i (heart) odd-toed ungulates

One Lovely Day in the Life...

I was asked recently by a friend (and elemetary school art teacher) to create a short video for her students of my life as a professional illustrator: How does one day unfold for me; where do I collect inspiration; what sort of tools are specific to what I do; what DO I do - and what ever do I even look like?! These are big questions, with potentially complicated answers, and the truth is - I do a wide variety of things in order to keep the lights on and Oscar well fed. It seems I have fewer and fewer "typical" days... but if you asked me to generalize for a moment and describe a single, quintessential day, I'd quickly use words to paint a picture of what's been neatly put into moving images above.

As luck would have it, I am studio-mates with a world-class videographer (and all around amazing and very talented individual). Doubly fortunate for me, Steve (Stebs) Shinnerer of Paper Fortress Films had been interested in shooting an "A Day With..." portrait of me (as part of a larger creative series) since last fall... The timing finally right, we coordinated a day of interviewing and shadowing through multiple locations (including my beloved Franklin Park Zoo), and a few weeks later, the final edit was ready for it's debut - in front of dozens of eager first and second-graders... in Missouri... The resulting 4-minute project is darn near pitch-perfect - I actually find myself pausing to thank my sweet stars for this life every time I watch it (plus, it's chock full of cool animals... so, WIN).

As a supplement to the video, I took one of the sketches started during that one, lovely day, and developed it into a finished coloring page, so that each child in my friend's class could create their own work of art, inspired by an FPZ creature ("Azul", a hyacinth macaw, to be precise). Drawn in a similar style to a project I did for National Geographic.com years ago, the ink drawing is designed for easy print/download. If you'd like to color your own parrot, just click on the image below and print from your browser, or save to your hard drive!

A note to my few dear subscribers:
You may have noticed the silence here at the ungulate blog over the last 6+ months... it was with great disappointment that I had to suspend regular creature feature posting; life, as they say, is what happens when you make other plans. This little personal project, beloved as it may be to me, just couldn't compete with a host of professional projects and opportunities that have been courting my time and talents in increasing numbers. One of those time monopolizers was, I am so proud to say, training for the 2013 Boston Marathon. The big day of course turned horribly sad toward it's end, but I couldn't have been happier with my run, and the reason for my effort:

I ran the 2013 Boston Marathon on behalf of the Franklin Park Zoo. That's right, I took on the fundraising challenge of running 26.2 miles with a charity that couldn't fit me better if it were hand-tailored to my every measurement. I ran with 2 other beautiful, strong women, each of us pledging to raise $5,000.00 by the end of the summer.

The race may be over, but my fund-raising continues, and it's projects like the one above that make it crystal clear how important the Franklin Park Zoo is to the Boston community, and beyond. Perhaps especially in light of the tragic events at the end of the April 15th race, now is the time to support the institutions and organizations that enrich, enliven, entertain and educate this vibrant city. So, if you are inclined (and I would urge you to be!) PLEASE CONSIDER SUPPORTING MY MARATHON RUN with a donation. I trained for 3 months and put over 4 grueling hours on the race course - what can you do to make a difference in the lives of these animals and their tireless keepers?

From the Mouths of Owls

I have fond memories of many lessons in elementary school, but one of the shining highlights was the day us kiddos were each given an owl pellet to dissect. The ugly little grey-brown lumps, the size and shape of stuffed grape leaves, looked a whole lot like any number of small critter scat one might discover on the forest floor, and while they were indeed evidence of wild digestive systems at work, poop they were not. Along with our pellet, we were given tweezers and microscopes, and it didn't take much prodding before squeals traveled the room, for each and every nugget contained a terrific assortment of tiny, nearly perfectly clean, rodent bones. Like archeologists at an ancient burial site, we gingerly tweezed through the furry fibers, lifting out everything from skulls to the most minute metatarsals. I don't know if every kid in the room felt this way, but for me, it was a bit like Christmas... and I've been dying for the opportunity to paw through an owl pellet ever since. To my rescue this spring: the Great Mount Auburn...

Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA became a bit of an avian circus last spring when the rather conspicuous nest of a resident pair of Great Horned Owls was discovered. The proud birds produced 2 handsome chicks and raised them successfully in front of eager crowds. Sadly, the female of that mated pair, Roxanne, died tragically this spring - I'm told an autopsy revealed she was "with eggs" as well... such a shame. Luckily for us, her baby-daddy, Alexander the Great (I didn't name them) is still very much alive, and on one early visit to the Dell last month, it occurred to me that I might possibly be able to sleuth a pellet or two from under his favorite towering pine roost...

Oh happy day - not only did I find a pellet, I found heaps.


Owls tend to select favorite trees (most often coniferous ones) - right down to the branch - so combing the ground beneath a known roosting spot is a bit like crawling around underneath the kitchen table of a toddler - each day, a predictable selection of tidbits hits the same spot on the floor... In this case, substitute Cheerios and frozen peas with mouse femurs and shrew pelvic bones, and what you get is nothing short of a bonanaza for a naturalist.

If you missed out on aforementioned owl pellet dissection day in elementary school, you may be wondering: So if it isn't poop, what is an owl pellet anyway? Well, here's how it works:

Owls, like all birds, must swallow their food relatively whole; they may pull it apart with their beak and claws, but without teeth, they can't masticate (chew) their food. In creatures with teeth, mastication is actually the first step of digestion, but birds skip most of that and just send their meals down the hatch. Since owls are birds of prey, and meals consist of small animals, an owl's stomach is faced with an assortment of rather challenging-to-digest fare; some of it, like fur, feathers, bone, teeth, and claws, can not be digested at all... instead, it must be "ejected" via the same route it went in.

When an owl swallows a meal, it enters the mouth, passes down the esophagus and then heads through the first of a 2-part stomach (all birds have a 2-part tummy). Stomach #1 is called the proventriculus, or "glandular stomach", and it produces enzymes and acids - just like your own stomach - that begin the process of digestion. Next, the partially-digested owl snack moves on to stomach #2: the ventriculus, or "muscular stomach". The ventriculus, aka the gizzard, has no digestive enzymes, but uses muscular contractions to continue the process of digestion and move soft and soluble food bits on to the rest of the system (intestines, liver, pancreas, etc) where nutrients will be absorbed by the body. At this point, the ventriculus also serves as a block for all of that INdigestible material that the body can't process. Within hours after eating, all that fur, bone, and tooth (and sometimes inorganic items like leg-bands from songbirds!) is compressed in the gizzard into a pellet, which travels back up from the ventriculus and into the proventriculous, where it will sit for up to 10 hours before being regurgitated.
 

An owl pellet in the proventriculus thoroughly blocks the digestive system while it waits to be ejected, so pellet regurgitation must be quite regular in a healthy bird or it will starve. When the moment comes, like a cat getting ready to yerf a hairball, the owl will hunch up, appear momentarily uncomfortable, then extend it's neck up and out, open wide, and quite silently spit out a pellet (I've found 2 videos of this event - one featuring a young Barn Owl *I'd mute the commentary*, and one seriously impressive Snowy Owl).

*For more reading on owl digestion and the pellet process, check out this great overview - and much more info about owls of all types - on The Owl Pages website.

Predictably, pellets vary in size and contents based on species of owl and diet. Additionally, many other types of birds produce pellets besides owls: herons, gulls, crows and jays, are just a few. Falconers refer to the pellets their hawks produce as "castings" and monitor them closely, since regurgitation serves the additional purpose of scouring and cleansing the crop (the crop is a small pouch in the throat for food storage - owls do not have crops - and if it is not cleaned regularly through regurgitation, a raptor will quickly become ill from bacteria build-up). Of note, hawks have the ability to digest bone matter, so castings contain mostly compacted fur or feathers...

