A carving friend who vacations in Colorado brought me a piece of Bristlecone pine. Fred is quite an accomplished carver who I think started about the time I did. He’s concentrated on carving faces, mostly out of Aspen. He also does stylized carvings from many different types of wood. The sycamore gecko I carved is from one of his patterns, and his cedar armadillo was the inspiration for my mesquite armadillo, although I didn’t use his pattern.
The Bristlecone pine stayed on the floor of my truck for a couple of months while I tried to figure out what to do with it. I thought about carving one of my birds to add to the collection, but for some reason couldn’t bring myself to chop up that piece of wood just for a bird. Last week I finally figured it out: I’d carve a bird in the branch. It’s a kind of carving I hadn’t attempted before.
I think what convinced me to try it was the fragment of a small limb that was sticking out from what was otherwise a fairly straight and boring branch. I decided to use that limb as part of the bird’s tail. I wish I’d taken pictures from start to finish. Unfortunately, I just got two after spending some time roughing it out.


As I said, this was new territory for me. I’d always started my bird carvings with a bandsaw cutout. Not here. I had to carve around the bird figure with my Foredom power carver. Carving a figure that remains part of the larger piece of wood is quite different. It can be difficult at times because I can’t just turn the thing over and carve from a different direction. The uncut part of the branch often got in the way. Detailing the beak was particularly difficult because I couldn’t easily get the Foredom in there, even with the detailing handpiece.
Roughing out took me an hour or two on Saturday. Sunday I spent two or three more hours roughing out and then detailing the bird. The result is a little thin and not quite symmetrical, but I thought it turned out pretty nice.

The bird figure is very smooth and sanded with 220 grit. The rest of the carved wood is sanded with 120 grit, and not perfectly smooth. I left some dips. I thought about trying to texture it like a nest, but didn’t have a good idea of what that should look like. Rather than do something that detracted from the carving, I just sanded and called it good enough.

The finish is two coats of Watco Natural Danish Oil, which I applied to the entire piece–including the uncarved wood. I haven’t yet decided if i should add a couple coats of a spray polyurethane to give it a little shine. We’ll see.
I made plenty of mistakes on this piece, especially in the bird shape. But I understand how and why I made them, and figure I can do better next time. I especially liked doing this with the bird shape because it’s a familiar subject, just rendered a little differently. I find trying to do something familiar in a new way to be an effective learning experience.

All things considered, it was a fun project and a good learning experience. And I like the way it turned out.