Ibises, spoonbills and cranes: the story so far (Patreon)

When time allows I am still drawing more birds needed for The Big Book - the Eotyrannus monograph, Dorling Kindersley work and assorted small authoring and consultancy job are mostly keeping me away from this project, >>>sigh<<<.

Anyway, here are some more. There are two or three lineages within Plataleidae (the ibis + spoonbill group) that I need, and here we have Threskiornis (specifically T. molucca) and Platalea (specifically P. alba). I've done Rhynchaeites already, a Paleogene stem-plataleid... (it's previously been posted here in the various montages of Paleogene birds).

I will probably add a few of the weird, extinct, island-dwelling ibises - I do have an old, semi-hypothetical illustration of Xenicibis drawn as a quadruped (here it is); I might include that in the book as well.

And there are some other ibises that might warrant inclusion given their presence in the fossil record, like Geronticus. I'm thinking that I now have enough images to blog about ibises at Tet Zoo soon - the problem with some groups of animals is that it's all too easy to get images of familiar, abundant species (in this case: Scarlet ibis, Sacred ibis), but harder to get more obscure ones. On that note, here's a nice photo I have of a Black-faced ibis (Theristicus melanopis) with a particularly impressive wattle.

I feel it's also worth noting that the illustrations I'm now doing for The Big Book are a world away from the small, more cartoon-like illustrations I was originally imagining for this project. Check out the ibis illustrations I was originally intending to include.... (this is a particularly bad scan of a small drawing; it comes from the big Sibley and Ahlquist tapestry tree I produced some years back).

Oh - I should also add that I've drawn a spoonbill before as well: it was done for the bird chapter I produced for The Complete Dinosaur, Second Edition. This illustration depicts a White spoonbill Platalea leucorodia. It's not bad. However, it's copied from someone else's drawing (the one included in the 1990 The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Birds; Chris Perrins was consultant-in-chief; artists are not credited in this large work so I'm not sure who did the specific illustration) and my current policy is not to include drawings that are straight copies of other people's work.

And on the right we have the cranes Grus (G. vipio) and Balearica (B. regulorum). I might draw one or two more cranes, not sure yet (thinking of various of the island-dwelling, recently extinct flightless species).

As usual for extant animals, these are drawn from photos. I'm thinking of creating a montage of waterbirds soon to see how many I've done. Everything is still taking sooo long, it's depressing. Anyway, more soon. Thanks as always for your support.