My morning in the cemetery was a fruitful one and I was able to collect many pellets, as well as many clean bones which had already been separated from their fuzzy fur-balls by the elements. A few of the photos above show the "raw" state in which some treasures sat waiting for me, though more fun were the lumps I got to dissect. Below is a record of some of my haul, laid out on a bone identification chart I made and printed out.


To my surprise, I discovered that there is an entire marketplace online for the owl pellet experience. Since it is such an entertaining activity for school children, there are businesses that source and sell pellets in bulk - pre-sanitized - for entire classrooms of eager young biologists to enjoy. There are many and varied bone ID charts (see very bottom of linked page) available for download, and even virtual pellets to dissect online (can't say as that I got anything out of that experience besides the novelty factor, but apparently - we have the technology!). Smart phone users can also download owl pellet ID apps, for quick reference in the field... 

Since my unusually critical attitude towards most "creative" science aides prevents me from being satisfied with most charts and illustrations I come across, I was compelled to create my own bone ID chart, based on reference I found online. I have included my chart here for download (just click on the image), should you be similarly irritated by poorly drawn anatomy, horribly compressed jpegs, and embarrassing composition and typographic labeling. And with that I'll just say - by way of the backyard, or a box in the mail, I hope everyone who loves science and wildlife as much as I do can find an opportunity to discover the wonder of an owl pellet. 

A Tern for the Worse

Forgive the pun... This beautiful creature - a tern of some description - is quickly sketched here before preparation for the Harvard Natural History Museum archives. The poor thing was collected this year from the southern US coast - the victim of a bad storm, she washed up already quite deceased on the beach. Fortunately, thanks to a banded leg, the individual could be traced, and most wonderfully appeared to have lived just past 20 years before being taken by environmental hazard. Her head here is resting on a pillow of fine sawdust (used to soak up the inevitable bit of blood exposed during the skinning process - and no, the red background is not said blood, but rather a brick-hued lunch tray).

Live Animals at the RISD Nature Lab

I periodically make my way to Providence, RI - it's only just over an hour from Cambridge, and it really is a special little city where (as a RISD alum) I have plentiful good memories. This past Sunday I found myself not only strolling the sidewalks of Providence on a brilliantly sunny Ocean State afternoon, but attending an event held on the RISD campus itself, in one of my all-time favorite buildings - the Edna Lawrence Nature Lab. Established in 1937 by Edna Lawrence, a RISD graduate and faculty member, the Nature Lab is housed in a studio building at 13 Waterman St., and it holds an absolute mountain of natural history treasures, many of which are available for handling and investigation, and some are even loaned out to students. From the RISD website: "Its hands-on natural history collection and studio environment offers the opportunity to examine and explore the patterns, structures and interactions of design in nature." And that it does, in spades. 

This past weekend, the Nature Lab also made a perfect venue for a live animal drawing workshop organized by the New England chapter of the SCBWI. Amongst the taxidermy, skeletons, and other artifacts, RISPCA Humane Educator Laurelin Sitterly kindly coordinated the transport and set-up of 6 live companion animals for an excited group of illustrators to sketch: a dog, cat, rabbit, ferret, tortoise, and African grey parrot - all rescued critters, and all impeccably mannered. Huge thanks to children's book illustrator Christina Rodriguez (RISD '03) for arranging such a terrifc afternoon, and to RISD and the RISCPCA for their generous sponsorship of the workshop. 

I Heart the MCZ Week (day 4): Bugs & Birds

I've written about days when impromptu sketching feels like second nature - smooth as sailing through a conversation with an old friend, where every word is perfectly timed, and even more perfectly chosen... today was decidedly not one of those days. So be it. But it does make working on a personally imposed deadline a bit of a challenge. After struggling with colored pencils and water color in front of a display of handsome pigeons for a good hour, I abandoned ship and decided to relocate. As I passed through the invertebrates exhibit, I stalled in front of a case of coleoptera: beetles - jewel-toned, patterned, and pinned in an orderly arrangement worthy of a meticulous philatelist. Despite the rainbow before me, I took out a Micron and let gesture override adornment - thankfully, the result felt 100% better than my previous exercises that afternoon, and if I had had more time, I would have drawn every specimen on the wall. There's something so pleasingly mathmatic about drawing insects - like sketching architecture or bicycles - they are a perfectly orchestrated collaboration of geometic shapes - a spray of hinged line segments, anchored by some elaboration on the shape of a pill... and symetry - at least when viewed dorsally over the head of a pin - is king.

