This spring, the Grenville Land Stewardship Council commissioned a watercolour of a Least Bittern, as a “Species at Risk”, to be given as a prize to someone who responds to a questionnaire about their SAR educational campaign. And it wasn’t very long before a suitable subject presented itself!

On August 3, we picked up a DOR (“dead on road”) Least Bittern on Highway 43.  At the time I wrote: “Fairly fresh, but I couldn’t get to painting it immediately as we had a full day of Sunday visiting yet to do.  It’s photographed and in the freezer now.   I’m not sure what I’ll do with it – maybe make a watercolour portrait…”

Fred commented: “It’s a very interesting process, watching how the modern Audubon works.” (and he speaks as my Lucy). “First we find the Bittern DOR, waypoint it, bring it home for exhaustive photography, and laying out on a tray for freezing, e-mail the MNR to say we’ve found a ‘Species at Risk,’ and then wait for a year until the Stewardship Council wants a painting… Then there’s a scramble to find the photos on the drive, and the Bird in the freezer, and a google to find various poses of Least Bitterns, select one that’s in the best pose, stretch the paper, immobilize the artist in front of the specimen and the computer by cajoling & threats, and hope for the best…”

But that exhaustive photography sure was useful! I spent an entire afternoon drawing the legs and feet from my macro photographs, and it’s a whole lot easier and more satisfying than trying to interpret feet from indistinct photographs in other positions and the feet of a freezer-dried specimen! Having the photos I took of this individual, freshly road killed, is next best to painting it from the fresh specimen!

The reason Fred compared me to Audubon is that this is the way I did the Sparrows for the Green Bird Network, so it’s an established practice. We imitated Audubon’s methods of posing freshly collected Birds in the “Birds of the West Coast” trip, but it was the “specimens + internet” method that made it so easy to do the Sparrows.

I don’t often get a chance to hold a bat! This one came to us on the bumper of our car, driven home late last evening by our son. He says he didn’t notice a bat clinging to the bumper, but we saw it there this morning. The right wing was broken but the eye was still bright, which leads us to surmise the sad story that it spent the night clinging to the bumper after it had collided with the car, and finally succumbed to shock and exposure shortly before we found it.

Fred said “Look at its eyes” – which I thought was a strange thing to say, as a bat’s eyes are so small that one seldom sees them. But held at the right angle under good light, they were tiny, but lifelike and bright.

All my plans for the day were set aside, and I devoted the next five hours to a watercolour, about twice life size, celebrating its particular beauty of fine detail as the least I can do to save something of its “bat-ness”, to faithfully render as much as I can of the vitality that this Little Brown Bat will have no more. To capture the delicate straightness of the thin, tapered tragus projecting from the ear, and to try to show the dense black whiskers that screen the lips, and the interesting pointed black eyebrow – and the texture of the leathery soft tissue of the ear.

It seems that “White Nose Disease”, spreading north into New York State, has not yet been found among the bats of eastern Ontario – but how long will their colonies be healthy?

http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/bat_crisis_the_white-nose_syndrome/

These flying mice are so precious – it would be so sad to lose them all!