Category: Birds

Garden Birdwatch

birdwatch 2013siskingoldfinchAFTER LASHINGS of rain overnight and this morning it’s refreshing to look out on a green lawn rather than on the snow that has lingered for the past twelve days. When the rain stops at 9 a.m. there’s a sudden influx of Goldfinches and Siskins so we decide to start our one hour RSPB Garden Birdwatch straight away.

magpieI do a few distracted sketches but feel the need to be continually scanning the whole of the garden. A Magpie briefly touches down on the fence near the greenhouse and pecks at something – a spider perhaps.

nuthatchA Nuthatch, usually the most conspicuous of visitors when it flies in, bullying other birds from their perch on the sunflower feeder, flies in sneakily, hiding itself briefly on the other side of the small feeder.

wood pigeoncollared doveAs I add the colour to my sketches who should turn up too late to be included but a Collared Dove, which touches down briefly on top of the shepherd’s crook feeder pole, and a Wood Pigeon that waddles alongside the watering hole provided by the still half-frozen pond, oblivious that if it had flown in just 10 minutes earlier it could have contributed to our record of the biodiversity of our garden!

chaffinchFull list and maximum number recorded at any one time: Blackbird 2, Blue tit 2, Chaffinch 9 (as large a number as I ever remember having seen in our garden), Dunnock 2, Goldfinch 8, Great tit 3, Greenfinch 2, Magpie 1, Nuthatch 1, Pheasant 1 male, 3 female, Robin 2.

RobinsThe two Robins that we saw today, one on the ground by the hedge and one visiting the feeder, were tolerant of each other so presumably they are a pair. Two of theblue tit Blue Tits flew over to the nest box, so perhaps they will be nesting before too long.

 

Fresh Page

cloudsTHE START OF THE NEW YEAR feels like opening a new sketchbook; a fresh white page to fill with whatever takes my interest.

My Dalesman nature diary for JanuaryDalesman January issueThis year I’m going to be focussing on the Yorkshire Dales because I’ve just started writing the nature diary for the Yorkshire Dalesman magazine. My new feature gets a mention on the Dalesman website;

‘Wild Yorkshire
Richard Bell hits the ground running as he gets ready to watch wildlife in the new year’

That sums up the way I feel today.

This new monthly column is all the excuse that I need to explore a National Park that Barbara and I tend to ignore. If we’ve got only a day we tend to head for the Peak National Park, if we’ve got a few days we zoom through the Dales on our way to the Lake District National Park or we head for our favourite stretch of coast where the North Yorks Moors National Park meets the sea.
male goosanderIt’s one of those New Year’s days which make you feel as if a new chapter is opening. It’s bright, cool and breezy. We don’t seem to have seen much sun over the Christmas period or any that we had, I missed.

The river isn’t in flood but it is lapping around the trunks of the willows that grow on a low silty bank by the bridge. A male Goosander, looking as freshly painted as a decoy duck, dives amongst them.

pheasant

There’s some soft but insistent tapping on the patio windows. The cock Pheasant is back. I can’t tell whether he’s pecking at his own reflection or picking little fragments of spent sunflower seeds from the glass.

pheasant, great tit and blackbird

Diving and Dabbling

IT’S A COUPLE of weeks since we last managed a country walk so we’re glad to be back at Newmillerdam where I sketched the multiple trunks of this Ash on the corner of the Barnsley Road by the old watermill as we waited for our coffee at Becket’s Cafe (formerly the Waterside but recently revamped by the new owners).

Amongst a flock of sheep one has died and Crows and Magpie have gathered to scavenge the carcass.

There are at least 4 Goosanders on the lake, two males and two females. There could have been eight in total but their ability to swim together underwater and pop up together 50 yards away makes me think we saw the one group in two different locations.

A bird which I suspect we often miss spotting at Newmillerdam because it spends so much of its time diving underwater is the Dabchick. After a quick view of it diving we waited a minute or so and, unlike the Goosanders, it popped at the same spot.

Treecreeper

WE SPOTTED this Treecreeper climbing up the crab apple by the pond, meanwhile a Nuthatch had flown to take a sunflower heart from one of the bird feeders. Our delight at seeing these two infrequent visitors in our back garden at one soon turned to shocked horror as the Treecreeper hurtled like a missile towards the feeders then continued, hitting the patio window and instantly killing itself by, as far as I can tell, breaking its neck.

I didn’t want it to have died in vain so I picked it up to draw and also checked the internet and phoned the British Trust for Ornithology just in case someone might be studying the species and might have a use for a fresh casualty for analysis, but they didn’t know of any study at present, unless the bird had died of disease.

