I took a whole lot of photos of Lesser Yellowlegs at Magee Marsh NWR back in September of 2009. My problems with identifying two shorebirds that I thought were just one are detailed here. One of the consequences of trying to ID the bird at the same time we were trying to hurry to get started on a long drive meant that I took many, many quick photos. Now they are serving as a wealth of material for sketches.
I grabbed 30 minutes this morning and then again tonight to do the two on this page. Slowly, slowly I'm learning something about the structure of shorebirds and yellowlegs. It's of course easy to be seduced by their complex feather patterning, especially if you have fairly detailed photos as I do. I'm going to need to watch out for that as I continue this process because it's very easy to get lost in that feather detail and completely mess up the overall structure of the bird itself.
These two in particular gave me trouble with the placement of the legs. But I'm getting to be more familiar with these birds. Maybe another 10 sketches and I'll start to feel comfortable enough to try another painting of them and the Solitary Sandpiper that we saw at Magee.
Finally, how often to you get to write "a few more lesser" as I did in the title? Life is full of small pleasures!
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