New Hummingbird Note Cards!

This is one of my favorite times of year!  It's the time when local Ruby-throated hummingbird juveniles are out of the nest and moving around, and northern males are migrating through, fattening up on insects as they get ready for their long migration journey across the Gulf of Mexico.

The males leave first and are usually gone from east Tennessee by the middle of September.  Amazingly, that is only a couple of weeks away.  They will be followed by the females who have finished nesting, and the juveniles will leave last, along with the late nesting females.

In the spring I refurbished my hummingbird garden and added more hummer-attracting plants--cardinal flowers, black and blue salvia, autumn salvia and pineapple sage.  Pentas, lantana, and butterfly weed are more for butterflies, but they attract hummingbirds too.  I then topped the garden off with nine hummingbird feeders.

Every time I have the opportunity and there's good light, I plant myself near the flowers and enjoy the challenge of capturing a hummingbird in flight, nectaring a flower or sometimes while they're perched on the feeder--fun, funny and beautiful!  

All of this hummingbird watching stirs a deep love and enjoyment of hummingbirds and inspires art.  

We have just spent a day of celebrating hummingbirds at our Wonder of Hummingbirds Festival sponsored by the Knoxville Chapter of the Tennessee Ornithological Society and Ijams Nature Center in Knoxville. Visit by blog post on the festival and check out the T-shirts the volunteers are wearing!  My male hummingbird study, created about this time last year, became the logo art for the festival and was printed on the festival T-shirts and the banner!  (above)

To visit more hummingbird art on this blog visit:  hummingbirds.

Wonder of Hummingbird Festival August 24th--TOMORROW!

Join us at the Wonder of Hummingbird Festival tomorrow, August 24th and Ijams Nature Center, Knoxville Tennessee.

A fun, exciting event that will be filled with hummingbirds!  Hummingbird banding with Mark Armstrong our very gentle Master Bander of songbirds and hummingbirds, expert speakers on several different nature subjects including bluebirds, hummingbirds, bears and wolves, vendors with plants and nature crafts, lots of food vendors and wildlife demonstrations!  Great fun and education for the whole family!  

Visit this link to get more information and complete directions:  Wonder of Hummingbird Festival

To visit more hummingbird art on this blog visit:  hummingbirds

More information about hummingbird banding and hummingbirds.

The Hummingbird Days of Summer

Breeding season is coming to a close for hummingbirds in our area, except for a few late nesters.  Lots of juveniles are visiting the feeders and hummingbirds from northern areas are starting to migrate.  This is when activity at nectar feeders and in gardens becomes very busy and its also my favorite time to paint hummingbirds!

The above hummingbird visiting a black and blue salvia is one of my sketches this season.
Below, a male hummingbird visits the black and blue blossoms.  (Some varieties are the deep blue below, others look deep purple.)

Besides enjoying myself, I'm getting ready for the Wonder of Hummingbird Festival in Knoxville, TN, August 24th at Ijams Nature Center.  We will be celebrating hummingbirds and their migration with Mark Armstrong, Master Bander, who will demonstrate how he bands hummingbirds so scientists can discover more about the health and behavior of the population.

Peregrine Falcon Watercolor in Tennessee Conservationist Magazine

When I submit an article to the Tennessee Conservationist Magazine, published by the TN Dept. of Environment and Conservation, I never know which photos will actually go into the article.  I send a good selection and the editor makes the final decision. Whenever possible, I include a watercolor of the bird that is the subject of my article but it is not a given that it will be published.  I was delighted to see that my watercolor, "Peregine Falcon", was included in the article that spanned five pages, and that the article also  captured the cover headline!

This watercolor began with a sketch that you see below, a practice to help wrap my mind around the shapes and expression that is characteristic of this incredible falcon. I had recently encountered a falconer showing this species on my trip to Alaska at the Sandhill Crane festival in Fairbanks, giving me a great opportunity to observe the bird up-close and take some reference photos.

The Peregrine Falcon's recovery in North America is one of the greatest conservation stories in our nation's history.  After the bird's devastating decline, largely due to the widespread use of DDT after WWII, the USFWS reported that there were only 324 confirmed pairs of breeding Peregrine Falcons nesting in all of North America.   

In Tennessee, breeding Peregrine Falcons had disappeared by 1947 and it wasn't until 50 years later that Peregrine Falcons were again discovered breeding in the state.

In the images below you can see how I approached this painting.  The sky was created by wetting the paper around the falcon and applying ultramarine blue to the wet paper leaving plenty of white for clouds.

As I often do, I put some detail in the face as I worked on the feather details.  I do this to make the subject come alive and add energy to the project while I work.  At other times, the additional detail gives me more of an idea of how the finished painting will look and helps guide my color application and lights and darks.  

