Talk about a bull in a china shop.  It could have been much worse, but still…

Just after the Three Star Owl Open Studio/Camelback Studio Tour came to an end, and I’d put all the remaining wares onto my studio worktables to await packing for the imminent San Diego Bird Festival trip, a big stupid dove — a Eurasian Collared Dove — blundered in on foot through the open door and into the small space, pecking the bricks for imaginary food.  It was not a good place for it to be; Eurasian Collared Doves belong in my studio as much as they belong in the Western Hemisphere, which is to say, not at all.

<< Eurasian Collared dove.  Their monotonous, moronic call is “Duhh, HUNHHH, What?…” (photo A.Shock)

The studio is an add-on plexiglass “lanai” type room, so there’s nothing but windows all around.  When the dopey bird realized it was inside, it panicked — even though no one was chasing it — flapping repeatedly against the windows, knocking stuff over, and not getting anywhere near the door, which was still wide open. Test-tiles and miscellaneous small art and found objects festoon the horizontal window-support where it was fluttering, and they rained down on the artwork below, crunchily.

Although several of the falling items were broken, I was lucky: there was only one serious casualty among the sales items, a nice little turquoise horned lizard box with a road-runner on top, smashed to unpleasantly surgical fragments: a horn here, a beak there, a tail, a foot.  Here’s the grisly carnage >>

The dove was luckier: it came to rest, and E was able to gently grab it in his hands and release it outside.  It flew away, a little bit alarmed at its unintentional incarceration, but probably mostly disappointed that there wasn’t any millet to be found in that scary clear box.  Sigh; one less piece to pack for San Diego.

…among other things.

Tomorrow, Friday, is the first day of Three Star Owl‘s Open Studio, part of the Camelback Studio Tour.  The weather is supposed to be beautiful, but the meteorologists have less lovely predictions for Saturday and Sunday.  We’ll see.  Rain or shine, wind or calm, I’ll be here from 10 – 5 waiting for you to come by and check out the owly and non-owly wares.  Lots of mugs, by the way, from corn to ravens, snakes to scorpions.  And bowls, lots of bowls.

Here is a detail of a small jar fresh out of the kiln: each owlmorph is considerably less than an inch tall. >>

Just under two years ago, we were in Christchurch New Zealand, finishing up our month-long tour of both islands. We had turned in our campervan, and spent a night or two in the city before flying back to Aukland and then home to Arizona. It was early winter, later in the season than now, rainy and cold; our enormous hotel room was heated only by a space heater — an inefficient plug-in radiator — making it no warmer than the campervan had been in snowy Aoraki/Mt. Cook National Park. We had booked blind into a hotel in the central business district for which we had no expectations except convenience and economy. But from our room, we found we had unexpectedly great views of the Christchurch Cathedral, right across Colombo St.

Here are two images I took then, before the structure, weakened by the September 2010 earthquake, succumbed to the 6.3 magnitude Canterbury quake which devastated the city yesterday. The spire was toppled, and the roof collapsed; at the writing of this post, there may still be victims inside. Google “Christchurch Cathedral” and you can see the awful contrast in the pictures the search will turn up. Many more buildings, and the people in them, were lost, of course, but these images were most vivid to me, being a place we’d seen.

Christchurch Cathedral (both photos A.Shock 2009)

My only connection with this vital, lovely city is our brief visit, but today I’m thinking of its people, many heading into winter with shattered shelter or workplaces. The New Zealand Red Cross is not currently taking donations of goods or volunteers, but here is their website for more info or in case you want to keep in touch with their efforts as the situation develops.

Three Star Owl is proud to be part of the South Scottsdale Art Alliance’s Camelback Studio Tour next Friday Saturday and Sunday, 25, 26, 27 Feb, from 10am – 5pm, and you’re invited!

<< detail, Greenish Beastie Pitcher, breast “plumage”

Several homes in the “we could have been but we voted not to be” historic neighborhood of Sherwood Heights, in what the sensitive prefer to refer to as “Original Scottsdale” between 54th and 60th Streets and Thomas and Oak, will be hosting more than twenty local artists in a variety of mediums on these days.  Everyone is welcome —  it’s free and it’s fun.

Three Star Owl (Studio 4) will have a small but pithy assortment of sculptural and functional clay items for sale (as they say, come early for best selection!), and throughout the weekend, I’ll be demonstrating hand-building techniques in my tiny and ramshackle studio space.  (And the always business-minded Cranky Owlet would like to remind potential shoppers that cash and personal checks are always welcome, but Three Star Owl is not set up to accept credit cards).

For more information and directions, click HERE, and click here for a map.  There will be signs around the neighborhood directing you to each host home.  If you have any questions or need further information, please don’t hesitate to contact Allison through this website’s Contact page.

Hope to see you there, rain or shine!

…and also why it’s called “Broad-billed”.

Although those two statements concern two different birds.

Update: as of Friday morning, “Bill”, the Broad-billed hummingbird, is still reporting in to our backyard feeders, passing the 72-hour mark (I first observed him on Monday afternoon).  We guess he’ll be here until he’s not!

