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.
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.
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!
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.
The grey squirrels in the Pleasure Grounds wood by the Lower Lake at Nostell have spent much of the autumn burying acorns and sweet chestnuts and they’re now starting mating activity. Apparently it’s the female who leads the chase; she leads the slightly smaller male around the trunk of a tall oak, spiralling down then up again into the branches. She then she sets him the challenge of leaping over into the branches of a conifer.
Studies of red squirrels have revealed that their chases can last five hours, so this male might be busy for a quite a while.
Who will blink first? Harvey the border terrier has spotted the low slung cat that likes to slink about in our border and keep a watch on the bird feeders. I don’t mind this feline intruder so much as I think that the territorial markers that it leaves in such profusion at the edge of the lawn might have the effect of discouraging any brown rats that are passing through the garden.
Harvey seems to be winning; the cat looks distinctly uneasy and steps out from cover onto the edge of the lawn. It’s only when the cat decides that it’s time to turn tail and run down the garden that Harvey breaks into a volley of indignant barking.
As soon as we park at Mirk Pot Farm, Snaizeholme, we get a view of a red squirrel which has been attracted to the bird feeders. When it has finished, it scampers past, paying no attention to us, heading for a corner of the plantation.
Walking towards the viewing area down through the conifer plantation, we pause to watch a second squirrel which is sitting in the fork of a conifer nibbling a pine cone as if it were a corn on the cob.
This squirrel not only runs towards us but circles around us a couple of times. I’m using my telephoto lens and I’ve got my camera attached to a walking pole which doubles as a monopod, so I struggle to focus on the squirrel as it pauses for a few seconds just a few feet away from me.
Two or three red squirrels are active around the feeder at the viewing area, but none comes quite as close to us as the first two squirrels that we saw.
It’s hard to believe that when Hugh and Jane Kemp arrived at Mirk Pot Farm in 1966, Snaizeholme was a bare hillside. They initially planted conifers but encouraged the regrowth of native trees, such as rowan, birch, blackthorn and oak, by fencing off the area from grazing sheep. Red squirrels started to arrive in 1997.
Red squirrels are capable of thriving in isolated conifer woods like this but as the woodlands of the Yorkshire Dales start to return to their natural state with more deciduous trees, would the red squirrels be able to hold their own if greys started to move in?
Young rabbit at West Field, SnaizeholmeChaffinch, coal tit and pheasant.
We see lots of coal tits – probably the most numerous bird in the plantation – and the inevitable chaffinches near the feeding station and also a great spotted woodpecker in the top of a dead tree. When we return to the car park a goldcrest is hopping about feeding on the branches of a willow by the bird feeders.
It’s so quick that I realise that I’d be better if my camera could take a burst of multiple exposures (if it can, it’s not given as an option in the manual) because the instant that I press the shutter button, it moves. In fact it is probably never entirely motionless during the time that we’re watching it.
Dales Centre
I’ve been concentrating on photography and trying to keep up with my written notes during our stay here but after lunch at the Firebox cafe at the Dales Countryside Museum at Hawes, I get the perfect chance to spend an hour drawing by Gayle Beck as the others head off to the shops. My key-fob thermometer registers a comfortable 60° Fahrenheit. Winter gnats dance in the sunny sheltered bank clearing beside me.
Mist around Ingleborough
As we return over the moor we pull in at the view-point to photograph mist rising around the sphinx-shaped bulk of Ingleborough as the sun starts to set.
Dark Skies
From my 1979 book ‘A Sketchbook of the Natural History of Wakefield’. I’ve never seen the Milky Way as bright as this, even in the Dales!
Appropriately for Halloween, we hear the screeching call of the barn owl as we venture out briefly to look at the stars.
Above the hill, the Great Bear is fading into thin cloud but overhead the ‘W’ of Cassiopeia looks brighter than it might at home, against the dark sky of this part of the Yorkshire Dales. Through binoculars there are bright star fields sprinkled along this arm of the Milky Way and nearby the Pleiades are also impressive through binoculars.
