Golden-crowned Kinglets Transparent Watercolor and Painting Video

Golden-crowned Kinglets are powerfully cute, so this transparent watercolor painting was great fun to complete.

In our house family members tend to get distracted by birds in the yard. That is a hazard—and benefit—of homeschooling the kids. It’s also probably one reason why our yard list is so long. It isn’t unusual to have classes interrupted by someone calling out the name of a good bird. Occasionally, if this is getting totally out of hand, we have to shut the blinds… or give up and take class outside.

Having spent a lot of time at MSU’s Burke Lake Bird Banding Station (BULA), at some point the kids started referring to each species by its four-letter abbreviated ABA band code. Golden-crowned Kinglets are GCKI. Ruby-crowned Kinglets are RCKI. To make things even more interesting, the kids now pronounce these codes as words, so GCKI becomes “Gicky” and RCKI metamorphoses into “Ricky.” When friends or painting students are at our house, they look confused when the kids say things like, “Look, there’s a FOSP!” or “WOW! Two Gickies are fighting right by the window!”

I couldn’t ask for a better distraction.