Underneath the Tuxedo

Sketch, from a recent NEAQ penguin-watching expedition... Luckily, the aquarium has a neat little penguin skeleton nearby the live animal exhibits, so when one attempts to ponder the underlying anatomy of such funny birds, she needn't look too far. Unfortunately, the angle I was drawing at lent a decidedly sinister perspective to the skeleton's posture - a decided conrast to the waddling, comedic character of a penguin in the flesh... (gotta love sketchbook surprises).

December at the Central Park Zoo

I spent my birthday this year driving down to New York City. Once there, with a whole day to indulge by my lonesome, what did I do in one of the most intense cultural metropolises in the world? I took myself to the Central Park Zoo to gawk at animals. I did hit the Society of Illustrators galleries first, then spent a good hour chatting with carriage drivers on the Southeast corner of Central Park (per previous post - I am still unquestionably horse-crazy), but the highlight of my day was most definitely the solid 3 hours I had to stroll the Zoo, and draw.

There are days when drawing feels like a drag-out fight between my brain and my hand - the exercise makes me question whether I have talent, or really any idea what I'm doing, at all... but other days, the two get together and have a platonic date within the pages of my sketchbook - drawing comes fluidly, and whether I love the end result or not, the act is the reward - it feels invigorating, effortless, and I am happy. Last friday the 16th was one of those days...

And for the record, the fowl depicted in this post - Spectacled Eider Ducks above, and Mandarin Ducks below - were some of the most incredbly striking, unusual, beautiful birds I've ever seen. I am relatively certain now that I am becoming a closet birder... for better or worse...


 

Knits & Purls for Penguins

On October 5th, not 2 years since the epic BP fail off the Gulf Coast caused the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, oceanic environmental tragedy struck again - this time 12 nautical miles off the east coast of New Zealand's North Island, in the Bay of Plenty. The threat: a loaded cargo ship (the Rena) run aground, hemmoraging oil, periodically dumping shipping containers from it's dangerously listing decks, and on the verge of fracturing into pieces with the next storm surge. The catastrophe is now the worst in New Zealand's maritime history, and it struck cruelly during breeding season for many native birds, who will now have to deal with sticky black tar as poisonous nest decorum.

In the scramble to clean up after such a devestating event, the desperately motivated can be counted on to get creative... With more and more oil-soaked birds washing onto New Zealand's beaches (over 1,200 casualties recorded so far) a unique and charming request was issued recently in an effort to aide the rescue and rehab of one of NZed's pluckiest avians - the penguin. What could these tiny tux-wearing birds need that trained wildlife cleaning crews couldn't provide? Sweaters! Yes, sweaters (aka "jumpers" in Kiwi-speak). You see, while waiting to be bathed (a thorough affair that can take over an hour per bird), there is a risk that ill, tar-soaked birds will try to preen out the gunk coating their feathers - injesting dangerous amounts of oil in the process. Sweaters provide a (jaunty) barrier between beaks and feathers - keeping oil out of penguin bellies - and they help warm birds that are highly stressed and uncomfortable, before and after being washed.

Grist.org reports that this is not the first mass call for penguin wooly-wear... Apparently, in 2001, the Tasmanian Conservation Trust thought it wise to try to bank penguin jumpers in preparation for a possible disaster: what began as a goal of 100 sweaters ended up with the reciept of roughly 1,000 after the request went viral and knitters got busy. Similar efforts have been launched to aide oil-soaked penguins off the coast of South Africa as well.


