After some discussion, a couple of the illustrations have changed for Birds of the Mogollon Wildway. I have now painted a Northern Flicker to replace the Gila Woodpecker (which are common within their very small range, but not quite in the area we are focussing on) and a Black-chinned Hummingbird instead of the Berylline as the former is a far more likely spot.
These have now been scanned in and standardised, and I am getting to work on the info and description for each species. It’s quite a lot of work as with the British birds I am sufficiently familiar with them to be able to write confidently as I’ve been interested in birds and birdwatching for years, but the US ones are totally unknown to me. I am triangulating birding videos on YouTube with my two North American field guides and the excellent websites from the Cornell Lab and Audobon Society to get a good grounding in what’s important and what’s not, and I’m really enjoying learning about them.
I listened to a good podcast last night which, although completely unrelated to birds made me think about this educational aspect of creating these booklets. The host was saying how he’d thought about doing a PhD but then actually presenting the podcast required a great deal of research in to the topics, and thought in to how best to present those topics. I’m not in a position to devote time to formal qualifications, much as I loved my Open University degree, so this kind of opportunity represents post-graduate learning if you like, and although this is the 14th logbook I’ve created, I’m still making new discoveries about InDesign, namely how to do fractions as this booklet needs the measurements to be in imperial, and I’m going with fractions of inches rather than decimals as I think it’s more intuitive, but I haven’t used that function up until now.
I will be sharing updates as the logbook progresses. The Western Tanager is now complete…21 more birds to go!
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