Birding with David Allen Sibley

if you ask a bird lover why he or she loves Birds you're likely to get as wide a variety of answer as there are species of birds some might say it's the magic of flight or the freedom of the sky or the miracle of nature and some might say there's something mythical about it you know you think about the the bird gods of Egypt and others will talk about biodiversity there's definitely something wonderful about walking through downtown San Francisco and seeing a bird and realizing we haven't completely just paved over nature I know for me personally my love of birds started early and was instilled in me by my dad I'll never forget the first time I saw a great blue heron take flight and it's still something that remains of me very very strongly to this day most birders are interested in identifying a wide variety of birds and to accomplish this we are fortunate to have the expert guidance of artist writer and naturalist David Allen Sibley his 2000 his 2000 guide to birds reshaped the world of birding and established him as one of the best and most knowledgeable illustrators of birds the bird is so ubiquitous the book is so ubiquitous that birders have turned his last name into a noun as in what's that bird I don't know check your Sibley he's here this evening to tell us about the long awaited second edition a complete revamp of the original please join me in welcoming to the JCC SF the one and only David Allen Sibley well thank you wow that's a lot of bird watchers thank you all for coming thank you for supporting me supporting my books and supporting your local organizations it sounds like there was a good showing from all of the partner organizations here tonight that's great to hear but thank you for being here and it's my pleasure to be here in San Francisco also so I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about my my background my process what goes into my books and the artwork and then I'll be happy to take some of your questions but I will well for me it started very young my interest in Birds I can't remember a time when I wasn't interested in Birds I from the time I was very young I started keeping a life list when I was 7 years old I had already been interested in birds and drawing birds even before that so for me bird-watching and drawing our two parts of the same thing there they go together and it's something I've done literally my whole life here's one of my one of my early bird drawings this was when I was about 8 years old and I like I said I had been drawing Birds already for several years at this time now I should say my father's an ornithologist so that probably had something to do with my interest in Birds but also all of the opportunities and the the support that I got for my interest in birds and drawing so there were bird books in the house and I enjoyed as a little kid pulling those books off the shelf and flipping through the pages finding a picture that I liked and copying it first tracing when I was young and then and then copying at this stage I I copied this picture of this peregrine falcon from a book that we had and about the same time about eight years old I started drawing birds from life and at that time my father was actually director of Point Reyes Bird Observatory for a year and a half in 1969 to 70 so I spent my my third grade year in the Bolinas school and learned bird banding at Point Reyes Bird Observatory when I was 8 this is me at about 12 holding a sharp-tailed sparrow that we banded in Connecticut where we moved after Bolinas so at this age I I was still a serious birders still doing lots of drawing lots of bird banding and I think as a kid the bird banding was a really important part of my my early interest in birds just the opportunity to hold a bird in your hands to get that the sense of touch involved and to feel it to to really see it up close feel it be able to study all the parts and it helped with the drawing but it was really just a kind of a magical experience if any of you had the opportunity to do any bird banding or to hold a bird in your hand one of the most surprising things about it is how little of bird weighs there's so much life and energy there but they only this sparrow probably only weighed 10 grams less than half an ounce a bird like a kinglet or Wilson's Warbler only weighs 5 or 6 grams you could put five of them put a stamp on five of them and send them anywhere in the country and my interest in birds and drawing also involved it was was supplemented by an interest in books from a very early age I was fascinated by or drawn to the idea of putting all of this information together into a book so I drew it was scientific illustration my drawings were all about conveying information so I would learn things about birds as I watched them and I would learn by drawing the drawings were also a way of recording remembering recording and transmitting what I was learning and I liked the idea of creating a book that would take all of that information that I was learning both the the words the information and the pictures putting all that together I really enjoyed looking at bird books reading them and thinking about making my own so this is an early book project of mine a limited edition of one but on a typewriter with glue and black and white photographs and colored pencils I was writing the Warblers of Connecticut so this I was about thirteen years old this is the first white winged cross bill that I ever saw and this was in in Connecticut and so this as a birder you could see this bird and you see the white in the wings and you see the crossed bill you know it's a white winged cross bill you can check it off on your life list and move on but for me as a my interest in in drawing just doing this relatively simple sketch there's this is just an outline really a few other details but mainly an outline but there's a tremendous amount of information that goes into that outline so just the act of producing this simple drawing forces me to look at the bird in a very different way to look at all kinds of details that I would otherwise not notice so the shape of the head the proportions of bill to head how the bill and the head fit together the size of the body the length of the wings the length of the tail the length of the legs the angle of the legs all of those things and many more details are all things that you have to look at in order to do even this really simple drawing and that to me was the real value of sketching I sometimes talk about it as being like an interview with the bird that I the sketching is a is a way it's sort of it guides my study of the bird it it I don't want to use the word that it forces me to do something but it it creates a a method a path for me to study the bird where I I look at different parts and in order to do to do the drawing I have to figure out how all of the different parts of the bird work together and that to me is the real value of sketching the finished product is rarely worth showing to anyone or hanging on the wall it's but it's the the value is in the process I learn a little bit from each