Length: 12.7 cm
Beak: 1.7 cm
Tail: 6 cm
Weight: 8 grams

Mobbed

1.10 p.m., Horbury; A BARRED brown Sparrowhawk is being mobbed by a flock – a ‘charm’ but I’m sure that the Sparrowhawk doesn’t see it that way – of about 20 Goldfinches over the trees by the Memorial Park. It swoops over the town hall then soars up towards the convent, pausing occasionally at the top of its arc of flight, as if it’s considering stopping to hover like a Kestrel.

Blacklight

The new Field Guide to the Micro Moths of Great Britain and Ireland by Phil Sterling and Mark Parsons, illustrated by Richard Lewington, has inspired me to have a go at setting up a moth trap at the end of the garden in my recently mown and hacked back ‘meadow area’.

Having asked a couple of friends who’ve done a bit of moth trapping – in fact one of them has done moth surveys for a living since since he left college – I’ve decided to go for the cheaper but more fiddly option of making my own moth trap.

The basis of this is a low energy flourescent blacklight; a 20 watt ultra violet light as used in discos.

Martins

As I walk down the garden to close the greenhouse, 14 House Martins are circling and chattering a hundred feet above the meadow. A reminder that autumn hasn’t totally set in although it won’t be long before they set off back to Africa.

I pick a couple of Supersweet tomatoes in the greenhouse and a couple of raspberries from the canes as I walk past, none of which makes it back to the kitchen.

Sketchy Impressions

First page in a new A4 Pink Pig cartridge paper sketchbook.

By the way, apologies for the scrappy drawings but there’s a reason for these. I’m out of the habit of regular sketching, particularly of wildlife subjects so I decided that to get myself back in drawing mode for the autumn I’d go back to the main method that I used for my Wild West Yorkshire nature diary in the early years, drawing the day’s wildlife observations from memory in as simple a way as possible, in this case fountain pen and watercolour crayons.

To get over the time that I spend sitting at the computer writing and revising text, I decided that I’d also write my notes in the sketchbook.

Writing by hand makes me slow down and think about what I’m writing and it usually turns out to be coherent enough not to need the revisions and tweaks that I always find myself doing when I’m typing my thoughts directly to the computer.

To Mow a Meadow

The meadow area this afternoon, before cutting.

THE END of summer; I think that the time’s right for cutting back the small meadow area at the end of the garden. There are a few scarlet poppies but most of the flowers are over now and should have set seed.

As I empty the trimmings on the compost heap, a Robin comes so close to me that I could reach out and touch it. There are two of them, equally tame, one hopping around where I’ve mown, the other near the shed. For the moment they seem to be sharing the garden in peace.

But inevitably cutting back this grassroot jungle has left one or two creatures homeless.

I try to mow the grass in sequence of swathes that will allow frogs and toads to gradually retreat towards the hedge as I progress. I get a brief glimpse of something hopping away near the log pile but I’m afraid that a couple of large slugs aren’t so lucky. I know they’re a traditional gardener’s ‘enemy’ but I’d have rescued them if I’d spotted them first.

I can see what appear to be vole runs in the turf and I notice two tiny newts, wriggling through the debris looking for cover in crevices in the damp earth. I manage to carefully rescue one and release it under the cover of the hedge, near next door’s pond.

Hope the Robin doesn’t spot it as it hops around under the hedge.

Heron and Wagtail

7.30 am; I SAW a Grey Heron flying unusually low over the roof tops and it was only 5 or 10 minutes later that I realised that it was flying so low because it was coming in to land at the edge of our garden pond; a juvenile, still in streaky grey plumage.

It soon flew off when it saw use looking at it. Hope it didn’t eat too many of our frogs and newts during its visit.

A minute later an equally infrequent visitor to our garden had taken its place by the pond; a Grey Wagtail bobbed and pecked around the pond edge.

Brockholes

WE TAKE the Mallard car ferry to Waterhead then walk along the lakeside path through the woods, following a trail of snack packets as there’s a school party ahead of us, some of whom have brought their own music with them. The way through the woods must be so boring for them without the music and snacks!

Columbine

For us though, it’s a break for coffee and a scone at the newly reopened National Trust property Wray Castle. The steam launch Columbine is down at the landing stage as we wait for the ferry to Brockholes.

Monkey Puzzle

While a second school party disembarks and heads for the treetop walk (now that does look fun) we decide it’s time for tea and a toasted teacake on the terrace by the house, where I draw this Monkey Puzzle. Monkey Puzzles, Araucaria, evolved at a time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and you can appreciate that only the tallest sauropod, standing on its hind legs, would be able to browse the scaly foliage on its top branches.

