New neighbor on the block

Juvenile Red Tail, Colored Pencil

My neighbors are fun to watch, I have my binoculars out all the time. No, don't go rushing off to call the police - I'm talking about wildlife! My immediate neighborhood is blessed with all kinds of animal residents. We have a doe and fawn that live under our deck. There are also four young bucks which we see roaming around. Birds are here in abundance. We have four or five hummingbirds, with one male who has claimed our feeder and defends it against all comers with typical fiestiness. The Orioles also like the feeder. We have a scrub jay to likes to bathe in our fountain.

Hawk sketch with water added

Over the last few days we've been hearing a hawk squawking up and down the valley. I spotted it on a telegraph pole outside our dining room window, so I snapped some photos of it before a mockingbird drove it away. Hawks are never welcome guests and mockingbirds especially go to great lengths to harass them until they leave. This was a juvenile Red Tail and I'm guessing it's squawking was to attract the attention of its parents and get some food. My photos came out well so I might compose a painting from them. For starters I did a sketch. I found some soluble colored pencils when cleaning up my studio, so I tried them out on this drawing. The first image is the pencil sketch, the second is after I put some clean water on it to see what would happen. Interesting. The colors are very limited, but they might be nice to sketch landscapes with.

My other sketches are of the doe relaxing in our mulch.