Tag: Pheasant

Some Pheasant, Some Neck!

sparrowhawk

11.15 a.m., drizzly and overcast: A male sparrowhawk swoops close to the bird feeders and lands on the hedge. Pheasant wouldn’t normally be on the menu for him but that doesn’t stop him looking down on two hen pheasants that have been foraging beneath the feeders.

Just in case he’s considering them as his brunch, they extend their necks and puff out their feathers to appear two to three times their regular neck size.

pheasnat display

They strut and hop, half spreading their wings and fanning tail feathers, a hip-hop swagger that reminds me of prairie-chickens lekking.

pheasant strutting
Continue reading Some Pheasant, Some Neck!

Pheasant

pheasant

When I was drawing them in action from a distance yesterday the female pheasants seemed fairly plain – light tan with streaks – but drawing in close up from a photograph I took yesterday with a telephoto lens there’s lots of complexity in the pattern of the plumage.

Pheasants at the Feeders

pheasant sketches

Five female pheasants alternated from pecking around the feeders for spilt sunflower hearts and crumbs from the fat balls to drinking at the pond (and one unwisely tried to run across the surface of the water!) then going down to the veg beds to rest for a while.

One pheasant, feeding on its own at that time, suddenly burst into a ‘mad half hour’ routine, as my mum used to describe similar behaviour in a cat; darting around and flouncing its feathers as if it was being threatened by some invisible enemy. This lasted less than a minute, not a full half hour.

Pheasant Duel #2

pheasants fighting

I decided that I needed a little sequence of sketches of the pheasants fighting, this is them squaring up to each other.

pheasants fighting

They circled, trying to outflank each other then they’d both leap up, sometimes striking out with their feet like a pair of heraldic beasts, then coming back low to the ground.

Pheasant Duel

pheasants fighting

Back in January, we watched these cock pheasants squaring up to each other in Coxley on a slope in Sun Wood between the upper and lower dams. It started like a Sumo contest with the rivals bowing as low as possible but simultaneously fluffing out their feathers to look intimidating, all the time nodding menacingly and occasionally making a rapier-like thrust with the beak at the opponent’s throat.

This would bubble up into sparring a foot or two from the ground. Considering how vocal male pheasants can be, there was surprisingly little grockling to accompany the bluster, just a short call as they came back down to the ground.

Pheasants in the Rain

Just time at 4.30 for a quick session drawing the pheasants that have been gleaning spilt sunflower seeds beneath the feeders for most of the day.

Working in fountain pen with regular ink speeds up the process of drawing. I’d normally use Noodlers waterproof ink because I find it so useful, being able to add a wash of watercolour without the ink running but, in the time available today, regular ink seems to flow more freely. Besides, I’m in the mood for a drawing with an inky quality to it. For once, I won’t add the red, green and red gold of the cock pheasant’s plumage.

60 seconds looking, 8 seconds drawing

I enjoyed watching The Great Painting Challenge from ZSL Whipsnade Zoo yesterday. The warm-up exercise that Pascal Anson gave the contestants, urging them to spend 60 seconds looking at the elephants, then only 8 seconds drawing, is more or less what I’m trying here – except without Pascal standing there with his stopwatch: the pheasants are so active that I’ve got no choice other than to try and take a mental snapshot of a pose, then draw the whole thing. But I do then work on the details of the plumage in short bursts.

Link

The Big Painting Challenge

Early Birds

The blackbirds have the lawn to themselves first thing in the morning, just as it is getting light. We counted eight on the back lawn yesterday. They concentrate on the area around the feeders, so I guess that they are primarily interested in spilt sunflower hearts.

At the top end of the lawn, a male has a bit of luck and seems surprised to have caught a worm. Soon a female notices what’s going on and tries to make off with his prize. He chases her off, then returns to the worm.

Before he can settle down to eating it, a rival male blackbird barges in. As the two males fight it out, the female spots her opportunity, dashes in and makes off with the worm.

Hen Party

The dawn patrol of blackbirds is soon ousted by a gaggle of female pheasants.  It’s not unusual to see seven of them busy around the feeders but usually one or two of them will break off the main group to inspect the herbage around the pond, or to forage on the veg beds.

There’s evidently a pecking order amongst the females because as they pirouette around, pouncing and pecking any spilt seed they notice, one of them will make a quick lunge with her beak at another, momentarily shooing it away from her personal space.

When the Furze is in Flower

The old country saying is ‘when the furze is out of flower, kissing’s out of favour’, but the gorse has been in flower for a few weeks, at least one bush on Storrs Hill has been, where it overhangs a south-facing embankment wall.

The female great spotted woodpecker is a regular on the sunflower hearts: it prefers them to the fatballs.

We hadn’t seen the pheasants in the garden for months but the recent wintry weather brought a male in. He settled down in the shelter of one of the plants in the border as the rain lashed.

Pheasants

pheasants and blackbirdsThere were eight blackbirds in the garden this morning. The lawn is the main gathering ground but now that the crab apples are starting to turn soft there will occasionally be one in the tree. Wood chip paths and a cotoneaster bush dripping with berries give them further foraging opportunities.

Star of the show is the ring-necked pheasant with white streaks on his crown. A female gives him the opportunity to puff himself up and display his plumage. As I add the colour, I can’t decide whether his tail coverts are grey or a very pale green. I get Barbara to take a look and we decide that the exact shade changes depending on how the fine feathers catch the light but the colour really is a sage grey-green.

The Pheasants are Revolting

A couple of years ago, I drew a rough of this for one of the exercises in Drawing Words and Writing Pictures and, as I’m using it in an article, I’ve enjoyed working on a final version.

pheasant comic strip

 I traced my rough (below) in pencil onto layout paper, then scanned and added the colour in Photoshop.

I’m reading Teamwork Means that You Can’t Pick the Side That’s Right, one of Scott Adams’ Dilbert books and decided that I’d try graded backgrounds like he does, fading gradually from dark  to light.

Hope that I’ll get the chance to try some more comic strips but I’ve got a lot lined up for the autumn.
pheasant cartoonThe squirrel went from being demented in the rough to looking evil in the final version, which is a shame because that might suggest that he deliberately dropped the coconut shell. I was aiming at making him manically determined rather than evil.

Link; ‘The Pheasants are Revolting’ rough version, October 2012.