 Well, welcome everyone. My name is Bill Graven, and on behalf of the Board of Directors of York County Audubon, we're delighted to have you here tonight. Just a word first about next month's program. It will be on Tuesday, April 16th, also at 7 p.m., but we will be returning to the Mather Auditorium at the Wells Reserve, and it will be a hybrid program available to experience in person there, or by a Zoom if you're not able to make it in person. And the program is entitled Main's Champion Big Trees with Jan Santair. Jan has managed the main big tree program for over 20 years. She directs the Main Forest Service Project canopy, and she'll be providing a wonderful program about champion and other big trees in Maine and what an important role they play in our ecology. So, full information on that is available on our website or Facebook page, so please check that out, and we hope to see you next month as well. But tonight, we are delighted to have a guest from, zooming in from the Midwest. Julie Sikfus, is that correct pronunciation? She is an absolutely wonderful illustrator, author, painter, birder. She has a slew of wonderful books that she's produced. She's been a commentator, a regular commentator on NPR. She's written for the New Yorker, the Smithsonian. She even had one of her books chosen as an Oprah book club pick. I don't think any of our previous presenters have been able to make that claim. Let me clarify. Thank you. I've never written for the New Yorker. I've done illustrations for them, but I've never tried to write for the New Yorker, so. Maybe there's a new idea for you. We are, the book Oprah's Choice book is entitled The Bluebird Effect, and Julie has written many books on birds and illustrated many as well. So, with that, I'm tremendously looking forward to this program. We will be having a question and answer at the end, so feel free at any time during the program to type any questions into the Q&A, and we'll do our best to get them get some answers for you at the end. So with that, Julie, welcome to Maine via Zoom. Thank you, Bill. The sun has already set. Look at that. It's almost down, but I'm still going to stay. I'm going to eclipse it for you. Okay. So thank you. It's lovely to be here, and I have a special attachment to Maine. I taught for a few years at the Hog Island Auto Camp with the wonderful Scott Weidensall and Sarah Morris, and loved it up there, and my daughter actually imprinted on Maine as a high school student, and she decided she needed to go to college in Maine, so she went to Bowdoin. And I'm pretty sure that a lot of it was about the food, because Bowdoin has the best college food of any school, but she also absolutely loved the giant stairs and the environment there, and we loved going to visit her. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about my book, Baby Birds Tonight, and I'm going to try and find the screen sharing and hit this, and then I'm going to hit play, and you should have a pretty much full screen there. This is where I am right now. It doesn't look like this right now, but we're getting there. This is my home in July, and with the white clover in the lawn, and the evening primrose is going crazy early in the morning yet, and this is a bird-watching tower that my husband and I built onto the house in 1999, the year our son was born, and it's 42 feet high, and we can climb out, or we could, now I can, climb out on top of the structure to look around the countryside and watch for birds. It's pretty awesome. I actually wrote most of the bluebird effect in that glassed-in tower room there. I plant for birds and butterflies and insect diversity, and my pride and joy is my meadows. I have a beautiful meadow stretching out from the house for several hundred yards, and this is my New England aster planting. The same fall that I planted it, I planted the seeds in the spring, and they did this. That was pretty cool. It's quite a bit of work to maintain, and I keep paths mown around the perimeter to keep the sumac from marching into the meadow too much, although it's already there, and I mow it once a year, and right now the wood cocks are displaying, and they will nest on the borders of this meadow, which is a great thrill. The field sparrows are singing. In a good year we get prairie warbler, we always get blue-winged warblers, couple pairs, so it's a very diverse and lovely habitat. We've got cerulean warblers in the woods, Kentucky warblers, hooded warblers, black and whites, red starts, oven birds, Louisiana water thrush. It's everything I need, and I give a whole another talk about the improvements we've made to the place to make it better for wildlife, and that's a fun one too. So I think of myself as an unpaid, rather dirty superhero, and my superpower is saving economically worthless wildlife that would otherwise die, and this is a key photo. There is a truck cresting the hill there. It's a monster truck with giant tires, and when he saw me trying to rescue this turtle, he actually gunned his engine and tried to crush the turtle, but I foiled him. I got it out of the road, and on the guardrail there is a little Greek chorus of juvenile starlings. This is a late summer, and they're already massing, and they were just watching in amazement. I am the person that people call when the lame goose that lives down on the levee gets tangled in monofilament because who else is going to wade in to a February Ohio river to rescue a lame goose? I will, and he's still living down there, Mr. Lonely is. He's a hybrid, Chinese swan-necked times Canada goose with a broken wing, but he's fine. So I think of my job as sharing, and I'm sitting at this very drawing table right now, a little bit less cluttered now, and I share what I see, and a great deal of time is spent watching out the window. I've got a set of feeders right outside the window and clumps of birches and beautiful camisiparous trees here, and the birds just come in like crazy. I've got a flock right now of 72 American goldfinches and about 30 juncos, and it goes on from there. This is the way the studio looked before I sent off the artwork for the bluebird effect to be scanned, and that's a nerve-wracking thing. You know, at that time we were sending everything overseas to be scanned more affordably, so packing up all the original artwork for the book, hundreds and hundreds of paintings was quite scary. This show is about baby birds though, and that was a book that kind of snuck up on me because I didn't really realize I was writing a book until I took the paintings to New York City to show to my agent, Russell Galen, who also happens to be David Sibley's agent, and I spread them out on the high top in a dark bar under a little single can light, and he kind of flipped out and he said, Julie, nobody else is doing this. You've got to do a book. This is a book. What I'd been doing is painting these birds from the moment they hatched until when they fledged and sometimes after and following them in life studies, but I want to back up a little bit and talk about some of the books that got me to the point of doing this one, and this is a book that was a formative book for me as a