My west coast brother has informed me that today is "Draw a Picture of a Bird Day." That sounds like fun and I would draw a picture or several pictures of birds if they would just hold still.
As I've said before, my spouse and I spend time every morning watching birds while we have our breakfast and linger over coffee. Being retired, we have lingering down to a science. Ocassionally I will take a picture of an interesting bird with my phone but mostly I'm satisfied to just watch them.
But thinking about drawing birds makes me think of John James Audubon (1785-1851), the ultimate drawer of birds. I knew that he drew lots of pictures of birds, but I did not know, until I looked him up, that his bird drawings were contained in "a monumental four-volume collection of life size prints of North American birds." The volumes contain 435 handcolored plates plus a separate five-volume biographical text. Wow, that is a lot of big heavy books. I'm sure they are fascinating and I will spend some time looking as his drawings on line.
But meanwhile my wonder spouse and I will content ourselves with referring to our little one-volume paperback guide to the birds of Indiana whenever a mystery bird shows up at our feeders.
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