>> for more information, and the many other cities visited by her local content vehicles, go to c-span.org/local content. >> coming up next from last week's 14th national book festival. but the next three hours through a preview michio kaku, david theodore george and adrienne mayor. the first time he restrained three, author and industry to "the sibley guide to birds."

he might thank you all for coming indoors on a beautiful summer off turn in. there we go. and my father is an ornithologist, so that probably has something to do with my early interest in birds. before as long as i can remember, i enjoy guys and i enjoyed earth in the two things that went together perfectly. drawing is just a great way to learn about something and there's so much to learn about birds. so for me, birdieing and drawing have always been one thing, a combination that could never separate. this is a drawing of a paragraph

talking that i did in 1969 when i was about eight years old. it is copied from one of my father's birth books. and here is me at age 13. my father being an ornithologist could offer lots of opportunities to me like bird banding. so i learned berg handing out i look back at that is one of the really important aspects of my earlybird study, the opportunity to hold a bird in your hand, to feel it, to get that extra sense involved is so much richer than looking out of through the binoculars. a lot of my early voting experiences was holding it in my hand, feeling the incredible amount of life and energy that is packed into that little tiny body and they are so small. this is a sharp tailed sparrow that probably weighs about three grams, half an ounce. so to put that in perspective,

you could put you in an envelope and mail them anywhere for one spam. [laughter] king one i'm utterly french king let's are much smaller. six grams, diagrams. imagine putting five and an elope for one stand. so that experience of feeling the energy, the life and seen life and see the birds up close and being able to release them and watch them fly away was really magical. all the birds the ending experiences i have her just great. and i also early on had an interest in books least in gathering the termination and compiling it. this is an early example of a book project that i worked on as a teenager, but were blurs of connecticut. this is a limited edition of one. [laughter] made at the typewriter, colored

pencils, glue and photographs. at sketching was the one constant in my birdieing experience. so i always had a notebook or sketchbook and try to draw the birds that i saw. drawing really is just a way to focus your attention. for me, that's what it was. my drawing has always been about information. so it is true scientific illustration. looking not a bird like the right-wing cross about, this was the first right wing cross sell i ever saw, so i could have identified it and see the white on the wings of the cross bill. check it off on your life listed move on. in order to do this relatively simple sketch, just a pencil outline with a few details added in, and there are hundreds of

questions that i had to ask. i sometimes describe sketching a team like an interview with the bird. it is a structure that forces you to ask those questions, to look more carefully, to wonder and mask what shape is the head? how big is to build relative to the head? thursday i? what shape are the markings on the wings? office questions and get translated in to pencil lines on the paper. but it's really all about the process of looking i carefully and asking us questions and whininess once you've gone through all those steps, you know what that bird looks like. so when people ask me about sketching and how to draw birds, i think it is really just about observation and practice and each sketch is just practice for the next one.

and one of the best bits of advice i can give for sketching is just think of sketching a something you're never going to look at again. it's all about learning. you are not producing something you were going to hang on the wall. it is not going to be your christmas card that might go in the trash. but you will learn something from it in your next scheduled event or in the next one after that. so this is a photograph of me sitting the back of a friends car in maine and i'm sketching the northern hawk owl and we would have back to that one in a minute. i will start with the first northern hawk owl i ever saw, which was in a few weeks of that right wing cross though. you notice a similarity in the style of the sketching when i was 13 years old. this was one we saw for a few minutes on a family trip and then we drove away and i did the sketches in the car as we

relieving, just something to remember it by. seven years later, i just finished college after almost a year and decided to go birdwatching full time. so i left college and this is the beginning of my full-time birdwatching and sketching. so this hawk owl was wintering in portland, maine. this is the first sketch i did on this day, just testing out some lines, testing out some ideas for how to draw it. this is crack is. later that day, after a series of five or so other sketches, several hours of watching and sketching, i am starting to get a better understanding of what a hawk owl looks like and how to draw. i went back three days later and

