The biggest news of the month is that I got back into watercolor painting. I'll start with news of the birds (this painting of a Vermilion Flycatcher male is based on one of my best sightings of the month), and move on to the paintings.
Ducks at Winter's End
The Cinnamon Teat have been hanging out at the Rio Grande Nature Center and being quite lovely.
The Gadwall are still around. Here they perform simultaneous dabbling, resulting in the quintessential duck butt photo.
On the other side of the bosque near Montano, I was happy to find not just one Mexican Duck, but a male/female pair. These ducks are found mostly further south, and the ones we find in Albuquerque are mostly somewhat hybridized with Mallards. The male looks overall like a female mallard, but with a bright yellow bill. The bill is also a good way to differentiate the female Mexican from the female Mallard. The Mexican Duck female is orange like the Mallard's but lacks the block mottling of the Mallard female bill.
As we head into spring, most ducks will leave the Albuquerque area, with the exception of Wood Ducks and Mallards. These Wood Ducks have been enjaged in the early spring activity of looking for a suitable nesting cavity in the bosque trees. Here you see then returning from the trees and preparing to go back into the pond.
Vermilion Flycatcher
In the first part of the month, a brilliant red rarity appeared in a park in Albuquerque's NE Heights. The Vermilion Flycatcher is fairly common in southern NM, More and more vagrant Vermilions are showing up further north in the winter and spring. They often hang around for awhile, though so far they aren't known to nest here.
As Spring arrives, the survey has been a fun time to observe the rituals that come with breeding breeding season. The Red-Winged Blackbird males, who have laid low all winter, are now pulling out all the stops to show off their colors.
We always check this nest box and a nearby cavity on the northwest end of our route for roosting raccoons. This raccoon really knows how to relax.
To end the bird section of this post: A male Belted Kingfisher at Tingley. Watercolor Painting
I took a 5 week watercolor painting class February-March with Sean Hudson. The focus was landscape painting, which is something I have found challenging. The class was great and I was happy with what I was able to do. Here are a few of the paintings that I did during the class.
The instructor talked about how the main key to improving our skills was putting in "brush miles." To put in my brush miles at home, I pulled out a sweet little blank page book that my sister gave me awhile back. I was waiting for an inspiration for how to use it
So now I'm filling my "elephant journal" with watercolor paintings. It's not high quality watercolor paper, but I kind of wanted that so as not to be so precious about the products of my practice. I've been pretty happy with what I've done so far. Here are a few of the paintings in the book.
Plein Air-The Next Frontier?
I've been so far working from photos for watercolor painting. Plein air is a whole other challenge. With my sketchers group the last Sunday of March, I decided to attempt a plein air watercolor at the Rio Grande Nature Center. This is the painting that I started there. Full disclosure, what I painted while at the Nature Center I thought was an unmitigated disaster. I worked on it more at home and was able to save it somewhat. You can see the difference though, from what I've done using a photo for a model.
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