Category: Birds

The Handbook

AS I STAGGERED back from my 16 mile walk in the sun the other week, a neighbour stopped and asked me if I was interested in some bird books he had been given which were sitting in his garage, waiting until he could find for a suitable home for them. He showed me four hefty volumes published by the RSPB in the early 1980s. They were still in their original packaging and in excellent conidition. It shows how incoherent I was after my walk that I didn’t immediately realise what they were.

A short search on Google revealed that these were in fact the first four volumes of the monumental nine volume Birds of the Western Palearctic. That’s the subtitle by which they’re generally known but the actual title is Handbook (some handbook; you wouldn’t get far with these in your haversack!) of the Birds of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. The RSPB printed an ‘orthnithologists edition’ limited to 5000 copies. With a bit of reorganising I’ve managed to fit them on my shelves. Now all I need to do is track down the remaining five volumes.

When Barbara and I were staying on Skokholm Island, the warden described Birds of the Western Palearctic as ‘the most boring bird book ever published’; what he meant was that you couldn’t really browse through it for pleasure but when it comes to information about a species, if something you’ve observed isn’t mentioned in the text, then it’s probably new to science. Barbara and I had been watching Jackdaws carrying shells into their nesthole in a rabbit burrow on the cliff-top near The Neck on Skokholm. The warden was soon able to tell us that there is no mention of shells in the list of nesting materials in the entry on Jackdaws, so that’s probably something that has never been observed and recorded in birdwatching literature.

I’m really grateful to my neighbour and I feel as if the books waiting for me to come along and put them to some use. Earlier this year, I decided that it was about time that I started exploring the wilder corners of Europe – hence our holiday in Switzerland – and the Western Palearctic is the ecozone that our continent occupies. I don’t know why I should ever need to refer to a description of a bird with that level of detail but it’s reassuring to have such an authoritative source of birding wisdom available.

Kingfisher

THIS MORNING I spotted a Kingfisher flying to a perch on a branch on a pebbly bank at the edge of the river by the Bingley Arms. It spent a minute or two bashing the small fish it had just caught against the branch.

It watched from the perch for a while then dived down into the shallows beneath, emerging without catching a fish. Back on its perch but looking the other way, it watched, then dived again, once more without success, before flying off downstream.

It’s a long time since I saw a Kingfisher and I don’t remember ever seeing one dealing with a fish but it’s good to know that they’re still about.

Monkeying about with Elements 5

As I listened to the radio, I started doodling on the back of an envelope. Envelopes are often pleasant to draw on, smoother than the cartridge I’m used to but still with enough grain on the surface to provide some character.

I’ve recently loaded up Photoshop Elements 5 on my computer. It came bundled with the scanner but I’ve never given it a try. I’ve yet to find a program that makes animated GIFs as simple as they should be. The Elements version won’t allow me to vary the speed between frames so this ape is doomed to roll his eyes continuously at a rate of 0.2 seconds between frames.

Greenhouse Mural Sketch

I WAS LOOKING through my 1972 student diary recently (see Student Days) and was reminded that on 4 October that year, at the start of my first full month at college I drew:

‘ . . . a sketch from imagination of the proposed identification chart which I thought that I might do as a large painting – in emulsion of course!’

This ‘identification chart’, which grew into an 8ft x 4ft acrylic on chipboard mural, absorbed a lot of my time for the next three years and I was still adding details to it – I think the last thing that I painted was a leopard frog in the foreground – on the eve of the degree show.

To demonstrate the process that I’d gone through, I included the original sketch in my show but I was surprised when a fellow student – a young man from the jewellery department who would go on to make a name for himself as a goldsmith – asked if it was for sale.

Detail from the finished acrylic on chipboard painting

I was taken aback by this and explained that, as a working drawing, it was never intended to be for sale. It’s on the cheap smooth offset paper that they sold at the college shop, folded down the middle and on the back there are streaks where I’ve cleaned my brush, ring-marks from a coffee cup but at one end there are some delightful sketches of frogs in ballpoint pen, drawn by my tutor John Norris Wood when he was advising me to add some reptiles and amphibians to the painting.

