Category: Animals

Squirrel Sketches

I’m drawing some illustrations of red squirrels for my next Dalesman article but, when I visited the red squirrel feeding station at Snaizeholme last October, I concentrated on taking photographs.

My aim is to give the impression that my sketches were drawn from life. I don’t think that I’d ever be able to achieve the same feeling of spontaneity by working from a photograph, but I’ll try to suggest character and movement rather than getting too involved in details such as the texture of the fur.

I’m drawing direct from a photograph on the screen, rather than starting with a tracing, which would be a sure way of getting the proportions right. My inevitable second attempts at lines give a similar effect to when I’m drawing a living animal and it moves slightly, adding a degree of animation. That’s the theory, anyway.

Squirrel-nibbled Cones

grey squirrelSquirrels will make an appearance in my Dalesman nature diary this autumn, so I picked up these squirrel-nibbled cones at Nostell this morning to illustrate the article. I’ll be writing about the red squirrels of Snaizeholme near Hawes but these cones have been nibbled by greys.

An ecologist recently told me that the last red he’d seen near Wakefield had been running down the road at Newmillerdam; I think that this would have been in the late 1970s or possibly early 1980s.

It sounds as if the unfortunate creature had an inkling that the greys had taken over and was heading off like a lemming on one last desperate migration. Lets hope it finally arrived at Snaizeholme.

Wood Mouse

We had a shrew and later a hedgehog foraging under the bird feeders yesterday and this afternoon – on a day when it never stopped raining – a wood mouse was feeding on the spilt sunflower seeds and the crumbs of fat ball.

It ran off and vanished down a hole in the middle of the lawn. There must be hidden world beneath the turf; yesterday a shrew popped underground via another hole in its restless search for food.

Fledgling Bullfinch

We’ve guessed during the last month or two that a pair of bullfinches must have a nest nearby. We used to see them sitting opposite each other on the sunflower hearts feeder and I suspected that they were gathering seed to feed their young. Bullfinches feed their young on regurgitated seeds which they store in the bullfinch equivalent of a hamster’s cheek pouches.

Today a bullfinch fledgling was sitting on the washing line, begging for food. The adult male, on a perch on the feeder, appeared to be de-husking sunflower hearts and storing them in his pouches. He then flew over to the washing line and fed them to the fledgling.

The fledgling looked rather dull, perhaps a little duller than the female but it lacked her dark cap.

Shrew

8.35 a.m.: A dunnock chases a shrew across the lawn but the shrew ignores it and continues its zig-zag pattern of foraging. It disappears into a small hole for a minute then pops up again in the same place and continues its investigations, pushing its nose amongst the grass stems.

It has lighter-coloured ears; it is whitish beneath and it has a stiffish looking tail which to me looks wider in proportion to its body than I’d expect. It has velvety light brown-grey fur. I’ve shown it too brownish here.

Shrew v. Blackbird

A male blackbird paces along a few inches from it, following its progress, but it seems too diffident to peck at it.

10.40 a.m.; Not so the female blackbird, which pecks at the shrew which is now foraging at the foot of the bird-feeding pole; she pecks at it several times and it scuttles off to take cover in the nearby flower border.

6.30 p.m.; The shrew is still around, busily investigating the turf by the edge of the lawn.

8.30 p.m.; A hedgehog snuffles about beneath the bird feeders.

Update

Sad to report, the following day, following non-stop rain, the bedraggled shrew had expired and was lying on the lawn. Its body measured 5.2 cm, its tail about 4 cm.

Frisky Llamas

They’re letting the alpacas out into the paddock this morning at Charlotte’s Ice Cream Parlour, Whitley. They seem so excited and frisky that I get the impression that this must be the first time they’ve been out since they were transferred to the stables for the winter.

Also getting their first taste of springtime freedom are the donkeys, which are trotting out briskly but not as boisterously as the llamas.

Crows v. Kestrel

We spot a kestrel hovering motionless over the open pasture but it doesn’t stay there for long: two carrion crows make a beeline towards it and the first dives down on it then loops around and swoops up from below, sending it on its way.

Wildfowl Wars

There’s a high-pitched whistling call from the wildfowl pool where a drake is having a go at a pair of mandarin ducks, which are perching on a rock at the corner of the pool. Unlike the kestrel, it doesn’t look as if they’re going to move.

I must go back and take a closer look at the ‘drake’. I’ve drawn him from memory and made him look like a miniature Canada goose, but I suspect that he might have been a variety of duck. He might even have had a black mask and a white neck, rather than vice versa, like a barnacle goose, as I’ve shown him.

Link

Charlotte’s Real Jersey Ice Cream

March Hare

Lakeside path, pencil and watercolour, from a photograph taken at lunchtime.

