Sketchbook Birds Studies

With a heart-stopping thump a kestrel hits my window, and I drop what I'm doing to go look. A messenger from across the species divide lies before me, stunned and quivering, a brilliantly colored little falcon with stiletto-calons. Seizing the moment, 1 take up my implements and co-gage the experience of kestrel. My day is changed as I define the contour of that falcon beak, woa-dering how many times this pertect instrument has puncured the brain case of some attractive songbird.

Sketchbooks of field naturalists once served scientific purposes, and therein lies part of their attraction.

I reflect wistfully upon expeditions sent out by natural history museums in the nineteenth century with budgets for porters, field labs, dark rooms, marksmen, and caxidermists to back-up the needs of their artises: such respoct for tho work of artists! I admit that I regard these works more as art than science, but I believe that I'm right co do so; chat their value is ultimately as art and that this value endures long after science itself has moved on.

Audubon traveled about colonial America like a kid in a candy store, with his guns and watercolors, documenting its varicty of bird life. Louis Ag-gasiz Fuertes went on expeditions from Cornell University and the Field Museum of Chicago.

The money was well spent getting him to Abys. sinia and Ecuador. I am convinced that those field studies have today become the primary value of those expeditions.

I reflect wistfully upon expeditions sent out by natural history museums in the nineteenth century with budgets for porters, field labs, dark rooms, marksmen, and caxidermists to back-up the needs of their artises: such respoct for tho work of artists! I admit that I regard these works more as art than science, but I believe that I'm right co do so; chat their value is ultimately as art and that this value endures long after science itself has moved on.

Audubon traveled about colonial America like a kid in a candy store, with his guns and watercolors, documenting its varicty of bird life. Louis Ag-gasiz Fuertes went on expeditions from Cornell University and the Field Museum of Chicago.

The money was well spent getting him to Abys. sinia and Ecuador. I am convinced that those field studies have today become the primary value of those expeditions.

The etchings you see hete began as drawings done at the ornithology labs of the Kalamazoo Nature Center. The frozers full of donated birds that have been found on roadsides and beneath picture windows are a treasure trove. I spent days over slowly thawing, smelly specimens, studying toes and bills of birds at which I would otherwise never get much of a look — defining the forms of the head and neck, examining relationships be-ween primary and socondary flight feathers, fecl-ing skulls and breastbones beneath the disguising fuff of feathers. Bald Eagles, when skinned out, are scarcely bigger than chickens. The legs of owls, when stretched out beyond the perching position to which we are accustomed, are those of an efficient predator designed to reach out and keep struggling prey well away from its body.

Other birds have such unlikely proportions, they can hardly be exaggerated. A kingsher's head is improbably large. Woodpecker tongues wrap around the skull and insert at the back of the head to allow for their extension deep into hol-lows. Night birds have extravagantly large optical lobes and eye sockets. It takes having the bird in hand to rcalize this and get away from generalized bird forms to the specifics of creatures with anatomical adaptations to particular ecological niches.

These works began life as zinc plates into which I etched the outlines of sketchbook pages, the per-focations of corn spiral bindings lovingly preserved and indeed embellished and repeated. The central portions of these 'sketchbook pages' were left open with but the nicks and scrapes of random marks left etched into their surfaces. Impres sions from these plates became the papers upon which I then made my lab studies. I scanned these works into a computer, re-sized and enhanced them to create half-tone transparencics.

These newly emergent images were then etched into new plates and reworked with traditional intaglio techniques: drypoint, aquatint and mez-zotint. The tochnical process has become a reflexive exercise by which sketchbooks and finished prints merge into curiously protean hybrids, employing the oldest and newest of technologits to artive at expressions that are not otherwise in any obvious way, of their time.

Ladislav R. Hanka (2007)