Category: Water

Penguin Dance

I’ve often seen great-crested grebes go through their head-shaking, ritualised preening display, but at last this morning at RSPB St Aidan’s, we got to see the presentation of beakfuls of water-weed and the penguin dance where the male and female rise from the water, breast to breast, paddling furiously and swaying heads. They appeared to drop the weed as they started this routine. They then returned to head-bobbing display.

We’ve yet to see the ‘ghostly penguin’ and the ‘cat display’ which apparently start off the whole routine.

Sutton-cum-Lound Gravel Pits, 1973

gravel lorry sketch

From my sketchbook (and diary) from 50 years ago today, Thursday, 23 August, 1973:

Mother and I visited Grandma (in excellent form). Such a fine afternoon that I took a walk out to the Gravel Pits that I haven’t visited since I was so high (well a little higher than that perhaps).

sketchbook page

A rich hedgerow was suffering from the dust of gravel lorries.

81 coots (mainly & a few tufted)
15 lapwing

sketchbook page

Common Persicaria, Pollygonum persicaria, is typical of disturbed and damp ground such as there was about the gravel workings. The leaves often have a dark blotch. Also known as Redshank.

One explanation of the dark patch is that the Devil once pinched the leaves and made them useless as they lack the fiery flavour of water-pepper.

Shetlanders used to extract a yellow dye from it.

Yes, this was a potato – the gravel pit seems to have been partly filled by rubbish.

In Search of a Lost Museum

Mother and I stopped off in Barnsley on our way to Grandma’s. According to The Naturalist’s Handbook there is a museum there.

comic strip search for the museum

“This building was the Harvey Institute, many years ago, and there was a museum here, which was in what is now the Junior Library.”

Outlet

duck

A mallard – possibly a youngster as it seems to be in the process of growing secondary wing feathers for the first time – standing at the cascading outlet of Newmillerdam lake this morning.

mallard

Meanwhile this adult female and her mate were paddling alongside the Boathouse Cafe.

Movement

Coxley Beck

Today’s module in Ben Hawkins’ Complete Beginner’s Photography Course explores movement, so he suggests techniques to freeze or alternatively blur the action of speeding vehicles or to capture traffic trails at night but I’ve headed for Coxley Beck to try some long exposures of flowing water.

Coxley Beck

For these one- to two-second exposures a tripod was essential and, as with the macro flower shots yesterday, using an app on my iPhone to trigger the camera and set the focus point made things a lot easier than squinting through the viewfinder. It also cut out any chance of camera shake.

log in the beck

A Bend on the Beck

Coxley Beck

Wearing wellies, I painted these hawthorns on a bend of Coxley Beck in April 1996. They were overhanging the deeper outside bank and since then the beck has undercut them and they ended up in the stream.

Jenny

Jenny

Jenny, natural history illustrator, drawing by our pond. She recently completed a commission to illustrate an information board about the wildlife at a pond on a nature reserve in West Sussex.

Jenny's drawing
Jenny’s drawing of the vegetation around our pond

She started on John Norris Wood’s natural history illustration course at the Royal College of Art a year after I left, in 1976 and graduated in 1979, focussing on the Chelsea Physic Garden, it’s history and plants.

Signal Crayfish

crayfish

The American signal crayfish has established itself in our local stream, which might be bad news for any of our native white-clawed crayfish that have hung on there. The good news is that otters like to eat them, so hope that they return to to our stream.

Coal Staith

coal staith

Remains of an old coal staith, a loading bay for barges, on the west side of Balk Lane bridge over the Calder and Hebble Navigation It served the former Hartley Bank Colliery, which closed in the late 1960s.

coal staith

The curved parapet of the bridge was originally capped by gently curved coping stones to prevent the tow-ropes of horse-drawn barges getting snagged. At this bridge you could have turned around the barge – and filled it up at the coal staith – without disconnecting the tow-rope.

Further upstream to the west approaching Horbury Bridge the canal passes a cutting so on this stretch towed barges heading upstream and downstream must have had some way of passing each other.

Coal Staith, Hartley Bank

Original photo

From my 1964-65 negatives, this is one of the two coal staithes (loading bays) at Hartley Bank Colliery.

The original (left) was in such a poor state that I’ve coloured it to make it more readable.

The same scene today is more green and rural, so I’ve superimposed my original 50 mm 127 frame on a wide angle iPhone shot of the same view today, taken from the bridge at the bottom of the Balk.

Apologies to ‘Ghosts of Horbury’ on our Horbury and Sitlington History Group Facebook page. I now realise how difficult it is to match up the perspective!