Here are the exciting final steps of Jack’s King Vulture.  (Previous increments can be viewed and read about here.)

This first photo, Increment 3, is a close-up of what the piece looks like after it’s been bisqued (fired the first time) and then glazed. Pretty crappy looking, isn’t it?  That’s because glaze is a chalky-looking liquid suspension made of clay, mineral pigments and oxides, a flux or glassy component to create various levels of gloss after melting, plus water. If Pepto Bismol came in a lot of different icky-pale flavors, they would look like glazes. Because of this, glazing a piece you’ve already spent hours on can be an act of faith, and once the raw glazes are on, it’s often hard to escape the feeling that now you’ve gone and ruined it, which sometimes you have.  Fortunately the more you glaze, the better able you are to predict what the chalky colors will look like after firing, so the more you trust the materials and the process (=faith, for a potter).  It’s only after the final firing that the glaze colors take on any kind of brightness and glassy quality. Here is Increment 4, Jack’s finished King Vulture, Sarcoramphus papa, photographed in the wilds of Scottsdale:

Check out the pale eye, it’s not a mistake: the King Vulture’s iris is white, which to our eyes looks pretty weird.  In Mayan glyphs King Vultures are readily identifiable not only by the fleshy knob or caruncle atop their strong, hooked beak, but also by the bold concentric depiction of the staring white eye.  Below is a plate from Animal Figures in the Maya Codices by A.M. Tozzer and G.M. Allen (1910) that shows a selection of Mayan King Vulture glyphs.  Of course, I’m not an expert, but Tozzer and Allen report that the King Vulture represents Cib, the 13th day of the month.  And, on an ornithological note, figure 4 in the plate below shows a King Vulture entwining necks with an Ocellated turkey, the turkey of the Maya, which puts our Wild Turkey of North America to shame in terms of colorful plumage and warty wattly facial skin, which is saying something.  I photographed the Ocellated turkey below at Chan Chich in Belize, where they inhabit the immediate area along with King Vultures, like the one in a previous post who tried to hide behind a leaf.

By the way, if you live in the Phoenix area, there are two King Vultures on display in a large aviary at the Phoenix Zoo.  You could drop in any time to visit them.  E and I just did, on Valentine’s Day.  I guess we missed Cib by one day!

Here’s a red subject for Valentine’s Weekend:

In Phoenix there are cardinals.

Everybody knows the football Cardinals, aka “the Redbirds”, who  nearly won the Superbowl recently.  But fewer people, even native Arizonans, know that we also have real Northern cardinals, (Cardinalis cardinalis), aka cardenal comun.  You can’t imagine how surprised some people are when they find out the familiar peaky-headed, conical-billed redster lives in the desert.  I can’t explain this, except that so many folks who live here are originally from the leafy Midwest and Eastern US where the bird is an iconic resident of yards, gardens, and woodlands.  The classic Redbird is so common in the East that it’s the state bird of no fewer than seven states: Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia, more than any other bird (just edging out the Western meadowlark with six and the Mockingbird with five).  But the spiny, dry desert?  Nope: in many people’s minds, the cardinal doesn’t figure in this land of Cactus wrens, buzzards, and roadrunners.  Without going off on a much of a rant (see “PS” below for a short one), I blame popular culture —  especially cartoons — which are such a pervasive influence on what we “know” about the world around us that they can override actual observation.

For example, this is a typical conversation:  Friend:  Hey, what kind of a bird did I see at the Desert Botanical Garden yesterday?  It looked exactly like a cardinal, but I know it couldn’t be, because they don’t live here! Me: Was it all red with a black mask and a point on its head, a little smaller than a robin? (We don’t frequently see robins here, but it’s a meaningful comparison for most non-birders because everyone knows robins).  Friend: Yes.  Me: Then it was a cardinal. Friend: What do they do, stock them there or something? etc…

But cardinals do live here, and they are more or less native. By that I mean according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology whose range map this is, Northern cardinals were “first sighted” in south-central Arizona in the 1870s.  (Were they here already, and some white guy just noticed them and told some official ornithology guy back east?  I don’t know.)  But their range is expanding northward, and now they’re found along the Colorado River, among other western locations, and there are even insular populations in Los Angeles and Honolulu, although somebody put them there, they didn’t wing themselves over.  Our desert cardinals like desert scrub and riparian areas, especially if there is water convenient.  They are found in some neighborhoods in Phoenix, but not all.  We see them occasionally in our yard, but the only evidence I’ve personally seen of breeding sadly involved a female cardinal feeding a cowbird chick.

