Days are getting short until Three Star Owl‘s third appearance at Southwest Wings Birding and Nature Festival, and I’m in a groove, making pieces for the event.  As posted, I’ve been making mugs, and also owls.  Lots of owls.  Even more owls than usual.

So recently I turned to the hairy side of Sonoran fauna, and have been doing Javelinas.  Javelina items are popular with Three Star Owl clients, both Arizonans and visitors to the desert.  Interestingly, it’s often people who have lived their lives in the less urban areas of AZ who are NOT fans of the rooting, tusk-bearing mammal: they may have grown up thinking of them as pesky neighbors, and are weary of battling them over landscaping, gardens, and garbage, or are tired of sewing up the hound.

But in general, javelinas have lots of fans.  I was thrilled when a herd temporarily moved into our neighborhood a few years ago. They were flooded out of their usual habitat during a rainy year when the Salt River swamped the Goodding’s willow woods growing up in its channelized banks.  They did a bit of damage in yards, including ours, but I also still remember the thrill of hearing clicking sounds coming up the street, and looking up to see a mama with two quite young piglets following her!

Javelinas are not true pigs: they are pig-like mammals in the peccary family, Tayassuidae, and have a New World origin as opposed to pigs and swine, family Suidae, which originated in the Old World.  Our javelinas are also called Collared Peccaries, and live in a wide geographical range and a variety of habitats in the arid Southwestern U.S.  There are three other species of peccary in the Americas, which live throughout Central and South America: White-lipped, Chacoan, and Giant Peccaries.

Three Star Owl will be offering Javelina candle-holders and salt and pepper shakers for your table.  Here’s a colored pencil drawing of a pair of shakers in progress.  It’s not the drawing that’s “unfinished” it’s the clay objects, which are in two stages of completion, still in wet clay.  One is modeled and textured, the other not yet detailed or textured.  The shaker holes are the nostrils at the end of their snouts, and each one is re-fillable through neat rubber plugs in their bellies.

And here is a larger candle-holder, completed. The salt and peppers will have the same coloration, matte slips and oxides, with a little sparkle in the eye.

(Photos: top, javelina dirt-napping at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, E.Shock; javelina in our front garden, munching spring wildflowers, A.Shock; colored pencil sketch on recycled, speckled paper, A.Shock; Three Star Owl javelina candle holder, A.Shock)

Early Monday morning I nearly stepped on a raccoon kit.  We both came around a wall at the same time, from opposite directions.  Fortunately, no contact was made: the kits are well-grown now.  Also, the Hairhen is very watchful, so we were all very careful to not create an incident.  She and all four kits were headed back to the Fan Palm where the family holes up invisibly in the spiny fronds during the day, after a night marauding.

It was the second raccoon Close Encounter in as many days — the night before last, the Hairhen spied an ENORMOUS fat Palo Verde Beetle above a window in the studio.  She attempted to climb the aging nylon screen to fetch it down, but the UV-weakened fibers couldn’t support her weight, and she slid back down, shredding the screen on the way.  I was on the other side of the window at the time, just a foot away (the glass was closed) unable to do anything but watch strong-nailed raccoon hands wreak destruction.

I wish she’d managed to snatch the high fiber protein snack — these giant beetles are very destructive, laying their eggs in the roots of Palo Verde trees, where their grubs (which are way too large to be appealing in even the slightest way) eat their way to maturity, doing considerable damage.  (See excellent photos and read more about Palo Verde Borer Beetles here at the fine Myrmecos Blog.)

Above is a photo of our yard Hairhen and two kits in the Palo Verde/Aleppo Pine complex. (Photo A. Shock)

“Paean to the Short-all”  (India ink and watercolor sketch,  6×9″, A.Shock)

One crabby technical addition: note the bleeding that occurred in the sepia ink lines adjacent to washes in the drawing.  This happened after adding the watercolor washes, after an hour of ink-drying time.  So, if you’re using Higgins “waterproof” sepia drawing ink, note that it doesn’t appear to be entirely waterproof, despite what it says on the bottle.  Perhaps more drying time?  Actually, the effect if you were doing an ink wash could be nice — a pleasant sanguine fuzziness — but not so much when you’re looking for a clean line to contain tinted areas.  Especially around the lettering…

I’m now in heavy production mode for the upcoming Southwest Wings Birding and Nature Festival in southeastern Arizona (see Events for details).  Some of the objects I’m making in small batches are smooth-surfaced mugs for glazing bird portraits on.  Flat-bottomed, hand-built (as opposed to wheel-thrown), and intended for daily use, these mugs have proven popular items at nature festivals and among Three Star Owl‘s birding clientele.  Who wouldn’t want to drink their favorite beverage out of their favorite bird mug?

I recently finished a batch for a client with a home in the Colorado Rockies, and here are a few shots of the process.  One of the reasons I’d like to share these photos is so folks can have an idea of the amount of work that goes into these mugs, which have three images of a species on each cup.

The mugs start out as flat rectangular slabs of clay that I make with a rolling pin and hardwood slats from the “home improvement center” as guides for thickness: very high tech.  (Many potters have slab rollers in their studios, which are fabulous items for making clay flat, but they’re big, and I’m not giving the swamp cooler the boot when a rolling pin and some wood molding will do.)  Then I curl the clay rectangles into a cylinder, seal up the side seam, add a slab base, a rim coil and a coil handle, and dry them very slowly over a period of several days.

