Tom Park 
DEMONSTRATION
A BALTIMORE ORIOLE
PART One
By Tom Park
With its brilliant orange-and-black plumage, the male Baltimore oriole (icterus galbula) easily qualifies as one of North America’s most beautiful birds. I decided to carve one after I saw two males visit the feeder on my deck railing during spring migration last year. Most years I just catch fleeting glimpses of them high in the treetops.
After making a lot of sketches and mock-ups for the carving I finally settled on a fairly simple pose for the bird. It is in a crouched position as though getting ready to fly. The head is tilted slightly upward and both the head and tail have a slight turn to the left. The wings are dropped with the tips of the primaries just touching, allowing the brilliant orange feathers on the back to show. When completed, the bird will perch on a branch of a silver maple. This is the tree in which I most often see them in my back yard. The orioles perch high in the tree so it’s easier to hear than see them.
I originally planned to cut the head separately from the body to avoid cross grain on the bill. I changed my mind when I came up with a pose that allows both the bill and the tail to run more or less parallel with the grain. It takes a bit more time preparing the blank but it also means I won’t have to hide a neck joint.
It pays to spend a bit of extra time preparing the blank and getting the first rough-out as accurate as possible. While this can be tedious, with a lot of measuring and drawing and re-drawing, it pays off once you get to the fun stuff. If you’ve accurately drawn and cut all the critical lines you can proceed with the rounding and detailing, confident that your shape and size will be correct and that you won’t lose the symmetry.
Read the rest of this article in Wildfowl Carving Magazine's Winter 2010 issue!
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