my arctic environment professor on narwhals: “they’re pretty interesting creatures, I guess, even though they’re not birds.”

I just learned Herring Gulls eat lemmings and I don’t know why this is disturbing to me but……… it is.

A Birdy Art Challenge!

December came and went without a formal Decembird (kudos to people who did their own!), which was 100% on me having too many jobs + moving + generalized holiday madness. However, I so enjoyed seeing what folks did for Decembird 2016, and am too impatient to wait till next December 2018 to see what you bird-loving creative people make.

SO! To make up for the lack of a Decembird in 2017, let’s get revved up for FEBIRDARY 2018!! (No, the pun isn’t as good.)

The rules are simple: draw one bird each day the month of February, post it to social media, and tag it with #Febirdary and #Febirdary2018! You can follow the prompts below, or draw whatever you want (so long as it is bird-related!). Feel free to interpret the prompts however you like.

PROMPT LIST:

First

Last

Nemesis

Friend

Lifer

Awkward

Elegant

Young

Old

Round

Sleek

Stocky

Bone

Water

Fire

Breeding

Superpower

Beastly

Backs and Bellies

Silent

Noisy

Beloved

Loathed

Misunderstood

Endangered

Extinct

Secret

Free

Since 28 days is fewer than 31 (shocking), here are a couple of ~bonus~ days to keep up your momentum into March (or on days where you’re feeling spunky and want to draw two birds):

BONUS BIRDS:

Fight

Flight

Favorite

Have fun, everyone! I look forward to seeing what you do!
<3,

VG

is there anything in life as thrilling as spotting a pileated woodpecker?

Birding While Driving is extremely hazardous to one’s health, but I can hardly be expected to NOT look at a bald eagle being mobbed by a flock of crows, can I?

when I was a kid I was largely allowed to free-range through our woods so my mother decided to teach me to respond in kind to a barred owl call (in lieu of, presumably, just yelling my name into the forest and hoping I’d yell back)

to this day I can’t hear a barred owl without instinctively wanting to respond to it

You were talking about animal guides and whatnot so I thought I’d share a story. When I was younger I was somewhat notoriously hard to get gifts for so one of my relatives got me a bird guide as a joke(?) They regretted this later because I became Resident Bird Expert and made a nuisance of myself on all family outings thereafter. (the usual gift was watches so I have a bizarrely large number of slightly odd watches but that has nothing to do with birds so where they got the idea is a mystery)

omg that’s great! they accidentally created a birder- I see no downside to this.

(okay that’s not true, there is one (1) downside to being a birder and that’s spotting a bird while driving and terrifying your passengers by leaning forward/sideways to try and ID it as your car drifts gently into the next lane)

my favorite old field guide is a pocket guide to birds of north america, circa 1890, that originally belonged to my great-grandfather, and which includes a charming little entry on the Passenger Pigeon. I remember as a child I was awed by this tangible reminder both of the destructive impact of humanity and of my family’s existence as an unbroken line of enormous bird nerds.