After they’re bisqued, I draw the outline sketch of the chosen bird with regular no.2 graphite pencil right on to the clay.  This is convenient because I can erase pencil lines or whole drawings if they don’t go as planned (although nothing eats through erasers like rubbing on bisqued clay!), but I don’t have to remove the lines before the final firing: the temperature in the kiln is sufficiently hot to burn off the pencil completely.  The photo above gives a general idea of the tools used for glazing; the one to the right shows the roughed-in pencil sketch for a Green-tailed towhee.  (Remember to click on any image you’d like a closer look at).

The next step is glazing the interior: that happens before glazing the images on the outside, so the glaze doesn’t drip down a finished bird while pouring out the extra from the mug’s interior.

Next, I brush the glazes on.  This is like painting, without the advantage of being able to see what the image will look like with its proper colors.  This is because most raw glazes have very little in common visually with their finished, fired selves.  They go from chalky, pastel flat patches to shiny, brightly hued areas often with brush strokes visible where the thickness of the glaze varies.  These two photos show the difference between a male Western tanager, before and after:

Each mug has an image of the bird on each side, often the male on one side and the female on the other, and a thumbnail sketch, usually a profile portrait of the bird, on the bottom.  The bottom image must be done with matte slips, so they don’t stick to the kiln shelves during firing.

This batch of birds is spoken for, but if you’d like some of your own, contact me and I’d be happy to make you your own, with your own choice of birds (for details click on Shop).  Or, come visit Three Star Owl in Sierra Vista and see what’s in stock at Southwest Wings this August.

(all photos A.Shock)

Arriving in the spring, they lurk like vultures for weeks on the crowns of blooming saguaros, waiting for the flowers to swell into fat green fruits.  When they do, the White winged doves (Zenaida asiatica) rip them open with their strong fruit-ripping beaks, exposing the sweet red fruit and feasting greedily.  Sometimes several doves will stack, treading clumsily on one anothers’ backs, vying for access to their favorite food.

“White wings” are big doves, and during their breeding season, which are the hottest and driest months of the Sonoran Desert year, they rely heavily on the fruit of the saguaro for food and water.  So heavily in fact that in this habitat biologists consider them “saguaro specialists”.  In other parts of their large range, which includes the Caribbean and parts of Central America, they are agricultural freeloaders, and vast flocks of them take advantage of bountiful farmland for food and roosts.  Here they are considered “tropical doves” by ornithologists and “pests” by farmers. As such, they have been hunted energetically, and their population numbers are subject to wide swings throughout the year and decades.

This pesky mooching aspect of this big dove is not hard to imagine: they are agressive and a bit greedy at the yard seed feeders, and will lower their heads and charge at smaller doves, like their “cousins” the Mourning doves, making a hoarse hoo that’s the columbid equivalent of a growl.

But perched picturesquely on top of a fruiting saguaro against a desert blue sky, their frequent “who cooks for you” call means summer to me, and a welcome sign that the desert cycles are intact and thriving.

(Sketch book drawing, graphite, and photo, A.Shock)

…she’s Queen B in the Fiery Jungle.

(B in the Grass, watercolor 7×10″ A. Shock 2009)

The Eurasian Collared Dove (Streptopelia decaocto) has an agenda well-befitting a Columbid: “Must Colonize New World.”

Actually, it started before that, and a lot farther east: a native of central Asia, the Collared Dove had populated Europe as far west as Great Britain by the 1950s.  By the early ’80s, a population had taken hold in Florida, likely coming from the Bahamas where they also had been introduced (or escaped captivity) in the 1970s. From there, the large doves filled the southeastern US, and have been spreading inexorably west and north.  The first documented report of the species in the state of Arizona was in Eager, AZ, on March 6, 2000, and they were regularly sighted in Maricopa County by the end of the same year.

As mentioned in a previous post, they’re quite similar to the African Collared Dove (which used to be called the Ringed Turtle Dove), but they’re bigger, and a darker beige, and have different vocalizations.  In the Phoenix area and over much of Arizona, Eurasian Collared Doves have become quite numerous — on some days I would ungenerously call them a pest in our yard — and a few theories exist as to why they’ve spread so rapidly.  One is that they fill a niche left empty by the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon  (Perhaps in the Northeast U.S., but I’m not so sure that applies to the desert regions?).

Like the African Collared Doves, they show a disturbing willingness to become tame, and quickly learn  to fly down to empty feeders when they see someone coming out with a bag of birdseed.  I’ve caught them lurking on top of my studio — their toenails clicking on the roof, their pink foot skin glowing hazily through the translucent plexi panels — as if lobbying for the filling of neglected feeders in a kind of inexorable zombie-like way.  They’re hard to miss since their arrival is a dry noisy wing flapping, the thump of a hard landing of a big heavily-wingloaded airship, and the inevitable repetitive hoo-ing and gibbering that follows.

(Images: pencil sketchbook drawing and photo by A.Shock)

…he is Hector Roi:

“Hector Roi” watercolor and colored pencil, 7×10″ by A. Shock 2009

Raccoon recount

Also, on an unrelated but more naturalistic topic, a reassessment of the local raccoon population has been necessary.  The night after the Hair Hen post, mama raccoon showed up with FOUR kits.  It was clear that this could not be yet another litter, and also that there were not two Hairhens: it was one female who was bringing out cubs one or two at a time, as they became ready to join her nightly foragings.  So, as it stands now, the count is ONE hairhen and FOUR kits.  Last night they were preening and nipping each other in the fork of the big Palo Verde, making endearing snarling sounds.  Too dark for photos, unfortunately.