child, and I still have it on my shelf in my bedroom. This is illustrated richly and poorly reproduced, but there was an illustration in here that absolutely lit me on fire of a buffalo jump, and they're driving the buffalo over this promontory that the animals can't see over. They basically run them up a hill and then run them off the cliff and process them down below. This is William R. Lee's painting as it should have looked, but was reproduced of course in half tone in the cheap little book. So when I looked at even just the half tone of this, I so longed to do powerful paintings that would move people the way this one moved me, and I think that was where it was set. The dye was set when I was looking at these books. I was very, very fortunate to have discerning parents who saw that I needed a lot of fodder for this artistic fire inside me, and this is me at 13 with my father. Barefoot is typical for him. The dirty front of his shirt is because he was downstairs in his workshop fixing turn-of-the-century gasoline engines, and he has brought a whole bunch of Ottoman prints up. This is a typical Saturday for him and me, and we're going through the prints one by one looking at them, and we're looking at the turn. As you can see, I think that's the Arctic or the common turn, and it was a real full circle moment many, many years later when a friend of mine, Alan Poole, the noted Osprey expert, asked me to restore his Arctic turn print that had from the Double Elephant Folio series that had faded so badly, and it was a rush like no other to go over Havel's engraving lines and to paint on the bird that Audubon himself had drawn. It was absolutely incredible. I'm reading a biography of him now by Roberta. What's her last name from the New York Historical Society? She's probably the leading authority on Audubon, and Roberta Olson, and it's just fascinating to read about Audubon's life as an artist, and Alan liked it so well that he asked me to bring life back to his common turn, so I was only too happy to paint on that soft 100% rag paper and make that common turn dance in the sky again. My father read me stories, but they weren't the typical stories that most kids get read. This was Ernest Thompson Seaton was my favorite wild animals I have known, and he would pick a story and read it to me, and Seaton saw animals as sentient beings with goals, hopes, and dreams, and emotions, and he painted the paintings, the half-tone paintings in the book, and he also sketched in the margins, and this is a key point for me. Another book that my father turned me on to was Man Meets Dog by Conrad Lorenz, the famed Austrian behaviorist, and Lorenz didn't just observe animal behavior, he participated in it. In this case, he allowed gray-legged Goslings to imprint on him, and he raised them, and they followed him through his Austrian town. It was pretty incredible. You can see Lorenz's beautiful little dog caricatures here talking about what people have done to dogs, what we have done to the wolf in making our dog breeds. Another very formative set of artists were Holling and Lucille Holling, and Lucille was actually the painter. She painted in egg tempera, and she was employed painting soft porn for magazines, women in various stages of undress, but her heart was in natural history. She was doing what paid the bills, and her husband Holling wrote the text, and I'm sure Lucille had a lot to do with that as well. This was in the times when women didn't get credit for what they did, so only Holling Holling's name was on the books, but it was a delight to find out that Lucille had actually done these sensitive drawings and paintings, but they wrote about charismatic, you know, microfauna like hermit crabs and snapping turtles, and that really spoke to me too. So kind of a funny bunch of coincidences led me to the doorstep of Lois Darling. She and Louie Darling illustrated Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and basically Louie did the people, and Lois did the animals and the birds. So in the famous Beverly Cleary books, Henry and Ribsy, Louie was drawing the policemen there, and Lois would draw Ribsy streaking by with something at stake in his mouth, and I don't know if you're familiar with Oliver Butterworth's incredible book, The Enormous Egg, about a New Hampshire boy named Nate Twitchell whose chicken lays a very strange large leathery egg and hatches out of triceratops. It's the most charming book you can imagine. Lois drew the dinosaurs. So when I was working for the Nature Conservancy right out of college, I started a turn and flubber conservation program in Connecticut because there was no such thing happening there. This would have been about 1983. And they like to have me come to Nature Conservancy dinners and fundraisers and stuff to meet the donors. And because I was, you know, a wild looking young svelte thing, and they would introduce me to people. And when I met Lois Darling, I couldn't believe my eyes that I was meeting my my idol. And I said the Lois Darling, and she kind of drew herself up to her full four foot nine inch height, and she said, it is I. And we became fast friends. Long story short, I was her executrix, and she left me that beautiful little canoe fitted with a sail, and a chunk of land in Tenants Harbor, which is now it's waterfront, but it's more waterfront than anybody wants right now. It's gotten swamped a bit in the last two storms. Anyway, connections to Maine. So I was remember where I was standing in Martha's Vineyard. On Martha's Vineyard in a used bookstore on an October day was rainy. And we've gone to a used bookstore to look at things. And I picked up the country diary of an Edwardian lady by Edith Holden, published long posthumously. And the second I saw her watercolors and her inscriptions, I felt I had met my sister, you know, who preceded me by a good century almost and her work was so accessible. And I looked at it and I thought I could do this. And in fact, I was doing this kind of thing, but it really changed the whole direction of my work. And I started annotating my paintings very heavily until in some cases I would write like a whole several paragraphs in the margins of the of the painting. Louis Fuertes was my artistic mentor, also deceased. So I had to just look at his paintings. And and these are his last and finest work from an expedition to Abyssinia, now Ethiopia. And this was in 1926, I think they went and Louis was the was the artist for the for the expedition. And they they crossed the ocean to get there and huge waves swamped the steamer they were on and swept his trunk containing all his art materials and papers overboard. And when they landed in Addis Ababa, Louis went to a bookstore and he bought some toned paper that was meant for pastel. He bought a child's watercolor set and some toy brushes, and he did these works with them. So I remind myself of that every time I go into a fetal position when Windsor Newton stops making the right kind of watercolor paper that I'm hooked on. So, you know, it's not it's not what you're working with. It's how you use it. Beautiful stuff. And Bob Clem from the outer tip of Cape Cod was another