Below, I begin to work on the rock surface where the Peregrine is perched.  I did not have a specific reference for the rocks but did look at rock treatments by other artists to give me some ideas.  I used warm colors to describe the boulder to balance the grays and blues in the bird.  For the boulder detail, I followed the lines of paint to shape a natural rock surface.

To finish, I added more definition and shadow to the feathers, sharper lines and individual definition to the rocks, and added some tufts of grass.  (See finished painting at top).  The Peregrine Falcon was one of the first species added to the endangered species list in 1973 and was finally removed in 1999.  In 2012, the USFWS reported that from 2000-3000 breeding pairs of Peregrine Falcons could be found in North America.

Links and Resources:
TN Conservationist Magazine--The Peregrine Falcon in Tennessee

Winter Delights--Yellow-rumped Warblers

Winter is a special time for watching birds.  For one thing, bare limbs make birds easy to see.  And for the second, you often get to see birds that you don't having during the warm breeding season.  In Tennessee, Yellow-rumped Warblers are one of those birds.

They breed in northern states and Canada, so we only get to see them while they're migrating or if you're lucky, when they chose your yard for their wintering grounds.  I have been so lucky this year.  Above you see a sketch I made of one of these warblers frequently seen hopping around under the feeders, and for the first time, I saw one sitting on my sunflower feeder picking up seeds.

More normally seen flittering around in evergreens eating insects and grubs, its always a surprise to find one sitting still enough to capture a photo.  But this winter season, I've been fortunate to see them frequently and engaged in a number of foraging activities.

They are what I call "my favorite bird of the week".  It is impossible to watch their busy personalities without wanting to capture that distinctive attitude in a sketch. While perched on that feeder, this warbler gave sharp warning chirps to the other birds and chased away even the tufted titmice that happened to land on the feeder.

Above, after feeding on the ground and in the flower pots for a while, this warbler seemed to respond to the warmth of the sun and began to maneuver all around the trunk and limbs of the hemlock appearing to be finding insects or grubs.

To see more images of the yellow-rumped warblers visiting this winter click here.
And to see what's been keeping me busy and away from blogging in the past few months, visit the new expanded version of the Discovery Birds Activity Book--36 pages and 75 illustrations!

Keeping the Wild in Your Heart

I have had three wonderful opportunities recently to work with other artists on projects that required more than one kind of artistic talent.  The first was my Red-shouldered Hawk Territory book, a rewarding project involving a talented layout person and another artist who coordinated the printing.   (visit the link for more details)

The second was our Hummingbird Festival bookmark that was part of an advertising campaign for our 2012 Hummingbird Festival organized by our bird club at Ijams Nature Center as a fund raiser.   The beautiful book mark layout and printing was conceived and coordinated by another talented artist.  (visit the link for more details.)

In my most recent experience I was asked to create "muddy water" that was bubbling as though a turtle was diving into it.  And in a second painting, create a more detailed rendition of a Red-eared slider.  Above and below you can see these two paintings before they were converted into the beautiful exhibit panel they eventually became.  The muddy water was created on a 22 x 30 sheet of watercolor paper, and the turtle below it, on a half sheet, 22 x 14 inches.

Pam Petko-Seus, of Ijams Nature Center in Knoxville, is the talented artist who conceived of this exhibit panel for the Center's Red-slider turtle exhibit, and Colin Hoffman, another exceptional artist at High Resolutions, was able to take Pam's ideas and make them into an exhibit panel aimed at teaching children and adults how to take care of our wild turtles--loving and admiring them without disturbing them.  

My job seemed the easiest to me!  

  

And here are some of the important facts that people should know when tempted to take a wild animal home with them:  

• Capturing wild animals often threatens species survival in natural habitats and disrupts delicate ecosystems.
• Wild animals spread disease.
• Captive breeding does not take the wild out of wildlife.
• Former pets rarely survive when returned to the wild.
• Many animals are sold illegally, especially on the internet.
• It is illegal in the state of Tennessee to possess native wildife without a proper permit. [This may be true in other states, as well.]

Upcoming:
One of My favorite Books:  Drawing and Painting Birds
I'm Getting Ready for Alaska!

Vickie Henderson's Art Featured in Nooga.com

My art is featured in a lovely article written by Jenni Frankenberg Veal for the June 3rd Lifestyle section of the Chattanooga online newspaper, Nooga.com. 

Jenni, whose free lance writings specialize in family outdoor activities and articles on conservation, makes regular contributions to Nooga.com, a local news website focused on the Chattanooga area in east Tennessee.