Photo previously posted here was Impasto Painting Songbird, oil on canvas, 2020, by artist David Padworny.
Today is Draw A Picture of a Bird Day!
I’ve done this a few times before: first in 2010; again in 2011; once more in 2014; and again in 2018.
In honor of the eclipse which has everyone so worked up, here’s today’s 20-minute drawing. Let me know if you draw a bird. =)
I’m thinking that songbird is solemnly swearing that it’s up to no good. Or maybe it’s thinking the person making glances, fiddling with rectangles, twigs and pots of goo is also solemnly swearing it is up to no good. Who makes the first move? But with an eclipse going on well before twilight, a neutron star collision isn’t going to break the staring muse.
The staring muse is thinking it hasn’t been that long since he got the early worm. WHY IS THE SUN GOING AWAY? And just like that, it’s dawn again. Another day, another worm?
Also, I looked at the painting again. Yes, that bird is definitely giving side-eye.
Yesterday, I was about go back outside for dinner, and as I went around the corner of the patio to my var, I saw it.
The apartment complex was invaded by those smaller Dish TV satellite antennas long before I moved here, and the previous hot season I was so tired of trying to convince these birds to make their nests elsewhere instead of those sturdy spaces under the upstairs deck that are so badly warped that not only failed nesting twigs fall so do their eggs, that I put up decorative sheet metal to block those spaces and wrote a really long run-on sentence out of once and for all, I will save those eggs!
Truthfully, at my apartment anyway, the only place left to make a bird’s nest was that disused Dish antenna mounting. I have no way to get up there to remove it, it wasn’t mine anyway, and I seem to recall my lease saying I’m not responsible for the upkeep of this property –the Landlord is.
So, as I went around the corner, my eyes watching the grey road surface go by, I saw a newborn baby bird. It couldn’t have been bigger than a golfball, and it probably never opened its eyes. At that instant, it just fell two floors to the pavement and crushed itself to death.
So sad.
The other day, I saw a video of a scavenger crow fail to catch a fish dying in water too shallow for it. After the crow gave up, a large egret came, picked up the fish, took it to deeper water, dropped it in, and left it to swim away. Now I don’t know what motivated the egret to do that, but what I found most interesting were the comments in reaction to it–divided between those who thought the egret showed compassion and those who provided explanations for why it wasn’t compassion at all.
It illustrated, for me, the reason I like to say, “Err on the side of compassion.” It doesn’t change the story, it doesn’t change the outcome, but maybe it changes something in me, and maybe that something is for the good.
You’ve tried to make a better, safer environment for the birds. You recognized and cared for the loss of the baby bird. Many years ago, when Steve was sleeping in his hospital bed, I did something I rarely did and cried as I stood next to him. My tears fell on his hand and woke him. I immediately apologized for waking him and also for crying. He said, “It would make me so sad to think no one would cry for me.” I’ve taken those words with me ever since.