sketch that I do and just putting the pencil lines on the paper is sort of a test of how much I actually know about the bird so the the process guides my study of the bird and it's also a an opportunity to to figure out or to show what I know and what I don't know about a bird so I never really feel like I've seen a bird until I've drawn it this is a picture of me sitting in the back of a friend's car in May and I'm sketching a northern hawk owl in this picture so you know I'm gonna show you some other northern hawk owl sketches that I did through the years and we'll get back to this one in a couple of minutes so this is the first northern hawk owl I ever saw it was in within a couple of weeks of my first white wing cross bill that I just showed you so you can see the similarity in the style of sketching so I'm about 13 years old and this bird we were on a family trip took a detour to see it where it was spending the winter in upstate New York and I did these sketches in the car as we were leaving and one of the details that I wanted to capture in this sketch one thing I had noticed during that few minutes that we watched the bird was that on the lower sketch here you can see that the you can't see a hawk owls feet the branch that it's sitting on just disappears into the feathers of the belly and the feet and the perch the actual perch are never visible so that was one of the things that I noticed looking at that Hawk owl and I wanted to record in this sketch but this was not a long study this was a few minutes and sketching after the fact now this Hawk owl is seven years later in Portland Maine and this was the first these the first sketches that I did when I arrived and started watching that hawk owl and sketching is all about simplifying and it's a very tricky process it you're taking a living breathing three-dimensional full-color bird and converting it into a few pencil lines on a two-dimensional sheet of paper so you have to it involves a lot of trial and error trying to find the right lines the right curves which which markings which of the dark and light patterns are really key to identifying to capturing the essence of that bird so here I'm just beginning to experiment with of the lines and patterns and a couple of hours later after probably five other pages of sketches and a couple hours of watching the bird I did this sketch so I'm starting to get a better sense of the shape and pattern of a hawk owl I went back a few days later and spent another few hours with the same hawk owl and doing this sketch I spent about two hours on this one sheet of paper just looking at every trying to look at every detail of the bird every aspect and I so this would be sort of the the in-depth interview of the feature story of trying to see all of the aspects every every curve of the outline of the body how all of the feather patterns and feather arrangement fits into that so there's a lot of erasing on this sketch typically the way it would go well typically my sketches I might watch a bird for several minutes and then spend 30 seconds actually drawing and this just involved many cycles of that so looking at the bird for a minute or two sketching for 10 or 20 seconds looking at the bird again for a minute or two and often what I see in that minute or two of watching I'm trying to memorize a few details that I can then transfer onto the paper but often when I look down at the paper at my partially finished sketch and I'm ready to add those few details that I've memorized I find that the the work that I've done up to that point is not quite right and I have to make some modifications before I can fit in the new details that I've memorized so I erase some things and try try a new version of a little part of the bird and by then I've forgotten the things that I just memorized and I have to look at the bird again and and reconfirm all of that so it's sort of a two steps forward one step back cross lots of testing and experimenting and and revising and erasing but eventually after a couple of hours I came up with this and this to me this is a it's a there's a lot of detail there's almost too much detail here it's sort of a to me it's a it's a stiff and overly overly detailed sketch but the again the value of it was in the process just the the way that it that it allowed me to look at every part of the bird and and experiment with different patterns and lines and figure out how to draw a hawk owl so after that a couple of hours later I was able to do a sketch like this which i think is starting to capture the essence the real spirit of a hawk owl in just a very few lines it's sort of a caricature of a hawk owl trying to be as realistic as possible but still just sort of a caricature drawing just with just a few lines and and dark and light patterns trying to represent that bird so then oh and I should say this this was 1981 and that was right after I had finished college well I went to college for almost a year and then left to go bird-watching full-time so I finished college and at this point I had just left and I and I was starting my my years of full-time birding and sketching basically everyday for about ten or twelve years I was just birding and sketching so this is seven years later this is the hawk owl that I was drawing sitting in the back of my friend's car in May and that photograph of a few minutes ago and this was again now ha Kells make fantastic subjects for drawing because they sit still and they sit in the open sometimes for hours so you can really set up a telescope and start drawing and work on your paper for five minutes and look back in the telescope and the bird is still there so they make great subjects for drawing but this is I had spent a couple of days many hours again watching this bird doing a series of sketches this is one of the last sketches that I did and I really put a lot of time into this one and it's seven more years of almost full-time drawing and sketching so I've learned a lot about birds and drawing and all of that went into this sketch but this sketch is actually very unusual for me for a field sketch I don't do these sort of finished pencil drawings in the field and it's a combination of the the bird being very cooperative and having spent a lot of time with it and really getting to know it but here's a more typical page of my field sketches these are leeches storm petrels so this would be a typical page of my field sketchbook and again this was probably half an hour of watching watching these leeches storm petrels in flight and I'm trying to capture the the wing shape the posture just the flow of their movements in flight trying to capture that in a few drawings so I'm experimenting with all kinds of wing shapes and you can see on the middle left the whole left side there those three images on the left side the the middle one is just scribbled out I started it and it wasn't working and I scribbled it out the one above that I was I started with one wing shape I had drawn one outline for the wing and then moved the whole wing forward that's the kind of adjustments and corrections and and experimentation that