Category: Animals

Ash Landing

SOMEONE had found this mammal skull and left it on one of the display boards at Ash Landing National Trust reserve, providing an impromptu quiz. What was it?

Even though the long canines at the front are missing, it’s obvious that this isn’t a rabbit or hare, it’s too large and long anyway, and to me it isn’t as broad and powerful as I’d expect for a badger so I’m going to guess at Red Fox.

And the answer is . . .

Yes, according to Mammals of Britain, Their Tracks, Trails and Signs (Lawrence and Brown, 1967), that’s what it is.

I’ve added their labels to my photograph. Alveoli are small cavities or pits, and here in an anatomical sense, that means the bony sockets for the root of a tooth. These three holes supported one tooth, as you can see from the opposite side of the jaw.

Oh, in case it’s not clear, the two lines are intended to indicate the cranium between the two eye sockets.

The Duck that held up the Traffic

This Mallard duck, followed by a companion drake, wandered over to the bench as we waited for the return ferry. As we had no bread to share we thought that she’d lose interest but she looked around then settled on the ground at Barbara’s feet, the drake standing close by. When the ferry arrived and the ramp rattled into place she stood up again and decided that now was the time to move – holding up the disembarking traffic as she waddled back unhurriedly to the waterside with her partner.

Sheepish

TILLY the bookshop border collie was looking a little sheepish today, curled up in her den beneath the desk. A busy Saturday morning for the bookshop, partly because tomorrow is Mother’s Day.

Tapir

IT’S A WINDY, RAINY day so we’re delighted to find that the South American Tapir, Tapirus terrestris, here at the Ponderosa Rare Breeds Farm, Heckmondwike, has ventured out of his shelter. He immediately ambles over to snuffle at us when we arrive. On a summer visit 18 months ago, he stayed in the shade of his shelter all afternoon and I didn’t get chance to draw him so I make a few quick sketches in the drizzle adding the colour later from a Googled photograph, and from memory, as the photograph didn’t quite coincide with the browny grey or ‘dull chestnut’ that I’d made a mental note of.

There’s also time to draw one of the busy band of Meerkats, Suricata suricata, which are chattering and burbling in their enclosure.

I get the opportunity in the Reptile House to hold a North American Corn Snake, also known as the Red Ratsnake, Pantherophis guttatus, (from its grey-brown colour, I guess that this was the Midwestern subspecies Elaphe guttata emoryi). Its scales are softer than I expected, despite being cold-blooded its warmer than the ambient temperature (it has probably been in a warm spot in its vivarium) and it feels stoutly muscular when it pushes itself into my armpit. It gives the impression of being completely relaxed and confident as I support it; it’s used to being handled. I also briefly have a female Australian Bearded Lizard, a.k.a. Central Bearded Dragon, Pogona vitticeps, resting on my shoulder. She appears briefly in a marker pen sketch on my page on the Animated Yorkshire workshop that I took part in here in 2010.

We’ll be back at the Ponderosa in May for the wedding reception of one of our god-daughters, otherwise we might never have thought of heading out here for our coffee/extended to lunch break.

We’ll certainly be coming back, hopefully on a drier when we’ve got a bit more time but even on a day like today, it’s a change from the coffee shops and restaurants in shopping centres, garden centres and farm shops that we so often find ourselves at on our errands and book deliveries.

You wouldn’t expect to meet a Meerkat in the White Rose Centre or a Reindeer at the Redbrick Mill.

Link; Ponderosa Rural Therapeutic Centre, Animated Yorkshire

PC and Friend

AS WE ARRIVE at Diana’s, a large fluffy Siamese walks ahead of us. We shut it out as we go in through the back garden gate but PC, Diana’s black cat, has noticed that his fluffy friend has arrived and they indulge in a bit of playful sparring, pawing at each other through the gap beneath the gate.

The Siamese can’t climb over the larch lap fence; it had already been declawed when Diana’s neighbour adopted it.

But PC is soon up and over the fence, returning five minutes later to sit out at the front on the windowsill. When he comes in, he jumps up on the windowsill (he recently dislodged a vase which broke into four pieces). He’s chosen the warmest corner of the room above the radiator. From here he can keep an eye and an ear on everything that’s going on but he’s soon stretching and snoozing.

Cats are so good at relaxing but however much they appear to be dozing those ears will swivel around to pick up any stray sound.

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Perfectly Frank

TRYING TO think of a birthday gift that combined my brother’s creative side in the kitchen with a reference to his accident-prone Springer Spaniel Frank (who survived snowdrifts and thin ice in France last week), I spotted these two bottles in the supermarket; Marston’s Pedigree Classic English Pale Ale and Frank’s Original Red Hot Cayenne Pepper Sauce.

All they needed to personalise them was a little logo of the Original Pedigree Welsh Springer Spaniel Frank himself. Perfect!

Yorkies on Walkies

AS IT’S HALF TERM, there were children, grandparents and assorted dogs at Newmillerdam this morning. One woman was gyrating in a slow motion ballroom twirl, holding one arm up and passing it over the other as two little Yorkshire Terriers kept circling around her, sometimes in opposing directions, as if she was a maypole.

