I stopped in at my parents’ place this afternoon to pick up Loki after a weekend at the Pinery.  My six-year-old niece begged me to stay awhile and take her out ‘bird sketching’ in the backyard, and I had to oblige.  Having no siblings to look up to, she’s adopted me instead as a role model and even has her very own field kit complete with sketchbook, pencils and watercolours so that she can draw birds alongside her Aunt Jocey.  Being the beautiful, outgoing kid that she is, I’m sure she’ll outgrow her nerdy aunt’s nature interests and replace them with those of her peers before long — but I’ll do my best to instill what I can until then.

Little Brown Bat

As we were climbing the deck stairs at the end of our outing, I noticed something drop from the barbecue cover that Dad was shaking out over the railing.  A closer look revealed it to be a bat — a Little Brown Bat, dazed after having been rudely tossed out of its daytime resting place and sitting helplessly in the grass.  Bats, lacking the powerful breast muscles that allow birds to leap into the air from a standstill, cannot generate enough lift to take off from the ground.  This little guy was well aware of this fact as he huddled there motionlessly, and indeed it was only his intensely fast and shallow breathing that convinced us that he was alive at all.  Dad found a pair of gloves and moved him to the wall of the house, and there he scuttled up the brickwork like a spider.  It seemed silly that most people could be so terrified of this tiny, mothlike creature, trembling in fear as he sought to escape!  Eventually, the little bat pulled himself together and launched into the air, swooping past the three of us and disappearing into a crack between a rain gutter and the house.

I go for walks in this park quite frequently on my lunch hours, which is why I was a bit sheepish to learn that a number of Black-crowned Night-Herons were hanging around there — and not hidden away in a tangle or high in a tree, either, but sitting in full view just offshore on one of the islands in the middle of the pond.

A juvenile was sleeping at the water’s edge when I arrived today.  As their name implies, Night-Herons are primarily active after dark, and spend most of the day resting.  Awake or asleep, herons are particularly talented at keeping absolutely still, and while this makes them easy to sketch, it can nonetheless make them very boring models after the first few pages.  Black-crowns are usually very shy birds, however, so I wasn’t about the waste the opportunity.

The adults are quite photogenic, with a bold plumage of black, white and grey accented by blood red eyes.  A pair of white head plumes arc across their hunched shoulders.  It’s quite a different garb from the streaky brown juveniles, but their stout bodies make all of them instantly recognizable as Nigh-Herons.