you would see in my my typical field sketches but again this is probably a half hour of watching and maybe only two or three minutes if actually putting pencil on paper and this is a more recent typical field sketch these are hooded Warblers that I saw in Texas a couple of years ago and here I'm I'm just I've watched the birds along the path there they're hopping around very active moving and feeding and I'm trying to capture some of the postures and shapes and this people often ask me how how can you draw a bird when they're constantly moving and you only get glimpses of them it's hard enough to see a Warbler let alone draw it and the answer to that is that what I'm drawing in a sketch like this is only a few little details that I've observed in this moment most of what goes into this drawing is things that I already know about Warblers about the way bird's wings work about the angles that the legs move so I notice a few details while I'm watching the hooded Warblers and then I can look down at the paper and do a quick a quick sort of Warbler template and modify it slightly in the ways to capture what I've just observed so I learn a little bit from each sketch that I do and and thousands and thousands of sketches gradually builds up the the knowledge to be able to see a bird fairly briefly and and still notice a few details that I can put into a sketch so I can well it's still very important to have a good look at a bird I can't sketch a bird that's very far away I have to see it up close and in in quite a bit of detail and the longer that you see it the better but I can do a sketch that is based on just a fairly quick view of a bird now so I spent about 12 years traveling birding and sketching in the field and what I do in the field is all pencil sketches just stacks of pages like what I've just shown then I get back in the studio and when I'm doing paintings for the field guide I have all of my field sketches I pull out as many photographs as I can find of the species that I'm going to work on and try to come up with the quintessential outline of the species so I try to pick a pose and a shape and get the right proportions that will represent that species in that to be a sort of average normal-looking stereotypical example of that bird and when I start the painting well it's kind of well you can see the pencil outlines above these painted birds just a little bit on that screen there so that the pencil outline that I start with for the painting is just a very simple outline and fairly rough and I add all of the details in the painting process so I refine the shape as I'm painting and add all of the plumage details most of the plumage details are added while I paint so this this is baikal teal on the left and falcata duck on the right it's two species that I added to the revised edition of the field guide and those sketches above were meant to be the females but I realized that there wasn't going to be room to add the females of those species in the revised edition of the field guide so I never finished painting those two but it's a good opportunity to see the the pencil outline that I would begin with and better than the I did actually did several hundred other paintings that I painted and then found that there wasn't room for them in the field guides so here's a northern saw-whet owl this is the Queen Charlotte Islands subspecies of northern saw-whet owl which does this is another one that's added to the second edition of the field guide so this it would have started with a simple pencil outline like the Ducks and at this stage I've added probably five or more very light layers of brown and gray paint to begin the painting process so I'm starting to build up some of the colors and patterns slowly through layers of paint and I just keep adding adding a few details lightly adding other layers of paint and then adding a few more starting to add some of the streaks on the under parts building up the layers that paint slowly so that I can see how the colors and patterns and shapes are developing and make adjustments as I go and I work on the whole bird all at once so I'm painting painting it all over from head to tail I don't paint the head and then work on the body or vice versa and gradually adding more adding more layers adding more detail just building it all up and it really comes to life as soon as I paint some definition around the eyes and the final stage is just adding some more white refining some of the edges adding a little bit of light color on the shoulders and the back and the head to give it a little more three-dimensional look but this is the actual finished painting that appears in the field guide and at this size it looks sort of it probably looks fairly rough and sort of impressionistic you see all the brushstrokes and but this is the I paint it I do the paintings at a fairly large size not quite this big imagine about seven inches long for this one so almost life-size for a solid owl and then it's reduced to about a third of that size in the field guide and that allows me to work with a fairly big brush I work quickly and loosely and putting the paint on and I leave it at this stage knowing that it will look more detailed when it's reduced but also I like I like to leave it impressionistic and leave the leave out as many details as I can so there's a sort of there's a level of precision that's involved but not a lot of detail and I'll talk about that a little bit more in well right now I think that it's really important to simplify the illustrations in the field guide as much as possible and this sketch is an example of that so this is female castas and black-chinned hummingbird and if I were going to illustrate a field guide to the identification of female castas and black-chinned hummingbird which would be a very thin book but this is the only illustration that would be needed this sketch just the outlines of the birds provides all of the details that you need to distinguish them all of the most useful things to distinguish these two species are shown in this sketch the the shape of the bill the shape of the head the proportions of head to body the lengths of tail and wings and other things all that those are the important details and I think if I had added color to this put in shading and green and buff and gray and an added background or added other other elements to the painting that would just distract you from the details that you'd need to see to identify the birds and that's my my reasoning behind trying to simplify the illustrations in the field guide to just show the general colors and patterns that you're likely to see at a distance and leave out all of the other details that you don't need to know about and that I think it helps also to allow you as the viewer to fill in some of those details to use your own experience to add the to sort of build a scene around each illustration to put your own experience into the book in a way that you you can't really do with the other extreme is photographs which are a record of a moment in time it's already a fully realized scene one experience that that the