When we called in at the Rickaro Bookshop in Horbury this morning I couldn’t help thinking that Tilly, the bookshop border collie was feeling the call of the wild.
Category: Animals
Frog Fest
1.40 p.m., sunny, 51ºF, 12ºC; I counted twenty-seven clumps of frogspawn yesterday and assumed that was it, the party was over, but today the frogs are back in action.
I sneak up on them with an iPad and attempt to record the sound of them croaking and to film them. I find that the iPad is a bit cumbersome to hold steadily so, without making any sudden movements, I retrace my steps to collect camera, tripod and sketchbook.
Hope to upload the movie later.
A pair of siskins feed on the sunflower hearts, just a few yards from me as I sit sketching the frogs.
First Frogs
2.30 p.m., overcast, merest hint of drizzle, 51ºF, 11ºC: Frog activity has started again in the pond. I counted seven but I guess there are ten in all, hidden in corners.
In the branches of the crab apple a greenfinch gives its nasal intake of breath through clenched teeth call – ‘Jeeeez!’
Blue tits continue to take an interest in the nest-box. Two female blackbirds fight it out by the shed. A male hops in between the two of them, as if to say ‘now cool it down.’
We two frogs together clinging
There are two frogs at my feet, one clinging to the other at the edge of the pond. I’m relieved to see the elegantly wafting tail of a male smooth newt in the depths below. I did wonder whether the female blackbird that developed the knack of catching them last year had eliminated them altogether.
I cleared overhanging plants and a lot of the pondweed a month ago so if the same female returns this year, she won’t be able to perch on so much emergent vegetation. I’ve left a big clump of pondweed in the deepest section so there’s plenty of room for the newts to hide.
Mole Map
Over the weekend I noticed that the mole has extended its excavations into the flower border below the bird feeders. For the last few weeks that single molehill, right in the middle of the lawn, had been the only sign of its activity.
If I can infer the layout of its tunnels from the heaps of earth above ground, the main tunnel runs west northwest to east northeast. This is along the contour of the slope. Would a down-slope tunnel be at more risk of flooding?
Molehill
3 p.m., 42ºF, 7ºC: This molehill appeared a week or two ago exactly in the middle of our back lawn. We could see it growing, like a mini-volcano erupting, but we were never able to spot the creature making it. A robin eyed the growing pile and flew over to perch and peck on it.
As it was directly under the fat ball feeder which hangs from the washing line we did at first consider that it might be a brown rat digging a bolt hole as close as possible to a source of food but no exit holes ever appeared so this is a subterranean creature; it must be a mole. At the moment there are plenty of molehills just like this on grass verges and alongside the woodland path.
I’ll rake out the soil and spread some grass seed over it. The tunnel will help improve drainage beneath what becomes a mossy lawn over the winter and the excavations will help recycle nutrients in the lower layers of the soil.
January Sketchbook
A second gallery of pages which didn’t make it into my daily posts, taken from my Dove Grey A5 landscape Pink Pig sketchbook.
New year's day: a morning walk at Nostel Priory.
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
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.
Squirrel
A grey squirrel approaches the bird feeders but I rattle open the patio doors and send him away. The problem is that our bird feeders aren’t squirrel-proof and we’ve had the plastic perches and seed-hoppers nibbled away in the past. Time to grease the pole, I’m afraid. I don’t like doing it but I’ve yet to come up with a better solution.
The leaping squirrel is another rough from my children’s picture book Deep in the Wood. I was trying to see the world from a squirrel’s point of view. What would it be like to be up there leaping with the squirrel?
You can see where I’ve had to adjust the head, sticking on a new version. The darker lines on both these drawings show where they were traced down onto watercolour paper for the final artwork. The squirrel with the nut was an early version of the cover. We didn’t use it because it looked as if the book was just about squirrels. A new version of the cover featured all the animals that appear in the book.
Fox
I drew this fox as a rough for my children’s picture book Deep in the Wood in 1987. I prefer this pencil on layout paper version to the pen and watercolour of the finished illustration. Construction lines always add some animation to a drawing. There’s an extra-heavy outline where I traced out the image onto the watercolour paper that I used for my final artwork. I rubbed pencil over the back of the layout paper.
Deep in the Wood is about animal senses and this fox appears towards the end of the story to illustrate the sense of smell. It’s pausing to take in the scents of shrew, humans and blackberries that are wafting through the wood in the evening.