I’ve just come across the sketch in a drawer in the plan chest and I can now see why my college friend was attracted to it. It’s rough and splodgy but there’s spontaneity about it that is inevitably missing in the laboriously crafted finished product.

Gull Feather CSI

I PICKED up this feather, a primary from the gull’s right wing,  on the pavement in front of the Bingley Arms, an old pub that stands on a narrow strip of land between the river and the canal at Horbury Bridge. Having a feather as a temporary bookmark in my sketchbook proved handy when I found myself sitting in a waiting room with nothing else available to draw.

The underside is a shade lighter. There’s a scallop-shaped indentation at the tip of the feather. Was this the result of the gull preening; tugging out an old feather that was past its best?

Under the microscope, half way down the unfeathered end of quill, you can see this scratch. Is the ‘V’-shaped impression on the underside of the quill an impression left by gull’s bill when it was preening?

Scratches like these around the base of a feather can be a sign that a sparrowhawk has gripped and twisted with its beak as it plucks feathers from it’s prey. Could this be evidence that the gull was taken by a sparrowhawk?

Smoking Shelter

A few yards from my suspected avian crime scene, down the side of the Bingley Arms, there’s a smoking shelter, one of the most picturesque I’ve seen, with petunias, geraniums and garden mint in pots and runner beans and sweet peas growing up the trellis.

If I was visiting a pub on a summer’s day, I’d find this more tempting than sitting in the public bar. But I’m still not tempted to take up smoking.

Heron at the Pond

7.15 a.m.; AS I OPENED the blind on the window in the studio I was puzzled by a shape like a Grecian urn reflected in the pond. It was only after I’d seen the reflection that I realised that there was a juvenile Grey Heron standing behind the pond. It flew off towards the wood. As far as I remember, this is the first time in over 25 years that we have seen a Heron by the pond, although we’ve had them in the garden before.

It’s a reminder to me that I need to continue adding marginal, emergent and floating water plants to the pond to give the frogs and newts some cover.

Yesterday morning and again this morning we heard the high-pitched ‘mewing’ of a bird of prey. When I heard it yesterday, all that I could see in the air were a couple of crows. Today we saw a Buzzard soaring over the wood and I wonder if it has been perching somewhere down at this end of the valley, causing commotion amongst the local crows.

I’ve been working down by the compost bins. I opened the lid of one of the bins to add more compost and there, sitting at the top of the pile was a small Toad. It’s rare for me to do much work on a compost heap without coming across one.

Moriarty in Colour

With all the clearing up I had to do in the garden there’s not much time to immerse myself in the world of Sherlock Holmes today but I did have time to add a spot of colour to Moriarty. There’s a black and white engraving by Paget that I’d also like to draw from. It has the caption ‘He turned his rounded back on me’. In it Moriarty looks like a cross between a black beetle and a Marabou Stork. A colourful character even in black and white.

Thrush’s Anvil


2.30 p.m., 22°C

FLIES, INCLUDING one bluebottle and three glossily metallic greenbottles, are attracted to the slimy stain on this fragment of sandstone in the bottom corner of the garden. The Song Thrush has been using it as an anvil, leaving fragments of the shells of at least three Brown-lipped Snails and one Garden Snail. I think that the plain ochre yellow snail in the middle is a colour variation of the Brown-lipped Snail.

You might think that the colour would provide suitable camouflage in this corner of the garden but it evidently wasn’t enough for it to escape the attentions of the Song Thrush.

Leylandi Stump

Soon after I’d started drawing this stump, a Bank Vole appeared, pausing under the stump before disappearing beneath it. Later I had a glimpse of its white front paws (do voles have ‘paws’?) beneath the adjoining log pile. Bank Voles have chestnut fur and a longer tail than that of the greyer Field Vole, which is also known as the Short-tailed Vole.

I’ve stacked the stump and sawn-up branches here as a habitat pile, so I’m pleased to see the vole using it.

But I have removed another habitat that it had been using; voles (or perhaps Wood Mice) had excavated a small network of tunnels beneath a clump of the Flag Iris that we removed from the pond. That has now gone on the compost heap.