Nothing looks redder than a male cardinal against greenery, and the cardinals of the Sonoran desert are no exception; in fact, they may look even redder.  There could be a couple of reasons for this.  Our subspecies, Cardenalis cardenalis superbus is the largest of the subspecies, and its crest isn’t significantly less red than its breast, and its black facial mask is slightly less extensive than that in other subspecies.  All of this adds up to More Redder.  Above is a picture of a Cardinal in front of a fully leafed-out Ocotillo.  He has a grub in its beak which he flew away with, which means he was feeding young or a female at the nest.  Otherwise he would have gulped it down himself.

So, in the interest in promoting the broader image of cardinals in all of our minds, the photo to the left is a replacement iconography to “cardinal in the snow”: a male cardinal in the Sonoran Desert.  This one, along with about six others heard or seen within a half-mile of the trailhead, was singing out his nuptial qualifications loud and clear on the Peralta Trail in the Superstition Mountains east of Phoenix last March.  Feel free to click on the photo to see a larger image.

Photos: #1, male Northern cardinal at Boyce Thompson Arboretum, Superior, AZ (A. Shock). #2, male Northern cardinal and Ocotillo, Rancho Esmeralda, Sonora, Mexico (A. Shock).  #3, male Northern cardinal and saguaros, Superstition Mtns, Pinal County, AZ (A. Shock).

P.S. — Please note that none of the real cardinals pictured in this post has a yellow bill.

Rant warning (this makes me see red).  The prevalent and imaginary species “yellow-billed cardinal” has been a pet-peeve of mine since we lived in St. Louis.  Both the baseball Cardinals and the football Cardinals (who were still in St. Louis when we were) use jazzy redbird logos that show Cardinals with yellow bills.  The baseball Cardinals’ mascot, Fredbird, has a yellow bill, too.  The artist in me understands that the second spot of color makes for livelier graphics. Unfortunately, I think it’s also another example of pop culture infesting our knowledge of the real world: robins have yellow bills, duckies have yellow bills, therefore cartoon crows have yellow bills, and therefore all bird’s bills are yellow.  And it’s not just the two Cardinals teams — start looking at images of birds in advertising and popular graphics: most birds have yellow bills.  Having made the complaint, I’m not saying sports logos should all be biological illustration (although the Baltimore Oriole is pretty realistic).  But for me the redbird logo loses some “cardinal-ness” with the bill color inaccuracy — it is shifted away from cardinal and toward generic bird, which is less interesting.  But I empathize with an artist who has to make a cardinal look tough, and I do admire the result, from a graphics point of view.  Here’s the Arizona Cardinals logo, and I have no idea if I’m infringing on copyright to post it here; I hope not.

However, I don’t think there’s any hope of biological integrity for Fredbird.  Sorry.  I have never seen a Cardinal with yellow gloves on.  And what’s with the primary-colored primaries?  A real cardinal isn’t colorful enough?  It’s just not right…

Bonus Bird with yellow bill absolutely free:

Now, if you want to see a real desert-dwelling cardinal-like bird with a yellow bill, check out the fabulous Pyrrhuloxia at an excellent post from Firefly Forest, which I can’t improve on.  Except to add, here’s a Pyrrhuloxia portrait magnet, from Three Star Owl:

…to describe his devotion to vole

(for lunch)

Happy Valentine’s Day!!

VOLE = LOVE

Another reason I’ve had vultures on the brain is because I owe a friend a vulture.  Specifically, a king vulture, Sarcoramphus papa, the largest of the Cathartids, the New World Vultures.  They are the largest vulture in our hemisphere if you don’t count the two condors, and they are striking birds (literally — I was given a hammery-beaky once-over by one in captivity long ago, but that’s a different post), with black-and-white plumage and a bare-skinned, froot-loops colored head roped with chicken-skin folds.  If that weren’t enough, both genders sport a caruncle on the top of their bills: a warty, fleshy, bright orangey-yellow knob whose purpose, frankly, I don’t know, if not to gild the lily.

So, here is Jack’s King vulture, in progress, Increment 1.  Having modeled the bird, it awaits slip, with a photo behind for plumage color reference.  I’ll give it a base coat of slip (“paint” made of clay, mineral colorants, and water) in appropriate colors while the stoneware is still damp.  Once it is completely dry, it will go into its first (or bisque) firing.  After that it’ll get glazes and other finishing colorants applied, and be fired again.

