i (heart) odd-toed ungulates

One Lovely Day in the Life...

2013-05-14T13:15:32-04:00

I was asked recently by a friend (and elemetary school art teacher) to create a short video for her students of my life as a professional illustrator: How does one day unfold for me; where do I collect inspiration; what sort of tools are specific to what I do; what DO I do - and what ever do I even look like?! These are big questions, with potentially complicated answers, and the truth is - I do a wide variety of things in order to keep the lights on and Oscar well fed. It seems I have fewer and fewer "typical" days... but if you asked me to generalize for a moment and describe a single, quintessential day, I'd quickly use words to paint a picture of what's been neatly put into moving images above.

As luck would have it, I am studio-mates with a world-class videographer (and all around amazing and very talented individual). Doubly fortunate for me, Steve (Stebs) Shinnerer of Paper Fortress Films had been interested in shooting an "A Day With..." portrait of me (as part of a larger creative series) since last fall... The timing finally right, we coordinated a day of interviewing and shadowing through multiple locations (including my beloved Franklin Park Zoo), and a few weeks later, the final edit was ready for it's debut - in front of dozens of eager first and second-graders... in Missouri... The resulting 4-minute project is darn near pitch-perfect - I actually find myself pausing to thank my sweet stars for this life every time I watch it (plus, it's chock full of cool animals... so, WIN).

As a supplement to the video, I took one of the sketches started during that one, lovely day, and developed it into a finished coloring page, so that each child in my friend's class could create their own work of art, inspired by an FPZ creature ("Azul", a hyacinth macaw, to be precise). Drawn in a similar style to a project I did for National Geographic.com years ago, the ink drawing is designed for easy print/download. If you'd like to color your own parrot, just click on the image below and print from your browser, or save to your hard drive!

A note to my few dear subscribers:
You may have noticed the silence here at the ungulate blog over the last 6+ months... it was with great disappointment that I had to suspend regular creature feature posting; life, as they say, is what happens when you make other plans. This little personal project, beloved as it may be to me, just couldn't compete with a host of professional projects and opportunities that have been courting my time and talents in increasing numbers. One of those time monopolizers was, I am so proud to say, training for the 2013 Boston Marathon. The big day of course turned horribly sad toward it's end, but I couldn't have been happier with my run, and the reason for my effort:

I ran the 2013 Boston Marathon on behalf of the Franklin Park Zoo. That's right, I took on the fundraising challenge of running 26.2 miles with a charity that couldn't fit me better if it were hand-tailored to my every measurement. I ran with 2 other beautiful, strong women, each of us pledging to raise $5,000.00 by the end of the summer.

The race may be over, but my fund-raising continues, and it's projects like the one above that make it crystal clear how important the Franklin Park Zoo is to the Boston community, and beyond. Perhaps especially in light of the tragic events at the end of the April 15th race, now is the time to support the institutions and organizations that enrich, enliven, entertain and educate this vibrant city. So, if you are inclined (and I would urge you to be!) PLEASE CONSIDER SUPPORTING MY MARATHON RUN with a donation. I trained for 3 months and put over 4 grueling hours on the race course - what can you do to make a difference in the lives of these animals and their tireless keepers?

Fruit Bats & Cathedral Bells

2012-10-08T13:28:04-04:00

And now for something completely different...

Shame on me for allowing this blog to neglect the ENTIRE month of September... my great apologies to the few individuals who keep tabs on this tiny window of artful ungulate (and other) adventures. Things get busy, others go south, and before you know it, it's October... but I am delighted to share this new post - it is both long overdue, and an exciting step in a direction I have been meaning to go.

A month or so ago I was aksed by the fine folks over at 101florals if I'd be interested in contributing a pattern to their weekly series of illustrator collaborations - and of course I did! But as an animal artist, how could I spin this assignment to reflect my own particular passion and skill, while sticking to the realm of "floral" design... My solution? In a word: BATS. The explanation (from the 101florals post):

"As a specialist in animal and natural/scientific illustration, it was important to me to incorporate a critter of some sort into this floral project. Pollinators were an obvious place to start, and the more I researched, the more I became fascinated with BATS! The flowers that lend themselves to bat pollination (aka chiropterophily) are generally large, showy, often bell-shaped, and bloom pale or white blossoms - at night! The bats readily duck into them to sip nectar, dusting themselves with pollen in the process. How cool is that?! The flowers featured here are aptly named Cathedral Bells (Cobaea scandens), and the use of a restricted/muted palette I think does a swell job at conveying a sense of dusk or nighttime… I'm hoping the concept of bats and big beautiful flowers inspires and encourages people to learn a bit more about these amazing, gentle, and extremely beneficial little flying mammals."

And there you have it... just in time for Halloween to boot!

