Month: October 2024

The Grebe in Winter

grebe

Many birders these days go to the trouble of carrying a DSLR with a long lens to record any mystery bird. I’ve always got my iPhone with me but it’s not much good for birds any distance away so I’ll try to make some quick field notes, as I did with this winter plumage great crested grebe a few years ago.

The Victorian naturalists were meticulous with their records but the ultimate proof of identity for them was to shoot the bird itself. That was the fate of this winter-plumage great crested grebe which turned up at Bretton Lakes.

Mr Wilkinson, a painter and decorator for the Bretton Hall estate, who presented it to me in 1964, explained that the bird had turned up and no one knew what it was, so they shot it. There’s no label on the case, so I don’t know the date. Presumably late Victorian or Edwardian.

Some Pheasant, Some Neck!

sparrowhawk

11.15 a.m., drizzly and overcast: A male sparrowhawk swoops close to the bird feeders and lands on the hedge. Pheasant wouldn’t normally be on the menu for him but that doesn’t stop him looking down on two hen pheasants that have been foraging beneath the feeders.

Just in case he’s considering them as his brunch, they extend their necks and puff out their feathers to appear two to three times their regular neck size.

pheasnat display

They strut and hop, half spreading their wings and fanning tail feathers, a hip-hop swagger that reminds me of prairie-chickens lekking.

pheasant strutting
Continue reading Some Pheasant, Some Neck!

Nestbox Clear-out

sketches

As I trim the dripping hawthorn and holly, the misty droplets in the morning air gradually build into soft rain. A robin hops around me as I work.

The sparrow terrace nestbox gets its first ever clear-out. I’m surprised that the far compartment of the three-hole box is almost empty as this was always the one favoured by sparrow, blue tit and bumble bees. The middle box contains the remains of a nest although I don’t remember it ever having been used.

Clearing it out, I evict a tiny moth, several small green caterpillars and, below the surface layer of moss, hundreds of sticky, silky cocoons, perhaps those of bee moths.

Song Thrush on Sumac

The berries on next door’s stagshorn sumac have been attracting a pair of blackbirds. This afternoon, a song thrush came to feed on a cluster of berries in the upper branches.

Buzzard

4.15 p.m.: A buzzard flies up from the ash at the edge of the wood. In the 1980s we never saw buzzards here and the ash was a regular lookout post of a kestrel, a bird of prey we rarely see in recent years.

What the Right Hand is Doing

This weed – thale cress? – is the sole survivor from a late sowing of basil in a pot on the kitchen windowsill. When the weather starts to get cooler our basil seedlings give up the will to live.

I’ve been giving my right hand a bit of a break for more than six months now but it still hurts as I write – at the base of my right thumb – so I’m going to have to learn to live with it and get back to regular drawing.

Published
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Quest Coxley

magazine spread

My November ‘Dalesman’ article: ‘Quest Coxley’, an intrepid search for the source of Coxley Beck, filmed on Standard 8, April 1966, with my friend John, armed with a 19th-century cavalry sword, in the Indiana Jones role.

My dad’s Leitz Leicina Standard 8 cine camera which we used for the film.