DEERFIELD — About a year ago, David Sibley was sitting at his desk, absentmindedly checking his emails, when one from the United States Postal Service caught his eye.
To his surprise, it was not about a package delivery.
“I got an email that said, ‘Hey, would you be interested in designing a set of U.S. postage stamps, and I said, ‘Of course!’” the 64-year-old Deerfield resident said, chuckling.
After a pile of drafts and a year of tweaks in collaboration with USPS art director and Hampshire College alumna Derry Noyes, who described Sibley as her “first and only choice” in the U.S. Postal Service’s description of the stamp, Sibley’s set of five stamps will become available on May 14.
The series of stamp designs, titled, “Bald Eagle: Hatchling to Adult,” showcase five stages of a bald eagle’s lifespan. By illustrating these phases, Sibley hopes the stamps will “make people think about the bald eagle as a bird — not so much as the national symbol, but just as a bird that lives out in nature,” he said.
Many picture a white head and bright yellow beak when they think of a bald eagle, but Sibley said only the adult eagles over 5 years old sport this signature look.
“So by the time you see that adult bald eagle, it’s had a lot of experiences and gone through different stages,” Sibley said. “My hope is that the stamps help give people more of an appreciation of the bald eagle as a bird that faces all the challenges that wild birds do.”
Though the request from the U.S. Postal Service surprised Sibley, he described the task as being “right up [his] alley.”
At 7 years old, he started a “Life List” of bird species he had spotted while bird-watching with his father, an ornithologist, and he spent his childhood surrounded by shelves of bird books. For Sibley, barbecues at home resembled bird scientist conventions.
“I just grew up with that as the culture,” Sibley said. “A lot of kids reject that, and I never did. I just got more and more interested in it as the years went by.”
Like his dad, Sibley became an ornithologist, spending decades watching, studying and illustrating birds. A scroll through his website reveals Sibley’s blog of bird tidbits as well as a shop for calendars, cards, games, shirts, posters, puzzles and 12 books with his bird illustrations, including field guides packed with more than 7,000 images of about 900 bird species.
Since his first trips bird-watching with his father, “Bird-watching and drawing have always gone together for me,” Sibley explained.
Almost every day, Sibley walks his dogs through fields near his Deerfield home, listening to and looking for birds. A few times a week, Sibley also sets off with the “essentials” — his binoculars, a spotting scope and a sketchbook — for “longer, more focused” bird-watching bouts at his favorite “local hotspots for birding,” like Barton Cove in Gill, the power canal in Turners Falls and the meadows in Old Deerfield.
The birds’ appearances, behaviors and songs spark questions in the bird buff’s brain, like the difference between male and female song sparrows or the purpose of a goldfinch’s call.
“The opportunities for discovering new things are all around us. I say that I learn something new about birds every day, and that’s not really an exaggeration,” Sibley said. “Even after 60 years of studying birds, I’m still excited about going out every day to look and see what I can learn.”
For Sibley, he draws and paints birds to sort through his questions and arrive at answers.
“Drawing is actually a way to understand the bird … testing different lines, different shapes to see what looks right,” Sibley explained.
According to Sibley, faulty feathers are a giveaway of an inexperienced bird artist. Unlike other animals that sport identical fur across their bodies, birds’ feathers vary and their looks shift as their feathers move, representing both an opportunity and a challenge for bird illustrators like Sibley.
“The birds can be all fluffed up like a big ball, or they can be really sleek. … The wing feathers are long and stiff and straight, and the feathers on the body are loose and fluffy and curved. The feathers on the head are very short and bristly,” Sibley said. “Birds allow for a lot more freedom to adjust your illustration.”
Capturing the details of the bald eagles’ feathers proved to be a difficult hurdle for Sibley’s stamp sketches to overcome.
“You have to figure out how to come up with an illustration that will work at that size and still show something meaningful,” Sibley noted.
In his first few sketches of the stamp, Sibley drew entire eagles, including a few of them flying, before he realized that “headshots” of the creatures as they aged would better allow customers to catch the details.
While the bird expert said he enjoyed illustrating the bald eagles, he insisted that he cannot pick a favorite bird.
“I like them all,” Sibley said. “I’m happy watching pigeons in a park.”