Also, for the record, pollination via bat is AMAZING - if your interest is at all peaked, here are some additional links: check out this gallery of bat pollinated plants; this crizay-zay photo of bat tongue (perfect for reaching into long tubular blossoms); an article on one incredible tropical flower with an ingenious, bat-centric phenotype; and this short exploration into the evolution of bat pollination.

Salameandering Into Cutaneous Respiration

2012-08-24T10:25:57-04:00

Meet Plethodon cinereus - the Northern Red-backed Salamander. These relatively plain little fellows belong to the "woodland salamander" family, a nod to their forested terrestrial home. Unlike some salamanders who, like many amphibians, lay their eggs in water, at no point in the Red-back sallie's life cycle are they aquatic. A cluster of 4-14 eggs is laid in the soft nook of a rotting log or tree stump, from which young develop fully inside their eggs until they hatch; the "infants" wobble out like dainty versions of their parents.

The painting above documents 5 stages of the Red-back reproductive cycle - zig-zag top to bottom: beginning with a clutch of eggs (fiercely defended by mamma for up to 2 months); followed by a view of the embryo development within those eggs (dark eye spots and long tail coiled around a creamy round yolk clearly visible); a pile of wee hatchlings (roughly 1" in length); a juvenile, starting to look a bit more proportional; and lastly, coming full circle, an adult Red-back, poised to find a mate of his own. The prominent Hemlock needles and cones in the painting are in reference to the Eastern Red-back's preferred forest type.

A unique feature of woodland salamander physiology not obvious in the illustration - they are lungless. That's right - no lungs! Instead of breathing through organs in the chest, a lungless salamander gets oxygen through its skin, via a process known as cutaneous respiration, or cutaneous gas exchange (remember, breathing in oxygen goes hand in hand with breathing out carbon dioxide). A seemingly bizarre strategy, but Red-backs aren't the only ones...

Lungs are what enabled the ancestors of all tetrapods (4-limbed animals) to climb out of the Devonian soup some 400 million years ago and begin sucking in great quantities of air for a living. Since they utilize the vast surface area of alveoli for gas exchange, rather than the relatively limited amount of surface area provided by a creature's skin, lungs are a much more efficient way for an organism to respirate - especially large creatures, or those requiring bursts of energy and high O2 consumption. For comparison, an average human adult's skin has a surface area of roughly 16-21 square feet - the surface area of the alveoli inside that same human is about 100 square yards!

Amphibians are neither large, nor particularly active, and many spend almost their whole lives in or around water. For these reasons, amphibians of the order Anura (ie: frogs) evolved FOUR mechanisms for breathing: 1. through gills (present in the larval stages of many aquatic species, but they are generally lost prior to adulthood); 2. lungs (slightly more primitive than those of mammals); 3. through their very permeable skin, and; 4. through sensitive skin inside the mouth (aka buccal cavity). Lungless salamanders (about 431 species of the family Plethodontidae, and making up an entire 2/3 of all salamander diversity!) took things one step further and got rid of the primitive lungs all together, to rely solely on cutaneous gas exchange. Similarly, two known Caecilians (bizarre, smooth-skinned amphibians resembling a combination of a worm and a snake) made themselves a sans-lung niche, one-upping the sallies by also losing their legs! ("squeam" factor is a bit high on these guys...). Until fairly recently, these examples were thought to be the only tetrapods lacking lungs, but in 2008, the Bornean Flat-headed Frog became the first frog (they're actually toads...) to be discovered without lungs. So yeah - Nature: stranger than fiction, EVERY TIME.

Still iffy on how this whole "lungless breathing" concept works? I was, and since the interweb failed to deliver the all-encompassing visual diagram I was hoping for, I went ahead and fashioned my own (facts carefully double-checked with the Harvard researcher who studies the Plethodons in the painting above)...

Hungry for more deets on breathing in and breathing out? WATCH: this quick 3D medical animation of respiration in human lungs; this insanely authentic Encyclopedia Britannica film on the respiratory system requires about 25min, but the 80s edu-film effects are priceless (and it's actually jam-packed with all the basics) - highly recommended if you want something thorough and entertaining; and for a gander at how a few additional amphibians have solved the oxygenation problem using... creatively alternative methods... check out the bizarrely bristly Hairy Frog, the excessively wrinkled Lake Titicaca Frog, and the amusingly sweet-faced Axolotl.

My great thanks to Zachary Lewis, currently a Phd student in the Hanken Laboratory at Harvard University (where he studies the evolution of development - via salamanders!), and Carolyn Eng, doctoral candidate in the Harvard Human and Organismic Evolutionary Biology departments (Carolyn studies anatomy and physiology and frequently puts animals like goats on treadmills to observe muscle function through locomotion - I covet her job).

