Drawing an ibis, with an ibis feather. A little exercise in response to Timo pondering, in response to a question posed by Eugenia Bertulis, how we might co-create with birds. Playing around with digital drawing tools. I still, and probably always will, prefer pens and pencils and paper — the material feedback is such an important part of drawing me into the ‘zone’ when I work. A stylus and a screen leave me cold. I ran a workshop on Nature Storytelling at Taronga Zoo in the April school holidays, for the Youth at the Zoo program. One activity was sketching the movement of small birds (Zebra and Gouldian finches) — not drawing representations of birds but using sketching as a mode of active observation. The workshop is an offshoot of The Urban Field Naturalist project, which is a parallel project to this Precarious Birds project, but there are crossovers and looping threads between themes (conservation, nature-culture storytelling, human-wildlife conflict/entanglement) and collaborators (Timo has contributed stories to UFN, we are drawing on the expertise of John Martin, Dieter Hochuli and Thom van Dooren in this project, Andrew Burrell and I co-designed an Augmented Regent Honeyeater birdbox with audio of Timo and I talking … a longer post on that coming soon).Half way through the session, a naughty bilby – four of them cohabit with the finches in the ‘desert room’ educational space – crossed over to the designated human side of the space. Expertly guided by Zoo staff, the 30 or so YATZ (youth at the zoo) were calm and collected, until he was redistributed to the nonhuman side. I just stood there drawing, animal handling is not my forte.
PRECARIOUS BIRDS 
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