And...now you get the second part of the promised post!! :D
After I visited a parrot breeder, different bird parks and bird of prey centers, the collection of the biodiversity center Naturalis and of course the Clinic for Birds, Reptiles, Amphibians and Fish in Giessen. And making the first sketches to portray the birds I also had to study the important parts: The urogenital-systems of the blue-fronted amazon and the saker falcon.
Not only I had to see these parts to illustrate them in the correct way, but I even had to see them in their different states. First you have the juvenile urogenital-systems: That's when the birds never had been sexually active before. Then you have the active and the inactive urogenital-systems: That's when the birds are sexually active at the time of breeding season or not active because it is not their breeding season. Their sexual organs do change, active = bigger and inactive = smaller.
These anatomical illustrations have never been produced before so I had nearly no books I could rely on. That meant that I had to do many dissections to prepare the sketches for my illustrations.
For the representative of the Psittaciformes shown I chose the blue-fronted amazon because it is a common pet parrot in Germany. That gave me easier access to specimens of this kind. To illustrate a falcon and not another parrot species was important, because there is a big difference in the anatomy of the females of falcons, hawks and kiwis and females of other bird species. Due to evolutionary reasons most female birds just have only one functional ovary (the left one), connected to an oviduct. Kiwis, hawks and falcons have two. So that was an important aspect to illustrate.
Two anatomical sketches made during dissection.
