To the Chicken Lek!

Deb, Tim and I took off on a Friday for a hot date with lekking lesser prairie-chickens at Sue Selman's ranch near Woodward on Saturday morning. Thanks to impassable roads, we couldn't get to the main lek so the festivalgoers had to walk to one that, on the morning we attended, had but three males. They put on a lovely show, bowing and making their peculiar ricocheting hoot. I was really glad Deb had loaned me a sketchbook and pencil, because the photography ops were like this:
Those are prairie-chickens in the middle of the frame. It was nice through the scope, so I was really glad I'd lugged that along. I sketched happily for a couple of hours until my bladder began impinging on my lungs. The rule for unobtrusive blind-watching is to get into the blinds before the chickens get there at first light, and not to leave until after the last chicken flies off. We're talking three, four hours of sitting still and being vewwy, vewwy quiet while your bladder slowly fills. OK, I know, enough about the bladder. But it's a thing.

And once you get out, the most you can hope for is a dip in the landscape for cover.Which didn't even slow me down.

I shared a blind with John, an extraordinary young guy with what looks like the brightest of futures as a field biologist before him. He's home-schooled, and passionate about birds and birdwatching. And funny as all get out. I went into full mother-of-a-13-year-old mode, fussing about his choice of clothing for an icy, wet prairie dawn: a cotton hooded sweatshirt. Dude is gonna freeze to death before he gets to that bright future. Borrowed a real coat for him and plopped one of my ear warmers on him, too. He took it off for the picture. Tsk. I, for one, am not afraid to look like a fool as long as I'm warm. Hence the Cat in the Hat look, the big white ski gloves.



I don't want you to think that distant specks is the only kind of view you can expect of prairie chickens at this wonderful little festival. We just had a little bad luck: bad weather and distant chickens on a secondary lek. By Sunday morning, the roads had improved to the extent that lucky festivalgoers were able to access the big lek, and they got fabulous looks at the birds. At that point, I'd been out two mornings in a row, getting up at 0-dark-thirty and testing my (here it comes again) bladder capacity, so I was happy to do something else and leave my fabulous looks at lesser prairie-chickens to sometime in the future.

A nice black-tailed jackrabbit came lalooping across the lek, which was amusing. I am unused to seeing hares. They are huge, leggy, and very odd compared to our little cottontail rabbits.

On the first morning, we walked to a vantage point where we could see lekking chickens. The weather was pretty good and the company was even better.

Debby made quick sketches of distant chickens. I want to grow up to be her.

A tiny mammillaria cactus in fruit.

There is nothing quite like coming in frozen stiff from a stint in a blind, to a warm ranch house redolent of bacon and maple syrup and waffles and coffee. Ahhhh. Sue Selman, owner of OK's largest private ranch, is a wonderful hostess, and she made every festival participant feel like family. A time-tested recipe from the New River Birding and Nature Festival!

Here, Tim Ryan shows Sue Selman (seated) and stalwart volunteer Susan some photos on his iPhone. Doubtless some of the ones from the previous post...

Susan's a blur of motion as Sue serves bacon, waffles and scrambs to hungry birders.

Sue's kitchen is as generously proportioned as her breakfast helpings.


It was so cool to be having breakfast at the home of the rancher who owns and protects the land that this endangered grouse needs to survive. She's host to the prairie chickens, and host to us, and gracious to all. She's also a wonderful photographer and interested in all aspects of nature. Sue Selman is a gift to the planet. But wait! more evidence that she's the finest kind:

Someone who reads my blog mentioned to me that among her dogs, Sue has a Boston terrier. So after most people had finished their breakfast, Sue let Bug out to meet us.


photo by Tim Ryan

You can imagine how happy I was to hold a Boston terrier on my lap, after three days without Chet Baker. I mean, I had plenty of bacon, but not The Bacon.

Bug is a beautiful 8-year-old girl, solid muscle and sweet as maple syrup. Sue confessed to me that she has had a lot of dogs, but Bug is her favorite of them all. Imagine that. Bug's the principal varmint-catcher for a busy ranch, and she patrols a route several times a day. Which brought to mind Chet's chiptymunk and bunneh route. I would hate to be a gopher in the vicinity of Sue's house. Or a piece of bacon, fallen to the floor.