incredible artistic mentor. Some of you may remember Shorebirds of North America, a big coffee table book produced in the 70s with text by Peter Matheson. It's really fine book. And that was really the only and last thing that Bob Clem ever illustrated because he was dissatisfied with the reproduction as perfectionist will be. And he decided to just do easel paintings from then on out. But what he did for me was, he would look at my work. He would come and visit me and I would go and visit him. And after one such visit, he, well, first he told me I should only draw from life, never from photographs. And I listened and I followed his advice. And then he sent me a big bunch of watercolor paper, which I never could have afforded, because he felt I should be working on something good. So that's help that helps. So he said, if you've only got house sparrows in your yard, draw house sparrows. And I said, well, hell, I've got turkeys in my heart. So I drew a lot of turkeys in the key is to draw them in all kinds of strange positions. You can see the bird and the lower margin there. I'm drawing it as it's turning its head and pecking and looking at what happens to the shape as its head turns. And if you're in the zone and you've been sketching for two or three hours, you can get some really nice reductionist things that that, you know, say turkey, but don't have too much detail. And I love those. Ospreys are a favorite subject. And I'm blessed to have been asked to illustrate a book on Ospreys by a man who never actually intended to produce a manuscript. So I spent a whole summer sitting under an osprey nest drawing everything they did. And in retrospect, I'm so glad even though I've never paid a cent and never given a manuscript to illustrate, it was just a rare experience. Bob Clem also told me to paint from dead ones, dead birds. And so I started salvaging birds in the, well, I actually started, I salvaged my first bird as a freshman at Harvard in 1976. It was a pine gross beak that had flown into a dorm window in Redcliffe yard. And I, I could only skin it, you know, and and it kind of went from there. So I prepared a bunch of skins for the Harvard Museum. And I learned birds from sort of the inside out, I would always check their stomach contents and it was really interesting stuff, but you learn so much about them being able to handle them and paint them life size. Hydebill greed weighs exactly a pound. Who knew? And it's also the texture and density of rubber. And it explains a lot about how they can just sink out of sight when they spell the air from their air sacs like a little submarine. So I started on a career of illustration and like many bird painters, we all do our time as field guide artists, producing birds in profile and three quarter view with all their field marks showing and a very reductionist perch. But what I really longed to do were these more allegorical lyrical paintings, you know, showing more of what I knew about birds, like I knew that you could see their breath in the right conditions. And I knew that ivory billwood peckers nested in live sweet gums sometimes and drilled a round hole and I don't know, I just I like to put as much in as I can to a painting like that. So I did strange illustration jobs. I did a lot for the Department of Defense, believe it or not, which owns a tremendous amount of wonderful land used as proving grounds, but winds up being great bird habitat because nobody goes out there on foot. And I guess the biggest illustration job I'm looking up at the shelves in my studio and there sits the birds of North America, which is now called Birds of the World. And I was a primary illustrator for that. That was a 10 year project and I did hundreds of drawings for it. So that was really fun. And these are some of the drawings, those three that aren't don't have tanks in them. And then I guess my longest running association has been with bird watchers digest. Did my first cover the Ruby Crown Kinglet in 1986. I think it was the November, December, 1986. Yeah. And I think I'm into 32 covers now anymore, 32 33. And yeah, this isn't all of them by any means, but I'll get back to that later. I'm still associated with the magazine, having been associated with it since 1986. Now I'm on the editorial staff. So I do illustrations. This is for Alan Poole's book on Osprey's recent book on Osprey's wanted to show what it's like for a bird to cross an ocean. And and how do you convey that? Well, putting a tanker out in the middle kind of says open sea. So I love watercolor for what it can do like the mist on the side of a mountain. I guess the juiciest illustration jobs that I could think of are the covers of breeding bird atlases. And I'm hoping somebody asked me to do another one sometimes soon. I've done two for Pennsylvania, one for West Virginia, and I just did Ohio's breeding periable warblers a new breeder for us. I've always thought that a painting should look like a painting. I've never tried to be a photo realist. And when I try, I fail miserably. So I keep it to loose washes and letting the paint do what it should do. And I think one of the things I love most about illustration is that for the time that I'm working on that illustration, I get to live inside those birds like the imperial woodpecker in the mountains of Mexico, northern Mexico. I get to figure out, you know, what an Apache pine looks like and what the mountains look like in the morning light and what kind of tree they might have nested in. That's that's my favorite thing to do. I love it. I also do a lot of private commissions. Each one is a challenge. You never know what people are going to want. Puerto Rican toady or a monarch in habitat. Happy to do both. I think this is my favorite commission for a very long time by an ornithologist who had written the says Phoebe account for the birds of North America wanted a painting that showed a says Phoebe with native sunflowers and this particular species of Yucca in the Flint Hills of Nebraska, I believe, and he wanted these stone fence posts that are made out of this stone that these outcrops are made of and he wanted an outcrop in the painting. By the time he got all those elements, I was just thinking, you know, I cook these things for weeks and I came out with this painting. And I think the my favorite thing about it is the is a perspective of the clouds, the way they disappear into the horizon and you feel like you could just take off and soar out into there. So I love putting birds in context. So I had this epiphany when I illustrated a book called backyard birds by an author with a nom de plume, Jonathan Pine. And I was sent the manuscript and was I think 1991 or so. And I read it and I asked the designer if I might annotate it a little bit and I wound up basically doing a rewrite because there were a lot of things I didn't think were accurate. And the book went on to win a burrows metal. And the metal goes to the author, not the artist, the artist doesn't even get invited to the ceremony. I thought, you know, that's a little tap on the shoulder from the universe saying just write your own books. Why are you writing? Why are you