spent several more hours at the same hawk owl and i did this -- this is like the in-depth interview. this is really looking at the bird, asking every question i could think of in really getting to know it. just as an exercise, to send an hour or so on this one sketch. and after that, after learning through that sketch, i was able to do this kind of sketch, which starts now that they've got her to the basics, the fundamentals of the hawk owl in my mind, i can start to do sketches to capture some of the movement, the care, the overall shape with a few lines. an experiment with more subtle names. now, seven years later -- and i spent the seven years basically birdwatching and sketching

full-time contract when all over the country, living in a camper van, learning as much as they could about birds and a drawing. this is one of the times i did sit in the back of my friends car is not photographs in maine. so this is actually a very unusual field sketch for me. this is very detailed. it's really finished pencil drawing. part of that is hawk owls make fantastic subjects were drawn because those of you who have seen a hawk owls know that they just sit still. they said not one branch. they'll sit on top of a flagpole. one really prominent perch and they will stay there for hours. so you can really set the telescope on it, work on your sketch for five minutes and will back of the bird in the telescope and it will still be there. so most of my field sketches i will show are more like this.

very quick pencil drawing. this is storm petrels, drawn from the deck of the bluenose in the gulf of maine. what this represents is probably 45 minutes of watching it maybe five minutes of actually putting pencil on paper. there is a tremendous amount of just looking and five minutes of looking and then some very quick scribbling on the paper, testing some things out i'm a look at the birds do more. look at the sketch. look at the birds, look at the sketch. figure out what is wrong and what i need to change into more scribbling. this is a typical field sketch. and here's another more more recent typical field sketch. people often ask me how i can draw a bird in the wild when it is so hard just to see them in a subject like these hooded warblers were on a path.

they were foraging along the path in texas. so i could stand on the passing launch and most of the time it would be one burden view. so they were coming and going on the past. this is 15 or 20 minutes of watching in just 90 seconds may be of actual drawing. 90% or more of the time involved in a sketch a simple observation and thinking about what i'm going to draw. when i draw something like this, he should be sketches built on everything i know from the past. so although warblers have gone before, all the songbirds are helping me to draw this. so if i was a musician would be like practicing chords. i practice my court and i know how to play the note and which ones go together in which the

coins so i can look at a piece of music, look at the bird and quickly modified just a few places to turn it into a hooded warblers. so that is one way each sketch helps to inform the next one. so this is one of my more detailed and more scientific field sketches. this is two species of hummingbirds. if i were going to produce a field guide to the identification of these two species of hummingbirds, this is the only illustration that would be needed. this sketch, this outline shows all of the details that are keys to identify the species. any other information i added to the would distract from the important information, which is

the shape of the bill, the proportions of head to body and wings to tail, shape of the wings, length of the neck. those are the details you really need to look at. adding color and shading in all of this flash to this would distract from the important details you need to identify the birds. and not thinking really helped me when i was planning my field guide, which i spent years thinking about the guy and planning it. one of the important point that came up with was the more simplified the illustrations can be, the easier it is to get the information you need. so i deliberately set out after a long period of trial and error and experimenting, but eventually settled on the idea of simplifying the illustrations

as much as i could so that information in their it's just the information that is really key to identifying those pieces. now here is a walk-through the process of doing one of the paintings that is in the guide. so after years in the field, watching and sketching birds, when i go back in the studio, i start working on the actual painting. all i do in the field is pencil on paper. so this is a painting of the queen charlotte islands have species, which is added to the second edition of the guide. so i begin with a very simple pencil outline and this is the first step, just adding -- a party at it for five layers of paint to it. these transparent, translucent layers of paint.

