Science Club: Jonathan Alderfer
In which DCist interviews area scientists, researchers, and academics on topics pertaining to natural and scientific interests. As Thomas Dolby would say: science!
Jonathan Alderfer began his career as a bird painter in the 1980s by illustrating bird identification articles for the Los Angeles Audubon Society's newsletter, The Western Tanager. He is the editor of National Geographic's Complete Birds of North America, published in 2005, and co-editor of the 5th edition of their Field Guide to the Birds of North America, published in 2006. As an independent field ornithologist he has published illustrations in scientific and popular publications such as Audubon Magazine, North American Birds, Bird Watchers’ Digest, Birding, and National Geographic Magazine. Alderfer co-authored Birding Essentials, which was published in 2007. Later this year, National Geographic will publish Illustrated Birds of North America, Folio Edition, a large-format illustrated guide.
Alderfer's paintings appear in "Birds of North America," a gallery exhibition of original and archived bird paintings by four illustrators, on display through May at the National Geographic Museum. Alderfer (whose work there is available for purchase) is the only modern illustrator in the group.
DCist: Are these works plein-air paintings? There is quite a bit of landscape in them.
Jonathan Alderfer: No, they aren't. I think it's an interesting distinction between illustration and fine art. I feel I do both types of painting, but this is pretty much illustration. In my mind, illustration is when somebody else is telling you what to paint. In fine art, there are no outside constraints.
When you receive editorial assignments, is the request for a specific bird you need to capture?
Sure. For the horned grebe, for example, there are five images here [in the Field Guide] to show all the variation within the species. You need to include all the plumages, different ages. A lot of species don't look the same year round or they don't look the same when they're young versus when they're adult.
When an editor says, I need a look at this bird, how do you start?
I was the co-editor of this book with John Dunn. We're expert birders, so we know what needs to be shown, but I'm not the sole artist in the book. There are a lot of artists. So if we say to an artist, We need you to paint herring gull, there might be 15 plumages that we wanted to see. So we say, We need this, this, this, and this. The artist submits a drawing, and we tell him if he needs to work on the bill or work on the feet or some details. Then we go to the stage where we say, This drawing is ready—you can start painting now.
If you're out in the field and you're looking for an animal, are you looking for one iconic example or a bunch of really good examples of parts?
You want to try to paint an image that you've internalized over a period of decades, if you've been a birder for a long time. You develop an internal image of what that bird looks like. You need to get all the details right, so you're not just going for a gestalt look of the bird. You need to get all the details, the way the bird stands or perches or flies.
You don't want to duplicate a photograph, for instance, because that shows a bird in a split instance. It might have odd feather arrangement, it might have odd shadows or reflected light or backgrounds that are disturbing.
Red-footed Boobies, 1997, Jonathan Alderfer
Beginners often think photographs are the best way to go. It's a general consensus with birders that you need a reminder of what the most important field marks are, and you need to show that clearly. If that means editing the bird a little bit visually, you go ahead and do that. You need to get across what's important, not a reproduction of a photograph. You condense, you edit.
Are there things that you find as an illustrator that you like drawing more than other things?
There are certain groups of birds that I like—
What kind?
I like shore birds a lot. Sea birds. Mostly because they're complex. I've gotten to a point where that's of great interest to me—the complexity of the patterns on a shore bird.
Why is that the case for shore birds?
Some of these patterns have a cryptic look to them. It's more camouflage, blending into your background where you live. You see on a snipe for instance, a lot of the dried grass where they're often found, those same colors are on the breast of the bird—even the patterns somewhat.
And you depict the grass with the bird—
To kind of emphasize that. A lot of birds have a coloration that's called counter-shading. They're pale underneath and dark on top, so as the light—they want to blend into the background somewhat. As the light shines down on top of them, they get darker underneath, so they become more single toned. The other reason is potentially—say they're going after a tiny minnow or something like that. When the minnow looks up out of the water, they see a pale underpart. So they don't see it as much as if it were darker underneath. That's not true just of sandpipers, that's true across the board.
What kind of studies do you have to do to do this kind of illustration?
An interest of mine is how feathers work—it's called feather topography. Like a map.
Why "topography"?
It's the landscape of feathers on a bird. Feathers grow in what are called tracts. They grow in groups on different parts. There are areas of the bird which don't have any feathers growing on them at all. Each group of feathers has a name. This one's called scapulars, these are the wing covers, these are the tertials, these are the primaries, these are the secondaries. They all overlap.
Through evolution, a bird is a supremely streamlined engineered flying machine. All these things have to work together to stay lightweight and give the bird the ability to fly and to survive. Most birds have basically the same plan, even though the feathers look totally different and have totally different lengths. Once you learn that—it's really important for an artist.
I use my own experience looking at birds. Then I use photographs, and there's a great supply of photographic reference material available today. I often visit the Smithsonian, and their bird collection—not their public bird collection but the ones they keep for scientific study. Hundreds of thousands of bird specimens. So you can go in there and check feather details. They're laid out sort of like cadavers, so they're not good at all for poses, but you can find out the pattern on that feather.
