Bird of the Year is back. And I have a problem...
Bird of the Year voting opened this morning.
Now, considering how much of my life I spend painting birds, photographing birds, looking for birds and generally boring my family by pointing out birds, you'd think choosing five would be easy.
It isn't.
There are far too many I love.
And quite a few of them have ended up on my easel over the last couple of years.
There's the ruru, whose limited edition print sold out and taught me just how much one little owl can mean to people.
There's the pīwakawaka, who seems physically incapable of sitting still for longer than about three seconds.
There's the kōtare, which I became slightly obsessed with after going out one morning hoping to photograph one and finding more than ten.
And now there's this little chap...
The timing of this was completely accidental
Today also happens to be the day I release my new South Island robin print, The Forest Watches Back.
I promise I did not plan an elaborate Bird of the Year marketing campaign around him. 😂
I've wanted to paint a South Island robin for ages because they're such funny, curious little birds. They're not flashy. They don't have the colours of the kōtare or the drama of the ruru.
But they watch you.
There's something about that little round body, those skinny legs and that incredibly attentive expression that I love.
That's what I wanted to capture in this painting. Not a robin simply sitting on a branch, but that feeling that while you're busy watching him, he's quite happily watching you back.
Hence the name.
The Forest Watches Back.
The South Island robin is classed as At Risk: Recovering, so there is actually some good news here. Conservation work and predator control are helping them.
And yes, he's on the Bird of the Year ballot.
He's definitely getting one of my five votes.
Probably.
See, this is where my problems begin.
Then there's the kōtare...
Anyone who's been following me for a while will know I have a bit of a thing about kingfishers.
Last year I went out to Allandale Reserve hoping I'd be lucky enough to photograph one.
I found more than ten.
It was ridiculous.
Once I'd spotted the first one, suddenly they seemed to be everywhere. On fence posts, above the water, sitting perfectly still one minute and disappearing in a flash of blue the next.
I came home with far too many photographs, obviously.
And eventually one of those birds became my Sacred Kōtare painting.
That's one of the things I love most about painting wildlife. A painting often starts long before I get the pastels out.
It starts with standing somewhere with a camera, watching.
And then there was the ruru
I couldn't write about my Bird of the Year favourites without including the ruru.
The limited edition of this painting is now completely sold out, but what I remember most isn't actually selling the prints.
It was the messages afterwards.
People told me about hearing ruru outside their homes at night. Childhood memories. Family stories. That unmistakable call in the darkness.
I painted an owl.
But everyone else seemed to see their owl.
I loved that.
It's probably one of the things that's made me realise that the birds I choose to paint don't necessarily have to be the biggest, rarest or most spectacular.
Sometimes they're simply the ones we have a connection with.
Which brings me to the bird causing me a slight problem with this year's vote.
I tried to paint a kea
Yes...That is a kea sitting on my shoulder.
And yes, I look ridiculously pleased about it.
I LOVE kea.
They're clever, curious, destructive, completely lacking in respect for personal property and apparently quite happy to dismantle your car while you're admiring the scenery.
What's not to love?
I've been lucky enough to get very close to them and I have loads of photographs, yet somehow I've never painted one.
But while I was looking through this year's Bird of the Year candidates, I was reminded of something that's very easy to forget when you've encountered these confident, cheeky birds in the wild.
Kea are in serious trouble.
They're nationally endangered.
And that stopped me a little.
Because it's difficult to reconcile the bird confidently sitting on your shoulder and investigating everything you own with a species that's struggling to survive.
Suddenly I think I know what I want to paint next.
I don't know what the painting looks like yet.
That's the exciting bit.
I've got photographs to go through, compositions to play with and probably several evenings of me staring at kea while everyone else in the house wonders what on earth I'm doing.
But I think there might be a kea coming to the kitchen table.
So who am I voting for?
Well...
I still don't entirely know. 😂
You can choose five birds, which helps enormously because asking me to choose one would be frankly unreasonable.
The South Island robin is almost certainly getting one.
And the kea has absolutely muscled its way onto my list.
For the remaining three, I'm tempted to deliberately choose birds that are really struggling. One of the lovely things about Bird of the Year is that for a few weeks these birds get talked about by people who might otherwise never have heard of them.
So I'm going to do a bit more reading before I cast the other three votes.
And I'll report back.
Voting is open now and runs until 5pm on 20 September, so if you fancy joining in, you can vote for up to five birds on the Bird of the Year website.
But before you disappear...
Should I paint the kea?
Because now I've said it out loud, I rather want to.
And if you've already chosen your five birds, tell me who made your list. I need all the help I can get.
Karen x
P.S. If the South Island robin has won you over, The Forest Watches Back has just been released today as a limited edition fine art print. There are only 50 at A4, 30 at A3 and 10 at A2, and each one is signed, titled and numbered by me.
And if the kea painting happens, newsletter subscribers will almost certainly see it while it's still looking like a slightly questionable collection of pastel marks on my kitchen table.