Mockingbird, Chickadee, and Egret

Birds seem to figure in somewhere in all my books,
either in the text or the paintings or both.
Always wonderful to draw or paint, and
bird names are so much fun
to play around with in poems.
This is a spread from my book Tippintown : A Guided Tour
concerning The Tippinfeather Choir,
Tippintown's premier avian A capella ensemble.
(Well, not completely A capella, because the mockingbird
plays the lyre. This is a little joke about how
a mockingbird plays the liar, when it imitates other birds.
Maybe liar is a bit strong. Plagiarist? Or maybe the mockingbird
is just sampling sound. In Pasadena we had a local mockingbird
that would imitate a car alarm.)
And the poor loon. He can't seem to remember
the words to the song even with sheet music.







This is a Poem called The Egret, from Soup for Breakfast.
It was inspired by the doodle and the little five line poem,
above, in a sketchbook.
Sparrows and swallows, cuckoos and cockatoos,
and whippoorwills on windowsills. I'll continue to
bring birds into my writing and art,
even if they get sick of me.