Those are the basics: specimens, photographs, experience. I do some drawing in the field, and I should probably do more. I don't often find the time to do it, but drawing while you're in the field is a great way to get characteristic poses down.
Brown Pelican, 2008, Jonathan Alderfer
There's a continuum between Audubon, who was painting in the early to mid-1800s, and previous to that there were other painters of birds who were mostly working in the scientific tradition. Audubon was sort of the first one who—he was working in the scientific tradition of depicting birds accurately, and he wanted to do the whole range of North American species. But, he also was an artist and was appreciated at an artist today, almost outside the illustration tradition. He's on both sides of that: He's an illustrator, yet his art work hangs at museums, is looked at as fine art.
It's something that influences bird painters today, because of his focus and his ability to depict detail. But a lot of his poses have a very dated look to them nowadays. They don't look particularly natural to a lot of people any more. They're beautiful compositions, but most bird painters today go for a more naturalistic look.
When he worked, there was no photography. He worked from his own observation. He may have had a binocular of some sort, but probably he had a telescope, which was useless, the kind they had back then. So he shot birds. He collected birds. Those birds ended up in museums, eventually. He stuffed them, he, well, that night he might have eaten the inside of the bird. The skins he saved ended up at [places like] the Smithsonian, they still have skins today by Audubon.
So, a lot of his poses, though they are artistically beautiful, are pretty unnatural. Particularly his flying birds. It's pretty well known, he took birds and he hung them up with strings to try to work his compositions. That was his best reference materials. To our eyes, they look unnatural, even though they're interesting to see.
Where are the bald eagle nests in D.C.?
Along the river—along the Potomac and along the Anacostia. They're back in great numbers. They were de-listed from the endangered-species list. If you go down to some place like Mason Neck, which is down on the Potomac, south of D.C., in the winter, you might find 30 or 40 bald eagles.
How old would you say birds are?
I'm not real good on the paleontology. They probably are direct descendants from the lineage of animals that included dinosaurs.
They're not direct descendants of dinosaurs? They're direct descendants from a larger category?
Nobody's definite, because the fossil record isn't very good, but it's pretty much agreed that birds, if you traced their evolutionary lineage backwards, you'd get to Archaeopteryx, which is a proto-bird that had a bill with teeth, and wings, and also claws. They could glide but probably not flap and fly.
Like a pigeon?
No, a pigeon can fly really well, actually. The Archaeopteryx might have climbed a tree and glided to the next tree—like a flying lizard or rodent.
Is D.C. a good place for birding?
It's a great place for birding, if you take in the surrounding areas as well. The Eastern Shore has great bird refuges for shore birds, egrets, herons, and that sort of thing. We live basically in a deciduous forest that's pretty much the same all up and down the east coast. But we have our resident birds, and we have our migratory birds in the spring and the fall. Further afield in western Maryland, you've got mountains and a different set of birds. It's not as variable as the West, where you have deserts and wet valleys and dry valleys and that kind of habitat variety.
But the birding is good here. There are a lot of active birders in this area.
Do you know how large the community is?
People try to put numbers on it, and it's really hard. The Fish and Wildlife Service came out with this ridiculous number of something like 40 million people in the United States who look at birds. That includes everyone who puts out a bird feeder and everyone who responded to a query: Are you interested in birds?
So that's my whole family . . .
Right. I think the community of active birders—it would be a total guess, but if you took the Baltimore-Washington area, it would be 3,000-5,000, maybe. That's active birders. If you counted all the people who had a bird feeder in their backyard, it would be a couple orders of magnitude larger.
Baltimore has the oriole—what does D.C. have? Besides the National.
The national bird? We don't have anything named after us. There used to be a bird that was known as the Maryland yellowthroat, but it was really a subspecies of what's now known as the common yellowthroat. I don't think George Washington was too interested in birds.
How have birds adapted to the built environment and the growing metropolitan area?
Not well. Those birds we saw in the courtyard, there are probably 50 house sparrows out there. That's not a native bird. That was actually introduced in the 19th century and spread throughout North America. It's a European bird. It happens to survive quite well in an urban environment. So does the city pigeon. Birders actually know it as the rock pigeon, because that's its European name. It's another imported bird. It used to live in the wild on cliffs, a lot of times on sea cliffs.
They do well. They're able to eat on garbage and stuff they find on the street, and they nest under bridges and building ledges. Most of the native birds don't do that well. But Washington is a city of trees, so there's a lot of habitat left.
What about birding inside the city?
A great place to go is Hains Point. If you go down to Hains Point, take a pair of binoculars. There where the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers come together, there are a lot of gulls, a lot of ducks, smaller songbirds moving through. Rock Creek Park is a great place to go birding. There's an area called the nature center that has some nice walks around it. There's a place that's known as the maintenance yard, which is where the park officials store old machinery, dead wood. It's a place that birders know about because it's up high and you can see treetop level birds. Picnic area 18 is a spot where the sun just hits the top of the trees first thing in the morning. During migration, any day in May you'll find at about 6:30 to 9:00 a.m. you'll probably find 10 to 15 birders checking out what's birding.