We’re delighted to have some of our facilities open for your visit, you’ll notice we’ve made some changes to help keep everyone safe.
RSPB Dearne Valley Old Moor website
We’re looking forward to being allowed to travel again as far as our nearest RSPB reserves, but for the time being we’re limiting ourselves to walks from home. Non-essential shops and hairdressers opened again today.
An earlier version of this homemade birthday card (happy birthday, Paul) suggested that a Masked Booby had turned up at Old Moor, but I don’t think that I’d get that one past the Rarities Committee.
It’s been a busy month for birthday cards, this one inspired by my niece, Sarah, who in real life really appreciates the bad boids visiting her feeders.
For World Women’s Day, two local heroes, Eliza and Helen Edmonstone, who did what they could in an attempt to preserve the legacy of their brother-in-law Charles Waterton: his museum and nature reserve at Walton Hall, near Wakefield.
Eliza (1807-1870) and her younger sister Helen (1813-1879) were of Scottish/Caribbean descent.
The margay was trained to hunt rats at Walton Hall. I’ve read that Waterton trained it to run with foxhounds.
According to a story that I heard via my tutor, Professor Bryan Robb, at the Royal College of Art, whose wife was related to Waterton, a tame crow (or possibly a raven?) once interrupted mass in the small chapel at Walton Hall, wandering in during the service and causing mayhem.
Charles Dickens consulted Waterton when researching the habits of Grip, the pet raven in Barnaby Rudge.
By the way, a credit to another of my tutors at the Royal College, Quentin Blake, who, amongst other things, did what he could to find me work on BBC television’s Jackanory and who tried to broaden my outlook by getting me to draw zoo animals in the way that Ted Hughes might see them. I now realise that I could have learnt a lot from him, so I’m currently taking another look at his work and trying to free up my pen and wash. When he’s adding wash, he never works exactly to the outline and in this drawing I tried hard to do that, but it’s difficult for me with my rather literal approach to illustration.
1.45 pm, Monday 25 January: So far no takers. I’ve somewhat hopefully set up my DSLR, Olympus Tough and even my iPhone all focussed on the birdbath. Just a few feet away there are long-tailed tits, wood pigeons and starlings feeding but nothing is touching down for a quick drink.
What do you know?! – just as I wrote that, a blue tit came down and perched exactly on the spot that I’d focussed on. Let’s hope that the memory card lasted out!
Later
Unfortunately it’s just as I expected: the blue tit turned up a few minutes after the two cameras ran out of memory. It should be there on the iPhone but that’s just taking a general view.
Back at the Waterhole
I give it another try and 3.30 pm, which in winter is late afternoon, proves to be a better time. Within the first five minutes this blue tit comes down to drink, then flies up to the sunflower hearts feeder.
I could have guaranteed some bird action if I’d focussed on the feeders but it’s going to take a bit more arranging to get my cameras up on that level. Besides, a bird’s bathing routine is going to be more interesting than just watching them feeding.
Just to be sure that I’d get something, I set up the iPhone at the foot of feeding pole, so at least I’ll have some close-up shots of blackbirds, chaffinch and robin on the ground.
Wrens at a sparrow box in mid-January – are they roosting or thinking about a nest site? And what will happen when the resident blue tit returns?
In the sequence where the two wrens are hopping around on top of the box, it looks as if one of them has a small green caterpillar in its bill. This could be courtship feeding, so the tour of alternative nest holes might be the male giving the female a tour of possible nest sites.
Wednesday 13 January, Barbara’s diary: Some day we will get it right for the birds!
First we put up a blue tit box and sparrows nested in it, so we replaced it with a sparrow terrace with three nest holes and the blue tits nested in it.
Now the blue tits are sub-letting to a group of wrens.
Barbara’s iPhone photograph of the blue tit at nest hole 1.
As I went to make our morning cuppa, passing the back door something caught my eye, I looked out at the sparrow box and in the half light could see a little head appear from hole number one. I was amazed to see a wren fly out and it was quickly followed by three more, they had obviously been using it as an overnight roost.
We had spotted a wren yesterday coming out of hole number three, while at the same time a blue tit was taking great interest in hole number one. Another blue tit attempted to investigate the middle hole but the one at hole one in no uncertain terms let it know it wasn’t welcome, although it didn’t seem bothered by the wren.
It would be lovely to think that we could have blue tit and wren making a nest in the terrace this Spring and a bonus would be a sparrow in the middle. Well, who knows what will happen with these contrary birds!
Barbara Bell
Saturday 16 January, 4.45 pm: I’d seen a wren hopping about on the hedge but it was taking its time coming over to the nestbox. That changed when a blue tit flew over an perched at the left-hand nest hole. Within seconds the wren was there, perching on the edge of the box and, in no uncertain terms, letting the blue tit know that it wasn’t welcome.
The wren popped into the hole for just a few seconds before flitting out again. We don’t know if there are any wrens roosting in the box tonight. On previous nights we’ve seen three going in there as darkness falls.
“As we head down the track we spot a buzzard being mobbed by a magpie and kestrel. As it dips and soars fending off the two birds another buzzard soars carefree over the ridge.”
From Barbara’s nature diary, 30 January 2020
I needed to inject a bit of drama into my next (January 2021) Wild Yorkshire diary for The Dalesman, so I’m illustrating the incident Barbara described, along with a male stonechat perching on a fence post. The pen and watercolour of the reedbed and lagoon will go right across at the foot of the double-page spread. I was busy with Sandal Castle and the Rhubarb Festival last January, so I’m having to recreate what my sketchbook might have looked like if I’d had time to draw on the day.
You can see that I’ve struggled to draw one of my Dalesman nature diary illustrations in the same grungy style as my first Adobe Fresco drawing on my iPhone, but really that’s the point of it. This heron, which touched down on the greenhouse last January, was probably checking out our garden pond for the first frogs. It looks suitably regal and, for our frogs, dangerous, so I thought of the Aesop’s fable of the frogs who ask Zeus for a king but soon tire of log that he throws down for them and request a more impressive leader. They soon come regret their request.
Seeing us watching a heron fly down the valley over the Go Outdoors camping store, a man stops to tell us of the buzzards that nested a couple of years ago in the row of trees down below Hostingley Lane. He says that one pair of skylarks nests each year on the open fields here but he wonders how they manage as the crop soon grows too long for them. It’s not like the cliff top grasslands on the Yorkshire Coast.
He’s tried inserting square plastic plant pots into the hedge banks for robins to nest in. This year robins have nested not in but on one of them. He gently felt in the well-concealed nest and they’ve already hatched their chicks.
But his most surprising success was with yellowhammers, ‘a million to one chance’ as he put it. He heard a yellowhammer singing and, using his hand, made a little scrape in a grassy hedgebank. To his amazement they did nest in the scrape and successfully raise chicks.
Another page from my Skokholm Island sketchbook, drawn on Thursday, 10th April, 1980, watching razorbills, wheatear, and grey seals. My drawing of the rocks didn’t get finished because:
“The puffins were enjoying the evening sun, standing in pairs outside their burrows, when I came back from a tea-break so I decided to leave them in peace”
Probably a first even for me, blaming the puffins for an unfinished sketch!
