My Feathered Winter Friends
- Sue Hand
- Dec 15, 2025
- 3 min read
A truly dedicated ornithological artist would tramp through snowy forests InSide the Back Mountain with an expensive camera sporting a telephoto lens weighing down its front, patiently communicating with birds using various bird calls. However, I am not a dedicated ornithological (having to do with birds) artist. I do not have an expensive camera with a telephoto lens–and would not know how to use one if I did! I don’t know many bird calls although I can identify a few common ones. Last but not least, after two horrendous bouts with Lyme Disease, the second with additional tick-borne co-infections, I am not about to tramp through any more forests anywhere in any season or weather!
However, I do enjoy seeing our beautiful bird residents InSide the Back Mountain, especially in wintertime. When the glorious leaves of autumn have gone the way of spring and summer flowers, the colorful feathers of our winter residents cheer my soul! When my human snowbird friends head south, my feathered friends remain, brightening every day!
My strictly indoor cat enjoys them as well! Angelo is a 9-year-old recently adopted rescue from the SPCA who occasionally glues himself to our kitchen window. His sleek tuxedo coat trembles a bit. Muscles tense. The tail twitches and jerks slightly. Ears switch to forward position. Eyes focus wide. His forehead presses the windowpane as he thrills to his version of Pennsylvania Outdoor Life on “kitty television.”
Outside the window, birds prance and flutter in the bare branches of our lilac bushes and the stark flowering cherry tree branches, most often when the winter sunshine is at its warmest on the south side of our home. Birds are truly fascinating! Would anyone else besides me love to tenderly hold a little puff-ball chickadee? I delight in the cardinals with their striking red feathers, a splash of joy in this Christmas season. I rejoice in the brash bluejays as they swoop and flash across our yard in a streak of blue, screaming threats all the way! I admire the black-and-white feathered formalwear tuxedos of the woodpeckers, accented with a touch of red like a rose or carnation in a lapel!
Because I love birds but I'm not a professional ornithological artist, I didn't hike through their haunts in search of hundreds of reference photos to paint my recent series of snow-birds. Instead, I gathered together my collection of bird photos on my phone, most sent to me by friends, as well as reference photos of birds I wanted to portray from my two-foot-thick stack of Birds and Blooms magazine. As a professional artist, copying published material is absolutely illegal and highly immoral. However as additional reference to practice for projects, extra knowledge is always helpful. To create these three paintings, I sketched cardinals, blue jays, and woodpeckers in different positions and lighting conditions. Then I began my own versions.
My cardinal is a composite of three birds, one much slimmer than this one. But I liked his beak! The background is purely “made up,” as is the color scheme. I wanted cool reds and blue-greens for a holiday look. Merry Christmas!
The blue jay has the same “made up” background. I used several bird photos as reference, taking great artistic license with the details, painting them loosely, not as they would appear in a Roger Tory Peterson bird guide. In one photo, a jay was perched on the tip of a yellow sled, which was way too warm for this color scheme. Instead, I perched mine on the suggestion of an ancient railing, a figment of my imagination.
The woodpecker is my favorite! I created the bird from several photos, added the evergreen cone from another, changed the color scheme, “made up” the background and departed from tight realism in favor of an impressionistic “feel the cold, fresh air” approach.
In all three paintings, kosher salt was used to create the blurry look of large, background snowflakes while the paint was still wet. Different types of salt create different effects. Depending on the look desired, I sometimes use epsom salt, sea salt, crushed rock salt, or table salt. The salt lays on the damp watercolor until it absorbs some moisture and color and everything is dry. The salt is then removed, exposing spots in the watercolor, the painting is completed, and, lastly–with a toothbrush and acrylic gesso–I spattered fine snowflakes in the foreground. My holiday birds in the snow were complete!
I'm so grateful for our feathered winter friends, especially for the education, the entertainment, and the joy of color they bring to our lives! Aren't you?
This article originally appeared in the December 2025 publication of InSide the Back Mountain.
