A favourite spot for Horbury’s feral pigeons to gather is the Co-op roof.
I drew these in my pocket-sized sketchbook and rearranged them in Photoshop before adding the tones in Fresco on my iPad Pro, using an Apple Pencil.
Pigeons
Category: Birds
Bird of Prey
A guest diary from Barbara from three weeks ago:
Tuesday 23rd November 2021
A buzzard chased by a crow swoops between the houses across the road, it appeared to have something long in its talons, Richard said a snake, I doubt it but can’t imagine what it could be
Barbara Bell
We looked in the road to see if it had dropped anything. We now suspect that this must have been an escaped bird of prey with jesses still attached. We thought how unusual it would be to see a buzzard flying so low, even when mobbed by crows, so perhaps it was some other species, such as a harris hawk.
Cache of Nuts
Later that morning we walked around St Aidan’s RSPB reserve in the Aire Valley:
After a welcome cuppa at Rivers Meet, Methley, we stride out back over the river bridge, lovely big blue sky and feeling quite warm in the sun.
We pause to watch a Jay at the side of the path. It seems to have found a cache of nuts and is unearthing them. We watch it from a short distance: the colours of the blue on its wing and the black moustache show up really well in the clear light. Meanwhile a perky robin forages around behind.
Barbara Bell
The jay removed six or more peanuts from each of several holes dotted around the turf within a few yards of each other. Had the jay previously cached them, or had it spotted a squirrel burying them?
We weren’t far from the village of Methley, so perhaps these had come from a garden feeder. In which case I think that it would more likely be a bird that cached them because the river would present too much of an obstacle to a squirrel and we were perhaps 200 yards along the path from the bridge.
The Buzzard on its Rounds
4.10 pm: A kestrel hover over the meadow and dives as if it’s about to make a kill but abandons the dive at tree-top height and flies off over the neighbour’s garden.
The buzzard was doing its rounds over back gardens and the meadow at breakfast-time this morning and it’s back again as the light fades, just thirty feet above me, as I sit at my desk by the skylight studio window.
Pheasant Duel #2
I decided that I needed a little sequence of sketches of the pheasants fighting, this is them squaring up to each other.
They circled, trying to outflank each other then they’d both leap up, sometimes striking out with their feet like a pair of heraldic beasts, then coming back low to the ground.
Pheasant Duel
Back in January, we watched these cock pheasants squaring up to each other in Coxley on a slope in Sun Wood between the upper and lower dams. It started like a Sumo contest with the rivals bowing as low as possible but simultaneously fluffing out their feathers to look intimidating, all the time nodding menacingly and occasionally making a rapier-like thrust with the beak at the opponent’s throat.
This would bubble up into sparring a foot or two from the ground. Considering how vocal male pheasants can be, there was surprisingly little grockling to accompany the bluster, just a short call as they came back down to the ground.
Autumn Migration
Latest card, for Alistair, who we’re hoping to meet up with at the London Wetlands Centre sometime soon. Of failing that Beckton Sewage Works is a bit of a biodiversity hotspot these day.
Heron Fishing
10.15 am, sunny, slight breeze: A heron is patiently watching and stalking in the shallows by an old coot’s nest near the outlet of Newmillerdam Lake. This is an immature bird; it has moulted out of its brown juvenile plumage but still has a shade of grey on its neck. It has yet to grow its crest into the breeding adult’s pigtails.
But it’s successful with its watch, bend neck and lightning-fast stab technique of fishing, catching two small fish in the space of 5 or 10 minutes. The second fish seems to me to be rather squat, and I wondered if it might be a bullhead.
By the time that I move over to the Canada geese, gathering around someone feeding them near the main car park, my pen has stopped running freely, perhaps because there’s a bit of grease on my sketchbook page or the ink is running low. I bend down from the fishing platform and dabble the nib in the water. I like the transparent effect it gives to my drawing.
The tufted duck is so buoyant that it needs a little burst of power to push itself below the surface. It looks to me as if almost the whole duck jumps out of the water before diving sharply in headfirst, with legs ready to act as paddles to propel it deeper.
Gulls chasing Bat
10.52 am, Newmillerdam near main car park, sunny slight breeze: There’s a commotion amongst the black-headed gulls and a boisterous flock of 20 or 30 of them swoop and tumble over towards me from the outlet corner of the lake. At first I think that someone must be feeding the ducks and they’re falling out, as they do, over a snatched crust.
Then I notice that the pale brown ‘crust’ is moving about on its own account. My first thought is that for some reason the gulls have ganged up on a sparrow, but the manoeuvrability is un-sparrowlike and I wonder for a moment if it could be a late swallow or martin.
One of the gulls briefly captures it and it’s not until it escapes that I can see that it’s a small bat. It dodges around then escapes into the lakeside willows where the gulls can’t follow it and the gulls head off back towards the outlet.
Ode to a Duck
At last, the world premier of my cartoon inspired by the ducks, swans, geese, squirrels and monster pike seen on our Monday morning walks around Newmillerdam.
Staple Newk
We were lucky with the weather for our midweek break on the coast, although at windswept Staple Newk at RSPB Bempton Cliffs, I made sure that I clung tight to my sketchbook as I drew this gannet calling and spreading its wings at the top of the cliff, just yards below the viewing platform.