As usual with clay, the heaviness of the material requires support, so I’ve had to fudge some physical realities: I can’t make the legs as thin as they are in nature, and I’ve used the wings as the third point of support so the bird stands by itself.  Normally, a vulture’s wings, as ample as they are, don’t reach the ground in a standing bird. But other typical characteristics will carry the likeness through: the hunched posture, the partially opened wings, the body plumage color, and of course, pleated froot-loop head.

Increment 2: Slip treatment.  In this case, the slips were applied with a brush.  They will not acheive their finished colors until the final Cone 5 firing.  For now, the black looks brown and the white looks grayish.  The froot loop colors will be applied as glazes, after bisquing.  Now this guy will sit until he’s TOTALLY dry.  Also, his body is hollow, and this time I did remember to pierce an inconspicuous hole to the cavity.  Stay tuned for later posts for finishing touches.

Most of us think of vultures as being all-dark birds, like Turkey vultures.  But there are predominantly white vultures, like the King.  In the Old World, the Egyptian vulture, also a vulture primarily of hot climates, is mostly white-plumaged.  You would think a large white bird would be disadvantaged by being easily seen.  Actually, King vultures, when roosting and nesting in their tropical forest habitat, are surprisingly difficult to see.  Their white feathers reflect the green light passing through the foliage around them, making them blend in quite well.  They are somewhat shy despite their regal reputation, and tend to assume a self-effacing posture when perched on a limb.  A King vulture in Belize “hid” from us this way.  We spotted it on the ground in a field.  Feeling our “eyeball pressure” it felt safer flying up into a tree, where it hid its head behind a tiny clump of foliage.  The rest of its enormous body remained in plain sight, but it felt better, and would peek out from the leaves occasionally to see if we were gone yet.

In the air, an all-white bird glints in the sun, but of course, up there, they’re out of reach, especially at the altitudes King vultures acheive.  It’s a spectacular sight to see the bright wedge of a King, as white and as large as a pelican, rising on thermals over a mahogany forest.  The photo below is of just such a Belizean forest as a King vulture would favor.  Imagine one soaring just out of frame, with Bat falcons, Swallow-tailed kites, White hawks and other tropical birds of prey swirling on the updrafts from the Escarpment near Chan Chich, one of the few places in that flat country where you can get out and up over the forest.

An excellent feature of Turkey vultures is see-through nostrils.  That is, they lack a septum, so the opening to their sinuses goes straight through the top of their beak. This is handy for an organism which eats its meals with its head in the liquescent innards of dead things. With just a quick sneeze, any annoying clogging matter can be ejected. Also, the free passage of air into the sinuses enables the scent of lunch to be picked up even from an altitude of several hundred feet.

The pervious nostril can be easily seen in the photo above (by E. Shock).  If this vulture were chilly it would keep warm by pulling his feathery neck-ruff up to his ears by corrugating his forehead skin even more.

The “pervious nostril” is a characteristic of the New World Vultures (the Cathartids: Turkey, Black, and King vultures, the Lesser and Greater Yellow-headed vultures, and both California and Andean condors) and like their bare facial skin is a physical characteristic most likely related to their ancestry: genetic studies have shown they are possibly more closely related to storks than to the Old World vultures and other birds of prey.

It goes without saying that the pervious nostril, as being indispensable to the visual character of the organism, is always faithfully reproduced in Three Star Owl vulture items such as candle-holders (seen to the right, as well as in the Three Star Owl Shop) and a small vulture bottle.

Etymology: If you grew up calling Turkey vultures “buzzards” as many Americans do, you are using a word translplanted here by European English-speaking settlers.  There are no vultures in the British Isles, but there are hawks, which are called “buzzards”.  When newly arrived Europeans saw our big vultures circling overhead, they used the word they had always used for raptors.  The “Turkey” part of the common name “turkey vulture” comes from the fact that at a distance turkey vultures, which like wild turkeys spend a lot of time on the ground, look like turkeys, being of a similar size, with dark body plumage and having colorful bare heads.

A vulture blew up in a bisque kiln yesterday.  Dang!  And it was my own fault, too, a foolish, neophyte error: its body was hollow, and I forgot to make a hole in it for the hot air inside to escape, kerPOW.  The carnage is visible, right.  Fortunately, nothing else in the kiln was harmed.

Vultures have been on my mind recently.  Not only because I’ve been making turkey vulture items like the candle-holder that blew up, and the small “bottle” with the movable head in a recent post, but because of a show I watched recently on PBS.