illustrating other people's books? So I thought I should start with what I knew. And bluebirds are something I know. I've been working with bluebirds since 1982, putting up boxes and monitoring them. And I know I don't look that old, but I really am very old. And I've taken my kids out on the trail the whole time, because it's a gift you can give them to let them peek into this. And I see things like this every day in breeding season, I've actually got a fullness from a crazy bird out in my orchard, a female who's just just couldn't wait. She's like planting your tomatoes in January, this bird has a full nest in mid March. And thank God she hasn't laid yet. But when you see things like this, and you hold these little miracles in the palm of your hand, how can you not want to paint that? So I started with bluebirds. And my first painting was of blobby babies. And I was instantly hooked because they looked like nothing I'd ever seen before. And I had to use all my senses to paint them life size and from life. I knew I could borrow a bluebird from the nest, feed it while I was painting it, keep it warm, and return it to the nest without the parents batting an eye, because I visited their nest a couple times a week and they knew who I was and they weren't upset when I opened their boxes. So it was a great place to start. The problem was, was that by day 12 I had to quit because bluebirds get, they get their wits about them and they become sentient. And they know that this person picking them up is not a bird and that they should be afraid of them after about day 12, 13. So I had to leave them in the box and it was just so awful to have to start, stop right in the middle of the development of these birds doing these life portraits. And so fate stepped in and brought me, many years later, brought me some baby bluebirds to raise. And here they are learning how to forage. There's another one there. Get it. Get it. Get it. Get it. Get it. We gave at it. Little stinkers. Okay, let's get you some more. So that's 34 days old and you can see they aren't great at this. They're still learning. Now here's 46 days. They've been out on their own for four days. I have released some and they're showing up to see me in the yard. It's so good to see my girls. They're considerably better at picking up the worms now. Look here. Here's the bowl. Here's the whole bowl. There you go. Yeah. This is what I call soft release. You are pretty. You are most pretty. So they're able to come and feed and subsidize themselves while they're learning how to forage on their own. This can go on for weeks. It can even go on for months. This is what they look like. It's August 16th. It's evening. And they're having their final feeding maybe. Big fatties. You can see that beautiful plumage coming in. I don't have rights. Sorry. This is Elsa. She's always the last to leave. Look at the blue coming in our back. Oh, she's looking like a bluebird. Yes, she is. And so fat. So they, bluebirds are uniquely addictive personalities as anybody knows. Oh, am I muted? Can you hear me? Oh, I can't. Yes, we can hear you. You can hear me. Okay, great. I just wanted to mute the video because I'm babbling. And these birds will literally eat mealworms as long as you will give them to them. So I caution people when they're feeding bluebirds in their yard to only give them about eight per day per individual as a treat, not to get them hooked on them, because they will eat nothing else. But as you can see, this was a rare opportunity that I had to follow their plumage development today 65 and have them under my care, but living free in the yard. It was just incredible. And I'm so happy that I got to raise these birds. I've raised a number of bluebirds, but this trio was really special because I got to watch them interact. And it was just incredible. So these are the paintings that I did based on those birds. And, you know, found out a lot about what feather tracks come in first and how they get their blue and all that good stuff. And you can see I've numbered them by day 66. They look for all the world like adults, except that their heads retain the juvenile plumage and the upper breast. And here's I love this picture because Phoebe has already started practice for a cross country. And it's August 11. She's already in training with her little socks hanging there in her uniform. And she's still feeding 60 day old bluebirds from a giant bin of mealworms. So how do I get my hands on baby birds to paint them for the book? Well, first I want to do no harm. I want to make sure I'm actually helping these birds. For instance, all of my boxes are baffled with a metal stovepipe that repels all but the biggest black rat snakes. And when I took this photo, all I could see where the tree swallows on top of the box. I didn't even see the black rat snake on the post who was trying to gain access to the very distant box. It did not succeed. This is just a quick little video, the only one that I've borrowed from the internet, showing the modus operandi of a black rat snake, which is one of the major egg and nestling predators in our area. There will be no robins out of this nest. Watch how the snake checks to make sure it got all the eggs. Let's give it another check. Really beautiful thing. I despair for open cup nesters who don't have meat to baffle their nests because there is quite an array of predators out there waiting to eat baby birds. So I was limited to working with cavity nests that I could actually protect because I did not want to lead predators to the nest. So that's how I started the project only in my baffled boxes and only the birds that I could get there. And then I found this very strange nest in one of my boxes and it had a bunch of dead leaves in it, but the leaves were not skeletonized. So I knew it didn't belong to a Carolina ran. And I had the forethought to take my little Olympus point and shoot and set it on video the next time I opened the box. And this is what I found. So that's, there's, I have not seen anybody else make video of that snake strike display of the tip mouse. You have to really be ready for it and have a steady hand. She had scared the bejabbers out of me the first time. I've also been bitten very hard by titmice and chickadees when I reach into their nest with the female lawn. So that's very, very funny thing about them. They're, they're terrible. My friend Al Vatt, the humorist says that if, if chickadees were the size of red-tailed hawks, nobody would go outside. So this is what it looks like when I'm painting a baby bird. These are the titmice and I keep them warm in my left hand. And I have a light that also helps keep them warm. And I feed them age-appropriate food. But more importantly, I sketch and paint with my right hand as I'm holding the creature in my left hand to keep it warm. And I take it out of its nest once a day for about 20 to 40 minutes. And I feed it three or four times in that period. And before long, strangely enough, the birds start to look forward to that and the babies beg for me right away as soon as I get them in my hand. They know the routine and they, they are not as afraid of me when it comes