which is opaque watercolor. so i start to painting and adding layers and gradually building a color in the detail of the entire painting. so i'll go through a series of about five slide and you will see it will gradually build up. so i am adding a little bit more depth, a little bit more detail, stern to a details around the face using a smaller brush and adding some details all over. starting to have some white around the phase and it pulls together a little bit more. finally, the finished painting. but gradually building up layers of paint over the entire bird. this should zoom in. there we go. so zooming in, the original paintings i did for the guide are about three times as big as the reproduction you see in the

book. they are much larger. when you look closely they are not really very detailed. there is a level of precision, but not a lot of detail. i use a fairly large fresh. i use quick rush strokes and all of this i assert is developed to work more quickly. in the air as another example of the species added to the second edition of the guide shows that the top to pencil outline i would begin with and not the bottom is finished painting of a male ito. when i set out to do the second edition of the book, i have all of the original art from the first edition. so here is three pages from the first edition showing several species of jobs. so each big sheet of paper,

about 15 by 20 inches shows all of the illustrations that i expect to appear on a page in the book. if i went through and worked on every one of those pages. every single sheet. i checked it. most of them i made some minor checkups. some of the many major correction. but i was looking through and updating most of the artwork from the first edition and adding illustrations to supplement that a new species for this second edition. in the first edition, when i was thinking these full plates, i would work on the entire page of wands for i showed the solid owl building up gradually layers of paint. i would work on each of the eight to 12 images of does on a

flow sheet of paper all at once. makes them great pain for the shadows and paint the shadows on all of the images at the same time and makes some reddish brown color and put that wherever we needed on all the images. that sort of assembly line process allowed me to work more quickly. it was more efficient and on a good day i could finish one more she. and about an hour per illustration is what it takes me to do a painting on the boat pared some species take longer. more detailed or more and tropez patterns. some like rose take a lot less. but this is -- in this will sound funny, but i don't actually have a lot of patience for painting. so i've developed -- sorry, wow.

i have developed all of these techniques for speeding up the painting process, for making it more efficient and getting results quickly so that i can feel like i'm actually looking forward, taking another step towards the top of the mountain. now, when i finished the first edition of the guide to birds in 2000, i did a couple of other bird objects in the may 2000, i decided i was interested in another big project going back to my childhood interest in books sort of compiling information. i wanted a project that wasn't birds, but that would give me a lot of the same challenges. and i settled on trees and i did a guide to trees, which was published about six years ago. and i found that trees are

actually surprisingly, in terms of nature study, may be the one most similar to bird study. if you think about other aspects for other groups of organisms in the natural world and studying them, if you want to study butterflies come out well in this part of the world's sterling butterflies around for half the year. a lot of the species require a tremendous effort to find. they are in very local places. they only fight certain kinds of the year. if you want to study reptiles and amphibians come you have to go in the woods and really search for them. mammals to have to go out at night. birds and trees are the two kinds of organisms that are around us all the time. you see them everyday. we see them from our office windows. we see them from the bus.

they are at the post office. everywhere you turned there were birds outside your kitchen window. words and trees. for me, and i was really important for maintenance project to have something i could study during the course of my everyday life. and also, something that i would be able to use com to clean. so that is how i ended up doing a guide to trees. identifying the rewards to up or very similar to what i think of as some of the rewards of word study. for me, a lot of it is about understanding patterns and getting to know the world around me are learning how things are related, how they linked together, how they are similar as well as the similar. so this species, the box elder

is really a maple. it's in the same genus. everything about it is the maple except it has compound leaves. so a lot of guys to tree identification that are focused on leeds will put it in the section with ashes and walnut another species that have compound leaves. but it is really everything else about it is a maple. this learning about tree identification, these two species in this picture and i'm sorry if you can't see very well from the back, but on the left is a grey birch. on the right is a quaking aspen. two superficially true center, on the north side in the northeast. in the winter the easiest way to tell them apart is by their tricks. once you learn not, you realize that helps you to distinguish all of the birches from all the aspen. they all have fun or delicate

waves and all the poplars in athens have thicker, more angular look into it. some of the things that i learned about birds. there are these patterns and similarities that run throughout the species of birds. these three species here, like all of the small songbirds, they have the same number of lines of street on their, the same number for is the feathers. so the pattern on these birds are determined by the arrangement of the feathers. they all have exactly the same arrangement of feathers. it is only the markings on the feathers that are different. and here, just like the birches in athens. at the beginning order of you might learn the difference between herons and cranes. they are both great longnecked birds on trade and birds. until you pick up a guide and