10.15 a.m.: It’s almost a year since we walked the circuit of Langsett Reservoir. We always go anticlockwise as the lakeside path through the pines gets us off to a brisk start; we prefer to leave picking our way through the mud at the far corner of the lake until later.

A coal tit flits about, investigating the branches of a lakeside pine.

As we climb the rocky path up to the moor, a robin perches in a shrub on the heathy slope.

On the moor, red grouse are calling: a repeated phrase, with the rhythm of several unsuccessful attempts to start a one-cylinder petrol mower.

A curlew repeats its bubbling call over an expanse of heather. Down by the lake we hear a shrill piping, which we guess is a sandpiper.

On our way out here, near Cawthorne, we briefly spotted a brown hare running alongside a fence. On the moor, a dead hare, lying by the track, looks like a grisly image from a Ted Hughes poem.

2 p.m.: Close to the bank by The Island at Horbury Bridge, a dabchick is diving.

An Audience with PC

When we call on our friend Diana, I usually struggle to draw her cat, PC, because, if he’s in, he hankers to go out but, once he’s out, it’s not long until he jumps on the outside windowsill to demand to be let in again. A busy cat.

Not today though, as it’s cold, dull and rainy out there. Snoozing in his basket or reclining on the windowsill, as he is today, you might imagine that PC would be far too laid back to catch a bird. Unfortunately not: Diana has had to stop feeding the birds in her front garden, which is a shame because she used to enjoy seeing goldfinches crowding onto the nyger seed feeder.

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Adder Bite

A dramatic incident on a Wakefield Naturalists’ Society meeting on a summer’s day in 1881:

In an attempt stop the poison spreading the ‘venomed finger, as well as the wrist and arm, were bound round with twine as tightly as possible’.

Messengers were despatched to Pontefract for medical assistance and a Doctor Simpson hurried to the place, and recommended that the sufferer should be removed to Pontefract:

“but Mr. Wainwright decided to be driven to his own residence. On reaching Wakefield about midnight, Dr. Wade, the medical officer for the borough, was called. Notwithstanding that poultices were applied at frequent intervals through the night, the sufferer became delirious, the hand and arm assumed unusual proportions, and Mr. Wainwright had evidently much pain. On Sunday afternoon, on a Wakefield correspondent calling at Springfield House, he was informed that the sufferer was sleeping soundly, and that he appeared to be progressing as favourably as could be expected.”

Fortunately Mr Wainwright survived. He died in Wakefield on the 10th April, 1884.

Molebusters

In the opening pages of The Wind in the Willows, the Mole ‘scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged’ his way to the surface. This winter there’s been a lot of scrabbling and scrooging around the lakes at Nostell Priory. Molehills have been popping up on verges, path edges and even under park benches, many of them just the size of a pudding basin but there are several that are the diameter of a dustbin lid, containing two bucketfuls or more of soil.

We’ve seen fieldfares using molehills as vantage points on the open parkland. Around the lakes, the resident robins often perch on them; they’ll give one that has been freshly excavated a close examination, picking out any food items (presumably invertebrates) that might have been brought to the surface.

Useful as they might be to some of the local birds, the mounds will present an obstacle when mowing starts again in the spring, so now is the time to rake them out. The freshly turned soil can serve as a mulch, bringing minerals back to the surface.

Sprouting bulbs uprooted in a molehill.

For regular-sized molehills a little footwork is all that is needed but for the mole-mountains there’s a garden power tool that can help. Leaf blowers can be eight times faster than traditional raking and sweeping and this morning one of the gardeners is using a powerful leaf blower to spread the earth of a mound over a lakeside verge. Noisy but effective!

Squirrel Baffle

8.45 a.m.: We’ve been waiting to see whether the squirrel baffle on our new bird feeding pole would defeat a really determined squirrel.

After nibbling a few spilt sunflower hearts from the lawn beneath, a grey squirrel looks up quizzically at the feeders. Taking a leap at the pole, it gets to within a foot of the steel cone and hangs there for a moment until gravity kicks in and it starts to slide back down, like a fireman on a pole.

It scampers off towards the patio then climbs to the top of the cordon apple and looks back towards the pole. After checking out the patio table and discovering the odd sunflower heart that I’d spilt there, it goes over to the shed and climbs to the apex of the roof, to check out the challenge from another angle.

You can imagine the thought processes that it’s going through. It completes a circuit of vantage points by climbing the clothes pole and the crab apple (where it samples one of the squishy apples).

Then it’s back to the feeding pole for one last attempt. Taking a running jump, it succeeds in propelling itself right up into the cone. For a few moments all that we can see of it is a bushy tail, dangling and swishing slightly. That’s as far as it gets, then it lets itself gently back down to earth via the pole.

I think that now we’ll be able to go back to using plastic feeders, in addition to the robust ‘squirrel-proof’ metal feeders that we had to start using a year ago.

Link

RSPB Pole-mounted Feeder Squirrel Guard