Carbon Dust Redux: Phacochoerus africanus

2012-07-12T17:27:14-04:00

The above slideshow is a quick process recap of a carbon dust drawing I completed recently using a warthog skull (from my personal collection) as my model. The drawing was made specially for an event at my favorite arts and event space in Brooklyn, NY - Observatory. Since the carbon dust technique was introduced to me just this spring, at a wonderful workshop held in the classroom at Observatory, I thought it a fitting medium for the assignment.

This week, Observatory co-founder, Joanna Ebenstein, released the second in a series of short, web-based documentaries centered around her work as a passionate researcher, curator, and collector of "curious collections" - you can watch this little gem on her blog, Morbid Anatomy. Below, an African Warthog (Phacochoerus africanus) making haste to somewhere important (look at that wee tail straight up in the air!). Compared to other African game, warthogs may be diminutive omnivores, but that tusky snout is backed up by a tenacious attitude, and wise predators learn not to make light of that.

From the Mouths of Owls

2012-06-12T18:59:34-04:00

I have fond memories of many lessons in elementary school, but one of the shining highlights was the day us kiddos were each given an owl pellet to dissect. The ugly little grey-brown lumps, the size and shape of stuffed grape leaves, looked a whole lot like any number of small critter scat one might discover on the forest floor, and while they were indeed evidence of wild digestive systems at work, poop they were not. Along with our pellet, we were given tweezers and microscopes, and it didn't take much prodding before squeals traveled the room, for each and every nugget contained a terrific assortment of tiny, nearly perfectly clean, rodent bones. Like archeologists at an ancient burial site, we gingerly tweezed through the furry fibers, lifting out everything from skulls to the most minute metatarsals. I don't know if every kid in the room felt this way, but for me, it was a bit like Christmas... and I've been dying for the opportunity to paw through an owl pellet ever since. To my rescue this spring: the Great Mount Auburn...

Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA became a bit of an avian circus last spring when the rather conspicuous nest of a resident pair of Great Horned Owls was discovered. The proud birds produced 2 handsome chicks and raised them successfully in front of eager crowds. Sadly, the female of that mated pair, Roxanne, died tragically this spring - I'm told an autopsy revealed she was "with eggs" as well... such a shame. Luckily for us, her baby-daddy, Alexander the Great (I didn't name them) is still very much alive, and on one early visit to the Dell last month, it occurred to me that I might possibly be able to sleuth a pellet or two from under his favorite towering pine roost...

Oh happy day - not only did I find a pellet, I found heaps.

Owls tend to select favorite trees (most often coniferous ones) - right down to the branch - so combing the ground beneath a known roosting spot is a bit like crawling around underneath the kitchen table of a toddler - each day, a predictable selection of tidbits hits the same spot on the floor... In this case, substitute Cheerios and frozen peas with mouse femurs and shrew pelvic bones, and what you get is nothing short of a bonanaza for a naturalist.

If you missed out on aforementioned owl pellet dissection day in elementary school, you may be wondering: So if it isn't poop, what is an owl pellet anyway? Well, here's how it works:

Owls, like all birds, must swallow their food relatively whole; they may pull it apart with their beak and claws, but without teeth, they can't masticate (chew) their food. In creatures with teeth, mastication is actually the first step of digestion, but birds skip most of that and just send their meals down the hatch. Since owls are birds of prey, and meals consist of small animals, an owl's stomach is faced with an assortment of rather challenging-to-digest fare; some of it, like fur, feathers, bone, teeth, and claws, can not be digested at all... instead, it must be "ejected" via the same route it went in.

When an owl swallows a meal, it enters the mouth, passes down the esophagus and then heads through the first of a 2-part stomach (all birds have a 2-part tummy). Stomach #1 is called the proventriculus, or "glandular stomach", and it produces enzymes and acids - just like your own stomach - that begin the process of digestion. Next, the partially-digested owl snack moves on to stomach #2: the ventriculus, or "muscular stomach". The ventriculus, aka the gizzard, has no digestive enzymes, but uses muscular contractions to continue the process of digestion and move soft and soluble food bits on to the rest of the system (intestines, liver, pancreas, etc) where nutrients will be absorbed by the body. At this point, the ventriculus also serves as a block for all of that INdigestible material that the body can't process. Within hours after eating, all that fur, bone, and tooth (and sometimes inorganic items like leg-bands from songbirds!) is compressed in the gizzard into a pellet, which travels back up from the ventriculus and into the proventriculous, where it will sit for up to 10 hours before being regurgitated.

An owl pellet in the proventriculus thoroughly blocks the digestive system while it waits to be ejected, so pellet regurgitation must be quite regular in a healthy bird or it will starve. When the moment comes, like a cat getting ready to yerf a hairball, the owl will hunch up, appear momentarily uncomfortable, then extend it's neck up and out, open wide, and quite silently spit out a pellet (I've found 2 videos of this event - one featuring a young Barn Owl *I'd mute the commentary*, and one seriously impressive Snowy Owl).