photographer had when they took the picture so it's more difficult for you as as a another person another viewer to relate that photograph to what you've just seen in the field and I think the the more simplified illustrations without any background without any habitat with very neutral lighting neutral poses and simplified colors and patterns allows you to superimpose all of your own experiences your own stories on top of those illustrations that's my theory of field guide illustration so these are some of the actual original paintings from the the field guide I would on a big sheet of paper about 14 by 22 inches or so I would put all of the images that I thought would go on a page in the book so one sheet of paper represents one page in the book and I would sketch out all the pencil outlines and then start painting all of the birds I mixed some gray paint and paint the shadows on all 12 or 18 Birds on that sheet all at once and then mix some brown and put that wherever it was needed and mixed the next color and add that to all the images I think that helps it helps to keep the colors and the style consistent across the whole page also saved a lot of time being efficient and is believe it or not I don't have a lot of patience for painting so I like to get results quickly and each of these when I was really on a roll and things were moving ahead smoothly I could paint a whole page like this in a day on average each image in the book took about an hour to paint some species take longer obviously birds like sandpipers with really complex patterns and subtle gradations of colors that takes longer to build all that up other species like crows or blackbirds are much easier and they went very quickly so it working on the second addition I I still had all of these original paintings and I took each one individually and looked at all of the images I did a lot of touching up of minor things little just sort of little artist tweaks fixing shading or fixing the outline about 10% of the images I made big Corrections I really changed the plumage or the shape or added details that that I had left out or or learned since I painted the birds in the first edition and one example of a real correction is that if you have the first edition you can look at the the flying mail Rose throated Piccard it doesn't have a Rose throat I forgot to paint the little dab of Rose on the throat of the flying bit card so I added it now it's in the second edition so after the when the first edition came out I had all of these things that I added in the second edition are ideas and information that I've been collecting for fifteen or fourteen years since the first edition went to the printer I immediately started keeping a notebook of all the things I wanted to change or add or or fix in the next edition and then I went on to do some other books about birds and about ten years ago decided that I wanted to do another book project that wasn't related to birds and I decided on trees and that book came out about five years ago but I I decided on trees because after searching around and testing out some different ideas I found that there are actually some real similarities between tree watching and bird watching yeah and the the biggest or most important similarity being that they're the only two kinds of nature study that we can do it in the course of our daily routine I can I could study trees in my backyard on the way to the post office if my kids were at soccer practice I could walk around the soccer field and look at trees for an hour and the it's the same with birds you can bird watch anywhere you can bird watch from your office window you know in a in a boring meeting can look out the window and watch birds or trees you can identify trees or birds from a moving car across a field in a city park there and you really can't do that with any other kind of nature study you don't see snakes on your way to the post office or or butterflies dragonflies all these other things require a lot of a lot of effort to find the different species so trees were something that I could I could get to know and study just during the course of my my daily activities and I took them on as a project to do another book and I enjoyed the whole the whole process again of putting together a book of learning all of the details and the minutiae of trees and tree identification and and then I love the feeling when those all those details sort of fit together into a bigger pattern so learning things for example like boxelder is really just a maple it's in the maple genus everything about it is a maple except that it has compound leaves and here's another tree example this is great on the left and quaking aspen on the right there are two species common in the northeastern US they both grow along roadsides and field edges and they have whitish bark they're superficially similar and sometimes confusing but the twigs are very different the structure of the twigs the thickness the direction that they point and once you learn to distinguish these two species by their twigs that same distinction works for all of the birches and all of the Aspen's and cottonwoods so you learn these little details by studying one challenging pair of species and then realize that you've learned something that applies to dozens of species the same way working on the the first edition of the bird guy doing all the paintings of the small songbirds one of my great Eureka moments was working on those paintings and looking at all the wide variety of patterns and colors on these birds and then realizing that they all have the same they're very different colors and patterns but the same arrangement of feathers exactly the same number and and arrangement of feathers on all these small songbirds so that a streaked pattern is created by a dark line along the shaft of each feather and the streaks can be broad or narrow or blurry or distinct or all different colors but they always follow the same lines along the body of the bird so that all these species a female red-winged blackbird any species with streaks has the same number of lines of streaks across the breast and the same number of lines of streaks across the back and that was such a revelation to me that all of this huge variety of colors and patterns followed some very simple rules so there some very simple and and predictable ways that the patterns can vary some some strict limits on how the patterns can go so whether it's a fox sparrow or a yellow Warbler or even a flicker or a Swanson's thrash birds that have spots on their breast instead of streaks they still follow the same arrangement of feathers so the spots are lined up in the same way as the streaks the same number of lines of spots across the breast of a Swensons thresh and it just it all became clear and this like the birch versus aspen example we get to know birds and beginning birders or non birders would call all of these birds cranes they're all gray with long legs and long necks but then once you start birding and learning the real names you'll learn that the one on the right is a great blue heron and as you get to know