Category: Birds

The Lime Green Sketchbook

3.30 pm; THREE Long-tailed Tits join the Goldfinches, House Sparrows, Bullfinch, Greenfinch, Chaffinch, Great Tit and Blue Tit already at or around the bird feeders. While most of the other birds are going for the sunflower hearts in the feeders or spilt below, the Long-tails go for the fat-balls.

A Wood Pigeon lands on the ivy in front of our next-door neighbour's. The ivy berries, now ripe, are probably the attraction.

Great Tits, Blue Tits and sparrows will also go for the fat-balls but we don’t recall seeing any of the finches feeding on them.

We’ve given up on putting out peanuts. They get left whenever sunflower hearts are available and they soon go soft.

The downside to this is that peanuts – especially red bags of peanuts – are particularly attractive to Siskins and, so far, we haven’t seen this small finch at the feeders this winter.

New Sketchbook

So far I’ve been saving my lime green A5 landscape format Pink Pig sketchbook for natural history subjects; I managed to draw 14 pages last year between mid-May and the beginning of August before events took over and I had to be content with a few snatched moments of natural history in my regular sketchbook.

That regular sketchbook, a black A5 portrait format sketchbook with soft, bleed-through cartridge paper that I’ve never cared for, is now complete and the drawing of the lime
green sketchbook (above) is the last that I’ve got room for.

I’m now going to use the green for my everyday sketches but, of course, I’m hoping that on most days that will involve natural history.

Chimney drawn from the optician's waiting room last month.

The little black book contains so many waiting room sketches – I take my mum to about 50 appointments through the year, and then there’s our regular visits to dentists etc on top of that – so the lesson that I can learn is always to carry some ‘natural form’ object with me, for those inevitable unplanned periods where I have to wait a little longer than expected; a pebble, a leaf, a fossil or a feather for instance.

The most popular waiting room subjects in the little black book were architectural details (11), chairs (7), hands (4), trees seen through the window (3), piles of magazines (2) and my shoe and the reception desk at the doctors (1 of each). There are also three sets of sketches of the goldfish in the dentist’s.

Café Rouge

Here are the last couple of sketches drawn on location in the black book this lunch time at Café Rouge in Meadowhall between my first one-to-one session learning a bit more about my new computer at the Apple store and heading off to Orgreave with a consignment for our book suppliers.

You might be thinking whatever happened to our ideal of getting back to healthy eating, well, apparently the grilled chicken with roast vegetables and bulgar wheat amounts to just 600 calories.

How many calories the chocolate and banana crepe contained we didn’t trouble ourselves to find out.

 

Wild Goose Chase

Our (anti-clockwise) 6½ mile route via Anglers Lake (bottom right), Walton Park (top centre) and the woodlands, mainly coniferous, of Haw Park, highlighted in Google Earth.

WE’RE MISSING one of the regulars on our traditional and slightly delayed Boxing Day birding walk. My friend from schooldays David hasn’t been able to migrate back from Cumbria to his home town this year so this is the perfect opportunity for John (back from Plymouth) and I to add two brand new species to the list of Boxing Day birds that we’ve built up over the last 30 years or so.

On our way to the Main Hide at Anglers Country Park we meet local birder Peter Smith and ask him to point us in the direction of today’s star birds:

“Is the American Wigeon still around?”

Pete explains that it’s out towards the centre of the lake. And he directs us towards the Greenland White-fronted Goose which has joined a flock of Greylags in the fields beyond.

“We’d like to get them on our list, so that we can tell David, who’s been coming round with us for the last 30 years but can’t make it this year!”

“That’s ‘griping off’!” chuckles Pete.

Sadly, we don’t get the chance to ‘gripe off’ David. I’ve no doubt that we saw the American Wigeon and the Greenland White-front, but we didn’t have the birdwatching skills to pick them out amongst (a) the hundreds of European Wigeon on the choppy water’s of Europe’s largest pond-liner lined lake and (b) amongst the other 77 grey geese (we counted them!) in the field.

Mute Swans, Wintersett Reservoir (also known as Top Reservoir) south west of Anglers.

David also missed out on an us getting slightly lost. After puzzling over the geese for 5 minutes we decided to press on directly to Walton Park but soon found that the footpath started veering off unhelpfully in the direction of Crofton. Still, we can’t complain because we spotted around 33 species including Goosander, Tree Sparrow and Pink-footed Goose (the latter probably an escape but, as a native, it can still go on the list).

And there was a bonus; because we hadn’t managed to get out on the Boxing Day bank holiday we were able to finish our six mile circuit at the Squire’s Tearooms in the Anglers Country Park visitors centre.

A View of the Wood

SINCE I moved my computer to the window end of my studio, I’ve seen the heron flying along by the wood a couple of times. This morning I was surprised to see a Kestrel hovering above the hawthorn hedge at the end of the garden. It might have been on the look-out (with its left eye) for voles in our rough patch of meadow or it might have had its (right) eye on the field beyond the hedge.