Later it was a little Jack Russell on a long lead that made a complete circuit of an unsuspecting black Labrador. Perhaps there was some rivalry as to who would be the first off the mark if their owner, wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Ask the Boss’, should produce a doggy treat.

It’s good to see the lake full of liquid water again and Mallard, Canada Goose and Tufted Ducks going about their normal business instead of waddling over the ice.

I drew the Yorkies with my pen tablet using Corel Painter Sketch Pad, which I think feels a bit more natural to use than Autodesk SketchBook Express but these trees in Sainsbury’s car park were drawn in my usual pen and wash.

Biscuit

IT’S RARE to see Biscuit down at our end of the meadow, as she’s fed by her shelter at the top end. She’s kept on her own without a companion but, from what I’ve heard, she’s a pony with attitude, so that’s probably just as well.

Just after I’ve drawn her, I catch sight of a commotion; something disappears down to the woodland side of the field while an agitated female Pheasant goes hurtling up, heading for cover at the woodland edge.

It’s a curly-tailed, stockily built, Jack Russell, which appears again running down the field shortly after, probably being told off by its owner on the woodland path.

Frank

“HAVE YOU noticed that whenever Frank’s around, we disappear?” says my brother Bill, as I focus on drawing Frank, the springer spaniel, who he’s holding on his lap.

Bill has already bowed to the inevitable and replaced his own photo with Frank’s on his Facebook page.

“At first I had a picture of Frank and me there but as all the comments were about him, I realised that people weren’t really bothered about me.”

I didn’t have time to draw Frank when I first met him before Christmas but I couldn’t resist taking quick photograph – cropping out my brother, of course!

At that time Frank has the rounded proportions of a younger puppy but three or four weeks later he’s grown considerably and changed in his proportions. He’s still got big feet – he is a spaniel after all – but his body has lengthened so that his head is no longer in the proportion to his body. At that time his proportions were closer to those of a cut cartoon dog character.

By the way, as my little before and after sketch suggests, Frank can do a quick change act; from one side, he’s liver and white, like a typical springer, from the other he’s plain white.

Spirit of the Woods

AFTER SPENDING several hours drawing the Nondescript in Wakefield Museum today, I feel that I’ve got more questions about it – or him – than I had before I started.

The naturalist Charles Waterton (1782-1865), who created this missing link to demonstrate his innovative method of taxidermy, wrote that the Nondescript or Itouli ‘has a placidity of countenance which shows that things went well for him in life’ but I feel that the creature is wistful rather than self-satisfied. There’s a suggestion that this zoological hoax may have been intended as a satirical portrait of the customs officer who had the temerity to charge import duty on a collection of tropical bird skins that Waterton was bringing into the country to display in his museum at Walton Hall near Wakefield. For me it goes a bit deeper than Spitting Image style satire; there’s a Sphinx-like enigma about him.

You might assume that as an ape-man, the Nondescript is Waterton’s riposte to Darwin’s theories on our origins but it dates from 1824/25, 35 years before the publication of The Origin of Species.

Waterton’s starting point for this creation was the skin of a Red Howler monkey which he collected on the last of his four Wanderings in South America in 1824.

The Nondescript is often seen as a joke that went wrong but I see him as a forerunner of characters (and hoaxes) such as King Kong, Piltdown Man and the Psammead in E Nesbit’s Five Children and It.

The Nondescript and the rest of the Waterton collection are currently not on public display because the Museum is in the process of moving to new premises in Wakefield One.

 

Red Squirrel

SOME DAY we’ll climb Cat Bells, one of the most popular fells for walkers in the Lake District. It sits enticingly on the western shore of Derwentwater as you look out towards it from the lakeside at Keswick. Cat Bells is 451 metres, 1480 feet high, and a three mile walk from the town but the boat house in the foreground of my drawing is on Derwent Isle, only two or three hundred yards from the shore.

4.25 pm; A Red Squirrel runs along the pavement by a roundabout near the Lakeside car Park. We’re so astonished to see it that, retracing our route back out of town, I turn the car on to the road we came on – which is one-way! Luckily I realise my mistake before we encounter any oncoming vehicles!

We’ve often come to the Lake District for several days and not seen a Red Squirrel, so this one came as a surprise.

We’ve driven here from home along the Leeds ring-road so many times that we were ready for a change; we headed up the road from home, in what seems like the wrong direction, to Grange Moor, then cut across via Brighouse and Keighley on smaller roads towards Skipton, avoiding West Yorkshire’s larger towns and cities.

Because of a road closure, we found another alternative route for part of our journey along a narrow lane across the moors and fells from Airton to Settle. A large flock of Fieldfares, the most we’ve seen so far, had descended on roadside hawthorns.

In Settle I drew the pillar in the Market Place as we stopped for lunch at Ye Olde Naked Man cafe. Limestone crags rise from woodland on the slopes to the east of town.