them a little better get to know real cranes and get to know the great blue heron and realize that they're not related they're in different families they're different nesting behavior different migratory behavior different vocalizations different flocking behavior feeding behavior bill structure feather structure all these differences and more and you realize how fundamentally different they are and that's to me that's another part of the great appeal of birding is getting to know the birds as the species as unique unique individuals and understanding all of their differences and there's a great difference in the demeanor also of these two species and I'm sure the great blue heron would have no trouble taking on the five sandhill cranes and bird-watching it it connects us to the natural world in really surprising ways and I think one of the the things that has kept birding exciting for me over the years is how changeable the birds are that you never know what you're going to see every minute every hour they changed by the week by the month and also by the year in my lifetime my 40 plus years of birding there have been tremendous changes in bird distribution birds that nobody would have considered seeing 40 years ago likes a wild turkey in the San Francisco Bay Area Bay Area are now common pileated woodpecker is an example in the Northeast that when I was a kid it was a very rare bird we had to work really hard to find one in the the biggest patches of forest and now in the Northeast the there's a lot more forests the forests of matured pileated woodpeckers have spread throughout the suburbs it's now essentially a backyard bird scarce but it's not unusual to see one in your backyard and that was would have been just unheard of forty years ago and the so it's this this surprising constantly surprising constantly changing aspect of birds that I think is a big part of their appeal and of course that's very different from trees no I'm sure nobody is woken up and wondered what trees they might see when you look out their window but you do you wake up in the morning and wonder what birds are going to be at the bird feeder what you might see as you walk through the park and you could walk through the same park the same path every day for ten years and not see the same set of birds twice it's just constantly surprising and right now we're in the midst of one of the great global spectacles the spring migration of birds this annual shift of incredible shift of biomass from one hemisphere to another species like yellow Warbler migrating north out of the tropics and into into the all of North America from from Mexico to treeline and it's um I think it's well it's tremendously reassuring and and hopeful there's an expression at Cape May New Jersey where I have done a lot of birding that the the birders say you should have been here tomorrow and I think that's a common theme among birders that there's always something to look forward to something something great is going to happen tomorrow next week next month there's always something new happening and that I think in a way that the the real fundamental appeal of bird-watching is really just seeking a connection to nature and birds provide a convenient and exciting sort of more and more socially acceptable excuse to set your alarm for 4:30 in the morning and go outdoors even if it's raining but that's what we really enjoy is just the experience of being out there seeing the Sun Rise seeing the seasons change walking through the park every week and seeing how the trees change through the seasons seeing a migration of dragonflies or seeing a fox all these other things that happen when we're outdoors are the sort of the byproduct of birding but really I think that altogether that's the the goal of of bird-watching and birds are just the convenient excuse to get us out there to get us out of bed and outdoors to experience all the rest of it so I think that the I think of the field guide as really just a directory kind of a contact list of birds that you might meet and it tells you their names it shows you a few pictures so you can recognize them but there's so much more to learn that you when you find them and learn their names then you can find out who they're related to what they like to eat where they spent the winter where they're going to whether things are going well for them or badly all these things like learning about the the difference between herons and cranes you learn so much more about them and that's where the the real pleasure and satisfaction of birding comes from getting to know all these birds so I hope that the field guide will serve that function for you and be your your introduction to the world of birds and these 900 plus species that are out there to meet so thank you there's some time for some questions you won't have some questions if you're sitting in the middle of a row please come out to the aisle I've got the first question yeah right down here how does he get the bird to come to your hand sorry how do you get the bird to come to your hand to sit on your head oh the picture of the sparrow we had trapped it in a net I was actually holding its legs so it couldn't get away and I let it go a minute later but you can it is possible to train birds to come to your hand for food I think scrub jays will do that chickadees will do that it takes a lot of time and patience but it can be done next question on this side thank you for your talk I happen to have a family a mr. mrs. redheaded Oh a Finch thank you redheaded offense and the mail comes and taps the question is can birds see their reflection oh yeah and comes and taps on the bathroom window and just has a wonderful time with himself yes that's a very common thing especially this time of year when the males are our territorial they see their reflection in the glass and they think it's a rival male trying to come into their territory and so they're they're trying to chase it away or or drive it off and they can never quite reach it it must be really frustrating but it happens there's a few species well it happens to be the the species that especially live right around houses so it's American Robins house finches Cardinals in the East do that a lot it's the species that are living right up around houses and the the way to solve that problem is to cover up the reflection you can try putting like a soap film on the window to dull the reflection so they don't see themselves or just tape a sheet of newspaper over the window so they can't see it at all and hope that then that they don't just move to the next window and start tapping on that one that that can happen you don't mind okay it'll it'll end in a few weeks once the hormones taper off so next question is over here to your right hi David thanks so much it was really nice to hear what you had to say tonight I also appreciated our walk yesterday I you obviously have a passion for learning and sharing what you're learning with the world and now that you've published this most recent bird guide and just earlier your tree guide I'm wondering what what your next project is what