Whenever I travel closer to home, where the flora and fauna are familiar to me, my birdwatching sketches look a lot like any other in my sketchbooks: full scenes, with plenty of time taken to get the details right. (And if my subject should happen to wander away—well, if it’s something I’ve seen before, memory can usually fill in the rest.)

When I was at Big Bend, however, the combination of excitingly “exotic” wildlife and an insane amount of it made my drawings just a jumble of frantic chicken scratches and field notes.

I felt like a student in art school again, concentrating hard to commit my subjects to paper in just a few seconds, drawing and redrawing everything again and again to try to nail down anatomy and details in real time.

As you can probably guess, I like having more time to “finish” a sketch… but I also love that life drawing in a place where I don’t know bupkis keeps me on my toes.