time for the time of sentience that I described before when they hit about 12 or 13 days. So I could, I can get another couple of days out of these babies that I've conditioned. And it's just so fascinating to see these changes every single day in a tufted titmouse. And by day 11, they're getting this fabulous little mohawk crest with the, the pin feathers sticking straight up. And this is what they look like back in the nest. And I know I'm always taking the same bird because just like puppies and kittens that pick a teat on their mother, baby birds stay at the same position in the nest throughout their infancy. So that helps the adults know who's been fed and who hasn't if they all keep their places. If you rearrange them, they will hurry back to their spot in the nest. So here we are back at the box. It's day 19. Day 19. I think they still be here. How are they? Yeah, pretty wonderful. I think the thing I love most about that clip is first the way they react when I say, wow, the way they shrink back. And second, the rich songs of the indigo bunting in the background and the hooded warbler. So it makes you realize how rich spring and summer are and how depopperate the winter and fall can be as far as birdsong. So I mentioned that I was only working with cavity nesters and I was always looking for a way to try to work with open cup nesters like cardinals and sparrows and buntings and things like that. But I really had to wait for serendipity to step in because open cup nests are so vulnerable. And I couldn't just walk up to the same open cup nest and pick a baby out of it and expect the baby to be there the next day or the whole nest. So what happens in these open cup nests because they're so unsafe and so vulnerable to predators is the babies developed at the speed of light. Those titmice were in the box for 21 days. Bluebirds can stay in that long as well. Watch the arc of these indigo buntings that I discovered in the hedge along my garage. What I found was that if I stayed on the cement sidewalk and just pointed my point and shoot straight down into the nest and then walked on, I didn't leave scent around the nest site. The predators were used to having human scent going up and down that cement sidewalk. It was the ideal situation. But in the time that I worked with this nest, I took two black rat snakes away that we're trying to rate it. So like I say, first do no harm, premium no serer, and then do good for the birds when you're working with them. So here we are. Those baby indigo buntings were out of the nest by day 10, which is half the time, less than half the time a bluebird takes to fled. And as you can see in the upper right there, that baby doesn't look ready for prime time at all. And in fact, all it needs to be able to do is clamber through the vegetation and the adults will follow it and feed it. And here I was able to catch up with the female and the two young on day 26. And they're practically as big as she is, but she's still filling them full of grasshoppers. So when I found a cardinal nesting in one of my liberated bonsai trees in the yard, one of my Japanese maples, the first thing I did, because I so wanted to paint cardinals was put a baffle around the base, which is a yard funnel made of plastic. And the very first night that was up, there were raccoon prints on it as they were trying to get up to get that nest, but they didn't succeed. And I got to paint cardinals who have a similarly rapid arc being open cut nesters. They want to get out of that perilous nest as soon as possible. And look at that by day 10, just like the indigo bunting cardinals are out and clambering. And the parents are following them around and feeding them. But look at that. Day 11, they're just these little featherless, look like a little ornament you'd see at Michaels. And then by day 56, they're still being fed even as they get their adult plumage. So birds do not, fledging does not mean adulthood by any means. Fledging is just when they get out of the nest and then there's a whole bunch of learning and culture that gets imbued in the weeks afterwards. Morning dubs, they have a bad rap for looking dumb, being dumb, but they're anything but dumb. They just happen to have a small head in proportion to their body size. And they have a disconcerting habit of sitting in the road until your car is almost on top of them. And then they explode into flight. And that's a predator startling strategy that works really great for all kinds of predators. And they don't often get hit by cars either. But the neat thing about morning dubs is they're incredibly loving and affectionate creatures. And they also have an incredibly short developmental arc. The adults build a very flimsy nest out of these two eggs. It's an obligate clutch of two hatch these lemon yellow little teddy bears that by day four are already getting spiky plumage. And by day seven, that plumage is bursting the sheaths. Look at this developmental arc how fast these things grow. And then by day eight, they're looking scaly and feathered. And by day 11, they're hulking and almost crowding each other out of the nest. And by day 12, they are able to fly, which I, you know, I've painted it and I can't believe it. They're able to flutter and fly down from the nest. And then the parents stay with them and feed them. Oh, past day 20, I would say probably in toward day 30, they're still being fed. And that's one reason. I mean, they fled so fast that the parents are able to recycle and raise multiple broods in the season, which is why we have lots of morning doves. How do the doves do it? Well, their secret is the rocket sauce that they produce in their own crop, which is an enlargement of the esophagus right in the front of the chest. And the analysis of the crop milk that the adults feed their babies for the first week or so is 57% protein and 34% fat. So it's probably like beluga milk or something like that or the seal milk. It's, it's incredible. It's not actual milk, but it's the crop lining that protein cells just slough off and are fed to the babies. And the really cool thing about this is there are only a few birds in the world that can do this. Pigeons and doves, flamingos, and penguins. Emperor penguins can feed their babies like this. So it's quite amazing to make your own food. And prolactin is the same hormone that stimulates lactation in humans and other mammals. And that's what stimulates the crop to slough off in the doves. And it's, it's all just a miracle. So my husband, Bill, was clearing some honeysuckle in the orchard when he stumbled on this nest. And he came back to the house with his eyes as wide as saucers. And he said, zig-zag, I think I found a cuckoo nest. And indeed, he had found a yellow-billed cuckoo nest. And I raced out with my point and shoot, stuck it up over the rim of the nest and got this photograph of two newly hatched yellow-billed cuckoos standing on the shards of their enormous blue eggs. I didn't, I couldn't see what I was doing, but I knew I wanted a little video of them. So I stuck the camera up there. And then I inadvertently jostled the nest and look what these babies did. They're flapping their