Category: Habitats

Birdbath Cam

Olympus Tough
Olympus EM10 MkII

1.45 pm, Monday 25 January: So far no takers. I’ve somewhat hopefully set up my DSLR, Olympus Tough and even my iPhone all focussed on the birdbath. Just a few feet away there are long-tailed tits, wood pigeons and starlings feeding but nothing is touching down for a quick drink.

What do you know?! – just as I wrote that, a blue tit came down and perched exactly on the spot that I’d focussed on. Let’s hope that the memory card lasted out!

Later

Unfortunately it’s just as I expected: the blue tit turned up a few minutes after the two cameras ran out of memory. It should be there on the iPhone but that’s just taking a general view.

Back at the Waterhole

blue tit

I give it another try and 3.30 pm, which in winter is late afternoon, proves to be a better time. Within the first five minutes this blue tit comes down to drink, then flies up to the sunflower hearts feeder.

I could have guaranteed some bird action if I’d focussed on the feeders but it’s going to take a bit more arranging to get my cameras up on that level. Besides, a bird’s bathing routine is going to be more interesting than just watching them feeding.

Just to be sure that I’d get something, I set up the iPhone at the foot of feeding pole, so at least I’ll have some close-up shots of blackbirds, chaffinch and robin on the ground.

Roosting Wrens

Wrens at a sparrow box in mid-January – are they roosting or thinking about a nest site? And what will happen when the resident blue tit returns?

In the sequence where the two wrens are hopping around on top of the box, it looks as if one of them has a small green caterpillar in its bill. This could be courtship feeding, so the tour of alternative nest holes might be the male giving the female a tour of possible nest sites.

wren at the nest box

Wednesday 13 January, Barbara’s diary: Some day we will get it right for the birds!

First we put up a blue tit box and sparrows nested in it, so we replaced it with a sparrow terrace with three nest holes and the blue tits nested in it.

Now the blue tits are sub-letting to a group of wrens.

blue tit
Barbara’s iPhone photograph of the blue tit at nest hole 1.

As I went to make our morning cuppa, passing the back door something caught my eye, I looked out at the sparrow box and in the half light could see a little head appear from hole number one. I was amazed to see a wren fly out and it was quickly followed by three more, they had obviously been using it as an overnight roost.

We had spotted a wren yesterday coming out of hole number three, while at the same time a blue tit was taking great interest in hole number one. Another blue tit attempted to investigate the middle hole but the one at hole one in no uncertain terms let it know it wasn’t welcome, although it didn’t seem bothered by the wren.

It would be lovely to think that we could have blue tit and wren making a nest in the terrace this Spring and a bonus would be a sparrow in the middle. Well, who knows what will happen with these contrary birds!

Barbara Bell

Saturday 16 January, 4.45 pm: I’d seen a wren hopping about on the hedge but it was taking its time coming over to the nestbox. That changed when a blue tit flew over an perched at the left-hand nest hole. Within seconds the wren was there, perching on the edge of the box and, in no uncertain terms, letting the blue tit know that it wasn’t welcome.

The wren popped into the hole for just a few seconds before flitting out again. We don’t know if there are any wrens roosting in the box tonight. On previous nights we’ve seen three going in there as darkness falls.

The Boathouse

Boathouse

To my mind the prettiest village is Newmillerdam, four miles from Wakefield. The scenery is in the village, not outside . . .

In summer people are allowed to walk round the lake, and admire the beautiful trees and ferns and flowers. In winter, when everything is covered with snow, and skaters are gliding along the lake, which is about a mile in length, it is a picture worth painting.”

Florence E. R. Clark, letter to the Leeds Mercury, 10 August 1907
British Newspaper Archive

Newmillerdam was ‘the ice skaters’ mecca in the Wakefield district’, according to the Yorkshire Evening Post, in January 1946, but they warned that although the surface was strong, it was ‘far from smooth’.

Spare a thought for the Chevet Estate gamekeepers, George Stephenson and William Mellor, who in October 1870 spotted a familiar trio of poachers – Henry Smith, Alfred Grace and William Crowther – in the Boathouse Plantation, sending a ferret down a rabbit hole. While Smith ran away, Crowther picked up a stone to strike the keepers with. They admitted poaching but said that they’d go to Sir Lionel Pilkington and ask to be let off. At Wakefield Court House, they were fined £2 each plus costs or two months imprisonment.

£2 in 1870 would be equivalent to £220 today.

