Horbury Bridge, 2.55 p.m.; A female goosander leads her seven young up the rapids at the foot of the old weir. As we watch the whole family disappears from view, giving the impression that mother and young have dived simultaneously. It’s the first time that we’ve seen a mother with young on the Calder.
Author: Richard
Mr Darwin Welcome
‘Mr Darwin Welcome. Delighted you have come to Yorkshire’ is the opening caption, spoken by Charles Waterton from the top branches of an elm tree to Darwin, then in his mid-thirties, midway between the voyage of The Beagle and the publication of The Origin of Species.
It’s a complex double-page spread but you’ve got to start somewhere so this very rough rough suggests how we can slot in the main aspects of a tour of Waterton’s sanctuary for wildlife at Walton Park. You could really extend this one tour into a twelve page comic story in its own right but that’s all the space we have for the last forty years of Waterton’s life.
I would so like to have heard a discussion between Darwin and Waterton about the Nondescript, Waterton’s enigmatic ape-man creation. Did it give Darwin the idea for his Descent of Man?!
And here’s another Darwin/Waterton which regrettably we’re unable to follow up in this brief comic strip biography. Here’s Darwin recalling his medical student days in Edinburgh;
‘I heard Audubon deliver some interesting discourses on the habits of North American birds, sneering somewhat unjustly at Waterton. By the way, a negro lived in Edinburgh, who had travelled with Waterton and gained his livelihood by stuffing birds, which he did excellently; he gave me lessons for payments, and I used often to go sit with him for he was a very pleasant and intelligent man.’
Charles Darwin, Autobiography
Also in Darwin’s autobiography there’s a passage which echoes Charles Waterton’s childhood. Darwin recalls; ‘To my deep mortification my father once said to me “You care for nothing but, shooting, dogs and rat catching and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”‘
He and Waterton had so much in common!
Rough Stuff
At last, I’ve had a look through the script for the Charles Waterton comic and I’m onto the first pencil roughs stage, quickly going through the scenes doing what in the theatre would be called blocking in; planning the movement of characters. Even with something as chaotic as a punch-up with poachers I don’t want to keep changing the point of view too much so that, for instance, the character on the left is inexplicably on the right in the next frame. Based on a true incident recalled by Charles Waterton, this near fatal fracas ends up with a touch of Laurel and Hardy slapstick because, Waterton tells us, the poacher ran away with his hat and he ended up with the poacher’s.
Despite having read the Dummies book and watching several video tutorials, I’m still struggling to get up to speed with Manga Studio EX4 but at least it is easy to draw up the panels to see how much action I need to fit onto each page. I might very well draw the panels by hand in the final artwork, I haven’t decided on that yet, but at this stage I’m happy to have a grid to work in. Obviously I wouldn’t go for such thick ruled borders alongside my pen and ink drawings.
I can see the advantage of getting friends in to choreograph the fight and take reference photographs but at the moment fast pencil sketches, getting the gist of the action, are all that I need.
Great Graphic Disasters
I was so looking forward to seeing my article in the local newsletter but, an illustrator’s worst nightmare, something went horribly wrong between the 300 dpi image I supplied and the print version!
Both reproduced here at 100 dpi, but I think you get the picture. Which is more than the readers of the newsletter will. John Welding says it looks as if the image has been converted to black and white, which is not recommended for anything scanned at less than 600 dpi.
DPI, does it stand for Disaster Prone Image?
Semerwater
The level of the lake is up compared to last year but tide-marks of dry sedgy debris show that it can rise by another five or six feet. Oystercatchers call at the top, marshy end of the lake.
A dipper perches on the bridge as we get back to the farm then flits off upstream.
On the drive back to Hawes, I see a kestrel fly to the corner of a field barn to enter by a square opening, just below the roofline, which I guess must be an owl window.
Squirrel Crossing
11 a.m, forest track, valley of the Green Field Beck, Langstrothdale . My first thoughts are red squirrel when we glimpse an animal dashing up the bank into the conifer plantation but a few minutes later it runs across the track fifty yards further on and follows the line of a wall before disappearing into the plantation again.
It wasn’t bounding in a sinuous way as I’d expect from squirrel nor did it climb the nearest tree when it saw us coming. Barbara and I both got the impression that it had a bushy tail and neither of us spotted the black-tipped tail that would have identified it as a stoat (there is a reddish form of stoat).
It appeared larger than a stoat anyway, about eighteen inches long. The Green Field valley is a stronghold of the red squirrel but because of this individual’s un-squirrel-like movements and behaviour, I wondered if it could have been a pine marten that had made its way into the valley. It didn’t , as far as we could see, have the face-markings of a polecat, but a polecat doesn’t have a bushy tail.
Since I wrote this, we met Simon Phillpot, wildlife photographer, in the riverside hide at Nethergill and he tells us that the red squirrel’s method of travelling across open country from one plantation to another is to follow a wall, which is exactly what this one was doing as it made its way around a recently cleared section of the plantation.
There are no reports of pine martens in the area so that must be what it was; the first red squirrel that I’ve seen in Yorkshire in 30, more like 40, years.
The red squirrels that I’ve been used to seeing on Speyside all have blond tails, which makes them unmistakable.
Link; Simon Phillpot’s Wild Dales Photography
Sandpipers
Riverside hide, Nethergill Farm, Langstrothdale, 3.45p.m.; A common sandpiper preens itself on a rock on the far bank of the beck then it sets off probing along the edge of the river.
It’s joined by a second bird, which trots off up the grassy bank while the first bird continues downstream.
A pied wagtail perches on rocks in the beck, flitting out to take invertebrates from amongst the pebbles.
Mole and Weasel
1 p.m.; A weasel scampers along beyond the cattle grid as we take the track from Oughtershaw back to Nethergill.
3.15 p.m.; This mole appeared on the grass verge just feet from me by some surface excavations, crossed three of four feet of short grass then vanished, melting away in front of ours eyes, into what must have been a tunnel entrance at the end of a rough patch.
Gryke
This gryke gives shelter to the kind of plants that you’d see in a hedgerow or in woodland. A velvety coat of moss on the limestone indicates how far the humid, sheltered zone of the gryke extends. In this particular crevice I noted wild garlic, dogs mercury, meadowsweet and creeping thistle.
A gryke is a crack between the clints (slabs) that make up a limestone pavement.
It might be sheltered for the plants down there but there was a cool breeze blowing down the valley this morning and the slab of limestone that I was sitting on proved surprisingly uncomfortable, even though I was sitting on a thin foam mat, so this is as far as I got with my sketch.
Town End Farm Shop
‘Do you do all your drawings from cafes?!’ asks Chris Wildman as I show him my latest lunchtime sketch, drawn as I waited for my quesadilla filled with cheese and Town End farm shop’s original chorizo. I must admit that I’ve ended up with three little sketches from cafe tables on this spread but all that’s going to change because we’re heading off for a week at Nethergill Farm in Langstrothdale, which is about as tucked away as you can get in the Yorkshire Dales. At last, I’ll be working in my 8 x 8 inch wildlife sketchbook again.
Link; Town End Farm Shop, the only place in the Yorkshire Dales where you can buy my little Malham Magic guide! Thank you for stocking it Chris.
If you’re unable to get there, I can send you a copy, price £2.95, post free in the UK; Malham Magic.