*For more reading on owl digestion and the pellet process, check out this great overview - and much more info about owls of all types - on The Owl Pages website.

Predictably, pellets vary in size and contents based on species of owl and diet. Additionally, many other types of birds produce pellets besides owls: herons, gulls, crows and jays, are just a few. Falconers refer to the pellets their hawks produce as "castings" and monitor them closely, since regurgitation serves the additional purpose of scouring and cleansing the crop (the crop is a small pouch in the throat for food storage - owls do not have crops - and if it is not cleaned regularly through regurgitation, a raptor will quickly become ill from bacteria build-up). Of note, hawks have the ability to digest bone matter, so castings contain mostly compacted fur or feathers...

My morning in the cemetery was a fruitful one and I was able to collect many pellets, as well as many clean bones which had already been separated from their fuzzy fur-balls by the elements. A few of the photos above show the "raw" state in which some treasures sat waiting for me, though more fun were the lumps I got to dissect. Below is a record of some of my haul, laid out on a bone identification chart I made and printed out.

To my surprise, I discovered that there is an entire marketplace online for the owl pellet experience. Since it is such an entertaining activity for school children, there are businesses that source and sell pellets in bulk - pre-sanitized - for entire classrooms of eager young biologists to enjoy. There are many and varied bone ID charts (see very bottom of linked page) available for download, and even virtual pellets to dissect online (can't say as that I got anything out of that experience besides the novelty factor, but apparently - we have the technology!). Smart phone users can also download owl pellet ID apps, for quick reference in the field...

Since my unusually critical attitude towards most "creative" science aides prevents me from being satisfied with most charts and illustrations I come across, I was compelled to create my own bone ID chart, based on reference I found online. I have included my chart here for download (just click on the image), should you be similarly irritated by poorly drawn anatomy, horribly compressed jpegs, and embarrassing composition and typographic labeling. And with that I'll just say - by way of the backyard, or a box in the mail, I hope everyone who loves science and wildlife as much as I do can find an opportunity to discover the wonder of an owl pellet.

Drawing at the Morbid Anatomy Academy

2012-06-02T12:02:28-04:00

I've been treating myself to some drawing workshops this spring... and when I treat my creative self, it usually involves seeking out animals of the deceased and preserved variety, with a sketchbook under my arm. And so it was that I found myself in the delightful classroom of Observatory, a Brooklyn-based art and science event space. Joanna Ebenstein, who manages Observatory, also curates the amazing Morbid Anatomy blog - a source of endless inspiration, and a killer travel planner for those who's first destination in a foreign city is usually the local catacombs. In addition to Observatory's wide variety of evening lecture subjects (covering histories of science, medicine, and the culture of the macabre), the loosly dubbed "Morbid Anatomy Art Academy" runs classes in such curiously alluring topics as anthropomorphic taxidermy, dollhouse crime scene recreation, and death-mask making. Joanna is a powerhouse, and when she scheduled a few animal anatomy drawing weekends, I absolutely could not resist.

Below my skeleton sketches (coyote skull above, then human skulls, followed by Homogalax - the earliest known tapir) are a few photos - the only one that isn't immediately self explanatory is the lower right image of something in a silver tray. That something is actually a stillborn orangutan body that had been partially dissected by various researchers. It was one of the most intense specimens I've yet seen - moreso even than the human hands that were sitting on an adjacent table... it had no head and was literally in assymetric dissaray. *A specimen like this is exceptionally rare, and "hacked up" as it was, each shred of tissue and bone was being conserved to await the next wave of scientists looking for a sample that might illuminate their research.

There are many drawing and painting techniques I have yet to try, and then there are the techniques I've never even heard of... carbon dust drawing is one of those. Back in March, the Academy held a weekend class on learning this obscure, meticulously beautiful method, and curiosity got the best of me. Taught by accomplished medical illustrator, Marie Dauenheimer, the workshop started with an overview of the history of carbon dust drawing, and proceeded into an afternoon of experimenting with a few drawings ourselves (starting with the grinding of our own dust from a stack of carbon drawing sticks) - naturally, we had a table full of skulls as our subjects (see main photo above).

Carbon dust drawing was developed in the late 19th century and perfected by Max Brodel, a medical artist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. The technique is a slow one, building layer upon layer of soft grey "dust washes" to create desired tones, though the resulting images have an etherial luminosity and near photogrphic quality that is really quite stunning. I'd like to continue these exercises when I can and will definitely add carbon dust to my roster of picture-making methods worth the effort. Below, my "finished enough" sheep skull in dust...