Sometime last year I was wandering around our garden counting up the things somebody should get on with when I heard some persistent squeaking coming from the canal bankside. I don't often get to see small mammals apart from squirrels so I crept over that way as stealthily as I could. This bankside is covered with scrubby trees which leave a nice soft leaf litter on the ground. The squeaking continued but also moved around surprisingly quickly for a mouse. At this point a flash of black, white and cinnamon brown taking off from the ground gave away the fact that I had been on the trail of a hoopoe, one of so many people's favourite birds.
But the squeaking didn't stop with its departure so I eased my head over the bank and was met with the gorgeous sight of three fledgling hoopoes begging food from a parent. The squeaking was their begging call and the parent was so busy probing the ground and flicking leaves around in the search for snacks for them that it did not notice me. I spent several minutes watching their activity hardly daring to breath until in trying to follow them I scared the whole family into bursting away in a flurry of jazzy wings.
Over the next few days I heard that squeaking several times but never managed to get anywhere near as close as the first time, which was the only time I did not have my camera with me because I was supposed to be busy gardening.
Hence the illustration above as a record of what I saw, more-or-less. Beyond the irrigation canal are paddy-fields lined by sugarpalm trees with the day-to-day activity of people trying to earn a living from the land. In some respects our patch is an oasis for wildlife having more trees and less intensive management than the surroundings. And that is my aim. If I can help a pair of hoopoes populate our world with more hoopoes then I am doing some good.
Other than a few minor tweaks, the final step to making an illustration like this for me is to play around with the colours. In this case I ended up sticking fairly close to my original colour choice as that orangey-brown is such a distinctive part of this bird (along with that crazy crest). However, I did come up with a couple of alternatives that I like.
One is a darker, almost night-time, version where the birds' pattern has moved a bit further away from reality.
The next has stronger contrast in the background so the birds stand out less.
And the final one is an alternative world where the hoopoe's real colours have been abandoned.
