Sketchbook Project: Inner cover- The Big Reveal

The more I thought about it, the more obvious it was to me which topic I should chose for the Sketchbook Project.

Dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs are cool.

Not only that they're a good conduit for some of my obsessions:
Birds
Bestiaries and field guides
Dragons
Comparative Anatomy

     To be honest during my childhood, I never had the typical all-consuming obsession with dinosaurs that boys are supposed to, but, then dinosaurs were much different back then. I liked them, to be certain and had my favorites, but back then dinosaurs were thought of as huge lizards, cumbersome slow and stupid. I was always more interested in behavior. Elephants and lions were more intriguing and tangible to me. Suddenly in the nineties,  dinosaurs were reshaped as though they were made of Plasticine. Lumbering cold blooded  prehistoric monsters became active, agile, well adapted animals with complex social structures. Dragging tails lifted from the ground to become elegant counterbalances. sprawling legs straightened and became muscular running limbs. Chest cavities expanded to make room for the big hearts and lungs of warm blooded creatures. Dinosaurs became beautiful and fascinating, more like birds than reptiles.

    Today with the combination of new technology and amazing recent discoveries out of the deserts of Mongolia and China, dinosaurs are wilder and more wonderful than I could have ever imagined. We've discovered astounding new species and reexamined what we believed we knew. There are answers to puzzles we thought unsolvable, and exiting new lines of inquiry to explore.
In my sketchbook, I intend to concentrate mostly on the most birdlike aspect of dinosaurs- feathers. This will give me a focus and the chance to investigate some of the most captivating current notions. I intend to be as accurate as possible using the most up to date information available, but inaccuracies are inevitable as new discoveries surface. Even the great Charles R. Knight couldn't avoid this.

The color of the cardboard cover reminded me of the sort of stone where you might find fossilized tracks. I liked the monochrome of the inner cover, so I drew  with coffee. The drawing is bisected by the pages so that you can't immediately see what is casting the shadow.
The dinosaur casting  a long shadow is Compsognathus. They were small theropod dinosaurs about the size of a chicken. He is following the footprints of a Greater Rhea, a South American cousin of the ostrich. Without giving too much away, this is not going to be my last bird/dinosaur juxtaposition.

There you have it. My Sketchbook Project is officially underway. More updates coming soon!

Crittercam: The new girls

    I've been remiss. It's been two months since I last posted anything here. the reasons for my neglect are complex and diverse. If you are well enough acquainted with my recent history, you may already understand some of them. I hope you will not take it personally that I chose not to describe them here. I'd just like to take a moment to apologize to the regular readers of my blog . Ill try to be more consistent in my posting habits from now on...for both of you!

    As you may already know I keep a small zoo in my apartment. It currently consists of a lizard,a tree frog, some fish and birds. I don't ordinarily write about them because quite honestly they don't do very much that's interesting. I also don't want this to turn into one of those bizarre obsessive blogs that catalog every detail of the lives of somebody's pets. I figure enough people already don't read this thing.

   Having said that, occasionally something cool does happen with the menagerie that I'd like to share even if I'm the only person who's interested. Such is the case today. Today I finally got a pair of female Lady Gouldian finches. I've had two males for a while now and have been looking for potential mates for my boys for a couple years (living in a small town in Upstate NY may have it's advantages, but it does make it a little challenging to obtain exotic birds). I thought it would be a nice way to ease back into posting to put up a few shots of my birds. The birds had different ideas about that. I picked out some of the better pictures of my uncooperative little subjects from today. Bear in mind none of this is what you'd exactly call "great photography" 

The breeder I went to had a lot of cool mutations and color variations available. I stuck as close to the "standard" variations as possible. I like holotypes. The black headed variety is apparently more common in the wild and the red heads are more common in captivity. Gouldian Finches are endangered in their wild habitat. It should be mentioned here that Australia has had a very sensible export ban in place for it's native fauna since 1959. Since finches in general only live about 15 years, and since the person i brought them from is extremely reliable and keeps flawless breeding records, I can guarantee that my birds are captive bred. 

 I like this one, I have no idea what they're looking at

 This is about 10 to 25 percent of what you wind up with when photographing birds: a blurry picture of where the bird was a fraction of a second ago

 Occasionally, and for no readily apparent reason, an animal will suddenly decide that they really hate photography and will do everything in their power to ruin every shot you try to take of them, even going so far as to spontaneously run into pictures of other animals just to make them blurry and unusable. This was the last good picture I was able to get of the black headed one for about an hour.

 Meeting their new cage mates

 A rare family portrait showing all my finches. There are a pair of zebra finches, spice finches and a society finch that share a large flight cage with my Gouldies.

 From left to right: My male Society finch (I'm trying to find a girlfriend for him), the new girls, a female Spice finch and my female Zebra (Her chest is bald because her mate plucks at it. I tried to remove her so that she could regrow her feathers once, but she sulked and was so miserable that I relented and put her back. I'd rather have her look miserable than actually be miserable. I guess that proves finches can be just as stupid as people!)

 Here is my redhead girl next to one of the males. You can really see the difference here!

 I managed to line up a good  picture of the black headed one... then she mooned me.

                                                                   Gotcha!