Cock of the Rock Nest!

It's one thing to see a life bird. It's quite another to get a little glimpse into its life. Although I didn't know it when we entered this little cave, there was a cock of the rock nest pasted to the wall, phoebe-style.
It was bigger than a robin's nest, and made of mud and rootlets, perched on a very narrow ledge.
It appeared not to be in use at the moment, but it also looked as if it might have been in use for some years, layered as it was. I was beside myself.

Looking around, there was more to the story. As the female cock of the rock incubated and brooded, and as the young birds grew, they had regurgitated the seeds and pits of the myriad fruits they eat. There was a carpet of pits under the nest.
And off to the side, a small forest of hopeful seedlings, probably never to prosper in this dry, dark cave.
But what a treasure trove for an ornithologist, botanist or ecologist! Here, clearly written in seeds and plantlets, is the diet of the cock of the rock, laid out for anyone to identify and study. Here is the evidence of the bird's value as a seed disperser, here is the list of plants that the birds need to survive. Of course, I was no closer to identifying any of the seeds or plants than anyone else; they were all foreign to me. But I could have, given time and the right resources. It was a heady thought.

But there was more. High up in a crevice, I noticed a bump.
Drawing closer, I could see that the bump had a nose.
Closer yet, and it resolved into a little bat.
Oh, you precious thing. I was reminded of the captivating red bat my friend Caitlin found on our field trip into the forest behind Clermont Northeastern Middle School in southwest Ohio, way back in November.
who has graced my desktop ever since. Hello! I say it every morning.
Each one, a gift. I don't understand people's fear of bats. I think they're just about the coolest animal of all--a flying insectivore! the only mammal that does not simply glide, but truly flies.

Meanwhile, the cock of the rock posed--here is a head-on shot of that orange cookie crest. Come nibble my fringe, ladies.
and it occurred to me that this had been one of the most satisfying experiences I'd had in nature--not only to see a strange, new and beautiful bird, but to understand a little something of how it lives.
To see its nest, to see its food, its habitat, the plants that support it, and then to see the male bird, glowing like a coal in the forest. It was almost too much to take in, in a single afternoon. Now, I yearn to see the female cock of the rock. She's a strange dark maroony brown, with the same semicircular crest. I guess that will have to be another time, another place, perhaps another life.

Cock of the Rock Displays

I mentioned Guyana as a premier destination for spectacular birds, particularly cotingas. Undoubtedly one of the most magnificent cotingas of all is the cock of the rock. For sheer brilliance, it's got them all beat, and it's obliging enough to sit at eye level in the forest where you can study it for many minutes on end. The rest of the cotingas we saw were often frustratingly high in the dark canopy. The other huge bonus of COTR is that it's predictable, appearing where there are caves and rock formations in which it can nest, and displaying in a loose lek situation like many other cotingas. So you can go to Guyana and count on seeing this stunning orange dreamsicle of a bird.

There's nothing quite like walking silently along a padded forest path, knowing that somewhere along the way you are going to see a cock of the rock. It's like Christmas morning, coming around the hall corner and seeing the presents under the tree. You just can't suppress a gasp when the neon-orange bird hoves into view.In the dark forest, he glows like an ember in the wind.

When you're brilliant orange, you don't really need to do much to impress the ladies of the rock. You just sit there and look gorgeous. Of course, when it all comes down, it's more interactive. When a female shows interest, the male COTR will descend to the ground, dance and crouch, and the female, ideallly, will approach and nibble at the wispy foofuraw coming off his tertial wing feathers. You can see his ladyfringe backlit, here.Next: The Cradle of the Cock of the Rock.

DOUBLE ZICK ALERT: I will be talking about hunting morel mushrooms this afternoon (Thursday, April 9) on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, which starts at 4 pm ET. If you miss it, go here.

Please leave a comment on the NPR site (registration's a breeze) and hit Recommend if you like it. That helps with everything. Go, flying monkeys! Go!

And there's a brand new This Birding Life podcast up at the Bird Watcher's Digest site: me reading my True Nature column about sandhill crane hunting, "Love and Death Among the Cranes." I'm going to listen to it so I can remember what my voice sounded like before I got the chest cold to end all chest colds. Hackahackahacka. Thanks to my brainy hubs, Bill Thompson III, for creating such a cool series of podcasts for nature lovers. Be sure to download the version with graphics! Great job, B!
Listen here.

