The Traveling Wizard

A Bewick Corvid Feathursday

Yesterday, our department head Max spent the day with members of the Wood Engravers Network (WEN) at their annual conference held at the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. In the afternoon he offered a presentation on “Wood Engraving Resources at UWM Special Collections” for this highly-attentive audience. Among the many books he brought along for the presentation was a double-volume set of the 6th edition of A History of British Birds, printed in Newcastle, England, by Edward Walker in 1826, with original wood engravings by the acclaimed British popularizer of the medium,Thomas Bewick.

So, today we dedicate our #Feathursday post to the members of WEN with these exceptional Corvids by Thomas Bewick. Bewick organizes these birds within a classification he calls “Birds of the Pie Kind.” The term perplexed us, because have never heard it used before. Then it dawned on us that Pie must refer to the Magpie, as in birds that are related to Magpies. For Bewick, however, this group goes beyond the Corvids to include Waxwings, all Blackbirds, Starlings, Cuckoos, and Wrynecks. Today, however, we only include the Covids, top to bottom:

Eurasian Magpie (Pica pica) Raven (Corvus corax) Carrion Crow (Corvus corone) Hooded Crow (Corvus cornix) Western Jackdaw (Coloeus monedula) Chough (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax) Eurasian Jay (Garrulus glandarius) Rook (Corvus frugilegus) Eurasian Nutcracker (Nucifraga caryocatactes)

And we cap the series of wood engravings with one of Bewick’s famous tailpieces: a gathering of Crows completely unperturbed by a scarecrow.

View more Bewick posts.

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Kyoko Mori, ‘Yarn’

That last phrase especially - “I won’t even try this because it doesn’t come naturally to me and I won’t be very good at it.” It really is like some kind of all-encompassing evil spirit sometimes.

Lenticular Cloud, Moon, Mars, Venus