learn the difference, you don't notice what they are fundamentally different. aside from color and overall shape and size, their behavior, their food, their voice, their flocking, their flight, everything about them is fundamentally different. and then their attitude as well through the great blue heron for those of you who know them could easily take on those five cranes. so the other aspect to bird watching that i really enjoy is the way it connects me to history, to the bigger picture. and it is short-term and long-term history. we have her is constantly coming and going. the birds around a few weeks ago, some species like her, terry were a blur have 30 migrated to south america and

they won't be back until next april. there is constant movement and species like the pileated woodpecker in this area 30, 40 years ago when i was starting birding and i was mostly in connecticut, but it was a rare bird then. there just weren't very many big trees around. and now, a lot of farmland has grown back to forests. a lot of the suburbs have mature trees. there a lot of 60, 70, 80-year-old trees around growing in our suburbs and parks and forests and a lot of pileated woodpeckers. it's a much more numerous bird now than it was 40 years ago. we see changes like that happening, delay. species declining, ranges shifting. it makes birdwatching constantly

exciting and interesting. the migrations of the invention, the constant excitement for birdwatchers is what is going to happen next. what is coming tomorrow. as much as i like trees, they don't quite match the excitement of birdwatching. nobody ever woke up in the morning to look out in their yard out of the kitchen window and wondered what trees they would be in the yard. the city with birdfeeders probably look out the window every morning and wonder what words will be there. it is that kind of excitement and interest that spirit of discovery that makes bird and bird watching exciting and engaging. along with the academic challenge of identifying them, the pleasure of learning, figuring inside of team those

patterns and a sense of understanding the passage of time. but i think of birdwatching really as one of the reasons birdwatching has become so much more popular in the last 40 years. anna has grown tremendously in popularity. is that our lives have become more and more disconnect it from nature, we are in our offices and cars and houses. we don't experience nature the way our parents and grandparents did. most of them were birdwatchers living on farms. they didn't call themselves birdwatchers, but they marked the change of seasons, the passage of time by the birds. they do the songs. we'll have that as part of our daily lives anymore and birdwatching gives us an opportunity to do that, to get

outdoors. and it is just the excuse. it is the hook that gets us out there. it's the reason we set the alarm clock for 5:00 a.m. and get up even if it is raining to go out. but the reward is seeing the sunset, see the sunrise, cnn migration of dragonflies. seen a fox. all the things that happened while we are out there. those other experiences and understanding that comes from being a part of it is the real reward of birdwatching. birdwatching gives us the structure to get us out there to make that a part of our lives. so i hope that the bird guide hopes to introduce you to that world and helps to increase your enjoyment of it. that would make be very happy to know that the guide was hoping

to get more people outdoors. thank you. outback [applause] >> thank you. if anyone is brave enough for a question. >> thank you very much. i appreciate the discussion. i wonder as many of us understand we are in the 76th extinction events in what you foresee for the authorization to north american biodiversity of her. >> yeah, i have a slightly less pessimistic view of it all as you might have gathered. i see a tremendous number of words species increasing. obviously, what we need to worry

about are the species that are more specialized or the species that require feel natural wild habitat. most of the species that are increasing our species they pileated woodpecker, red tailed hawk, canada geese, while turkey, species that have adapted to human modified environments. they live in the suburbs now in their thousands, hundreds of thousands of square miles of suburbs to occupy. it is a species that very natural habitat that need our help. each species is part of a different story. it's one of the things that makes it so challenging is each species requires a slightly different set -- slightly

different kind of help. but some of the common threads that are here in rate of consumption of resources and preserving land as open space and allowing it to be natural. so those are the two key issues i think that cross many, many species. if we could get a handle on those, there would be a really bright future for all of the birds. but there are a lot of species that are doing very well in our suburbs and human modified environments. >> i wondered if you had a chance to work with roger tory peterson.

