Hurricane Irene - Art Before and After

Yesterday when we prepared, as best we could, for Hurricane Irene's impact my main thought was WIND. Rain could be so strong as to flood our basement but wind could both bring down trees and cut our power and bring down trees on our house or car. There is a huge Silver Maple in a neighbor's yard. I've always preferred to have trees than not, unlike many of our neighbors who seem to consider the leaves a nuisance. But with ground that was already saturated with record-breaking rain, 6-12 inches predicted and winds of up to 70 mph I wondered just how stable that maple was.

So wind was on my mind. I remembered a photo I'd taken last May of a Green Heron landing in a far tree in the wind at Magee Marsh in Ohio. It seemed like a good subject for a 15 minute flash watercolor. It's at top. Due to rain and distance I really couldn't see any color - just some varations in blue-gray.

Yesterday was so dark that the light just wasn't good enough to undertake anything major. And of course we never knew when we might need to drop everything.

Eventually the boredom of waiting for the storm took over though and I started something a bit more developed based on some photos of an Ovenbird from a number of years ago.

Oddly we never saw much of the anticipated wind yesterday. I was up very late and still didn't see signs of a really strong wind. Today though, now that Hurricane Irene has been downgraded to Tropical Storm Irene, the wind has really picked up. The recently trimmed Silver Maples outside the window are whipping around and the panes in the window are rattling.

It really LOOKS more dangerous today. The photo above shows the early stages of the ovenbird watercolor, which I may or may not continue. It's really not very inspiring at the moment. The photo also shows the maples outside my window. Unfortunately it doesn't really show how the limbs are being whipped around. And the bird feeder attached to the window is full of food but empty of birds. I bought new bird food on Friday and I don't think I've seen a bird since.

Hurricanes do odd things. Ocean birds are being reported all around, having been blown off course by Irene. And the local birds? Maybe they're just hunkered down, waiting for this wind to end.

It's been an eventful week for nature. One day the floor is moving thanks to a 5.8 earthquake. A few days later we're preparing for a hurricane and then a tropical storm. Cape May where we vacationed just 10 days ago just had an evacuation of 750,000 people. When sun and normal weather returns it will be like a visit from a barely, recognizable stranger.

After I posted this I realized I needed to try to salvage the ovenbird watercolor. This is done now. It could use more work but it's on sketch paper not watercolor paper. So it's time to leave it be and save any future versions for good watercolor paper.

Sorting Dowitchers

I suppose in any field you hear a truism and assume it is true until someone tells you otherwise. I've always heard and read that Long-billed and Short-billed Dowitchers could really only be told apart by call. But shorebirds are not my area of expertise. Perhaps if I'd seen more of them I'd know this isn't true.

In any case the shorebird workshop mentioned in the last post spent a fair amount of time showing how to differentiate them. But even after all that when I saw the mystery dowitcher that I spent an hour sketching and photographing I thought it was a specific race of a Short-billed Dowitcher.

As I looked through my photos though I realized that one showed a longer, thinner bill than is often found on a Short-billed. When I looked at 'The Shorebird Guide' I found this regarding molting adult Long-billeds:

Head molt starts earlier than body molt so many late-summer birds have agray-headed, salmon-bellied look.

The Shorebird Guide, by Michael O'Brien, Richard Crossley and Kevin Karlson

The gray head with salmon wash on neck and going into belly was one of the most striking parts of this bird. That, the long bill, the rich colors of feathers, and the 'swallowed-a-grapefruit', hunched look all make me think this was a Long-billed. And I'm sure if I remembered everything from the class I could cite a couple of other reasons.

In the long run it doesn't make much difference. But for me part of the enjoyment of birding is trying to make difficult IDs like this.

One side note: hardly had I started this than our whole house shook. The cats appeared in the hallway with wide-eyed looks. Yes it felt just like one of those earthquakes I used to experience in California. And it was: a 5.8 one centered in Virginia and felt all the way to New York.

I think I wrote a few months ago about how the study of geology humbles you. And to actually feel geology is probably doubly humbling. It's so easy to think that our lives and what goes on in them, including the most idiotic headlines in sensationalist news, are what's important. Then the ground wiggles under you and you have second thoughts.