Even with dark skies, I’m struggling to see the Andromeda galaxy which is directly overhead with my unaided eyes but the misty patch that marks its bright centre is clearly visible in binoculars. The photons that are reaching our eyes tonight set off on their long journey from Andromeda 250 million years ago.
A couple we meet on the towpath tell us they’ve just seen a mink amongst the tree roots on the opposite side of the canal. As we continue on our way we hear them calling behind us. A mink is swimming across towards some overhanging vegetation. It seems to vanish when it reaches the bank.
It’s a sleek predator but I wish that we could return to the days when I regularly saw water voles alongside the canal. As the introduced mink spread into valley, the water voles disappeared.
As we walk back later that afternoon we come across a young heron that stands at the edge of the canal looking intently at the water, its yellow eye unblinking. It’s so intent that it lets us get within a few yards of it before flying off and settling twenty yards further along the towpath.
10 a.m., Nostell Park: As we reach the southeast corner of Priory Wood a brown hare runs right in front of us, only ten yards away, crosses the (filled in) cattle grid and hares off across the bottom corner of the wood.
“Did you see that?” I ask the man who’s just been putting a lead on his black labrador “I think your dog must have disturbed it.”
“It’s the farmer cutting this field,” he suggests, “I often see them around. There are a few setts around here.”
He’s wrong actually; a sett would be badgers, it’s just a form for a hare: a shallow depression in the ground. But I don’t like to be pedantic!
It’s great to see a hare so close up, close enough to see the prominent black and white markings at the tips of its long ears and its black and white tail.
Accounts suggest that hares aren’t doing well in the English countryside. Traditionally managed parkland, as here at Nostell, gives them a refuge and hopefully there isn’t too much lamping: hunting at night using powerful spotlights, which is thought to have led to a decline in their numbers in some areas.
London Zoo: The bearded pigs, Sus barbatus, are native to Borneo, Sumatra, Malaysia and the Philippines. This morning they’re pushing around chunky plastic feeders, a little larger than a football, which are dispensing food amongst the wood chip of the enclosure. This gives the pigs a lot more entertainment than gathering around a trough. Occasionally one of the feeders will pass from one pig to another with, presumably, the pig which is higher in the pecking order winning the prize.
In the evocatively designed Land of Lions, a langur monkey relaxes in the top of dead tree in a convincing replica of the dry scrubby Gir Forest Reserve in India.
The vegetable samosas from the street food vendor in the zoo’s colourful version of Sasan Gir village are equally convincing.
White pelicans are sitting together resting but they spring to life when a keeper appears with a bucket of fish. They each save several fish for later consumption in their pouches. Two herons have been hanging around and they’re also successful in grabbing a fish each. I think of herons as being one of our largest birds but compared to the pelicans they’re lightweights.
The Sumatran tigers have two small cubs. One tiger – the male I guess – checks out the perimeter while the other stays with the cubs in a shrubby corner of the Tiger Territory enclosure.
Link:Land of the Lions, Zoological Society of London. For my Royal College of Art degree show in June 1975 I produced a hand-coloured print of the Victorian Lion House at the London Zoo which was then scheduled for demolition. At the suggestion of my tutor John Norris Wood, I sold the print in aid of the conservation of Asiatic lions at the Gir Forest Reserve. I remember thinking that some day I might get to the Gir Forest with my sketchbook. Visiting Land of the Lions has been the next best thing!
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.
They initially planted conifers but encouraged the regrowth of native trees, such as rowan, birch, blackthorn and oak, by fencing off the area from grazing sheep. Red squirrels started to arrive in 1997.
“It’s the farmer cutting this field,” he suggests, “I often see them around. There are a few setts around here.”
White pelicans are sitting together resting but they spring to life when a keeper appears with a bucket of fish. They each save several fish for later consumption in their pouches. Two herons have been hanging around and they’re also successful in grabbing a fish each. I think of herons as being one of our largest birds but compared to the pelicans they’re lightweights.
The Sumatran tigers have two small cubs. One tiger – the male I guess – checks out the perimeter while the other stays with the cubs in a shrubby corner of the Tiger Territory enclosure.