It amazes me how the Boston personality is so consistent from Ohio to Oklahoma. Such sweet, merry little dogs they are.

Zick, with Bug, at peace. Photo by Tim Ryan.

That night, I'd give the keynote at the Woodward Cultural Center. If it looks kind of like a frontier town in the Wild West, wal, it is.

Off to Oklahoma!

A scissor-tail takes flight in the rain

It all started innocently enough. Well, what eventually happened was going to happen anyway, but none of us knew it, at least not in our conscious minds. I've been waiting to tell this story for a few weeks, but it keeps unfolding, kind of like the Zick- bats story, and I'd like to know how it ends. Failing that, I'd like to help make it end better. I've been working on a series about Oklahoma for awhile now, and because there is so much to tell and because continuity is important, I will break my twice-weekly blogging cycle and be posting on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. I hope you enjoy it.

I was asked over a year ago if I would like to give a keynote at the brand-new Lesser Prairie Chicken Festival in Woodward, Oklahoma. Knowing that this bird has thus far eluded me, and more importantly, that two of my favorite people on the planet: traveler/writer/photographer Tim Ryan and fearlessly versatile artist Debby Kaspari--live in Oklahoma, I grabbed the chance to see the chickens and my friends in their native habitat.

You'll remember the prairie chicken poster from earlier how-to-paint-like-Zick blogposts:Well, this was the 2010 poster. And 2009's kickoff festival poster was done by none other than Debby Kaspari!


I love her palette, and the daring angles and rock-solid drawing. Mmm.

Tim Ryan picked me up at the Oklahoma City airport on April 15 and brought me to his beautiful Arts and Crafts cottage in a gorgeous suburb of OKC. There, Debby met us for a delightful lunch on his terrace, and then spirited me off to her little rural paradise near Norman. We were gabbing away at lunch when Debby glanced up at the sky and said, "I'm not crazy about the looks of those clouds. Let's head for my house." I heard the resolve in her voice and didn't protest. The clouds didn't look all that bad to me, but what do I know about Oklahoma weather?

So off we went to Debby's house, where I'd spend the night. I was exhausted from a 4:30 wakeup in Ohio, so after a little garden tour of Debby and Mike's magnificent rural contemporary house and yard, nestled in hundred-year-old oaks, I collapsed in a hammock under the oaks and drifted off to the songs of black-and-white and yellow-rumped warblers. Every once in awhile I'd crack an eye to the drifting clouds, and once Debby's little cat Gizmo leapt up and landed on my stomach, curling up contentedly. Which flattered me, since Gizmo, who arrived on the Kaspari porch as a pregnant teenager and proceeded to work her way deep into Deb and Mike's hearts, is a very cool, smart cat. Here she is, nuzzling one of Debby's many incredible sculptures--a harpy eagle planter (!) Who else would think of it? Told ya Deb could do anything.

I slept off the weariness and let the peace of wild things settle over me. I felt cared for and welcome and unpressured and content. It was one of my Top Three Naps of All Time.

Sure enough, there was weather moving in, just in time for the festival. As I think back over the many festivals I've worked, I remember rain at most of them. Of course, most of them are in spring, and it rains in spring, but still! it gets old. Rain at the Lesser Prairie Chicken festival is especially problematic because the road to the main chicken lek (display grounds) gets gumboliciously impassable after only a few hours' downpour. And boy, did it.

Tim and Deb and I, world travelers that we are, were (naturally) woefully unprepared for such conditions, and so, in the grand festival tradition started by Bill of the Birds in a Jamestown, ND Wal-mart, we repaired to Woodward's WallyWorld for things like rubber boots and heavy fleeces, because not only was it pouring; it was freezing cold. After all, we had packed in deep denial of how cruel Oklahoma springs can really be.

First order of bidness: rubber boots. These weren't bad, and they had all three of our sizes. iPhone photo by Tim Ryan. We're being Gumbies. And our brains hurt!


