ruby-throated hummingbirds and their beautiful feathers up close, visit:  Swarming Hummers and The Beauty of Hummingbird Feathers at Vickie Henderson Art.

Hummingbird Studies--Vickie Henderson

This is my favorite time of year to watch hummingbirds.  The heavy migration time in the east varies depending on where you live.  In east Tennessee it's now.  Tropical storm Lee has pushed cold air and lots of rain our way and hummingbirds are coming down in droves, escaping the wind and rain.

This creates a perfect opportunity to enjoy and observe their behavior.  I have five feeders out now and they are all busy.  Yesterday while refilling two of them, I was amazed to see that every feeder had three to four hummers settled on it, quietly drinking.  Just what makes them settle down peacefully for a moment is a mystery of subtle hummingbird communication.  It doesn't last long.  A moment later, they are chirping with tails fanned and giving chase!

Hummingbirds from the north begin migrating through Tennessee in July.  Last year by September 19th, all of our male Ruby-throated hummingbirds had departed; by mid October most all of the hummers here will be gone and settled on their wintering grounds in southern Mexico and Central America.

To see more about my hummingbird studies, visit:  Hummingbird Studies--Movement and Light, at Vickie's Sketchbook.  For more information about Ruby-throated hummingbirds visit:  The Hummingbird Days of Summer, at Vickie Henderson Art.

Hummers!

Our most frequent avian visitors still seem to be these hummingbirds!  We only have the ruby-throated ones in Missouri, and I'd love to see some of the other colorful little creatures.

When I sit out on the deck in the morning, close to the two feeders near my studio, I'm astounded at how tiny these are!  It's fun to listen to the buzz and whir of their wings and their tiny chittering voices...

When I used to have a regular column in Country Living magazine, I mentioned that I'd never seen a hummingbird's nest.  This delightful old woman sent one to me, that her father had found when she was a little girl.  She said that she was old and passing along her treasures and she couldn't imagine anyone who'd like the nest more.

I can't either.  I treasure it, to this day.  It must be close to 80 years old, now...

Take a peek at Dan Kaiser's wonderful photo, with a penny for scale!  This one has an outer layer of lichen; mine seems to be made of mullein leaves, soft, grayish and fuzzy...

Nature Observations...

This one started out with an unfinished sketch of my husband (you can see his ball cap under the hummingbirds!), then the guy in the car next to us when we went to the library.  Then, the transitional female cardinal feasting on my mulberries demanded to be drawn...

We ran away from home today and went to check on the flooding on the Missouri River...not bad here, yet, but you can see the boat ramp a bit less than accessible out there in the rapidly moving water.

The hummingbirds were all over the place this evening, and I kept doing quick sketches at our feeder and wondering about their life habits--"gizz," one of you called it?  That's a new term for me, and thank you!

There are certainly more females at our feeder than males, and turns out that's fairly common.  They're aggressive little wenches, as are all hummingbirds.

I got to watch the male do his pendulum-like mating flight the other day, swinging back and forth in front of one of the flirty females.

I looked in all my bird books and couldn't find enough on them..."I'll bet there are whole BOOKS on hummingbirds," I told Joseph.  I wanted to find my old Eyewitness book that includes bird skulls and skeletons to see a closeup of their needle-like bill, but couldn't.  What I DID find was the book referenced on this spread--Hummingbirds, written in 1960 (oops, I had his birthdate, not the pub date!) by Crawford H. Greenewalt, and published by Dover; this edition is from the '90s.  Anyway, it's wonderful--and of course written very differently from some of our dry texts today.  Delighted observation...the kind of nature writing that first hooked me when I read my grandmother's books when I was a kid.  I knew then that I wanted to write about nature when I grew up, and sketch all I could.  I've been fortunate enough to get to do a lot of that, in my life!

Somehow this all seemed to be related...Homo sapiens and all...

Juvenile Ruby-throated Hummingbirds--Vickie Henderson

I have had many more hummingbirds at my feeders this summer than in the past two combined.  I have no explanation for why, but I've taken advantage of the opportunity to observe them as often as possible.  This precious time has provided me with tons of reference photos, many surprises, and a special place for hummingbirds burned ever more deeply into my heart.

Fall migration is naturally a very busy time of year.  Not only do we have all the adults from northern breeding grounds coming through our yards in the southeastern USA, but the air is full of this year's fledglings.  It is these juveniles that have impressed me the most this year.  On three occasions I have watched what I have come to call 'flight wrestling', as two fan-tailed, spiraling juveniles carry their dispute all the way to the ground.  Always my jaw drops and I marvel at the intensity of their fiery spirits.  They quickly recover and I know that these disputes are preparing them for the skills and stamina they need to survive both their rigorous migration journey and competition for food on their wintering grounds.

Visit my blog post, Ruby-throated Hummingbird Migration to enjoy some of the fun images I've captured at my feeders this season, and in Ruby-throated Hummingbirds and Sea Turtles, I share how nature and art come together for me, making my world a richer place.  

Hummingbird Fledglings--Vickie Henderson

Hummingbirds!  They fill the air with their chirps, wing buzzing and deep dives.  But on a few occasions, the activity settles and the males who guard the feeders are quiet.  This happens when a female brings her fledglings to the feeder.

You wonder what's happening as two hummers with white throats settle on the feeder together.  One fiercely chases off an intruder, while the other watches then resumes drinking.  And the males?  They remain settled on their perches.  Ah, it's those subtle communications we know nothing about.  A communication between male and female, a bargain that allows, if only for a brief interval, the youngest of the young to drink and learn.