It wasn’t about vultures.  It was called the Dragon Chronicles, and it was an episode of Nature with a genial herpetologist traveling around the other hemisphere finding examples of real reptilian organisms which shared some of the characteristics of dragons, to promote how each could have given rise to the existence of the legendary fire-breather.  It was a pleasant way of spending a TV hour, but the basic premise seemed a bit of a stretch because the narrator put forth several separate organisms rather than one as possible sources of the dragon legend.

I’ve got a different theory.  I think tales of dragons arose from encounters with vultures.  Think about these “known” characteristics of Dragons:  they are reptilian and large, with snaky necks, they fly, live in caves, horde treasures, are long-lived, wise, fire-breathing, and man-eating.  You can make a good case for each of these also being true of vultures:

Eurasian black vulture. Photographed by Julius Rückert.

Vultures are very large; in the Old World, the Eurasian black vulture of mountainous regions between the Iberian peninsula and Korea is one of the largest birds of prey in the world, massive by both bulk and wingspan (weighing in at nearly 30 lbs and keeping this heft in the air with a nearly 10 foot wingspan).  Its nearest competitors, the Lappet-faced vulture and Andean Condor, are also airborn giants.  With their bare neck and head, vultures are quite reptilian but, unlike modern reptiles, they can fly.  Their contour plumage is stiff and when a vulture rouses (shakes) to adjust disarrayed feathers it rattles like a scale-covered creature, often emitting scraps of fluff and powdery cuticle flakes from feather sheaths.  They lay eggs which are much larger than most birds’, and if broken, would have a baby vulture embryo inside, looking very dragon-like.  Many species of vulture roost and nest in caves and ledges, often in inaccessible peaks and cliffs, where their (to our noses) malodorous lairs are filled with a loose pile of sticks, droppings, and debris — maybe not golden treasure, but a heap of stuff for sure.  In the case of the European vulture-like raptor the marrow-eating Lammergeier (photo below), there are often bones on the ledge, enhancing its image as horder.  When approached too closely, a vulture will hiss loudly, and when pressed further, will sometimes disgorge the contents of its stomach in a forceful jet — like breathing fire.  This disagreeable material (remember they are carrion eaters) is acid enough to be corrosive. A fine deterrent to an interloper, this is also a way of lightening the load for flight.  Most vultures are long-lived, and there are records of Turkey Vultures living past 60 years in captivity.  They are “smart” in the way people mean it, because to some degree all vultures are social, interacting in large numbers at carrion and in migration.  As for man-eating?  Well, long bones in the lair could be interpreted as human by someone who only got a quick glimpse before being driven away by an enraged incubating vulture’s hot projectile carrion slush.  Grimmer still, in times when battlefields and other human casualties were not always swiftly cleaned up, vultures would have made meals of human dead.  As nature’s “Nettoyeurs” (remember Jean Reno in La Femme Nikita?) it isn’t uncommon even today for vultures to be blamed for deaths of livestock they didn’t cause, but were taking advantage of.

Lammergeier, photo by Richard Bartz.

I should add that there are also dragon-type creatures in the mythology of the New World, like the cliff-dwelling, human-devouring Piasa Bird of the Mississippi valley, and of course, Black Vultures and Turkey vultures live in the U.S., not to mention California Condors which had a range of nearly the entire U.S. in the times legend would have been made.  And this doesn’t even scratch the surface of New World vulture mythology; the King Vulture of Central and South America has a prominent place in the mythology of the Maya.

There’s no way to know for certain that vultures were the source of the dragon myth, but I find vultures to be the closest thing to dragons that I’ve personally experienced.

Right now most Vultures that breed in the U.S. are on their wintering grounds, in the far southern states and points farther south.  Even in toasty Phoenix, we won’t see them again regularly until spring, where as in so many places like Hinckley Ohio their return is celebrated on a specific date.  Here in central Arizona, it will be around the third week of March.  So after that, look up in the sky and see if you can Spot the Dragon.

To the right are Turkey Vulture Candle-holders from Three Star Owl (inquire for pricing).

Bonus fact about turkey vultures:  they have an excellent sense of smell, and I’ve heard that some Gas companies use a rotty-smelling compound called ethyl-mercaptan in their gas, to check for open-country gas leaks by looking for kettles of (frustrated!) vultures circling over broken pipeline.

Bonus bonus trivia about Lammergeier, from Wikipedia:

The Greek playwright Aeschylus was said to have been killed in 456 or 455 BC by a tortoise dropped by an eagle who mistook his bald head for a stone – if this incident did occur, the Lammergeier must be a likely candidate for the “eagle”.

The black and white photo of the very vulturine Dragon Bridge is by Barbara Meadows.