wings. They're trying to scare me. I didn't know what I'd captured, but I knew it was pretty good. So I was on fire to paint these birds. I had had, this was the only experience I had with the nest. And I, I worked for weeks and months to get some cuckoo researchers out in California to loan me their nestling photos so I could complete the book with the yellow-billed cuckoo because I thought it was the most fascinating arc of development of any North American bird. First off, they have the largest egg per body size of any bird in North America. They're like kiwis. They, they these enormous eggs. And from that huge well-provisioned egg with a giant yolk and it hatches this baby, that by day two can perch on the rim of the nest and snap at passing flying insects. Day two. It's almost a precocial altricial bird. By day six, the feathers have burst the sheets. By day seven, they're perfect feathered miniatures of the adults and they're out of the nest. The entire nesting cycle of a yellow-billed cuckoo from the start of incubation to the fledging of the baby is 17 days. Shorter than the entire nestling period of the baby bluebird, which is hatches and is in the nest for up to 21 days. So this is quite a miracle. And again, it's about predation. The driver here is they nest in flimsiness, set low in dense vegetation. They're extremely vulnerable to predation so that it behooves those babies to develop as fast as possible and get out of the nest. Now, after they fledge, they are followed around by the parents and they follow their parents around and they get fed and all is, you know, it's a fairly normal arc after that. But the part that's truncated is the part that's where they're in the nest. So this is what it looks like when I'm working or what it looked like when I was a bunch younger and working on a tree swallow. You can see I've got it on right on the paper. I because it's a tree swallow and they poop a lot, I have it on Kleenex. But I usually make an actual sort of tracing like a crime scene outline of the body on the paper just to get all the proportions slammed down and then I do the rest of the drawing as I hold the bird in my hand. This is the final stages of doing the Starling painting. I was desperate for any cavity nester I could get and the Starling turned out to be one of my favorite subjects because they're like these giant inflatable balloons, bags of guts. They're just so great looking. And I've got there a dead, a roadkill bird that that I used for reference on the adult. So I want to show you how I spent last summer. I didn't I had been for years I had been posting about my escapades with baby birds and the bats that I rehab on Facebook. And it finally hit me a year ago that when I do that I'm basically making an ad for my services. So anybody who finds a baby bird or a bat in their house in the winter calls me or sends me a Facebook message and because I have 10,000 friends on Facebook. I have a lot of people with access to me and they like to tag me whenever anybody says I found a baby bird they tag. So it gets crazy real fast. So I finally learned not to put anything on Facebook, but it's torture because I absolutely love sharing this stuff. And in May last year a friend brought me a batch of Carolina Rens whose parents had both been killed by a cat. And this is what the little baby looked like. Okay, so these will be a little series of videos. They're not quite as hungry here. It's so cute the way that they swallow their worms. You can see I've dabbed acrylic paint on their forehead so I know who's who. I fell in love with them real fast. They were clearly so intelligent and just such cool little birds. And I had always wanted to raise Carolina Rens. I'd come close. I'd had three babies, you know, single babies that I had raised partially and then had to take to other rehabbers because I was always traveling when they came in. So giving talks and stuff. So this is the moment when my dog Curtis who is a hunting dog and who has a strong prey drive but who very, very quickly as a rescue found out that he had to be very good and he couldn't do anything to my baby bird. So here's Curtis coming up to meet the babies. They're in a tent in the garage. Yeah, come see the babies. Good smell of the babies. He's such a good boy. Well, only one of you had the sense to fly. That's not good news. They were pretty sure that Curtis was safe and he was indeed. They actually landed on him and crawled all over him. But I can tell you that they will get to know a dog but they will not do that with every dog. Dog is still a predator. But if they know a dog, they trust it. So the neat thing about Carolina Rens is they have this thing about being near the ones who care for them. And I would say they are very affectionate. So after I fed them, after they were able to fly and they were in their fledging tent, they would fly to all cuddling to my hand at once. And this was their idea of a nice time. And it was so disarming and so charming. And I just couldn't get enough of them. I almost did nothing else but cuddle Carolina Rens all summer. They like to fall asleep in my hand. Oh my God, I have a ladybug in my shirt and I have hands. Got it. It just bit me. So yeah, ladybugs Carolina Rens, this darling little things. And this is the cuddle session after the feeding. And as soon as the feeding is done, this is what happens. They wipe those. And given the choice, they would sleep on me for the next hour until the next meeting. But I have things to do. I set an alarm on my phone and it goes off on an hour. And I come out and they're good and hungry. And I feed them. And then I cuddle them a little bit so they know they're loved. Yep, if you are loved, I need it for them. And I go back inside and work for an hour and see what I can get done before the five-minute interview comes on every hour for 13 hours a day. So for those among you who have heard that the credo of rehabbing is to feed them and leave them alone. I clearly don't adhere to that. I think that it's important to the development of these birds to be shown affection, to be shown that someone cares for them. And I wrote a book called Saving Jemima about the experience I had with a blue jay raising her. And she absolutely demanded to be with the family. If we were all in a room with her and we left the room, she would fly and blunder and hop and stumble after us because this was her family unit, imperfect as it was. So I had written a lot about imprinting about the fallacy that songbirds will imprint on people. The only way they will do that is if you keep them past the day at which they should be associating with a potential mate. In blue jays, that's day 40. And you have to keep them in absolute isolation away from the sound, sight, and call of their own kind. And that is cruel. But what's more cruel to me is the practice in some rehab centers, very well-meaning people, will keep impressionable birds like blue jays and baby crows in complete darkness, in covered cages. They will turn on the lights and feed them and then cover them up and leave them in a dark closet all day. And that was one of the reasons I wrote the book about the jay was to dispel that ridiculous idea that they're going to imprint on people and be ruined for life in the wild. It's not true. So these birds grew into incredibly strong, beautiful birds. And by day 20, they were picking up their own food. And here's day 28. They were still being fed 13 times a day and looking very thrifty, as you can see. And this is the day that Orange picked up and subdued his own worm to day 21. All instinctual, these emotions hardwired. Good job, Orange. I'm so proud of you. What a good baby. What a good boy you are. I can taste freedom. So here's day 31. 