your next you know your next leap or what what you're diving into these days are coming up yeah well the the first thing on the schedule is revising the eastern and western field guides the small books and those were starting to work on those and they're scheduled for 2016 also working on revising the app of the field guide with all the new material and that well that will actually be out first that should be out later this year a new version of the app and I have a couple of other book projects in the works but they will wait until after these I'm in the in the revision cycle right now so finishing taking all this new material and using it to revised the other books that are out and that'll be over the next couple of years and then after that I do have some ideas for other other book projects it'll be more about birds I don't have any plans to go into any other any other group like butterflies or or anything like that or or to another continent I'm gonna stick with North America and birds for the foreseeable future so maybe in ten years I'll have the energy or the time to think about something else but for the next ten years or so I think it'll be more more birds next question back here back in the house hi have any of the birds from the first edition gone extinct and are not in the second edition I'm sorry have any of the birds that were in the first edition gone extinct and they're not in the second edition um no no and I think in general the the rarest species in the first edition have increased birds like California condor whooping crane they're doing fairly well that well I should say if there are only a few hundred of them in the world it's hard to say they're doing fairly well but they're at least stable or increasing there there was one species my book doesn't cover Hawaii there was one species in Hawaii that did go extinct in the last fifteen years the the PO uli was down to just three individuals about ten years ago and they they disappeared so that's a sadly a u.s. bird that did go extinct in the last fifteen years but not one that's in my book next question is over here to your right so I actually have two questions one is you said that you had all the original paintings from the first edition and then you took some of them and and redid them does that mean the so the originals those paintings don't exist anymore or they've changed yes they have forever changed yeah and then my second question is when you were done with college and you started doing birding and sketching full-time how did you manage to support yourself during that initial period mostly well largely by controlling costs I lived very cheaply I lived in a camper van and and free places to camp the coast of California was a fantastic place I camped at Pigeon Point and the Carmel River mouth and in the national forests wherever I could Southeast Arizona was another great place to find free camping so my only expenses were food and keeping the van going and so I was able I I had I've sold a little bit of artwork I worked on a few small book projects I am towards the later 1980s I had some other other things going on I worked for a tour company called wings leading serious bird-watching tours so I would go out on five or six tours a year so maybe 60 days I spent leading tours and I earned enough money from that to support myself for pretty much the rest of the year it just didn't take very much money to to do what I was doing and then as time went on through the by the late 80s and early 90s I worked on books like Hawks in flight and was starting to sell more artwork and and and gradually got more and more settled as also as time went on but but that was it was basically by living very cheaply and finding whatever jobs I could that would pay a little bit of money and allow me to watch birds at the same time nice question back here do you have a favorite bird and if so could you describe your emotional reaction to it I well I generally say that I don't have a favourite bird and then I generally go on to name one but so I don't have a favourite bird but my favourite bird is the long-eared owl is is right at the top of the list and the reason is when I the first fall that I what would have been my sophomore year in college I I got a job at Cape May New Jersey Kate made bird observatory and they had an owl banding project and that wasn't part of my job but I volunteered to go out at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning and help with the owl banding and we trapped a few long-eared owls that fall it's a pretty rare migrant there but I had banded a lot of birds I had held a lot of birds in my life up to that point and long eared owl is by far the most feisty the least submissive and the most dangerous bird that I've ever held they're so aggressive so uh none submissive and so flexible that you really can't hold them safely with one hand they get you with either their bill or their feet depending on which part of the body you're trying to hold and most all the Hawks they don't try to use their bill for defense you think that they would but even a golden eagle you can hold it by its feet and you don't have to worry about the bill at all but long your dials are very different so I appreciated that that spirit that that indomitable spirit that they had and also the fact that long-eared owl is maybe the the only species or the the most elusive species in North America that if you named any other North American breeding bird even some very local ones and said you wanted to see it tomorrow well it's a little late now maybe the next day but you could get on a plane and go I could tell you where to go get a plane ticket you could go see it tomorrow but long eared owl even though it occurs from coast to coast it's very sparsely distributed and very erratic and the general reaction if you ask someone in any state or county local bird Club where can I see a long eared owl the response will be something like oh gee well two years ago they nested in this canyon over here but I haven't heard of any lately or though it'll be you know usually in the winter somebody finds one roosting somewhere but not not this winter it's just they're unpredictable scarce erratic and that makes every time you see one that much more of a treat that you never know when the next one is going to be so when you do run across one or have an opportunity to see one it's a really special experience because you can't it's a species that you can't just say I'm gonna go see a long eared owl so for those reasons that's my favorite well they're also really good looking and I enjoy owls in general I have another question back here oh thank you thank you for this evening it's just great I live in the city and not every year but certainly it's happening in the last three nights I call them night birds they're very loud they're not especially melodious but because it's dark I can't see them I don't know how to identify them there I'm sure that they're migratory birds but very very loud at one o'clock in the morning I open up all the windows and just lie there and just listen to this cacophony of