Category: Birds

Bird Rescue

bird rescue

From my diary for Monday, 9 June, 1997:

I had a reputation as a naturalist amongst the local children; once I was presented with a specimen of a dragonfly that had been trapped in a conservatory and on another occasion a neighbour’s son reported seeing a large black cat near the quarry in the wood, at a time when ‘The Black Beast of Ossett’ was roaming the nearby countryside.

Children assumed that I’d know what to do with orphaned or injured birds. In fact the only birds that I ever kept, two Bengalese finches that I bought, hoping to breed, when I worked on the illustrations for Ways of Drawing Birds, died when I allowed them to feast on too much lettuce. The best I could do was to phone a friend, a headmaster who lived in Horbury, who kept silver pheasants and owls in an aviary. I didn’t record in my diary what became of the hapless nestling.

Walking along the road in April that year, I was recognised by two skateboarding children. The girl pointed me out to her companion:
“It’s Richard Bell, he’s an artist.”
The boy must have confused me with another artist, perhaps the only one he’d so far learnt about at school . . .

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Categorized as Birds, People

Lurking

lurking

The birds on our feeders are having a hard time with the sparrowhawk swooping in regularly and this character, a neighbour’s cat with a bushy tail, lurking in the flower bed. Even the pheasants keep their distance when the cat is around, although they don’t seem too concerned about the sparrowhawk.

Female Teal

juvenile teal

There were plenty of mallards, gadwall and nine shovelers (three drakes, six females/juveniles) on the Lower Lake at Nostell this morning, but it was this little duck, which didn’t look much bigger than a dabchick, that had us puzzled. It’s a teal, and the conspicuous triangular pattern on its back suggests that this is a female in breeding plumage. Juveniles have dark feathers on the back, with just narrow, lighter margins.

The note I’ve written on my sketch, that the female should always show a speculum, is something we read (or perhaps misread) on the Internet, but it’s incorrect according to Noel Cusa’s illustration in The Birds of the Western Palearctic, which shows the female with speculum completely covered by the surrounding breast and back feathers. I’ll go with that as you can’t get any more authoritative than The Birds of the Western Palearctic.

The female was on her own but when we returned forty minutes later there was no sign of her. Although this duck looked so petite compared with the nearby mallards and gadwall, the teal is in fact about 25% bigger than a dabchick.

We saw just one goosander this morning, a drake on the Upper Lake.

Nostell Middle Lake
Wigeon, gadwall and mallard on the Middle Lake at Nostell in yesterday morning’s fog.

Goldfinches

View from Charlotte's
View from Charlotte’s Ice Cream Parlour, Whitley, on Monday.

We’ve recently started feeding the birds again after taking a break over the summer. This was partly to reseed the bare patch in the lawn trampled by the pheasants that had spent so long pacing about in tight circles below the feeders, pecking at the spilt sunflower hearts but also because two or three small mounds of earth had appeared at the edge of the lawn.

We thought that this might be a sign that brown rats were moving in but a neighbour has since told me that at that time there was a lot of mole activity in his garden, which is the most likely explanation as there were only piles of soil but no sign of any entrance holes.

Today the feeders were visited by coal tits, blue tits, great tits, nuthatch and greenfinch but outnumbering all of them were goldfinches. At one stage all eight perches on the feeders were occupied by them, with another ten on the ground below and six or seven waiting their turn in the branches of the crab apple.

Pigeon Food Pyramid

At breakfast time, a loose flock of wood pigeons flew over the house, followed later by a grey heron, which appeared to be struggling to clear our roof.

Top Predator

Calder & Hebble Navigation at the Strands, Horbury Bridge.

sparrowhawkThis evening down by the canal, a sparrowhawk perched briefly in a tree then flew off on its rounds. I suspect that a sparrowhawk killed the pigeon that we found on our back lawn a few days ago. It’s not going to be short of prey with so many wood pigeons about.