Deep in the Wood

The last time that we were at Brockholes was in 1987 when I launched my children’s book Deep in the Wood. Barbara and I organised the event with the Lake District National Park, informed the local press and booked ourselves into a bed and breakfast at Hawkshead. All the publishers had to do was supply the books and we’d seen them a few days before and their top rep had promised to do that.

‘Have the books arrived yet?’ I asked in eager anticipation when we called in at Brockholes the day before the event.

‘No, no sign of them, have you got copies with you?’

I had yet to even see a copy so we phoned the publishers who told us that, yes, they were going to send them but when they went to the stock room they found that the book had sold out in the first few days of publication, so they couldn’t!

They rounded up a few copies from around the office and sent them on via overnight courier. I think this was when I realised that my future lay in self-publishing!

As it happened, it rained heavily all weekend so we had sufficient books for the few visitors who braved the weather. As a consolation, the Lakeland National Park Authority invited us to take a stall at their annual national show at Chatsworth. Princess Diana opened the show and on her tour of the marquees took a brief look at our stall. But she didn’t buy a copy of the book for William and Harry. She seemed rather shy but we’d been instructed not to talk to her unless she spoke to us first. I was equally nervous; I’d been determined to be drawing when she came to the stall but I just froze as she stopped to take a look. This awkward moment ended when a child, peeking in through a gap in the canvas behind our stall, waved at her. Diana smiled and moved on.

In fact the only person who she talked to in the whole marquee was a watercolourist, who was the only exhibitor who had her back turned to the public, as she was working on a painting. Diana leaned over to take a closer look and confided to her; ‘I’m hopeless at that!’ (unlike Prince Charles who has painted watercolours for years).

Birds at the feeding station included Nuthatch and a juvenile Great Spotted Woodpecker.

Return Trip

Langdale from Brockholes landing stage

The return ferry, taking an anticlockwise route around the northern end of Windermere via Ambleside back to Bowness gave me an opportunity to draw the landscape, and add some watercolour.

Hills to the north east of Ambleside

Western shore of Windermere, Ambleside to Bowness.

 

A Walk in Wharfedale

THIS SUMMER we’ve had so much cool rainy weather and few mornings like this; warm but not sultry; clear, bright sunlight and intensely blue skies with fair weather cumulus. With trees in full leaf and verges frothing with Cow Parsley the countryside now has the fullness of summer but grasses, flowers and foliage still have the un-nibbled freshness of spring.

We’ve missed out on this, a favourite spring walk through Wharfedale, in the last two or three years and when we arrive at Skipton we discover that we can’t get to our starting point at Bolton Abbey by bus because the county council has been cutting back on rural services (except at weekends), so we opt for a taxi. But we start our walk from the bus stop and just over the wall, down in a culverted water course, the first bird that we see is a Dipper flying low just above the water under a old stone bridge, which I guess is where it has its nest.

‘Have you seen any Kingfishers?’ a couple ask us later on the walk. No Kingfishers but we’re pleased that despite the recent heavy rains there’s a lot of activity around a Sand Martins colony in the riverbank at Gibson’s Mill, where a pair of Oystercatchers are standing on the sand below and a Grey Heron stalking in the pasture beyond.

Whenever I see Bolton Abbey, whether its on television or on a calendar, I always think that it’s about time we visited it again and at last here we are. Some day I’ll buy the guide book and study the ruins but today we’re here for a riverside walk, so we backtrack along the Dales Way to its official starting point in Ilkley.

Addingham is perfectly placed for a coffee stop and when we reach Ilkley we take a break on a bench in the shade of riverside trees overlooking the Old Bridge where the sign ‘Bowness 82 miles’ marks the start of the Dales Way.

Ackworth School

A QUAKER SCHOOL since 1779, the main buildings of Ackworth date from 1757 and were originally built as a Foundling Hospital, taking in homeless children from London. Two decades later the Society of Friends bought the then empty Hospital and 84 acres of land surrounding it for £7000.

We’re here on a Wakefield Naturalists’ summer field meeting to explore the grounds, which originally included 5 acres of garden and orchard in addition to the the 1¼ acre quadrangle.

Gold Spot

Francis Higginbottom, science teacher at Ackworth School, our guide this morning has left a moth trap on overnight. Perhaps because of the recent unsettled weather there are only half a dozen moths in it, including this Gold Spot, Plusia festucae. This moth is found in damp habitats, such as water meadows and riverbanks. The trap was set up a hundred yards or so from the River Went. Those gold spots have a metallic sheen to them.

Bird Life

A pair of Sparrowhawks is nesting in a sycamore by the cricket pitch and Long-tailed Tit had built, and now abandoned, having reared a brood, this nest, which incorporates spiders’ webs and lichen.

Nearby on the ground there’s turquoise blue Starling’s egg.