chirping and bird sounds do you have any ideas of I I don't I does it happen this around this time of year in the spring it's happening now in the last two or three nights or early early mornings so I think people are suggesting a Mockingbird is that so there's a few few species of songbirds will sing at night and Mockingbird is one that's very it's well known for singing very loudly at night and they'll go on for a long time I could play a recording of a Mockingbird right now for you and we'll get this solved so there's there just aren't a lot of birds that make noise at night anything like that you can whistle quite well thank you a lady over here suggested that it might be a toe he I there they don't sing at night as much and they have a very short one short simple song and then a long pause like 15 seconds and then another song so it I guess if it depends on the exactly that the pattern of sound that you're hearing and and what some more details of that but if that recording sounded similar then I would I would bet it's a Mockingbird next question up here I'm so nervous and this is so exciting I have been burning for over 15 years and I've even banned it but I still struggle with the LBJ's and especially the sparrows and I was wondering if you had any tips as an expert for how I can finally conquer my Sparrow challenges I think that the sparrows you yes I do have some tips there they're very distinctive in their own way but I think you have to sort of get to know what the what the key distinguishing features are and focus on those and and not get calling them brown and streaked they're all brown and streaked so that's sort of irrelevant you have to look at other things then size and shape is really useful habitat is incredibly useful for sparrows exactly where they are and what they're doing will distinguish most species so that you're only going to see Savannah sparrows in certain places and song sparrows in certain places and golden crown sparrows in certain places and there's not a whole lot of overlap between them so I guess I would suggest taking the taking the field guide and going through with just focus on the the species that are really common here that you're likely to see and don't worry about oddballs like clay-colored Sparrow just work on the the ones that you're likely to see here and it's going to be a pretty short list and then there will be some that are like golden crown Sparrow is found in in brushy areas and and really never far from dense brush song sparrows are found in low dense brush usually near water Savannah sparrows are found in open dry or open areas grassland or in the in the brushy hedgerows at the edges of grasslands but they're in much drier and more open areas than song sparrows and you can start to work on some of those distinctions the more you can narrow down the list of candidates before you even look at the details of the bird the easier it's going to be to distinguish them and and then also pay attention to size and shape because there's a obviously a huge difference between golden crown sparrow and chipping sparrow or golden crown Sparrow and Lincoln Sparrow they're very different sizes but there are subtle differences in size and shape between all of them and that's a much more useful thing generally than the the brown and streaked aspect the next question is over here thank you hi David thank you for your incredible work it's how do you think your guy could be used to further conservation efforts and what we you like to see individuals and organizations to help protect habitat and species that's a that's a big question I well like I said I hope that my my guide just helps to introduce people to the diversity of birds and I think that's really the the key to conservation is getting people outdoors to to get to know the birds and appreciate them and so that and I think one of the most important things that anybody in this room could do is take some kids out birding or just take some kids outdoors get him outdoors and look at bugs and plants and dead trees and stuff I when I think back on my my earliest childhood experiences my father is an ornithologist so there was a bird focus but when we went out on hikes on the weekend it was him and some biologist friends and the most memorable parts of those hikes for me were people who were you know somebody was turning over rocks and finding mole crickets and somebody else was picking berries off a bush and saying here try these and it was just a whole nature experience and the birds were part of it but I think that was that's really the key and and so I think getting getting kids involved in nature getting kids outdoors is a really important thing to do next question on this side I am I'm so nervous because I used the word simply that way that you talked about I've been burning for about 20 years I started for lots of different ways but Ned Johnson at UC Berkeley and all over the place which dark hub and John Donne and I've been to the Arizona it I'm obsessed with birds in the way that you know girls are obsessed with other things but so this is such an honor thank you for coming mainly thank you for bringing all these people together I've never felt normal you know so I really appreciate it and so I wanted to ask two part one is to me you are so ultra famous and amazing and everyone in here do you have some crazy experiences of you know you lead a normal life but you also don't and then the second part is do you ever come to schools I teach at schools of the Sacred Heart Stewart Hall for boys and you are invited right now every day for the rest of the year let me know stools of the Sacred Heart I'm Loren Richardson well thank you I I do I do visit schools sometimes and I will I will definitely keep that invitation in mind so and I'm sorry what was the I didn't quite catch the focus of your first question you have any when when you're out in the world you know to us you're so famous if we've saw or said someone said Sibley's in the restaurant we would all come over and you know be excited do you have some funny stories at all of being famous and/or being treated like a regular person well okay yeah I was in New Hampshire a few years ago with my son and renting cross-country skis and filling out the form to rent the skis and the person taking the form looked at my name and said Oh David Sibley you know there's a guy who writes bird guides with that next question is over here the Alan's and the Alan bird and the Rufous hummingbird you say that they're virtually indistinguishable but other books that I've looked at in comparison seem to have a different image and they really distinguish between the two so how do you compare what you're saying compared to other in contrast to other other authors or publishers yeah well Alan's and Rufus hummingbirds are barely distinguishable they're distinguishable well the adult males are distinguishable with about maybe 99% confidence that they're the only difference that you can see really see in the field is that male Alan's has a green back and the male Rufus has an orange back usually but some Rufus have green