In one period, when living on a farm and teaching the owner's two young daughters to draw, he "could often be found handling and posing the tame frogs from the spring house, carrying turtles up from the pond and arranging chickens and other farmyard poultry for Thanksgiving sketches".

While in the city, Church often visited Barnum and Bailey's premises as well as the Central Park Zoo, to study and make endless sketches of the animals held there.

On such occasions he was described as "playing catch with an elephant, watching the dance of a distressed ostrich and spending hours observing seahorses in an aquarium", so as "to effectively capture the character of each creature".

Aside from his numerous animal drawings, Church dealt with many other themes, usually in a "cheerful and fanciful" mood, such as a "Holiday Series" including "A Halloween illustration of dainty witches crouched by a cauldron under a smoke-filled sky, a Thanksgiving image of a young girl driving turkeys, and a depiction of Christmas morning on the bottom of the sea as little mermaids open their gifts and polar bears dance arm-in-arm with a lovely young woman".

Others are at the collection of Dale and Rosie Horst of Newton, Kansas, which lent them to the Fulton Gallery in 2003, for an extensive exhibition including both Church's original drawings and the magazines and periodicals in which they appeared.