…that migration is quite the thing.

Fortunately, I was able to hook up with V on her scouting trip this morning, and this is where we went: the dawn lift-off of Sandhill cranes just south of the town of Willcox, AZ.

Above is a photo of a small fraction of the cranes flying out from the ice-crusted ponds where they spent the night — something like 6 or 8 thousand roost at this place.  Dos Cabezas peak in the Chiricahuas is the twinned topography in the distance.  The sound the cranes make is as much a part of the spectacle as the sight of thousands of birds in wheeling lines overhead.  It’s an amazing noise, which I haven’t found an adequate way of describing.  A croaky sort of rattly trumpeting, continuous and amplified and multiplied by thousands of syrinxes, it’s mixed with the baby-piping calls of immature birds urging their parents to wait up, distinct above the stuttery honks of the adults.  (I’ve got a great video clip with the sound of the lift-off that I’m currently unable to get the editor to accept; I’ll post as soon as that struggle is over…)

An immature Golden eagle momentarily fools us all into thinking it’s intent on a crane on the fly, but it turns out to be adolescent high jinx and it perches on a power tower instead, after creating a fuss in the air, and setting most of the remaining cranes into flight.  Earlier, a handful of Chihuahan ravens hadn’t done as efficient a job of agitating everyone.

The cranes fly out to feed in the stubbly fields of Sulphur Springs Valley during the day: here’s a telephoto shot of a group working in a field with an irrigation pivot looking like a fence behind them.  They move slowly but steadily as a group, pecking the ground and occasionally each other, challenging breast to breast and vocalizing if necessary.  An occasional stick is brandished boldly, and there is some hopping about, with stick.  The immatures have brownish crowns, the adults a bright red heart-shaped “shield” between the base of their bill and their crowns.  Not visible in the picture, a big Ferruginous hawk lurks over the crowd, perhaps waiting for the probing bills to stir up a rodent, and American kestrels follow the foraging flocks as well. The cranes themselves often seem to follow the field equiptment, poking through freshly turned soil for goodies.  Horned larks work the furrows too, a Loggerhead shrike emits a variety of calls from a power line, and Eastern meadowlarks in large numbers stalk purposefully over the clods.  All of these birds, like the farmers, make their living off the soil of the Sulphur Springs Valley, and to some degree their numbers and even presence are due to agriculture.

In Willcox,  Land of the Cranes, they are everywhere: back at the motel, a solitary crane poses obligingly on the commode, but its stately blue silence has little in common with the mobile, gabbling gray thousands we’ve just witnessed.

For those of you within range of southeastern Arizona, consider visiting the annual Wings Over Willcox Nature Festival this weekend.  Held in the historic community of Willcox, this event celebrates the yearly return of tens of thousands of Sandhill cranes to the Sulphur Springs Valley in southeastern Arizona.  The rich Chihuahuan desertscrub and grasslands are slung between the Chiricahua Mountains and the Dragoon Mountains.  Patched with mesquite bosques, farmland, rangeland, and dotted with pools and ponds of semi-permanent and seasonal water, the Sulphur Springs Valley is winter home not only to the cranes, but to extraordinary numbers of birds of prey, sparrows and longspurs, waterfowl, shore birds including upland varieties, and other bird species people may not commonly associate with our region.  Scaled quail, Eastern meadowlarks, Bendire’s thrashers and Mountain plovers lurk in the wintery fields along with more expected Roadrunners and Gambel’s quail.  It’s a land of agricultural heritage — hydroponics and hay, and ranching, too.

This close to the event, many of the fieldtrips are filled, but check at the registration desk in the Community Center for last minute cancellations.  Also, many of the sights, notably the crane lift-off at Whitewater Draw and elsewhere along the farm roads in the Valley, are something you can do on your own.  The WOW organizers can give advice on where and when to go.

This year’s festival is the sixteenth annual WOW, and it’s the second year Three Star Owl has been in Willcox for the event, offering Arizona-specific table wares and sculptural items both funky and sensible.

Come visit “The Owl” at:

Booth 12, Willcox Community Center, 312 West Stewart Street, Willcox, AZ

Friday 16 Jan: 10am -7pm

Saturday 17 Jan: 8am – 5pm

Sunday 18 Jan: 8am – 3.30pm

more info at: wingsoverwillcox.com

Right: Small Turkey Vulture “Bottle” with detachable, posable head.

(3.75″ ht, $52)

Bird photograpy by Ed Bustya, “Sandhill Cranes taking flight”.