Gratitude 28

Gentle Reader, as I am making last minute preparations for my early flight tomorrow to Costa Rica, I will simply please your eye with photos of one other group of lovely birds of the New World, known as the tanagers.  Enjoy.

  

 



























That`s all for now, Gentle Reader!

Gratitude 27

I am particularly grateful for the orioles.  Not the baseball team, and what's with this business of naming baseball teams after birds?  Blue jays, orioles, redwings.  They have nothing to do with each other.  Birds are beautiful.  Unlike dumb competitive team sports that have nothing to do with beauty and everything to do with summoning forth some of the uglier traits of human nature.

I am referring here to the New World orioles, which are also known as icterids.    Sounds like disgusting critters from out of a science fiction novel.  But really they are beautiful and here are some lovely images if you don't believe me:

These birds are so elegant.  Despite the brilliant colours of their plumage there is still something understated and restrained about their beauty.  They are like the silent fire in the night and the flames of the sun fallen to the earth.

When I visited Ottawa and Toronto I saw some Baltimore orioles like this one.

They are a delight to draw and paint and their calm joy touches me in deep places.

I saw some of these in Bogota, Colombia, one day in the botanical gardens.

Here are two of my own lame attempts at honouring

orioles in my art.  I will keep on trying!

Gratitude 26

And now, a word about jays.  Not the baseball team, the Toronto Blue Jays, though I have seen blue jays in Toronto, but they were not of for bat, neither were they pitchers nor catchers but rather striking looking birds with blue, white and black plumage.  Where I live in Vancouver on the West Coast we have the closely related Steller`s jays, closely related, and often mistakenly called blue jays by the many who really don't any better.  See for yourself.

Blue jay







Stellers Jay (excuse the bad punctuation, Gentle Reader.  Microsoft has really messed up my computer keyboard)



I often see Stellers jays during my many neighbourhood walks and they are lovely in life as are the blue jays.  Because they are familiar and common birds here in Canada they are very easy to take for granted.  If I were from another country I would likely find them uncommonly beautiful and exotic, as I do the many Mexican species of jays, for which I am also very grateful.

Feast your eyes, Gentle Reader:



And here is a turquoise jay from Colombia









And the black-collared jay, also from Colombia

And how about the azure hooded jay from Central America

There are many other species, some very lovely and blue such as these.  In nature they are not the kindest birds and they will not think twice about robbing the nests of other birds to breakfast on their eggs or dine on their young.

Because they are so lovely to the eyes I give much thanks to God for the pleasure of their existence.

Gratitude 25

I am particularly grateful for sunbirds.  No, I don't mean the sports car.  Try googling sunbirds and you will get pictures of cars. 

Whoops!  Wrong again.  I just googled and got...Birds!  With beaks and feathers.  Shining, gleaming rainbow coloured feathers.  Gentle Reader, let me treat you to a few photos, as well as some images of my paintings:

  
 These birds are not hummingbirds, neither are they even remotely related to hummingbirds, except that they have feathers and hatch out of eggs.  Africa and tropical Asian regions needed a counterpart to the hummingbird in order to pollinate some of their outrageously gorgeous flowers.



                  

The hummingbirds didn't want to do it because they were all living in South America where the nectar tastes better and the rent is cheaper.   They also didn't want to make that flight all the way across the Atlantic and I won't go into here their contractual obligations....

So God, or Ma Nature, or if you want to use any of the scientists' names for God, Evolution or Natural Selection determined that Africa and Asia could also have beautiful long billed little birds with jewel-like plumage to service their flowers.  The only deal was they couldn't fly fancy.  The hummingbirds already had the trademark and no one wanted to see this in court.




  















There is no denying that sunbirds are equal to hummingbirds for their iridescent splendour.



I  often visualize them suspended from a vertical twig or flower stem in the blazing tropical sun as it is just beginning to rise, holding still as they shine like jewels in the silent light of the new day.






These last two images are of purple-breasted sunbirds, native to Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda.  It is hard to imagine such delicate, exquisite and innocent splendour set amid the horrors of genocide, war, institutionalized homophobia and brutality.

If only we could be reminded of the delicate, fragile beauty of the world around us, and so learn to emulate that splendour in how we treat one another and the other beings we share the planet with.

Gratitude 24

Yes, Gentle Reader, more birds!  Can it get any more boring?  Didn't think so.  These are three particular birds, rather related to each other and rather similar except that they are all different primary colours, which is to say red, blue and yellow with black wings.  That's right, they are respectively, red, blue and yellow, like medieval stain glass windows.  I did a painting of all these birds together once and gave it to a friend.  They are called, by the way, the maroon oriole from Southeast Asia




And here is a painting I did of maroon orioles



Now here is the Fairy Bluebird from Southeast Asia

and last but not least, the black naped oriole from the Far East

I could write more, but the pictures say it all, eh?

Gratitude 23

I suppose you must be sick of reading about birds, by now Gentle Reader, but for these reasons I am devoting an inordinate amount of blogspace to them:

1. They have long occupied my interest.
2. I love to paint them, plus, I get to promote my art on this page
3. They are so wonderful and underappreciated
4. I am sick and tired of writing about political, social and global controversy
5. I can post all these neat images and write only a token bit of text.  A real time-saver!

Any more questions?  This post I would like to dedicate to the Glossy Starlings, these amazingly shiny, iridescent birds from Africa and Asia:

Let's see what I can pull from Google Images without wrecking everything



These first two images are of a purple glossy starling from Africa.

This, I believe to be a blue eared glossy starling, also from Africa.  I first saw them at the Crystal Garden aviary in Victoria.  I was totally mesmerised by their iridescent beauty.  This was back in the eighties, before I started painting and I was overtaken by a sublime longing to portray these birds somehow, by my own hand.

This is a long tailed glossy starling.  Obviously!

Here is a golden breasted starling from East Africa.  Here is a painting I did of this bird

Oops!  I was wrong.  The painting exists, and it is beautiful, but it isn't on my website.  Now how did that not happen?

Hey, Gentle Reader.  I looked again, and what did I find but my painting of the golden breasted starlings







Emerald starling.  I first only knew this bird from a black and white photo in a book I no longer have.  Thanks to Uncle Google I finally know its true colours!



I pulled these three images of an amethyst, or plum backed starling, also from Africa




for one simple reason.  To give you an idea of the beautiful range of colour that the iridescent plumage proffers


depending on the angle of the sunlight. 


I have also portrayed this superb glossy starling in the painting below.




Aaaahhhh!   The wonder of it all!