We couldn't resist a little People of Walmart safari of our own. The pickin's were rich. I posed for a surreptitious shot of a gender-bender: a woman in a wifebeater. Unfortunately, the tats aren't showing up too well. There's a angel on my shoulder...


From there, it was on to Atwood's, which is the most spectacular farm-supply store I've ever seen. And I savor farm-supply stores like I savor morels in April.

Tim found a hat, but it wuz too small. That did not stop him from vamping a bit.


iPhone photo by Debby Kaspari

Yes, we were having loads o' fun. In fact, as I think about that trip to Oklahoma, I think about our shopping trips and the crazy foods we ate and the laughter in store aisles just as much as I think about dancing prairie chickens and prairie dogs and coyotes and longhorns and my nap under the oaks at Debby's house.

When we got to the denim section of Atwood's, my eyes nearly rolled back in my head. Because ever since September '09 when I left my favorite ever denim shirt in a hotel in Wisconsin, I have been pining for a shirt like that. I didn't find an exact replica--maybe I never will--but I came back from Oklahoma with four perfectly decent denim shirts (one for Bill) AND the most fabulous pair of Round House Oklahoma-made overalls you have ever seen. I have been living in them this spring, with pruners and trowels bristling from every pocket, and I think about our good times in Oklahoma every time I put them on. I regret not having taken a photo of the Sizing Chart for Round House Overalls that was posted at Atwood's. It advises would-be overall wearers: "If your belly hangs over your beltline, add four inches to the waist."

I did, just because.

iPhone photo by Debby Kaspari

Tim and Zick at Atwood's, flushed with joy at having found the ultimate plain denim shirts and real overalls. When's the last time you saw real overalls? No pearl buttons, no yoke-stitched frippery, just good plain clothes. And the dearest of friends.

The Highest Use

As an illustrator, I am accustomed to seeing my artwork in service. Not standing alone, on an easel or wall, but working, getting a message across. I absolutely couldn't wait to turn the prairie chicken poster over to Bird Watcher's Digest's talented Production Director, Claire Mullen. It would be in a poster design that this painting would see its highest use. Claire works her magic on the magazine six issues a year. When you've been confined in the pages of a magazine, designing a poster has got to be fun, like painting a mural would be for me, and Claire leapt at the opportunity to moonlight this job.

Claire worked off the excitement of the battling birds and took the poster to the wild West with a vigorous, eclectic, fun design. Let's hear it for Claire! And if you're anywhere near Woodward, Oklahoma in April, please come see the vanishing lesser prairie-chickens and the anything but vanishing Zickefoose in the flesh.

Painting Prairie-chickens, Part Three

Seeing Bird #1 finished, the underpainting for Bird #2 will make more sense to you. Yes, he's blue and gold and peach to start with. I wish I could leave the painting like this. It looks like Bird 1 is fighting his own ghost, or an angel. I like the way Bird 2 looks illuminated. The light I've envisioned is beginning to work now.

I started this day of painting thinking I'd have it all done by nightfall, but it's all I can do to get Bird 1 done and Bird 2 started. Wow. Thanks to all the markings on the birds, this would be a challenging enough painting even without special lighting effects. But I'm finding that I'm burning extra mental wood just trying to figure out how to light my subjects. It would be so easy if I were just copying a photo, but that's not how I work. I build the birds and then figure out a lighting regime that pleases me. Sometimes I have to make clay and cardboard models to see how the light would fall on them.

Still cranking away on it. There are a few things I have to enhance, a few I have to fix, but after painting Bird 2 and diddling away at the grass some more, I'm done in. The work will go into another day.

I like this bird. He's really lit up. I've had fun tracing the outline of his portly belly on the near wing, and letting the sun blast through his secondaries and primaries.

Now it's time to diddle around in the grass a bit, darkening here, toning down there...trying to weave it all together with some well-placed lit grasstops. I decide to quit before it gets too fussy.

I think it's going to make a good poster. They can put type right over the grass, it'll look fine if they drop it out to white or even yellow. And when I give a painting workshop at the festival, I can share with everyone how the show poster was done. That'll be cool. Just another way blogging for you sweetens my real life.