Cock of the Rock, In Progress

Let's have a closer look at his head.
I don't want to get all fussy on this bird. I couldn't see him very well in the darkness, couldn't see much detail; he just looked like a glowing coal to me. The fun part for me is working in the detail neither I nor the camera could see, but that I know to be there. I spend some time figuring out where his feather tracts would lie, and organizing them so I can paint them right. I'm setting up tons o' fun for myself on these fancy feathers of his wings and back. His tertials are the square-ended wing feathers. And as far as I can tell, the long filaments are modified body feathers. I'm not sure about that, but they seem to originate on the lower back, so that's how I paint them. Because this is watercolor, I'm going to have to paint black in and around all those filaments. No worries. I can do that. You can see where masking compound comes in handy. I used a toothpick to draw it into fine lines, and painted the green background right over it. When the background is dry, I just rub the compound away with my finger and I can paint the bright orange where it had been. It looks pretty cool now, with the orange playing off the muted greens and grays of the background.
But the painting will really take off when the black goes in. Oddly enough, I was most impressed by the bird's black and white wings, and I couldn't wait to set the bird off by painting them in.
Look how the whole scene comes alive with the punctuation of black.
What fun to paint in his details--the burnt edge of his semicircular crest; his eyes, his gorgeous wings. I noticed in observing him that his crest was like two lemon thin cookies on edge, parting to admit his beak, so I emphasized that structure in my painting. I've also painted in some wing detail that I think is probably there, but which I can't discern in my photos. Needless to say, I'd love to have a specimen in hand to work from, but that's not going to happen any time soon. I'm winging it here.
Now the muted greens seem to work well, letting the bird be the star of the show.
The finished painting.
Managed to finish it in time to send it off and get it framed by our good friend John at Frame & Save on High Street in Oxford, Ohio. He returned it in a huge wooden crate that someone had used to send some photos by Linda McCartney over from England. The crate had been secured with screws, so I wrapped up a Phillips head screwdriver and gave that to Bill in his stocking before he got his big present. Whaa?

John always gives me a joke to tell Bill when we talk. Here's the latest:

Guy walks into a bar and out of nowhere a voice comes, saying, "Man! You look great! Have you lost weight?"

He looks around and doesn't see anyone but the bartender, wiping the counter. "Who just said that?" he asks the barkeep.

Bartender says, "Oh, it was the peanuts. Just ignore them. They're complimentary."

Painting a Cock of the Rock

Ready for another bird painting?

It's hard to have to wait to post my step-by-step descriptions of how a painting is made until after the surprise has passed. I don't know why I seem always to be painting on a surprise basis but that seems to be the case. Lately, I paint for gifts. In this case the giftee was none other than Bill of the Birds. He was the one asked to go on the trip to Guyana, and he passed the trip along to me. The least I could do is paint him a cock of the rock for Christmas.

In my last post you saw the pose I knew I'd use for the painting. I'm not normally too wild about painting from photographs, unless I've made them. Given world enough and time, I'd sit there for a few days and draw COTR's from life, coming up with a composite pose that delighted me, and learning a lot about the bird in the process. Sigh. Lately the world doesn't seem to be working too well with Time, so I had to rely on what my camera was able to capture in the dark undergrowth. We had less than an hour on the COTR lek before we mushed onward to the next destination.
The sketch doesn't look like much, I know, but it's code for what I want to do in the painting.

As usual, I masked out the bird, branches and foreground leaves with Incredible White masking compound and a clear film. When the masking compound dried, I dove right in. I had laid down a pale background wash and a bunch of darks before I remembered to pick up the camera. You do tend to leave your rational mind in the dust when you go galloping off across a big expanse of wet white watercolor paper.
While everything is still damp and diffusey, I throw in a bunch of vegetation. I try to paint background washes when there's no one around to distract me. That's why animals are such good studio companions (as I listen to Charlie riffling through his feathers by my right ear, and Chet snoring softly in his studio bed).
I run the painting across the studio, prop it on a chair, and decide I hate the three-parted leaf I've hurriedly painted in the lower left corner. It looks like a flying macaw, and this is not a painting of macaws. Charlie has sent me a telepathic message to include him in the painting, I guess. Sorry Chuck, you lose. So I wet my brush with clear water, spray down the offending macaw-leaf, and scrub it out. Bye!
I don't want it to leave a shadow, so while it's still wet I throw some salt on the wound. When it dries, it has a nice, organic look. It doesn't look like anyone had an artistic cow right there. It looks like whoever painted it actually knew what she was doing. Heh.
Time to peel off the masking film and get going on the bird's perch. If the painting looks paler and warmer, it's because it's now nightfall, and I'm shooting by incandescent light.I get that vine painted in, careful to vary the color and value along its length so it looks like it's part of the scene, not pasted on top of it. And then I paint in some leaves. You'll notice that my greens are pretty toned down. Greens can be tough to manage in watercolor. Have you ever seen a painting that's pretty OK, but has some too-vivid or fake-looking greens in it? There are a lot of paintings like that. I've done some of them. Nothing can spoil a painting faster than obnoxious greens. I'm being conservative with them, because I want the star of the show to be the bird. And when I put the first bit of him in, I'm glad I took it easy on the greens.Wouldn't want to hurt anyone's eyes.

