In high school, Meg T. Justice spent countless hours sketching ducks along the Tennessee River in Scottsboro, Alabama, capturing their glorious quirks. These days her primary medium is printmaking, but she still delights in waterbirds. She chose the Hooded Merganser for this print because of the male’s striking plumage.
“I do some color printmaking,” she says, “but I’m really more drawn to the black and white and creating texture and contrast with the ink.”
In “Spotted Towhee” artist Phyllis Shafer depicts a widespread bird of the West in a rapidly changing landscape.
After college, Kirsten Furlong developed a deep interest in birds while working in a wildlife photographer’s gallery. The Boise, Idaho, resident’s current obsession is the Bobolink, a songbird whose numbers have plummeted in step with the loss of prairie nesting habitat.
To reach these breeding grounds, the birds use the stars to help navigate more than 6,000 miles. “It’s pretty magical,” Furlong says of the feat. Here she depicts two Bobolinks against a star-spangled backdrop. The ink and acrylic drawing is heavy on intricate detail but light on color, with pops of yellow at the birds’ napes and green grass blades that serve as fragile perches or lifelines.
Artist Sarah Conti situates life-size versions of the shorebirds in a disappearing habitat.
Stuck inside her Brooklyn apartment in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, artist Mayuko Fujino had one connection to the outside world: a single window that looked out on a neighbor’s yard. It was March, then April, and Fujino thought it was about time to see an American Robin. She spotted sparrows, pigeons, cardinals—but none of the robins that usually appear in spring.
Jessica S. McKenzie