Above: an AP photo of a penguin sporting a jumper after a spill near Tasmania in 2000; a penguin, mid bath, photo from animaltracks.today.com (such a teeny little guy - so many blue latex fingers!); and a clean penguin recouping at a wildlife center in Tauranga, photo by Bradley Ambrose/Getty Images.

My travels around New Zealand this past summer were largely based out of Auckland - a few hours from Tauranga - and I had the pleasure of taking in the beauty of the Bay of Plenty coastline. My thoughts are with those who make this region their home. For photos of the Rena spill and it's effect on Tauranga beaches, see this gallery at the Guardian; read more about the spills effects on NZ's birds here; and see more pics of past penguin sweater endeavors here.   

As of this posting, the overwhelming and quick support of knitters around the world has once again filled the emergency closets of New Zealand's penguins with turtlenecks - but if you're curious, or would like to make your own penguin sweater for kicks, I've posted below the penguin jumper pattern, as found originally on the website of Skeinz, a Napier, New Zealand knit shop - *it should take able hands about an hour to craft:

Penguin Jumper in 8ply

Yarn
 (must be 100% wool)
1 pair 3.25mm , 1 pair of 3.75mm needles , 1 set of 3.25mm dpns or circular
Elastic (approx. 35cm)

- Cast on 36 stitches using 3.25 needles. K1, P1 to end of row.
- Repeat this row 7 times. Change to 3.75mm needles and K2, P2 rib.
- Work 4 rows increasing at each end of every row. (44 sts)
- Continue until work measures 15 cms.
- Decrease 1 st at each end of every row until 28 sts remain.
- Decrease 1 st. in middle of next row (27 sts.)
- Leave on needle.
- Make second side the same.
- Transfer the 54 sts from both pieces to 3 of the set of 4 3.25mm needles (18 sts on each) and work a round neck in K1 P1 rib for 10 rows.
- Cast off.
- Stitch up sides to decreasing to 27sts (opening for flipper). Add elastic to the top and bottom to prevent the penguins getting out of them. Top: 15cm of elastic; bottom 17 cm (knots allowed). Flat elastic is okay.

NZed Sketchbook: the Kakapo

In the words of writer Douglas Adams, the kakapo (Strigops habroptilus) is "a bird out of time". The following most appropo description of kakapos comes from his 1990 book, Last Chance to See, cowritten by Mark Carwardine:

The kakapo is a bird out of time. If you look one in its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, though you know that it probably will not be.

It is an extremely fat bird. A good-sized adult will weigh about six or seven pounds, and its wings are just about good for waggling a bit if it thinks it's about to trip over something - but flying is completely out of the question. Sadly, however, it seems that not only has the kakapo forgotten how to fly, but it has also forgotten that it has forgotten how to fly. Apparently a seriously worried kakapo will sometimes run up a tree and jump out of it, whereupon it flies like a brick and lands in a graceless heap on the ground.

By and large, though, the kakapo has never learnt to worry. It's never had anything much to worry about.

Most birds, faced with a predator, will at least realise that something's up and make a bolt for safety, even if it means abandoning any eggs or chicks in its nest - but not the kakapo. Its reaction when confronted with a predator is that it simply doesn't know what the form is. It has no conception of the idea that anything could possibly want to hurt it, so it tends just to sit on its nest in a state of complete confusion and leaves the other animal to make the next move - which is usually a fairly swift and final one.

A most remarkable parrot, and yet, due to the same unfortunate series of human-perpetuated historical events that has left all of New Zealand's endemic birds at critical risk of extinction (hunting, introduction of invasive species, habitat loss, etc.) as of July 2011, the kakapo population stands at just 131 individuals... There are more bones in the human body than there are kakapos on the planet. A heart-sinking tally, but when you consider just how vulnerable the poor little fellows are in the face of modern threats, it's no wonder they nearly vanished. In 1899, the Westland explorer, Charlie Douglas, had the following to say about the ridiculous ease of catching a kakapo:

They could be caught in the moonlight, when on the low scrub, by simply shaking the tree or bush until they tumbled on the ground, something like shaking down apples. I have seen as many as half a dozen kakapos shaken off one tutu bush this way.