backs and some Alan's have quite a bit of orange in their back and they do hybridize occasionally so in the hand you can measure the width of the outer tail feathers and then if you know whether it's an adult or immature male or female you can look up the look up the range of measurements that are allowed for each one and see whether your measurements match and so that's how you can distinguish them in the hand but in the field it's other than adult males it's in general under field conditions it's just not possible with really good close-up photos of a bird in the field that's sort of like having it in the hand but even even at that with the non adult males you there's there's some so much variation in the width tail feathers so anyway it's it is it's a it's a problem that comes up in the East when the both of those species show up as vagrants in the east and everybody of course wants to know whether it's most of them are Rufus but a few Allen's show up and when everyone shows up everybody wants to know if it's Rufus or Allen's and it's a it's just incredibly difficult to figure out without trapping the bird and measuring that those tail feathers we have another question right down here down to your right okay what's the rarest bird you have seen oh that's a good question well the I guess the from a sort of global sense I saw a couple of California condors back in 1985 when there were only five left in the wild so that was there that was just within a month after that they had all been trapped and taken into captivity and now thankfully there's there are hundreds a couple hundred in the wild and more but from a birders perspective the rarest bird I've seen was a Bullers Shearwater that is no it's fairly regular off the coast of California here they nest in New Zealand and they come to the North Pacific in their non-breeding season and quite a few show up along the coast here in the fall but I was on a boat off the coast of New Jersey and a Bullard Shearwater flew by which was the first and still the only record for the Atlantic Ocean and it was a life bird for me at the time and ironically I had just come from California and hoped to see one here but it was not a good year for them so in like five boat trips in Monterey Bay I did not see a Bullard Shearwater drove back home sadly without Bullers sheer water and then a few weeks later off the coast of New Jersey there was a bullish year water but that's one of the rarest birds I've seen last questions on the side hi David thanks again for yesterday above Sutro Baths so I've got a few very short questions do you want me to ask them rat-a-tat-tat or one by one let you answer each one let's go one by one okay so the first one is how did you get your parents to save your early drawings there are only a few of them my mother saved a few but most of them are gone so that peregrine falcon is one of the very few that I have from that long ago okay so the next question is how did you develop your artistic skills were your parents artistic did you study it in school what what who your teachers my parents are not artistic and I did not study art formally I I learned from other I got a lot of encouragement and and I learned from other artists along the way I got tips I studied the work of other bird illustrators but mostly and I think that the most important part of my training was just getting to know the birds because that the outlines that I draw those simple pencil outlines that I use to start a painting are the most important part of the whole painting if any part of that outline is wrong the painting won't come out right and there's no amount of painting technique or skill that can save a bird if the outline is wrong so that just getting to know the birds the years of sketching and watching and and practicing drawing those outlines I think was the the most important artistic training that I had so with all the the watching and sketching and observing how do you prevent yourself from getting bored I suppose the flip side of that is how do you keep your interest because you're really doing a lot of the same although there are a lot of details but I'm sure it could get a little monotonous at times I I always felt like I was learning new things I felt like every sketch was helping me to get better at what I was doing and I always found new questions to ask and new things to wonder about and that still happens now essentially every bird I look at I think of things I don't know things I wonder about things I'd like to look at if I see one golden crown Sparrow I think oh I'd like to I'd like to see a hundred lined up so I could check that or this on on all of them and see how it varies or there's just an endless number of questions and just like in any science every every question answered leads to ten more questions that you can ask so I think that's what really keeps me going and it's still it it's just the same as it was 40 years ago last question so journeys like you have to bird by sight to draw and I always wondering if if you bird by sound and when you develop that because I've been burning my site for 11 years and the sound is still yeah I found it hard yeah I I do a tremendous amount of birding by sound and I started I mean it was obvious to me at a young age that it was a really important part of birding so I set out to learn it and I I kept notes I think that that's where my my sketching sort of carried over into keeping notes on everything about birds so I when I heard a bird sound I tried to write down what it sounded like or do a little drawing of the pitch how the pitch changed or and I think that was really helpful to to remember the sounds but there's no substitute for just experience and getting out there and actually I think finding a bird that's making a sound and watching it make the sound is a really good way to remember it trying to imitate the sound or write down a description of it will also help to remember it and and also thinking about what the bird is doing or what what information the bird is trying to convey with that sound because they're all all different sounds that the birds make each mean different things they're used in different situations and that if you're you're trying to get a sense of sort of the bird language so understanding what the sounds might mean or even in the most general sense what it means I think what really helps to to remember the sounds and put them in context and and develop a better better sort of repertoire or become fluent in in bird well reminder everybody that David's gonna be signing immediately after the program thank you all for coming and thank you David Allen Sibley thank you you

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Length: 79min 20sec (4760 seconds)

Published: Tue May 20 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/feelingproductive]

What a boss. I just picked up the 2nd Ed. Sibley West and am pretty excited about it. I started birding with the first edition of the Sibley guide and have tried others, but I just love the amount of visual information that Sibley includes. His paintings are wonderful.