10×14 watercolor enhanced colored pencil. Original unavailable. As of 04-20-12,907 views and 19 favorited.

When I first came upon Macky’s photograph of a Black Shouldered Kite, I fell in love immediately. I BMailed him and asked if I could use it as reference for a piece I was thinking about doing. He gave me permission and this is the end result. It now resides happily with him in South Africa.

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The Black-shouldered Kite (Elanus axillaris) is a small raptor found in open habitat throughout Australia. Like all the elanid kites, it is a specialist predator of rodents.
The name “Black-shouldered Kite” was formerly used for a European and African species, Elanus caeruleus, and the Australian bird (and also a North American species, the White-tailed Kite Elanus leucurus) were treated as subspecies of this. However the three species are now regarded as distinct, and the name Black-winged Kite is used for E. caeruleus. Modern references to the Black-shouldered Kite should therefore unambiguously mean the Australian species.
Black-Shouldered Kites are around 35 to 38 cm in length and have a wingspan of between 80 and 95 cm. Adults are a very pale grey with a white head and white underparts. The leading edge of the inner wing is black. When perched, this gives them their prominent black “shoulders”.
Although reported from almost all parts of Australia, they are most common in the relatively fertile south-east and south-west corners of the mainland, and in south-east Queensland.They are also common throughout Southern Africa. They are rare in the deep desert and appear to be only accidental visitors to northern Tasmania and the Torres Strait islands. Although found in timbered country, they are mainly birds of the grasslands. European occupation of Australia has, on the whole, benefited them by clearing vast expanses of forest for agriculture and providing suitable conditions for much larger numbers of mice (info from Wikipedia).

• Complete 09-11-2008 in 13.13 hours spread over 8 days