All the work involved in reorganising my studio has meant that I’ve done very little drawing during the past week, except, at the weekend, a design for this year’s Christmas card so this hand, chair and cast iron pillar in a mill are all that I’ve drawn in odd free moments.

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Goldfinch

8 a.m.: ‘TOCK! Tock!’

Two knocks on the windows and one goldfinch is lying stunned on the patio. I guess that a sparrowhawk has just raided the garden. A small flock of goldfinches is flying off with buoyant, bouncy flight over the rooftops.

At first it seems as if it has been killed instantly by the impact but I start wondering whether it is still breathing. Perhaps its just that its tail is moving in the squally wind.

I slide back the patio doors and reach out and put it upright so that its wing isn’t splayed out. It keeps its position but still with no obvious signs of life.

As a shower of sleety rain starts, I reach out again to put it in a dry spot beneath the patio table. Now it’s looking like a stunned sportsman, hunched with head down at the edge of the playing field in recovery position.

Twenty or thirty minutes later it is sitting on the spot, looking stunned and turning its head, as if looking at the patio windows and wondering what hit it. No sign of a broken neck or wing and its sitting symmetrically, suggesting that it hasn’t broken a leg either.

Forty minutes later it has gone but Barbara sees a single goldfinch on the nut feeder. It appears to have made a full recovery.

 

The Bittern Hide

THIS IS THE VIEW looking east from the Bittern Hide at the RSPB’s Old Moor Wetlands reserve at Wath-on-Dearne, South Yorkshire. Temperature, a balmy 24°C.

We didn’t spot the reserve’s resident but elusive Bittern. During the summer it never ‘boomed’, so it’s thought to be either a juvenile or a female.

But, thanks to a birdwatcher sitting near us in the hide we saw the equally elusive Water Rail, emerging from the reeds and crossing a grassy gap. I’m pretty sure that it’s a lifer, a first for me. Oddly, it was a bird that I was very familiar with as a child; a terrace of old stone-built cottages on our street stood empty, awaiting demolition, and my friend Stephen went rummaging there. He rescued a leatherbound copy of Cassell’s Science Popularly Explained (1856) by David A. Wells, which I still have on my shelf, and a stuffed water rail in a glass fronted cabinet, long since vanished. A little time capsule commemorating some Victorian’s fascination with natural history.

There was a flock of well over a hundred of these waders in the scrape at the other side of the reserve. I’m not good at waders and these looked far from distinctive so I took notes and consulted one of the field guides in the visitor centre.

The bird that I looked up was Golden Plover – that was my first guess – but the field guide that I consulted showed summer plumage only; a striking golden yellow bird, as the name suggests.

The warden took a look at my sketch and confirmed that was what it was, but of course in winter plumage.

Back home, looking in my current favourite field guide, the Collins Bird Guide, there are several illustrations of various plumages and, helpfully, an illustration of a winter flock, looking just like the birds that we saw.

Starl-ink

THIS DRAWING of a Starling was made with my ArtPen and inked in with a Sakuyo Japanese brush using Calli Jet Black India ink. It’s on Goldline layout paper, which is 50 gsm bank paper; very smooth and semi-transparent.

With no bleed the bank paper isn’t letting the ink lines run into the fibres of the paper, which was a problem with the soft cartridge I was using the other day, but because layout paper is so thin it’s just about on the limit of being able to take a dense wash of India ink. There’s some cockling but very little sign of the ink soaking its way through the thin paper.

Pies

I’M DRAWING a proverbially Thieving Magpie and a boy snaffling pies today and, after a busy day of appointments unrelated to artwork of any description, I’m trying a different approach from my roughs first, then pen and Indian ink final artwork regime; I’m simply doodling these as Barbara and I sit and relax after dinner. I don’t get off to a good start and I think that I might have to draw these two later, but two so-so drawings are better than nothing.

Working this way a drawing takes about as long as some of my roughs. And, as I say, I can still redraw it if necessary, I don’t have to stick with my first attempt.

My drawing of Old Nick himself has turned out about as well as I’d have managed in the studio. The hand and trident are a bit shaky but the the face and figure will do.

His horns have the simplicity that I’m aiming for but my everyday sketchbook lets me down a bit here because the cartridge paper in it isn’t bleed-proof so I can’t get really crisp woodcut style lines.

Drawing a self-important Victorian gentleman wearing spectacles for my next illustration I, not surprisingly, end up with someone resembling Mr Pickwick.

I’ve used a Rotring ArtPen with a fine-nibbed sketch nib filled with ArtPen ink, not my usual Noodler’s, for these drawings and an ArtPen with a larger ‘M’ nib for thickening outlines and filling in. The hatching on Old Nick’s cloak and my Pickwick character’s coat introduces a messy sort of animation to the drawing, which I expect adds a bit of hand-drawn charm, but I’ve got something a little more sharp, graphic and punchy in mind for the images in my book, so I’m going to go back to Pentel BrushPen for the fill-in, or to watercolour brush and black ink.

And it’s got to be bleed-proof paper!