Sage

sage

The leaves of this purple sage proved a bit tough when Barbara was making the stuffing this Christmas but a clump of the regular sage-green variety, growing at the end of our herb bed had smaller, more tender, leaves. It gave an aromatic lift to the stuffing, made to recipe Barbara’s mum, Betty, used every year. And it lasted until Boxing Day to go in our chicken sandwiches.

sage
Published
Categorized as Herbs Tagged

Squirrels Behaving Oddly

squirrels

Perhaps spring was the reason for the strange behaviour of a group of five grey squirrels, which we saw capering about under the beeches and oaks at Newmillerdam last February. We watched as they bounded playfully and rolled about on their backs. They weren’t bickering or chasing each as you might have expected at that time of year and they weren’t foraging or going through a grooming routine. They reminded me of children let loose in a soft play ball pool.

We couldn’t guess what they’re doing and nor could a dog, which stood motionless a few yards away, transfixed by their antics. Could that be a reason for their forest-floor frolics: to confuse predators?

If it had been the dog rolling around, I could have understood that, as they like to gather scents as a kind of badge of honour, but would squirrels do that?

Acorns

oakwood

This mixed oak wood at the top end of Coxley Valley is typical of woods on Coal Measures. In the background there are planted conifers: crops of larch and Corsican pine have been planted here, adjacent to Earnshaw’s Saw Mill, although some of them have been badly damaged by grey squirrels.

oak leaves

Even on our short walk around the wood, there’s always something to see. We got a chance to squeeze in a quick visit a couple of days ago and I was determined not to stop to take photographs, but when I saw these frost-rimmed oak leaves, I couldn’t resist getting out my iPhone.

acorns

There are so many acorns this year that in places you crunch over them and they look like pea gravel strewn along the edges of the path. The resident greys haven’t been able to squirrel them away and the flock of wood pigeons, hanging around at the corner of the wood this morning, has come nowhere near making serious inroads into the enormous quantities on offer.

pigeon feather
jay

Wood pigeons are great acorn eaters but jays are the real specialists. We’ve often seen a pair of them flying from a large oak, crops bulging with acorns. On this morning’s walk we hear them screeching somewhere in the background but we’ve yet to spot them here, collecting and caching.

holly

Berries are few and far between on the hollies, which provide some winter cover in the shrub layer of the wood.

earthball

There isn’t a lot of fungus around at the moment but I spotted these common earthballs, Scleroderma citrinum, growing amongst the leaf litter at the top corner of the wood.

badger scrape
badger

What made this scrape amongst the roots of a larch tree?

  • A squirrel? They’d usually make a neater job, they’re discrete in their excavations as they hide and recover acorns
  • A rabbit? Apparently there are some in the wood, so it’s a possibility
  • A fox? Again, you’d expect to see signs of them
  • A badger? Well, yes, I’d go for badger because of the scatter of debris. To me it looks as if it must have been a robust animal doing the digging. There are smaller excavations dotted along the side of the path. I can imagine a badger snuffling and scraping on its way through the wood.

Watercolour Border

I’ve redrawn this border from my Dalesman nature diary featuring the walk around the lake at Newmillerdam Country Park, near Wakefield. In the first version, I thought that the pen and ink was competing too much with the text. To soften it I’ve gone for:

  • soft B pencil instead of black ink
  • textured watercolour paper instead of smooth cartridge
  • loose brushwork, all with a no. 10 sable round, instead of trying to define what textures are
page layout

Masked Highland Cow

I’ve been using Photoshop for over twenty years but I’ve never got into using masks to select areas of an image, partly because I find it difficult to draw precise outlines with a mouse or a graphics pad. Now that there’s an iPad version of Photoshop I’m beginning to see the point of it. Masks are non-destructive, so your original image, in this case the highland cow, is still there if you decide you’ve erased too much of it.

The meadow is the river embankment at Skelton Lake, while to highland cow (or bull?) was grazing in a pasture at Middle Wood near Redmire Force on the River Ure in Wensleydale.

Celeriac

celariac

These celeriacs smell deliciously of celery but as they aren’t much bigger than golf balls, by the time we’ve trimmed them down there won’t be much left. We’d never grown them before but a neighbour had plenty of seedlings so we thought that we’d give it a try. We probably won’t grow them again.

Floating the Ducks

page layout

As I’m writing about our circuit around Newmillerdam for one of my Dalesman nature diaries, I thought that I’d represent our walk as a decorative border. The text fits neatly into the frame but it’s better to drop in the ducks, swan and coot to float above the background and text, then, in a program like Adobe InDesign, you can set it so the text wraps around them.

It makes a change to my usual nature diary format and I’d like to try it again with another walk, along the seashore, for example.