Ruby and Kiwi

By far, my favourite birds at the Bloedel Conservatory were Ruby and Kiwi. They are two brilliantly coloured eclectus parrots.

At first I thought they were both males because of their bright colours. I was quite wrong. For the eclectus parrots the females are more brightly coloured with red, blues and sometimes violet and lavender while the males are mostly emerald green. Ruby, the female, had a black beak and Kiwi's, the male, was a “candy corn” orange and yellow beak.

The other interesting difference to other parrot species is that the structure of their feathers is so fine that it actually resembles hair rather than feathers.

Kiwi was the better talker of the two.  Actually, his voice sounded a bit like Dustin Hoffman’s character Ray Babbitt in the movie Rainman when he got going.

Totally fascinating and beautiful birds.

 The layout is from the September Stick It Down double page sketch. I so enjoy participating with Stick It Down as one of their double page team Members.

There are also great single page and card layouts on the site. Whatever your fancy there's a sketch for it. Be sure to link up your design. The link is active until the end of September.

Picking embellishments was interesting. I loved how the sketch suggested different groupings that really pulled the pages together.

 

I chose circles with a dream catcher overlay, to go with feathers, for the ones behind the two photos, and branches to mimic the sweeping groups of circles.

 

 

For the title I chose multi-toned grey and blue paper and did a bit of journaling as I've done with other of the pages highlighting birds of the Conservatory.

 

I was very pleased with how it all turned out.