Cecelia Azhderian, a science illustrator who also is the sea otter handler at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, graciously organized a behind the scenes tour of the sea otters for our January meeting of The Guild of Natural Science Illustrators. She led us up a stairwell to the top of the exhibit, past rows of plastic dog toys to a concrete spot where we could look down into the sea otter exhibit (Enhydra lutris).There were two otters on display Joy, and Kit. Kit is young and playful, I loved watching her rolling around in a plastic tub. Cecelia fed them for us to show us specific behaviors and parts of their anatomy. When Cecelia put food on top of the rock landing in the exhibit, Kit would run up jump onto of the food and hide it in the pockets under her arms to take back into the water to eat it. She enjoyed gnawing on shrimp frozen in an ice block, frozen clam juice and pulling out shrimp that was stuffed into dog toys. She constantly in motion.

Luckily for the other illustrators, Cecelia had also put out a sea otter skeleton, a stuffed sea otter and several other stationary objects to draw. I was having too much fun watching the antics below to draw them myself.

To see the otters for yourself:
http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/efc/otter.aspx

Yup. I’m home. One of my readers asked me today if I was back yet. Finally, yes. Arthur and I spent the last week celebrating New Years with family up at Donner Pass. It was quite a shock to go from the sultry tropics to the cold mountains, and it was wonderful to see everyone.

Thanks to everyone for your patience with my technical difficulties while I was abroad. I had to factory reset my phone from a software glitch, and it seems to be working again.

I am now playing catch-up. I will hopefully be back to working on the graphic novel, and sharing sketches again next week.

Happy New Years Everyone!

We caught a late light flight back arriving in Bundeena at 6am, to spend X-mas with Jess and her family. Like all family gatherings, the celebrating revolves around pets and children. In this case, her aunts dog, Oscar, and at Jess’s parents house their bird, Jack. He likes to try to steal your food while your eating it and enjoys knocking his beack against whatever beak your holding, because it makes a satisfying “Clink” sound.

These are estuarine or salt water crocodiles. The locals call them “saltys”. This tank of them must have had at least three dozen crocs, actively swimming and clibling on top of each other. As they swam up to the side of the tank to watch us you could see the milky covers to their eyes that act like goggles for them under water. Pretty spooky, but cute!