Flying Ants

There’s more than usual ant activity on the patio by the kitchen window this afternoon. It’s a still, warm settled day and it’s been chosen as the time for ant colonies in the area to release their winged queens and smaller winged males on a nuptial flight. Barbara said that on her walk home from work at 5 p.m. there were lots of them about, some of them landing on her as she walked down Quarry Hill.

Pondweed

AFTER  CLEARING the pond last week and leaving the water to clear we’re now adding ten weighted bunches of oxygenating Curled Pondweed, Potamogeton crispus. I’m thinking carefully before I choose the floating and emergent plants that we’re going to add next as I don’t want to introduce anything which will completely take over the pond as the Yellow Flag Iris did.

The evening after we’d cleared the pond and cut down some of the surrounding vegetation, we watched a Hedgehog snuffling around the pond edge. It waddled over to the garden shed to search amongst the grasses before disappearing under the hawthorn hedge into next door’s garden.

Snails are a regular part of a hedgehog’s diet but the empty and broken shells that we find on concrete paths in our garden are the result of another snail-eater which we’ve been seeing quite often recently; the Song Thrush. A week or two ago it came up to the patio with two youngsters. It may have nested in the ivy in the far corner beyond the greenhouse or in one of our next door neighbour’s dense evergreen shrubs.

Sadly another young Greenfinch collided with the patio windows on Sunday afternoon. We heard the bang. Sometimes the bird is dazed but it survives but this one was unlucky and apparently broke its neck on impact. The windows were open at the time but unfortunately it flew into the glass instead of flying into the house.

Four Feathers

I PICKED up these crow feathers in a pasture as we walked from Hope to Castleton on Wednesday. I’ve drawn them in dip pen using Winsor and Newton black Indian ink but the wash is dilute Chung Hwa Chinese Ink (see Dark Materials, 11 March 2006) which I keep ready-mixed in four different strengths from pale to dark. I’ve used the two palest shades here. I used these pre-mixed washes regularly when working on my black and white sketchbook published as High Peak Drifter (Willow Island Editions, 2006).

For this gull feather, which I picked up when I drew at the pond at Dewsbury hospital on Tuesday, I used Winsor and Newton Peat Brown ink with pen and wash.

I find feathers quite a challenge to draw because of the gentle curves of the outline and quill and all the curving parallel lines of the barbs. I admit to putting this feather on my desk with the quill curving up in the middle because I thought I’d find it more difficult to draw it the other way up, against the natural curve that a pen makes as you rotate your hand at the wrist.

It would be good practice for me to keep picking up feathers and drawing them until I get a feel for them.

Absent Feathered Friends

‘. . . its flesh is good and wholesome eating. It is a silly simple bird, as may very well be supposed from its figure, and is very easily taken. Three or four dodos are enough to dine a hundred men.’

‘The Auk, which breeds on the islands of St Kilda, chiefly differs from the penguin in size and colour : it is smaller than a duck ; and the whole of the breast and belly, as far as the middle of the throat, is white’

Oliver Goldsmith, History of the Earth, 1774

In his footnotes for the 1832 edition Captain Thomas Brown describes the dodo as extinct but says of the Great Auk that it ‘inhabits Europe and America ; is three feet in length ; is very timid ; it has not the power of flying ; its food is chiefly fishes.’

The last Great Auk was killed in June 1844 on Eldey Island, Iceland.

Mystery Bird

Engraving by R. Scott, 1832.

Reading the chapter on Penguins in Goldsmith, it’s surprising that they have escaped extinction: ‘Our sailors . . . give these birds the very homely, but expressive, name of arse-feet.

‘ . . . They have stood to be shot at in flocks, without offering to move, in silent wonder, till every one of their number has been destroyed.’

But what’s that bird standing between the Rockhopper and the Patagonian Penguin? Is that another extinct sea-bird? The down-curved bill is curious, more like a curlew’s, and, in the context of penguins and guillemots, the lack of webbing between the toes looks distinctly odd.

I think that what has happened here is that the artist has been given a cabinet skin of a kiwi, Apteryx, which wouldn’t give a true impression of the shape of the bird and he’s found it appropriate to depict it amongst the southern hemisphere penguins. I’ve yet to find Goldsmith’s description of the bird because neither ‘kiwi’ or ‘Apteryx’ appear in the index of History of the Earth.

