My Birds

We have lots of birds that hang out with us on our hill.  I so enjoy watching them!  So, when I had to draw some birds, I of course picked the ones that I see almost daily.  The first one reminds me of what we call the "bobbin'" rock birds.  The walk up and down our rock wall bobbin and jumping from rock to rock.  They have an unusual voice too, kinda like a machine noise.

And we have a lot of "big mouthed" birds too.  We have black birds with colors on their wings that not only holler lots, they make really prettey trilling sounds too.  Then we have some blue jays that caw really loud and they like it close to our house!

  And also the crows that play on the wind current and argue about everything.

And then we have the hooty owls, who used to get on our roof to sing, but haven't done that since we got the new metal roof, lol.  But we can hear them over in the cliffs.

Once in a great while, we have a flock of geese or ducks fly into the local area, honking and swarming, seeming to try to work out the leader ship on their way to whereever.  And we have the long legged variety of water birds too, like the long legged heron fly by.  They are not so noisy as the other birds but we get a kick at their legs dangling as they fly.

And we have pairs of doves.  Did you know doves mate for life.  We always hate it when the September dove hunt starts as sometimes we have pairs for months, then one day, it will just be a single dove, and it makes us sad to think they lost their mate.  This one has a crest... not too authenic,  I'm afraid.

I used charcoal-it's been a while since I tried to draw with charcoal but I like the looseness and feel of using it.  I used a handmade sketch book with tinted pages.  The pages here are kinda of a grayish green... I have not liked the color for scanning but the drawings are okay on it when you look in the book.  The paper is really nice for a sketching and drawing... good feel to it!