Breeding season for Anna’s hummers is in full swing here in Phoenix.  The males are executing their showy flights, shrieking down from a height with their gorgets flashing scarlet, making a loud peeping pop with their tail feathers like tiny bullroarers, then rising vertically upward to do it again and again, usually targeting a perched female to impress her with this routine.

<< Anna’s hummer on current nest in Aleppo pine (click to enlarge; all photos A.Shock)

And from my studio I’ve been watching a female Anna’s gathering spider webs and flying away with her beak wrapped in gossamer, a sure sign of “nidification,” otherwise known as nesting.

When our trees were trimmed last week, we searched hard beforehand to make sure there were no current nests in the trees affected, and didn’t find anything. However, late this afternoon, while scanning for the errant Broad-billed hummingbird who has been working our feeders, I did find a nest, just by luck: I saw the Hen fly up into a low pine branch, and stick.  Binox showed me a little beaky head above an apparently completed nest, built above a pine cone on a nearly horizontal branch.  From everyone’s perspective, it’s not a great spot: it’s fairly low over the path through the part of our yard we call the Sonoran Garden, and E could (and probably unintentionally will) bump the branch with his head as he walks by. To me it seems a very exposed location.  In fact, while I was watching her, the Broad-bill zoomed up and perched on a smaller branch just inches below the nest with hen, apparently unaware of her.  She knew he was there: she froze, and waited perfectly still until he went away, which was soon — he’s a restless body.

>> Male Broad-billed hummer, out of place, out of season, but he’s been here for 48 hours, that we know of.  (Click to enlarge.)

The Broad-bill flew a short distance away and settled on a preferred perch in the “ugly” lemon tree.  Although the photo isn’t perfectly sharp, you can see that the base of his bill is slightly flattened, making it look broad, especially in comparison with the needle-like rest-of-the-beak.

Incidentally, for the first time ever, the normally prolific “ugly” lemon tree set one whole lemon as its entire crop this season, and it dropped that during the tree-trimming episode.  So as far as I’m concerned the shirking citrus can bear the burden of a tiny colorful bird as its tangy winter crop for a while longer.

Another update: going onto day three of “Bill” at the feeder.

Update: as of Tuesday late afternoon, the BBLH is still at our feeder, defending it against the local Anna’s hummers, happily zipping about under the pine and between our yard and the neighbor’s.

A series of rapid, smacking clicks and a rich chip caught my ear as I was making mugs in the studio, and I looked up to catch a dark emerald at the hummingbird feeder under the Palo Verde.

A glittering green hummer with no light feathers on its belly? This was worth risking the mugs drying before I could get rim coils onto them, so I went out with my binox and little camera to stake out the feeder. I didn’t have to wait long: a male Broad-billed hummingbird is working our backyard. If I lived in Tucson, this wouldn’t be exciting. But this is a species that usually sticks to Sonoran desert foothills and southeastern Arizona; they can be found 50 miles east of here (for instance, in the oasis of Boyce Thompson Arboretum), but only once have I ever seen one in the low desert, and that was several years ago at the Desert Botanical Garden, a couple of miles from here. This is a species whose range is usually shown as just coming up into the southwestern US from Mexico. So, this little guy is a “yard bird” for us… a never-before-seen species for our property.

(All photos A.Shock, click to enlarge!)

Perhaps the unusual cold pushed it down into the Metro area from the foothills: our Chuparosas were in full bloom when last week’s extreme cold hit, killing almost every single spray of nectar-filled blossoms, and it’s even colder up around Superior — the food sources higher up must be few and far between. This little guy is aggressively holding his own against the Anna’s who are the more usual residents.

I managed to get some lousy pix, but here they are anyway — I’m too excited by having a Broad-billed hummer in the yard to self-edit! And in fact, the blurriest photo — of the speeding little glinting shuttlecock coming in fast to chase a competitor off of the feeder — is my fave. We’ll see how long he hangs around.

The Beasties are coming!

Here is a close-up of the finished surfaces of the same Beastie Pitchers shown in raw clay a couple of posts ago.  They, and other functional and sculptural ware, will be offered for sale at the upcoming Three Star Owl Open Studio, coming toward the end of this month!  Stay tuned for more details.

… I mean in the air, and in my lungs, too. When not pathetically curled up in bed with Bronte novels on the iPad (well, Jane Eyre, at any rate, not Wuthering Heights; I remember finding Heathcliff a bit tiresome, although I may give him another try since it’s been so long), all my illin’ energy is going into making things for two up-racing deadlines, and so I’ve slacked off on writing in this space.

Here’s a deceptively placid photo of Christmas lights under frost cloth around the pool (in reality, the chilly desert wind is howling outside and we had to weight the flapping cloths down with rocks and empty flower pots). It’s our attempt at keeping the poor little cax and sux warm: our trees are being trimmed tomorrow — scheduled before we knew sub-freezing temps were forecast for the remainder of the week — and so the plants and pots had to come out into the open to avoid being crushed by amputated limbs. Thank heavens for old-school C9s, right?