11 days later, I opened the tent in the garage and out they came inside of the tent, in and out, in and out, just busy, busy, busy. The tent was their security. On the evening of their first day of freedom, a funny thing happened. They flew back to the tent to sleep. And they slept in the same pink fleece that they had throughout their baby freedom. And we're about all afternoon, about four or five on, I guess, in the pink, they came back to the tent just as I previously would. And zipped it up, and they will sleep safely. So it was really cool to see them widening their circle, but still sticking close to their security tent in the garage. And this is a neat thing. They, even after they were well grown, they continued to give the baby call whenever they saw me. Where are you? Where'd you go? Where'd you go, Pinky? Do you want to go there? So cool. So cool. Now here they are. Third evening after release, they came back into the tent to sleep. So it was a very interesting thing going on at the same time. There was an adult pair of Carolina Wren's nesting in my hanging basket right by the front door, where I fed my babies all day long, popping in and out to feed them. And I had been giving these birds peace offerings of mealworms during this whole period, knowing that I would be releasing babies right into their territory. And I don't know if that had anything to do with it, but they did not attack my babies. They would escort them from the general area of the nest, but they were not aggressive toward them. And this is something I plan to plan to write about, because I was so stunned that they were that tolerant of these strange babies. So then the problem I had was, since I've raised and released and healed so many birds in my yard, and they all know that when I'm raising babies, I put out this fabulous food. How was I going to get food to my babies without the titmice stealing at all? So I invented the renarium. This is a plastic critter keeper turned on his side. I cut a hole in the screen of my studio window, allowing the rins to enter and feed. I was very proud of this innovation. Soon, however, the titmice who could see the worms right through the plexiglass began investigating the hole. And I knew it was a matter of hours before the titmouse made their way inside and stole all the food again. So I had to modify the renarium, which I successfully did. I also didn't want these babies getting back in my house. They were wild now and they needed to stay wild. Yes, I was very proud of myself. So what I did was I modified it with tracing paper so the light could come in, but the titmice couldn't see the food. And because rins have object permanence and they knew where the food was that didn't slow them down one bit. They would just make their way into this hidden box and eat. So they were released on the 18th of June and they came into the garage until July 6th, which I find an absolute miracle. I had an evening ritual of sitting in the tent waiting for them to come in. Then when they were all in their roost, I zipped up the tent and I closed the garage door so no snakes could get in and get them or reckons. So this, I call this, does this ren make my hair look gray? Well, since I've had a head full of rins, please go up to the roosting thing I made for you. It's late. It's a very good place to sleep tonight. I'll just stand here. How's that? I had made them a little bucket with pink fleece in it up by the door, which they were interested in using. That night they slept in a camisiparis and I worried about them all night, but they were fine. So the bonds stretched. They didn't break, but they stretched and they stopped taking food. They didn't need to. But the cool thing is that every time they saw me, they still gave the baby call even after they looked for all intents and purposes like adults. That was really, really cool. So these are the things that I've done that I had to live these experiences to be able to write an illustrator book like Baby Birds. I keep getting these experiences. I'm open to them and I keep getting them and I know I have more books in me. I just need to find a publisher. My publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, went under in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, was bought by Harper Collins. And with that, the greatest natural history publisher in the world simply ceased to be. So I currently don't have a home for my work. I hope that will change. I'm not actively looking. I'm pretty busy with other things right now. So from the introduction of the book, I was talking about how I had all the cavity nesting birds that I could paint except for white breasted nut hatch. And that was the bird I most wanted. The book came out in April of 2016. And that very May, I had a surprise. I had been working. I've actually worked the New River Birding Festival in Fayetteville, West Virginia for 23 years. And last year was my last year because I figured just because you've done something for 23 years doesn't mean you have to do it for the rest of your life. So I'm no longer packing up all this stuff and hauling it to West Virginia so I can give programs and lead heights. But anyway, this day I came back from my week-long trip to West Virginia. And I had a very strong feeling that there was something going on in the little box on the clothesline pole, which I had put up simply to trap how spare I was from. I never knew that anything would be in there. But I pulled up into the front yard and I jumped out of the car and I ran to that box. I cannot tell you why. And what was inside that box? Those are white breasted nut hatches. The first white breasted nut hatches I've had in probably, I had had in probably 30 years. I'd seen one nest as a child in our yard in Virginia and then I had one in the 80s in Connecticut and here it was 2019, 20, no I'm sorry 2016. And there it was white breasted nut hatches. It was a message from the universe that I needed to keep doing this even though the book had already come out. Here was my holy grail bird and there she is with her baby right there under her bill. Beautiful little nest. The first thing I did, of course, was baffle the box. I stripped the baffle off my peach tree and put it on the box so nothing would get them. And that is a white breasted nut hatch in the hand. It's practically square, built like a little Tonka truck. And there's the scene as I'm painting it. And this is my favorite video of all time. I think it's looking good on his throat. Oh he's gonna keep shooting, keep shooting. I know. That's pretty