i wonder if you have a chance to work with roger tory peterson and more in any way influenced by his approach as? >> yeah, i got to meet roger tory peterson several times when i was a kid. i grew up in connecticut and he lived 20 miles away. so he had a tremendous influence on me. both his books and from actually being there is a real person. i showed him my sketch books a couple of meetings than he was. curry gene. -- encouraging. i think maybe his biggest influence was just sorted ener as an example to give me the idea that writing a bird guide was a viable career option. because it seemed when i was 12 or 13 years old, people were

talking about he lived just 20 miles away and people were talking about word guides in with my father beaten or in allergist, hanging out with other birdwatchers on the weekend, it seemed like everyone rode bird guides. [laughter] it was just something people do. >> hi, thank you for the top. two questions that are split related and very quick i think. one is, can we assume that the birds in your book were all birds you have seen? >> almost all of them, yes. there were about a species in the first edition that i hadn't seen when i painted them and i had accounted. i added a lot of rare species in the second edition. >> is there any bird you really wish you had so you could get it in the book? just one or two maybe.

>> as a burger, i wish i had seen all of them. it is difficult to paint them when i haven't seen them. but the solid owl painting, and building up the layers of paint over the whole bird and i can kind of visualize how it is going to end. or if the version of the finished painting as they put on each layer. if i haven't seen the bird, if i don't know it very well personally, it is harder for me to have that version of where i am headed with the paintings, so i have to be caught utley comparing autographs to what i have painted and it is a much more tedious, less intuitive process of painting. i use photographs allow for restaurant anyway to make sure in getting the details right. rupert that i know well, a lot of what i am painting is just what i visualize myself.

but you name a couple of species that i am particularly anxious to see, that i haven't yet seen, asked to express, a mexican species that occurred in arizona quite a few times and i've missed it by 24 hours three or four times. in fayette petro is another high on my list. it is a mess in the eastern atlantic. it is seen every year now and the gulfstream. that's a pretty recent discovery. >> hi, i live on the eastern shore of the peninsula and i do most of my birdwatching on my morning runs. i had a question the other day. why is he for white? all of the other water birds icr brown were gray, but the egret

is so bright in the sky and along the shoreline. i was just wondering what the reasoning behind not would be as far as predation. >> yeah, there are many, many fascinating questions just like that waiting for someone to come along to try to answer. yet, it is interesting that quiet a few of the hearings are white and some of them have both the wife more in a dark morph, the same species can be white or dark. i don't actually know if anyone has tested, has done a study to see if there is a difference in where they forage or when they are better. one of the theories i have heard his wife birds might be less visible to fish. most of them are hunting fish that are below them in the

water. so the egret mac is taken over the water is going to be visible to the station may be a white neck is harder for the fish to see. but there must be other times when dark plumage is better or maybe it doesn't make any difference in there some other reason. >> i thought maybe it had to do with color blindness of some of the predators. i don't know. they can't even wait. >> yeah, we don't know whether it's something to help hide them from fish or pray or predators or two just maybe to make them more attractive to other egret. >> thank you. keep thinking on it. >> yeah. >> hi, i don't mean to rescue an embarrassing question, but in terms of the bird guides now including yours, which is wonderful, if you were a bird

for other than yourselves anyway to get three guys coming in know that there's photographic guide and different approaches. what do you think about the different approaches just generally and can you give advice to those of us who are looking to purchase one besides yours. >> well, i have several books. [laughter] >> we don't know each other. the debate over photos versus illustrations will continue. to me, as i've described a little bit here, in the illustration i cannot decide the key point and strip away everything else so that you are only seeing the information that is really a port.

the photograph is just a complete record of that bird at that instant. the benefits of photographs is that it shows you exactly what the bird looks like at that moment. so i would supplement my book with a photographic field guide. and there's quite a few out there and new ones coming out all the time. so i won't single one out, but there are some very good photographic guide. and i will recommend -- actually, a book that really inspired me for the artwork is lars jonsson's birds of europe that was published in the 1990s, published in the u.s. by princeton university press. just fantastic artwork. it is not a fantastic field guide, but the artwork is