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...