Rain Dance

A FEW MORE photographs from last weekend: this is the stream that joins the River Ness just below Ness Islands in Inverness.

There had been heavy rain on the Friday night and with the ground already soaking, this Herring Gull on the grassy banks by the Aquadome at Bucht Park was having some success with its ‘rain dance’. It was poddling the sodden turf, producing an effect which to any unfortunate earthworm below would have felt like heavy rain, prompting it to make its way to the surface to escape being drowned it in its burrow. The gull apparently caught two or three small earthworms in the few minutes that we watched it.

Tunnel Network

Something, a paving stone or a metal plate about two feet square, had recently been removed from a grass verge nearby revealing this tunnel network. A Yew tree grows close to it and the tunnels are full of Yew seeds.

You can see that many of these have been split open. Most parts of the Yew are poisonous but some birds eat the ‘berries’ (Yew is a conifer so it would be more correct to call the fleshy envelope of the seed an aril) and here, I guess, voles or Wood Mice have been collecting the ‘berries’, perhaps eating the red sticky flesh and storing the seeds, some of which have been split open. I guess that the seed case is the most poisonous part of the female yew cone but that its contents can be eaten by rodents.

It’s strange to think that one of these seeds might have germinated and grown to be a tree that might have lived to be some 3,000 years old, like the Fortingall Yew near Loch Tay, which might be the oldest tree in Europe, surviving until the year 5011 A.D. or beyond . . . if the vole hadn’t eaten it first!

Puffer

This Clyde Puffer, the S.L. VIC32 from Greenock, one the last coal-fired steam coasters, was moored on the Caledonian Canal at Merkinch. Puffers worked along the west coast, supplying the island distilleries, such as Laphroaig, which stands on the shore at Port Ellen, Islay.

I illustrated one for Stephen Cribb’s Whisky on the Rocks and was so fascinated by them that I made a folksy model for use in a Whisky on the Rocks assemblage – which also included shells, whisky miniatures and so on – that I thought might look good on the back cover of the book. Considering my skill as a model-maker it’s not surprising that they decided to stick with my pen and ink and watercolour artwork.

 

Woodland Edge

12.45 p.m.: WOOD PIGEONS clatter about and coo in a clump of trees and bushes by Coxley Dam. A Dunnock methodically pecks amongst the gravel, grasses and weeds at the edge of the parking area. Short heavy showers are interspersed with watery sun.

A Wren flits from the post to a clump of nettles, following the same route along this short stretch of woodland edge as the Dunnock but a foot or two higher, amongst the vegetation.

So that’s ground layer and herb layer that are being checked out for invertebrate prey. Up in the tree canopy, around fifteen feet above the ground, a Blue Tit is making an equally thorough investigation of the branches and foliage.

And of course there are those noisy Wood Pigeons too. They’re no doubt doing some feeding in the canopy while they’re there but I suspect most of their feeding is taking place in the surrounding arable fields and pastures, with frequent trips back to the cover of woodland when they’re disturbed.

The River Ness

Mas leat an saoghal, is leat daoin’ an domhain

If the world is yours, the people of the world are yours too.

Gaelic proverb on the wall of the Cuach Coffee Shop, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery.
(A Cuach or quaich is a shallow, two-handed drinking cup, still used on Burns Night in Scotland)

DOES THIS PROVERB mean that if you go out into the world and become a part of it people will accept you and welcome you? It could just as easily be the motto of Cináed mac Ailpín (Kenneth MacAlpine), “The Conqueror”, the ninth century King of the Scots who is reputed to have conquered the Picts.

Inverness, known as ‘the Capital of the Highlands’ is the only capital city that I know of where you can look down from a bridge and see the bottom of the river.

10.25 a.m.: A juvenile Herring Gull wheels down to the grassy bank on the far side of the river to peck and preen, oblivious of the people walking past yards away on the pavement at the other side of the wall. My sketches suggest that this is a juvenile that fledged last year because its back is beginning to turn grey (top left). In a first year bird, the back would be entirely mottled brown.

Some of the litter bins have posters on them asking you not to feed the gulls. The gulls are streetwise, hanging around on the bustling pedestrianised high street of the city, on the look out for scraps. They can recognise a bag of teacakes from a hundred yards away; a man and boy walk past, the man holding a white plastic bag of teacakes (for human, not gull, consumption) and soon three gulls and two crows appear.

These crows are black like the Carrion Crows we’re used to seeing in Yorkshire but we also see Hooded Crows which are grey with black head, breast-patch, wings and tail. Seeing this race of the crow always makes me feel that I’m in the Highlands. They’re also the crows that you’re likely to see in Europe to the south and east of the Alps. We see a number of hybrids of the two races.

An immature Grey Heron watches then strikes. I can’t see whether it actually caught a fish but I suspect that it did as it then wiped each side of its bill against the branch that it’s standing on.

Three Herring Gulls swooped down on the Heron and half-heartedly tried to dislodge it from its perch. They then took up look-out posts on the tops of buildings overlooking the river.