Tomorrow we'll paint the bird. Or I will, and you'll watch (after the fact). Which reminds me of a recent comment, someone wishing they could stand and watch over my shoulder as I paint. I smiled at that one. My kids can attest that when it comes down to the actual painting part I get very distracted, and then kind of snarly. I think it's a way of protecting my subconscious brain, which has to be firing on all cylinders when I'm in the act of painting. My kids like to interact with my conscious brain, and when we're together they keep plucking at the conscious brain's hem, making sure it's engaged. They're not being pesky; they're just being human.

I've never shut my kids out of the studio; rather, I've schooled them in the art of leaving space for that subconscious creative action to go on around them. From their end, I'm sure they recognize the trance when it comes on, and they know that buggin' me for a popsicle, fighting over space at the desk computer, or asking for help with a math problem isn't the best move when I'm laying down a wash or trying to figure out if I've just painted something ugly. It's good for them to recognize another person's creative space, and it's good for them to see how to maintain their own, too. Call it subconscious/conscious or right brain/left brain; creative space is another space entirely from the everyday, conversational space we usually occupy.

Cock of the Rock!

The falls, the tank bromeliads, the froglets would have been enough, more than enough. But Guyana's Kaieteur Falls Park would give us so much more in our too-short afternoon there. Because there is a bird living there, in this impossibly magical, vine-draped steaming forest, who can hurt your eyes with its color. It is the legendary cock of the rock.

I know. It's a weird name. Google it, and you get all kinds of heavy metal images right alongside stunning photos of a brilliant bird, an impossible bird. I didn't understand where it got its name until I walked in its habitat.
The cock of the rock needs rocks where it can nest. Huge, towering walls and slabs and jumbles of rock. The Science Chimp is elated to say that she will report later on the nesting habits of this marvelous bird. First, she needed to see her very first COTR. You can just imagine how excited I was. Wending our way silently through the forest, the wet floor padding our footfalls, we watched our guide and froze when he motioned that he had spotted the bird, low down in the jungly tangle, some distance ahead. We were approaching the lek site of a group of male COTR's, where they pose and display, hoping to attract visits from the burnt-brown females. Our first looks were a bit compromised by vegetation, but it was clear we had one heck of a bird in our sights.
As quietly as we could, we maneuvered around until we could see and shoot around the obscuring leaves.I shot image after image, upping my ISO to 1600, leaning against trees for support to lessen lens shake. I'm not digiscoping here, just pushing my 300 mm. telephoto lens to the maxx in the almost hopelessly dark and lightless jungle.This is not some little songbird. It's a cotinga, one of the suboscine passerines, and a honkin' big one, about the size of a city pigeon. And the color of a neon orange traffic cone. There's no missing it, even as it sits quietly and still. Think about a pigeon this color and you get some idea what an impression it makes.

Nearer, nearer, trying hard not to upset the beautiful bird who perched so calmly for us. Ooh. What's that foofuraw coming off his back?
They're filamentous plumes, orange as shredded carrots, that the female COTR likes to nibble on as the male crouches motionless on the ground before her. Nice touch.

Changing perches, he showed what a beefy broth of a beast he really was. Look at those strong yellow feet. Hey, Mr. Tangerine Man. That's a semicircular crest, neatly edged in burnt orange, that he can erect and push forward so as to completely hide his bill. Not a whole lot of tail on this bird. But he's got a very cool rump. The frills on it reminded me of those awful panties people used to put on little girls, the kind meant to stick out from under a too-short Easter dress, with ranks of frills on them. I wish I could purge such untoward thoughts when I look at a bird, but they well up nonetheless.
Though it's not that close, this is my favorite shot of the bird, on alert.
Let's blow that one up, shall we?
Right after I took this photo, he whirled off to a deeper, more obscure place, on a gasp of pinwheeling wings. Who'd have thought he'd be tricked out in black and white wheels? I was laid out, so much more than I'd ever hoped to see of a bird I'd dreamt of since I was seven. Ahh, thank you, cock of the rock. We'll leave you in peace now. And I will use this image later to rekindle my connection with you...