Speaking of real life, come meet us and hear our music, willya? The Swinging Orangutangs are all het up. We've been rehearsing for our appearance at the Ohio Ornithological Society's Waterfowl Symposium this coming Friday, February 26, at Columbus Audubon's beautiful Grange Center. Whether you're a birder or not, if you're in the Columbus area you should come out and see us at this fundraiser for Nature Iraq. There will be fabulous Middle Eastern food, specialty beers, great people to hang out with, and live highly danceable eclectorock from Bill of the Birds, the Science Chimp, and the rest of the Orangs. Who will be in fezzes.

photo by Phoebe Linnea Thompson

You can attend the Friday night musical fundraiser for only $10, or you can go for the whole weekend enchilada of field trips and talks about waterfowl. Ought to be a blast. You can register here. Who knows--maybe after you've partied with birders, you'll want to take in the whole weekend, maybe even get yourself a fez. They're very comfortable.

Painting Prairie-chickens: Part Two

Since not everyone reads the comments, I'd like to thank those who've commented for their support. And I'll reprint my response to them, because I think it pertains to the how and why of these how-to-paint posts. I'm not pretending that this is the be-all, end-all bird painting--even the finished product is far from what I wanted it to be. And my process is almost as scary to write about as it is to go through. I don't mean to present it as the only way to paint--it's just the way I go about it. But I'm producing something, however imperfect, and I want to share that process. My ulterior motive is to inspire the artist within my readers, and let them know that it's OK to be shaky and uncertain and scared, facing the blank page. Showing the stages, I hope, makes it more accessible, makes painting feel less risky. With that said, I'm more than ready to have some fun with this painting.

At some point, I get tired of slogging through the grass and decide to move on to the birds. I can always fuss with the grass after the birds are done, and that's what I wind up doing. Phew. What a relief to pull the masking film and compound off the clean paper and paint something I'm more comfortable painting.

You can see where the masking film leaked on the flying bird's flanks. Baaah.

I start with the underwing of the lower bird. Yes, it's quite blue. Remember, all this is in deep shadow, except for the lit-up parts.

Moving on with the underpainting for Bird #1. I model it all in lavender-blue-gray.

The bird is heavily barred with brown, but I've got to get the whites keyed right on it so that it reads as being in shadow, so that's why the underpainting is shadow-bluish. I'm leaving the extended wing white because the sun will be coming through it.


As you can see from this detail, I've been working on the grass, too, while painting the bird. As the bird comes into focus, the grass has to, too.

Now you can start to see which parts of the bird will be lit up. The light is coming from behind him, and that means his translucent wing--the one toward the sun-- will be lit up as the sun shines through it. The near, foreshortened wing is in shadow.

At last, I'm having fun. Heavily barred birds are fun to paint. The challenge, as with painting grass, is to keep the barring from looking too mechanical or orderly. You don't want the bird to look fake or manufactured, just as you want to avoid that look in your habitat rendering.

See how I've left a rim of light all around the bird's outline? When something is backlit, it's got a halo of light around it. And the other thing about backlighting is that lights are very light, and darks will be correspondingly dark. Lots of contrast.And a yummy close-up to close this part of the series. Next, we'll move on to the flying bird, but that's another day. I've got to dream up what's going to be for dinner and not think about prairie chickens and low light for awhile.


Today's fun: digging a stuck car out of our driveway. It had to happen sometime, and we're amazed to have been able to get in and out the 1/4 mile long unplowed corridor for this long. There's only so long you can keep mushing through 4 fresh inches a day, though, and today's the day of reckoning. I look at my thickening waist (and Chet's) and try not to think about the fact that, in a normal February, I would be walking a balmy meadow, listening to the peent and twitter of American woodcocks right now, catching the scent of red maple flowers, hearing the small wet sounds of nightcrawlers under leaves. I hope the woodcocks are holed up with a hot toddy somewhere in Alabama right now, because they'd need a front-end loader to get to the nightcrawlers in southern Ohio. Fie upon this steady 24 degrees, fie upon thigh-deep snow. Fie upon putting out 20 pounds of bird seed a day, upon incessant shoveling, closed schools and young brains going to mush. We want out.

