Subject: Howdy from Denise
Date: Jul 31 03:22:32 1996
From: Dtaka at aol.com - Dtaka at aol.com


Hi, Dennis!

I just got back from the east coast, visiting my family and attending the
Guild of Natural Science Illustrators' annual conference in D.C. I talked to
Brian Schmidt (sp?) at the Smithsonian for a few minutes after Phil Angle
gave some of us a tour of the Ornithology collections. It was fun to see
Brian in a different museum. He had been living just about two miles down the
road from the house I grew up in!
I also sat in on a book-outline-roughing-out session with John Anderton
(who's working on a field guide to birds of the Indian Subcontinent) and
Nancy Halliday (an Illinois naturalist, educator and illustrator). They hope
to write a book on Drawing Birds, stressing the underlying anatomy of birds,
and the physics of flight. I don't know in what capacity I'll be involved
with the book, but it'll be interesting to see the steps in the
book-publishing process. Run for my life, you say?
Anyway, I'm writing to see if you know of anyone reasonably close to
Seattle who is doing much birdbanding (Passerines, especially). Would I need
to be certified to assist? I mostly want to be able to see and photograph
live (albeit stressed and unnaturally posed) birds up close for illustration
purposes.
Also, Teri Martin told me about Carol Spaw's lung cancer just before my
trip East. Carol's such a nice,wonderful person, always so helpful when I
come stumbling around the Burke collections. Do you know of anything that
would help her and Rick out?
Well, I hope you are having a chance to do a lot of travel and
collecting. When I was by a creek in Germantown, Md., I saw lots of beautiful
metallic blue(-green) dragonflies with black wings, and similar green-gold
ones that had single white spots on their black wings. It was enough to make
me wish I had one of Molly's nets! -Denise dtaka at aol.com