These watercolor sketches showing the postures of a begging hummingbird fledgling were created on 90# Artistico Fabriano paper.  To see more views and the story of these fledgling sketches, visit hummingbird fledglings at  Vickie Henderson Art.

Fun at the Hummingbird Feeders - Vickie Henderson

Ruby-throated hummingbirds from northern breeding grounds are migrating through Tennessee right now, adding to the numbers of local hummers and their fledged off-spring.  As if it's not enough to see so many hummers zipping around the feeders, I've had the added pleasure of another frequent guest, a male Downy Woodpecker.

When I hear his call, I often step to the window to watch the activity.  Hummers zip all around him, ignoring his presence while they fling their fury at one another in U-shaped dives.  But on this occasion, a hummer hovered for an instant to get a better look, then settled down on the feeder to drink right along with him!

To see more about how this sketch was created visit Triple the Fun of Painting at Vickie's Sketchbook and to view more of my hummingbird sketches, visit Ruby-throated Hummingbirds.

Phoebe loses Stormy - Maree

A quick sketch I've done as I'm writing this - Phoebe back from feeding

Many of us have been following Phoebe, the Allen's Hummingbird, sitting on her nest in Orange County, California, via live cam (http://cam.dellwo.com/), whose babies, Sassy and Stormy, hatched on the 19th January 2010. The sad news is that Stormy died last night - apparently he hatched the same day as Sassy, but was only due to hatch 2 days later, so he was premature and weak and, therefore, did not make it. RIP poor Stormy...

But, of course, we must realise this is nature's way of ensuring that only the fit and strong survive. The second egg is normally laid as an insurance policy.


Sassy alone in the nest...

Yet Another Phoebe Fan - Pam Johnson Brickell

Oh, Vickie, what did you start :)

But, really, thank you so for bringing Phoebe to our attention!!

Life's been crazy of late and I haven't had time to really finish a journal page. I began sketching this sweet Allens Hummingbird, on the 19th, using a light grey color pencil.  Then on the 22nd, sketched the chicks and noted their amazing instinct of putting there butts up on the edge of the nest when they had a b.m.

I've seen parent birds clean nests of their babies bm's, but never witnessed newborns with these instincts.  Perhaps it's because Mom basically is doing everything herself.  Dad-o-Dad just mates and off he goes.

Today, I got tough with life and said enough! I'm at least going to paint today's sketch :) I put the web cam on pause and lost my self in sketching and painting her. The other sketches are done from the live webcam.  Luckily Phoebe eventually sits in repeated poses :)

Ahhhh, peace!

Allen's Hummingbird - Maree

I've decided to also try my hand at sketching the Allen's Hummingbird from the live cam link Vickie supplied (http://cam.dellwo.com/) - it's great watching her settling on the eggs, blinking from time to time, even that long tongue swooping out every now and then and then flitting off for a snack.

I did this sketch from screenshots taken of the live cam. Not knowing Hummingbirds very well, we don't have them in South Africa, only Sun Birds, I Googled it and somehow think I've made the beak much too curved, like that of a Sun Bird (although it certainly looked like that on the screenshot) - the description read, "Allen's Hummingbird: Small, compact hummingbird; male has straight black bill, glittering green crown and back, white breast, and rufous sides, belly, rump, and tail. The throat (gorget) is iridescent copper-red. Feeds on nectar, insects, spiders, and sap. Swift direct flight, hovers when feeding." It also states that it is the female that incubates the eggs for 15 to 17 days, so maybe the female's bill is a bit more curved. All wonderfully new stuff to me!

Sketching Phoebe Allens--Vickie Henderson

Phoebe Allens is a female Allen's Hummingbird who lives in the Channel Islands, Orange County, California. She is incubating two eggs and has her own live video cam and broadcast. And what a treat!
I started watching her yesterday and couldn't stop. It was amazing to see her bring nesting materials to add to her nest, hear her zip off for a few minutes, see her stand up and reposition the eggs, then watch her settle down again, wiggling until everything was just right. Immediately, I wanted to sketch her.

And so I did. Several times. Since its cold outside, this turned out to be a fun (and warm) way to practice sketching a moving subject. She's moving all the time, though not as fast as we have come to expect. The unusual, of course, is that you get to see her upclose.

Try it and see if you don't fall in love with her. And keep in mind, the female hummingbird is the sole gatherer and builder of the nest and the only provider for the young. And in Phoebe's case... she was photographed incubating one nest while she still had juveniles in another! You'll find this image by clicking on the 'photos' link at the top of the cam page.

To see Phoebe visit: http://cam.dellwo.com/
To see more sketches of Phoebe, visit Vickie Henderson Art.

Hummingbird Migration--Vickie Henderson

October in Tennessee is one of my favorite months. It's a transition month, with leaves turning, daylight shortening, air cooling and plenty of movement in the bird world.
All of these signs plus a timeless, internal clock, signal Ruby-throated hummingbirds that its time to migrate. With breeding season behind them, they fatten up in September, ready to make their long journey to Central America. By mid October, most have already gone. (I last saw one at my feeders on Oct 11th but I'm still watching for them.) I love to see them fluffed up, perched near the feeders. Travelers, taking a much needed rest. Their energetic presence is so missed during the winter. But I will be leaving feeders out throughout the winter for the chance hummer that stays.

For more hummingbird stories and sketches, click here.