Painting Prairie Chickens--Part One

It's been awhile since I've done a painting in progress for you all. It isn't that I haven't been painting. I've painted a lot, thanks in part to my resolution to blog less and paint more. For a good step-by-step blog series, I have to be working on a larger, more complex painting, because there's not all that much to say about painting small illustration vignettes.

So when I was asked to paint the poster art for the Lesser Prairie-chicken Festival in Woodward, Oklahoma (for which I will also be presenting a keynote and workshops April 16-21), I thought that would be the perfect subject for a step-by-step treatment for the blog. Here's how it came out.
Original is 14" x 18"

As with all of my watercolors, I cook the painting in my head for a long time--sometimes months--before I take brush in hand. In this case, I'm pleased, looking back on my initial thumbnail pencil sketch, to see how closely the final painting adheres to the original concept. Of course, it never turns out exactly as I've envisioned it, and I might take a completely different approach if I had world enough and time to do it over, but I try mightily to get close to the vision.
And the vision was action, drama, and low dawn light.


The day I started work on it was dark and rainy, and I had left my good camera in town, drat! So I fuddled through with a couple of unfabulous shots of the opening washes.

Of course, I've masked the birds out with film and liquid masking compound, so I can paint freely over them without sullying the paper where they'll be.
This part is always kind of scary, wondering if you've sealed the edges of the masking film sufficiently to keep your wild wet washes from intruding. (I hadn't.) Not to mention that you're doing an underpainting in a bright color that has little to do with the final look of the piece. Yikes.
Today, having just put the final touches on the painting, I'm SO glad it's done. There's a whole lotta work between this splashy, fun-looking part and the finished painting. This one turned out to be a weeklong mama bear of a project. The original is 14" x 18," which is pretty big by watercolor standards.
Obviously, I did a lot of work between the splashy yellow stage and this next one, but it was pouring outside and I couldn't take the painting out to photograph it. Also, I forgot about photographing it. When you're wrestling with grass, the nemesis of many a wildlife painter, you have to just get down and deal with it.

While grass-wrasslin', I paint a wet-on-wet Oklahoma prairie landscape and sky behind the grass. That came out OK. Back to the grass.


I hate painting grass. Always have, probably always will. It's so easy to get too mechanical with all those little blades, and it's really, really hard to paint them so they look acceptably real but not repetitious. It's important to vary your color. I probably varied mine a bit too much here. Whatever... I know I'm going to err, so I try to err on the side of going too loose and splashy with it. At least that way it won't end up looking like a plugged hair transplant.

There's this tension in many of my bird paintings between the rendering of the bird, which is usually pretty tight and specific, and the rendering of the habitat, which is often much less so. The tension comes when there's too great a disparity between the two. You don't want superrealistic birds in a completely loopy landscape.

The other thing that's going on here is that my vision for the birds includes strong backlighting, the kind of low, intense light you get at sunrise. Above all, the painting has to say sunrise, because that's when prairie chickens get busy on their booming grounds. So I'm continually darkening and darkening the foreground because I want the birds to be lit up against it, and to pop out of it. That's why we're looking at purple grass here. I have to keep the faith while painting purple grass that this is all going to work out in the end.

Next: I move on to the birds, but keep working on the grass. Always the grass.


I got a very special Valentine from Chet Baker when he waded out this morning through belly-deep boilerplate snow and presented me with some (dog) chocolates. This, after four days of holding out. I had shoveled a Pee Alley with foot-high walls right out the front door, but the little gentleman much prefers the back meadow for more important business. You all have my permission to exhale now; I know you were waiting to hear this, and worrying right along with me.

I have been shut inside this house with my school-free kids, our brains slowly liquefying, for oh, about a month too long, and heard this morning there might be another 8" on the way. Of snow. Eight more inches of snow. Isn't that romantic?

Here's wishing you a happy Valentine's day. For those of you who get to spend it in a tete a tete in a fancy restaurant, drowning in wine and red roses with someone you're mad for, good for you. Good for the fancy restaurant, good for Hallmark, good for the florists. For we ordinary mortals, whether you're kissing a human, a horse, cat, dog, bird, or small furry rodent,** just make sure you kiss somebody, and tell them you love them.



**this list not meant to be comprehensive