Todd Forsgren is the fantastic photographer whose vivid images of birds tangled in mist nets caused a bit of an internet stir a few years ago. I interviewed him about his images and his life birding in 2013.
At long last, Todd's mist net photos have been collected into a book called Ornithological Photographs, now out through Daylight publishing. I urge all forward-thinking birders out there, all the hip birders, to pick up a copy. You may not look at birds again the same way.
My friend Ali teaches fourth graders in my home state of Maine. A few weeks ago she posted a request to the teacher crowdfunding site DonorsChoose.org looking for some magazine subscriptions she could share with her students. Being the selfless, helpful friend that I am, I chipped in to help the project along. Soon after I was updated via email that my contribution, along with others, had helped the complete the project: the kids would be getting their magazines. Good deed done.
But teachers being teachers and kids being kids, my meager contribution would not go un-thanked. In fact, Ali (ahem, Ms. Roberts) told her students a few facts about me and had them write honest-to-goodness Thank You notes. One of the facts about me Ms. Roberts told her kids was that I liked birds, and into my mailbox today arrived a set of lovely notes, fretted over and laboriously colored and spelled out by a bunch of innocent nine-year-olds. On some of them were drawings of birds.
The worst bird drawings I've ever seen.
Look, I'm not here to pile on to the American educational system. I'm sure these kids are trying as hard as they can. But the fact the remains that none of the "birds" these kids drew resemble anything close to a real species. Have any of them even seen a bird before? Isn't there a window they can look out of?
Maybe we should just take it one bird at a time.
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I have only birded outside North America once, in 2006. I had just finished a winter ski-bumming in Aspen, Colorado, and I was flush with cash from a winter spent hustling vacationers as one of those on-mountain photographer guys. My friends were also flushed, and we decided to go on a trip.
One of my friends knew a guy in Ecuador, and tickets were cheap, and so we went.
My friends were not birders, and we were not going to a particularly birdy part of the country. In fact, although it sounds unbelievable for a country containing more than a thousand bird species, I came home after ten days in Ecuador only identifying 56 species.
I bought the enormous Ridgley Field Guide to the Birds of Ecuador before I left, but had not nearly enough time to really get a handle on what birds I might see in my travels. Plus, the book weighs like 10 pounds and was too much to carry around with me. Instead, when I'd sneak off to go find birds, I'd bring along a little notebook and make quick sketches of things I saw, returning home to figure out IDs later (I didn't have a camera, did I mention that?).
I expected to be frustrated by my lack of knowledge, but this kind of birding was far and away the most fun I've had birding maybe to this day. I didn't know what to expect, I wasn't jaded to anything. Every bird needed to be examined for possible differences from other, similar birds. It was birding again for the first time.
I recently found my notebook in a box of old things and wanted to share the crappy little drawings I made. They're a far cry from the detailed, shaded, dog-bottle watercolored (!) images that real artists can produce, but I think there's a certain charm in my rushed scribbles. The pictures didn't scan very clearly, sorry, but click to enlarge.
Artists and scientists have something of an uneasy alliance. Both pursuits find kinship in being frequently maligned by the public for their high-mindedness, but true bonds are hindered by the openness and aloofness that characterize artists, and the density and seriousness that characterize scientists. To use a completely random an unnecessary analogy, they're like Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker in Rush Hour: perceived opposites forced to join up to compete against larger foes.
Anyway, into this fray comes a peacemaker: Rosemary Mosco. Rosemary is an artist and she's also a science communicator, someone who, in her words, works to connect people to science through creative communication projects. Very cool.
Rosemary's comics - which are collected at Bird and Moon - bridge the gap between biology and art with joy. She does for biology what XKCD does for math and Hark! A Vagrant does for history: pull out the humorous voice from a field not known for expressing itself with much gusto. Rosemary agreed to answer a few questions for me about her comics and the gaps between science and art. (By the way, her brand new "Birding Is My Favorite Video Game" piece is my favorite of all things.)
