Larry McQueen's bird illustrations pass the test with both artists and scientists

WHEN LARRY McQUEEN was growing up in rural Pennsylvania, his father, a country doctor, gave him a copy of Roger Tory Peterson's "The Junior Book of Birds." Published in the 1930s, the little hard-bound volume contained illustrations by some of the top bird artists of the early 20th century. McQueen, who was in grade school at the time, proceeded to improve on the book's illustrations, taking pencil in hand and drawing directly on the book's pages to fix a composition here or correct an anatomical detail there.

He still has the book, sitting on a shelf in his Eugene home, although in a burst of modesty years ago, McQueen erased most of his improvements. If the book were published today, chances are he wouldn't need to improve it. Its authors might even call on him to do the illustrations in the first place. McQueen, 62, is one of the pre-eminent bird artists in the country. He successfully straddles the aesthetic divide between science and art. His paintings hang in galleries and museums but they're also respected by scientists. When the Smithsonian Institute needs a painting of an obscure new bird somewhere in the world, it is McQueen they call.

"He has a very special ability to capture the appearance of birds that is almost unrivaled by other bird artists," says Pamela Rasmussen, an ornithologist at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History. She recently commissioned McQueen to paint some 20 color plates for her upcoming work, "Birds of the Indian Subcontinent," and used a painting he created to find an Indian bird long thought extinct. "He has a very artistic way of approaching things rather than an illustrative approach," she says. "But he is also highly aware of what it is that makes different birds identifiable from one another."

He also draws rave reviews from a more artistic quarter. "Larry captures character," says Seattle nature author Martha Hill, a former picture editor at Audubon magazine who has begun to collect McQueen's work. "He has a wonderful sense of composition and design. He is not a slave to detail. I have a little hummingbird painting of his and a starling painting. Starlings! This is such a beautiful painting it didn't matter to me it's starlings."

A tall, thin, shy man with curly gray hair, McQueen has been obsessed with birds from as far back as he can remember. "My earliest memories are getting up in the morning and exploring," he says. "We lived in a small town. There isn't an awful lot that's going on, especially at 6 o'clock in the morning when you're young and want to get out and explore. Birds are aesthetically satisfying and it's challenging to learn about them. To even see them and watch them is a challenge. All these things appealed to me at the time. I just never lost the interest." A childhood photo, taken when he was perhaps 11 years old, shows McQueen as one of the founding members of the Bucknell University Ornithological Club. He's wearing a jacket and necktie, as are all the other males in the photo - but the other members are, without exception, adults.

He once raised a young cedar waxwing that someone had brought to him, thinking it abandoned by its parents. The bird lived in a cage in the McQueen household but was free to fly around the house, perching on lamps and streaking their shades. He tried to return it to the wild, but the bird preferred its life among humans and flew back inside and returned to its cage. He also raised a pair of kestrels, named Kittyhawk and Tommyhawk. He raised a screech owl. He built a small aviary in the back yard. And he looked at bird pictures - the elegant, slightly stiff looking pictures by John James Audubon, who first painted birds in America in the last century; the more dynamic pictures by Louis Agassiz Fuertes, who captured birds' vitality at the beginning of this century and remains an influence on McQueen's work today. "Just in studying the published art I realized that this was something I really wanted to do," he says.

McQueen studied conservation biology at Bucknell University and Idaho State University in Pocatello. Then the Army put him to work in its biological warfare division, sending him to the Marshall Islands to capture seabirds and determine whether they were able to spread diseases from planned experiments there. He did; they could; the experiments were canceled. When McQueen arrived in Eugene in the 1960s he worked as a house painter, studied art at the University of Oregon and worked as a graphics designer. A decade would go by before he realized he needed to decide: Was he going to be an artist for real?

By then he had met Elga Brown, whose house he had been called on to paint. In addition to being a perfect soul mate and avid nature lover, she was working as a school teacher and had a steady paycheck. In 1975, McQueen quit his day job for good. He sold his first bird paintings for $50 each. In 1980, renowned bird artist John O'Neill happened across a McQueen painting, "Towhees in Blackberries," at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum's "Birds in Art" exhibit. O'Neill was working with Ted Parker, one of the near-legendary demigods of the birding world, on a landmark book, "The Birds of Peru." O'Neill wrote McQueen a letter. Did he want to work on the book?

Peru, explains McQueen, is a birder's paradise. You can see a hundred species in a day in Peru. Maybe two hundred. New species are still being discovered there. The project offered more illustration work than he could handle alone, O'Neill said. Soon, McQueen was in Peru for a three-month visit. He didn't speak Spanish, but that wasn't a big concern. "Spending all my time observing birds, I didn't converse a lot," he said. "Peru is a fantastic country. It has almost every geophysical quality that's found on the Earth. And possibly more species of birds. More than 1,700 species in Peru. All of North America has 800 or 900. That's partly because of its varied habitat. It has the Andes, with high cloud forests, rain forests, the Amazon, coastal, deserts. Some of the most severe deserts in the world, where it rains maybe once a decade or so. Discovering birds there couldn't be topped. It's just so very rich in bird life."

At first, the birds seemed almost a blur. "You don't see most of them at all. You hear them. What you do see, you see only fleetingly as they go by. You'll be surrounded by lots of activity and many species for a brief period of time. You look for the rare, hard-to-see species first. And hope that next time you find the flock you'll have a better chance. You may run into these flocks once or five times during the day. And you can learn to recognize the flocks. They may be anywhere from 50 to 150 species."

In the middle of his trip, McQueen was arrested as a spy. Unable to make planned connections with a local farmer, he had been killing time on the outskirts of a town by birdwatching with a pair of binoculars when a soldier suddenly stopped him at gunpoint. McQueen had blundered onto an air force base without realizing it. The soldier fired his gun into the air to summon help, and McQueen was taken to jail. The colonel of the air force base thought it extremely suspicious that a North American would travel all the way to Peru to look at birds - you have birds, after all, in the United States, he said - and McQueen spent three nights locked in a holding cell while police searched his hotel room, taking as certain evidence of his wrongdoing the camera equipment they found there. Only after the farmer returned to town and spoke to the colonel, with whom he had gone to school, was McQueen released. It was a dismal experience, one that festers still today.

"The Birds of Peru" is now on hold. Parker was killed in a plane crash in Ecuador 1993 and funding has, for the moment, dried up. Lately, McQueen's attention has turned to India. Last year, Rasmussen discovered evidence that a small spotted owl, long thought extinct, might still exist. She sent McQueen photographs of study skins - stuffed birds, basically - from the collection of the British Museum, and asked him to paint the Indian forest owlet, Athene blewitti, as it might look alive. "A lot of artists would have refused to work from such materials or at least complained about it a lot," Rasmussen said. "But Larry did an exceptionally good reconstruction of the bird based on the scanty evidence I was able to give him."

Rasmussen returned to India and began showing a copy of McQueen's painting to foresters. After 12 days of hunting, she found the owl. Though he has yet to see the bird himself, McQueen has now done a better painting of the Indian forest owlet based on Rasmussen's photos and videos of live owls in the field - and on a lifetime spent watching birds.

"In essence," McQueen says, "it is a painting of the way I think the bird must look."

March 15, 1998