A tubenose and a sungrebe (Patreon)

Things are terrible for me at the moment --- I'm perpetually swamped with tedious work, and unable to do the stuff I actually want to (like The Big Book). A few illustrations have been produced lately, mostly of birds. 

To show that things are still coming along (slowly), here are some recent efforts needed for the NOW ENORMOUS bird section of the book: the heliornithid Heliornis (a group with an interesting and weird fossil record) and the diomedeoidid Diomedeoides.  Diomedeoidids (ugh, how I hate that name: I've even said this in the book) are extinct (probable) stem-tubenoses known from the Eocene and Oligocene of Europe and Iran. They seem to have mixed features of petrels and storm-petrels but have a less hooked bill-tip than those birds, and have really weird feet with big, blunt, flattened claws. You can't tell from fossils whether they had a dorsal nasal tube, but I bit the bullet and illustrated one. This bird needs adding to the tubenose montage - that will happen eventually.

The Heliornis is redrawn from various photos. Heliornithids are close relatives of rails, but are specifically close to the flufftails, an obscure Afromadagascan group now excluded from Rallidae and given their own family (Sarothruridae).

I will aim to upload more birds soon... I need more time!