Ducklings

11 a.m.: MALLARD DUCKLINGS are dabbling and snapping at flying insects or stretching up to peck resting insects from the tall leaves of reedmace in the pond by the occupational therapy unit of Dewsbury hospital. The feathers on their backs look soft and downy but they’re completely waterproof; droplets are repelled ‘like water off a duck’s back’.

Every waiting room should have an adjacent pond: this makes a change from drawing a chair, as I did yesterday morning as I waited for my mum at the doctor’s. And think what all those little ponds would do for our country’s commitments to increasing biodiversity!

It might make us healthier too. I’ve got only 10 or 15 minutes to sit on a rock at the water’s edge but, during those minutes I soon find myself drawn into a timeless world. I’m sure if the medics here hooked me up to one of their monitors they’d find my blood pressure and my pulse-rate going down, my muscles relaxing.

When you climb over the broken wall and walk past the scatter of drinks cans into this little park you enter another world. The watery jungle of reedmace stems is the nearest you’re going to find to a mangrove swamp in Dewsbury. The chicks swimming to and fro are behaving much as the chicks of Hesperornis might have 70 million years ago.

For that matter, the birds are probably behaving much as their dinosaur ancestors might have done down by the waterhole. A Moorhen chases a Mallard duck across the grass. The duck is larger but the Moorhen is more than a match for it.

Perhaps it’s so aggressive because it has young nearby. A couple of small fluffy black chicks paddle across the khaki-coloured waters of the pond towards the reedmace.

It might be protecting young, but on the other hand it might simply be expressing its crotchety character as a Moorhen. Moorhens don’t seem to need any excuse to act aggressively. Whether they’re protecting young, nest building or involved in courtship, they’ll take any opportunity to pick a fight.

Goldsmith on the Water-hen

Where the stream is selvaged with sedges, or the pond edged with shrubby trees, the water-hen is generally a resident there : she seeks her food along the grassy banks, and often along the surface of the water. With Shakespeare’s Edgar, she drinks the green mantle of the standing pool ; or, at least seems to prefer those places where it is seen.

History of the Earth, 1774

 

Greenfinch

THIS YOUNG greenfinch had hit the glass panel in our back door. We’ve heard bangs on the patio windows on two or three occasions during the last week or so but this is the first fatality. It’s whole shape, but particularly that tail, is fishlike.

Ways to reduce casualties might include moving the bird feeders further from the house and sticking birds of prey silhouettes on the windows but the latter would have little effect if, as probably happens several times each day, the bird is being chased by a real sparrowhawk at the time.

Another young greenfinch, presumably a nest-mate of this bird, continues to come to feast at the sunflower heart feeders.

One evening Barbara saw a sparrowhawk swoop at a goldfinch on the feeder. The goldfinch swerved from side to side as it was chased at high speed down the garden and managed to escape across the meadow into the comparative safety of the wood. By this time the sparrowhawk gave up and flew up to perch on a branch.

Mole

Another casualty, but this mole may be a casualty of natural causes rather than of predation. I noticed a number of molehills in our small patch of meadow when I was mowing back the weeds and grasses on our return from holiday. It’s been very dry, so the mole might have been under some stress as its earthworm prey became inactive, but this individual appeared to be a well-fed. This week the meadow between us and the wood has been mown, so I expect that it’s possible that this mole suffered some kind of internal injury as the tractor moved across the field and fled to our garden.

But moles may be like their relatives the shrews; you find them lying dead by paths, apparently having simply expired there. Shrews are said to be distasteful to predators, so perhaps, like them, moles don’t make attractive prey items.

Horse Chestnut

Taking my mum to a hospital appointment when we got back from holiday, I found time to draw this horse chestnut from the shelter of the entrance porch, as it was raining at the time.

Growing from a narrow grass verge between building and tarmac road, it’s not surprising that the tree is showing signs of stress, putting out all those shoots from the trunk.

Parts of the Pea Flower

My mum had put some sweet peas from her garden in a vase with sprigs of lady’s mantle.

The magenta petals of the flowers are backed by the green, star-shaped sepals. The flowers grow in a raceme, a type of inflorescence in which the flowers are arranged along a central axis along the stem.

Each flower is supported by a pedicel – a small stalk.