amazing, huh? He feels so much better now. Thanks, Liam. That video was made by my son Liam. I wish I could have him here to make all my videos. He's so great. So I painted these things and the paper was 20 by 30 inches and I ran out of paper because they were in the nest for 23 days. And as you can see the studies get compressed over to the right. I thought I had all the time in the world and I wrote paragraphs. But toward the end I was just painting for my life, hoping these things would fledge. And they finally did. Now I told you that birds keep their same position in the nest throughout their infancy. The female was always in front. The male was always behind. You can see her slate blue cap and his black cap. And they fledged at day 23 and on when they were 50 days old, the male came back and clung to a tomato steak right outside my studio window and looked inside where he had been depicted all those times. And that was another little tap from the universe that said you are on the right path. You need to keep doing this. I love the Joseph Conrad quote. We must be willing to give up the life we had planned in order to have the life that is waiting for us. And that's the essence of what it is to be a rehabber and to raise baby birds. You have to drop everything and just answer their call. So this is a nice quote from Andre Geed, writer. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And out of yourself, create impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings. So that is the artist's call to do something that is different and that is needed, even though some would consider it esoteric. And that's my presentation. And I think I'm a wee bit over. Sorry about that. But I hope it was entertaining and I will stop sharing now. That was absolutely spectacular. Thank you. I'm trying to make my cursor do this. Let me hit X and see if I can do, there we go. Stop share. Here we are, Rebecca. And it's dark. Look, the sun is down. So that has set. Now it looks like Maine. That was an absolutely wonderful program. Thank you so much. Thank you. We do have, did have a couple of questions. One of our viewers was asking the cavity nesters, I believe, or the cup nesters are so vulnerable when they're in the nest, so they're trying to get out quickly, as you described. But when they're still hanging around, they haven't, they're not fully adult, certainly, and able to move to that greater degree. They're still quite vulnerable, wouldn't you say? Sure. Yeah. And I read the, I'm reading the question here. How are cup nesters more protected from predators out of their nests and in the vegetation? Well, the answer is they're moving target. When their nestlings in the nest, they are unable to move. They can't locomote. So a snake climbing up, it's just got a banquet spread there. But a baby that's clambering is actually able to take evasive maneuvers and to respond to its parents' calls to get out of danger or to freeze when a hawk goes over or something like that. So yeah, they're definitely safer. And they also disperse. So one baby will be 100 yards from the other, but they're all maintaining contact with the parents with contact calls. So all the eggs aren't in one basket when they're out of the nest. Couple more questions. One, now that you've achieved your life's goal of painting the white-breasted nut hatch, do you have any, what are their birds that are your target birds that you'd love to catch up with and study? I would love to paint barn swallows. I haven't had a nearby nest that I could actually access to do that, but I think they'd be really fun because I've raised one before and it was just a neat little bird. I'd love to get a great crested flycatcher in my gourd. So I keep martin gourds up, hoping, hoping, hoping because that would be amazing. I really, I did Phoebe's for the, for the book, but I'd love to paint great crest because they have a, they look incredible as fledglings. They're really cool. But other than that, you know, I'm happy to write about whatever presents itself. And what I think I'm going to work on now when I finish my house renovation is Carolina Rens. I took such copious notes on those babies, as you can see. And I had such incredible experiences with them. I'd like to, I'd like to show the world how amazing Carolina Rens really are. And we know, one last question, we know you've birded in Maine and Ohio. Are there, and presumably in other places as well, are there, you know, any really favorite spots that you, that are close to your heart? Oh, in, in Maine, I love the giant stairs. That place does something to me. I love Hog Island. I love the Freeport area. I don't know, of course, Acadia is incredible. I love, I was just out in Arizona, Southeast Arizona. I'm crazy about it out there, the Tucson area and Sierra Vista and Wilcox. I enjoy it all. I really do. I mean, there's nothing to me that's more electrifying than being dumped into a habitat where I don't know the birdsong and to have to track them down and figure out what they are. And that, that's what I was doing in, in the Tucson area just a couple months ago. Sounds wonderful. Well, thank you so much for, let me just one quick check here. I'm seeing there's perhaps a few more questions have come in. Yes, have I cared for baby hummingbirds? Absolutely. And when I, when I wrote the bluebird effect, I, the hummingbird chapter was so big that, that I almost called it hummingbirds and other birds I've raised, you know, so yeah, if you can get a call to the, of a copy of the bluebird effect, you can find those on my website. I'm even selling baby birds. Since all my books are out of print now, I have the last stores of them. You may be able to find them used, but they're horrendously expensive. And I think I'm probably cheaper. The other thing I failed to mention was that what I'm doing now is I'm advising editor for BWD magazine, which is the new improved. Hang on just a second. I'll get a copy. Great. Yep. It's the full size version of the little digest that we used to put out. This is a cover by Alex Warnick, a young woman who does incredible work. And we have this magnificent designer and our photo editor, Bruce Wunderly, does these, Lisa Co does these amazing layouts and Bruce sources the photos. And we just have so much fun with this magazine now. And I am charged with getting the cover art. And I find the most awesome artists that I can. This is the only magazine in North America that features paintings and has for more than 40 years. So I hope that you'll subscribe by going to bwdmagazine.com. It's my baby. Thank you. A lovely baby. And I will close with one public service announcement to everyone out there to if you have cats, please keep them indoors. That's our one of our slogans that we, I mean, most of our viewers are certainly aware of that. But please share it with your friends and neighbors. Cats take so many birds lives. And we don't we don't want that to be occurring. So Julie, thank you so much for joining us tonight. It was a wonderful pleasure. Beautiful work. Everyone, please check out her books. And perhaps we'll see you in Maine sometime. Thank you so much. Good night. Bye bye. Yep.