The images are the work of John Sill, a renowned wildlife artist and illustrator. Over the past three decades, Sill’s watercolors have become familiar fixtures in the world of bird-watchers and others interested in conservation.

For 21 years, his work has graced the bird identification calendar published by the Massachusetts Audubon Society. He’s been selected twice for the prestigious "Birds in Art" show at Wisconsin’s Leigh Yaukey Woodson Art Museum. And his illustrations can be found on the covers of birding magazines, in field guides for ecotourists and even on L.L. Bean thermometers.

Sill, a 1970 graduate of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, traces his career to one of his mother’s treasured mementos, a church bulletin where, as a fidgety 5-year-old, he’d sketched a cardinal; to hours spent watching the birds that came to feed in his Aunt Della’s yard near his childhood home in Saint Pauls, N.C.; to the influence of his artist father; and to the encouragement offered by one of his professors in the department of zoology.

When Sill came to N.C. State University in the late 1960s, he had set his sights on becoming a wildlife biologist. But as he neared graduation in 1970, the job market wasn’t as promising as it had been when he’d started his studies.

"During my last semester, I was taking an ornithology class with Dr. [Tom] Quay. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do once I graduated, but I’d always drawn, so I showed some of my drawings of birds to him," Sill says. "I don’t know what he saw in them — they weren’t that good."

With Quay’s kind words in mind, Sill moved after graduation to the small western North Carolina town of Franklin to join his father’s gallery. Sill remembers the early days as "tough," a time when he barely scraped by selling to tourists and retirees who viewed his paintings as a way to capture a bit of local color in their homes.

"We pushed the envelope as far as the starving artist goes," he says.

His fortunes took a turn in 1977, when he won first place in a wildlife art show in a Georgia mall. That led to a Fontana Village exhibit for birding clubs from the Carolinas, Tennessee and Georgia. There, Sill’s works caught the attention of a prominent ornithologist, who passed his name along to the Audubon group in Massachusetts.

"Three weeks later, I got a call from Jim Baird, who was just hatching the idea of a bird identification calendar," Sill recalls. "The job would pay probably twice my yearly income at that time."

While he calls the experience "God’s gift," the job proved to be perhaps his toughest career challenge. The first 10 to 12 sketches he sent to Baird were returned with red marks.

"Things like ‘eyes too big,’ ‘legs too small,’" Sill recalls. Baird pointed out every small detail that could be questioned — mercilessly — by the studied bird-watcher.

"Year after year it would happen," Sill says. One day, he became so exasperated that he ran up one of Franklin’s steeper hills until he was exhausted. "I had hit a critical point in my career. I said to myself, ‘John, are you going to listen to people who know more than you do?’ I decided yes."

Since that time, Sill has concentrated on capturing what he calls the "gestalt of the bird." He focuses not just on getting the eyes and legs the right size but on ensuring that the bird appears in the proper habitat, doing what it would naturally do.

Such attention to detail is Sill’s hallmark. As he told Birder’s World magazine, "If there’s gonna be a bird on a thermometer, I’d just as soon it be a good bird."

Though he takes his work seriously, Sill is, underneath it all, prone to occasional silliness. Among his recent projects is a series of three popular little books designed to tickle the fancy of serious birders. They are A Field Guide to Little-Known and Seldom-Seen Birds of North America, Another Field Guide to Little-Known and Seldom-Seen Birds of North Carolina and Beyond Birdwatching.

He, his wife, Cathy, and brother, Ben, got the idea for the books during one of their countless birding field trips. To pass the time, they were making up joking names for birds — names such as the Western surferbird, or Breakerium pacificus, and the least gibberish, or Gobbledygookus confuscus.

Sprinkled throughout Beyond Birdwatching are mock advertisements that parody those found in birding magazines. There’s one, for example, for "ricochet raptors": "Do you have certain windows that birds make a habit of flying into? Why not take some active steps to prevent injury, death and subsequent feelings of guilt?" the "ad" asks. "Cover each window with polystyrostretchethylene. When the birds fly toward the window, they will just bounce happily off again."

It’s followed by a note of caution: "Some species enjoy this so much that they begin to fly into the windows just for the fun of it."

Working with his wife on those books opened the door to further collaboration. In recent years, the couple has produced three children’s books. The Sills hope these books fill a void that Cathy had noticed in her job as a kindergarten teacher. There was a dearth, she found, of well-illustrated and accurate natural history books.

The books, written by Cathy and illustrated by John, are About Birds: A Guide for Children and its successors, About Mammals, About Reptiles, and About Insects, due in spring 2000. The two also plan to put together similar books on amphibians and fish.