Sparrow Nestbox

Photographed, then drawn (well, I admit it, traced!) and coloured in Clip Studio Paint, on my iPad Pro, using an Apple Pencil.

First visitor to our new sparrow nest box: a blue tit. It checks out hole number three first; no, that’s not quite right; then hole number two and it’s just about to investigate hole number one when a second blue tit appears, there’s a skirmish and off they fly.

It’s likely that, as this RSPB box was made specifically for sparrows, the blue tits will find the entrance hole a little too wide for their liking but the old box, single-holed variety, attracted blue tits one year, sparrows the next (and finally bumblebees), so we’ll have to wait until springtime to find out who finally takes possession.

Link

RSPB sparrow terrace nestbox

Coot Feet

You can tell that I took this photograph in an area popular with walkers because the coots have incorporated a walking pole into their nesting platform, here by the dam head at Newmillerdam Country Park.

The juvenile coot in the foreground hasn’t yet developed the bulging forehead of its parents, nor has the colour in its legs begun to show.

But its flanged feet match the adults in size; ideal for trotting over mud and floating vegetation and almost as useful for swimming.

Link

My Walks around Newmillerdam booklet

Teal in Eclipse

teal field sketch

At this time of year there are juvenile teal around, which look rather like the females but the drakes are in eclipse plumage so they too look very similar. It won’t be until the autumn that they moult into their winter plumage.

lagoonIt’s warm this afternoon, 24°C, 77°F, and, typically for the summer, there’s not a lot going on. At the Reedbed Hide a family of swans swim by; there are coot dotted about on the lagoon and moorhen probing the vegetation alongside the reedbed.

treeAs they peck at the mud, the young moorhen are currently in dull brown plumage with lighter streaks. They remind me of waders, but without the long, probing bills.

On the Mere, along with the teal, there’s the odd lapwing and a little egret.

It’s a quiet time for the birds but dragonflies are busy, hawking over the paths around and egg-laying in the lagoons.

Link

Old Moor RSPB Reserve

Black Swans Preening

The Calder Valley beyond Mirfield is disappearing into the haze this morning.

In the waterfowl pen at Charlotte’s Ice Cream Parlour, black swans are preening.

This disconsolate-looking West Highland terrier was sitting by a table at the the Caffe Capri.

These are the first scans from my sketchbook made using Affinity Photo. Aspects of the process are still slightly unfamiliar but there are plenty of short tutorial videos on specific subjects, like setting levels, so I’m not finding it too difficult to get into the program.

I do still miss the the preview that you get in Adobe Photoshop, which takes the guesswork out of exporting an image for the web. In practice, as I stick to pretty much the same settings every time, it’s unlikely that I’m going to be surprised by the end results.

The sketch of black swans preening looked very similar when I saved the same image in Photoshop.

Dawn Solo

3.50 a.m.: Not so much a dawn chorus as a dawn solo as the song thrush goes through it’s varied routine in the half light. It’s not until about an hour later that I hear the five-note cooing of a wood pigeon.

 

At breakfast-time, on our front lawn, which is shaded by the house from the morning sun, a young blackbird is repeatedly picking up some tiny food item, probably ants. It’s at that halfway stage: still brown and streaky above, but, in contrast, the tail and wing feathers are already showing up in black, so this is a young male.

Pheasant Turning Circle

I can’t take full credit for this piece of land art. The pheasants, up to twelve of them at a time, worked hard over our long drawn-out winter circling the bird feeding pole, pouncing on any fragment of sunflower heart dropped by the goldfinches, bullfinches and others, gradually trampling away the grass and compacting the clayey soil.

Taking a tip from Nick Bailey on last week’s Gardener’s World, I sharpened my spade and half-moon turf cutter before starting to dig over the resulting bare patch. I went around the trampled area with the turf cutter first then dug spade-width sections.

A sharpened spade made it so much easier but, even so, I’m taking a break before forking it over, adding a bit of gravel and sowing it with grass seed.