Vulnerable as it sounds, 131 is actually an accomplished number, since as recently as the 70s, the species was thought to have dissappeared completely. Only through scouring the most remote habitats remaining in the fjordlands of the South Island did conservationists begin to discover and collect lone survivors. Those rare specimens were carefully relocated to offshore sanctuaries, where there was no threat of them becoming stoat or weasel snacks, and where they could resume their very specialized lifestyle. The current 131 birds are known, by number and in most cases by name, and monitored non-stop by a team of biologists with the newly formed Kakapo Recovery Programme -members rotate lonely shifts on the remote sanctuary islands, patrolling, watching, recording.


Every successful campaign needs a mascot, and for the Kakapo Recovery Programme, a young male named Sirocco rose to the ocassion. In a stroke of uncoached brilliance, Sirocco single-handedly brought the plight of his kind to world-wide attention when he took an intense shine to a BBC zoologist/photographer in 2009, during the filming of a televised version of Last Chance to See. The resulting video footage went viral immediately - the title should say it all: "Shagged by a rare parrot". 

For context, dear Sirocco suffered a serious respiratory illness when he was a chick, requiring him to be hand-reared. The process caused him to imprint on humans, and sadly, he now has no interest in other kakapos - an unfortunate circumstance in terms of propagating his species, but it does make him a stellar spokesbird for the Recovery Programme, since he delights in human interaction. Since 2006, Sirocco has been visited by school children, put on special exhibit at multiple sanctuaries and Zoos around New Zealand, and world-wide fans can follow him on facebook. In the name of 131 kakapos, Godspeed, Sirocco, Godspeed.

For more kakapo goodness, here's a fun kakapo podcast; and for more detail about the kakapo's "booming and chinging" (including video of the vocalization), check out this site, and the Kakapo Recovery Programme's "breeding" information page.
 

Above: 1. a diagram of the male kakapo during "booming"; 2. a kakapo walking a "track" through it's luscious terrestrial environment, photo by Shane McInnes; 3. a Nicaraguan stamp featuring a kakapo; 4. a close-up of the kakapo's mottled, earthy-green plumage, shot by Dr. Paddy Ryan; 5. a vintage illustration of a Kakapo by Walter Lawry Buller, Birds of New Zealand, 1873; 6. a head-on portrait, making the kakapo's owly likeness evident, copyright NZPA; and 7. a gorgeous shot of a kakapo peeking through the underbrush, shot by Dr. Paddy Ryan.

NZed Sketchbook: Harrier Hawk, Tahr & Shelducks

A few more pages from this summer's (ever so slowly revealed) New Zealand sketchbook. Above: a harrier hawk (aka Kahu, marsh harrier, or Australasian harrier) - a common sight gliding above open spaces (where the small mammal-getting is good, and roadkill can be spied from miles away); and a sketch of a tahr trophy mount from designer home goods boutique, Vesta, in Queenstown. Tahr are a Himalayan species of wild mountain goat. Around the turn of the century, they joined the company of red deer and chamois as imported large mammal nostalgia for European settlers on New Zealand's South Island - and just like the red deer and chamois (and virtually every other ungulate, rodent, and reptile that was "liberated" into NZ by the Europeans) they made themselves more than comfortable and eventually became extraordinary pests. Government culling programs have reduced their numbers, and they are hunted for sport, but apparently tahr steaks are of questionable quality, so these sure-footed freeloaders have little economic value.

Below: at the icey trail head of one Mt. Cook hike we spent a good 10 minutes bothering a pair of Paradise Shelducks for a decent photo in the rapidly setting sunlight. Positively striking flowl, and even more striking as seen waddling around the snow of the frozen moonscape that is Mt. Cook in winter, Shelducks are endemic to NZ and were a favored game bird for Maoris prior to European settlement. The female is the one with the bright white head, rusty red body, and avocado green highlights... *The fat, happy tabby at page bottom is Basil - world's most patient kitteh.