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.
Category: Lake
Preening Canada Geese
The preening routine of a Canada goose involves Pilates-style stretching and twisting.
Tufted Duck
The last of the supporting players, the tufted duck is taking shape and I’ve made a start on the main character, the hungry duck.
Ode to a Duck shouldn’t take long to put together now that I’ve got all the elements together. The animation shouldn’t be much longer than 60 seconds.
Pike and Perch
We’ve got most of the Newmillerdam ecosystem appearing in Ode to a Duck. It took me a while to work out how to stop my characters floating around – you simply pin their feet to the background – but that hasn’t been a problem with these two.
Joining the swan for the prologue, this Canada goose. I haven’t given him moving eyes and eyebrows, but he seems suitably goose-like without them.
Coot and Moorhen
My Ode to a Duck animation is going to be a biodiversity hotspot: here are the latest recruits, the moorhen and coot. It’s surprising how these characters take on a life of their own: I’d never thought of a moorhen as being a bit of a spiv or of a coot being an ingenue.
Ode to a Duck
T'was the last week of summer And, down by the lake, We hear the sad quack Of a hungry old drake.
The grebes and the tufted ducks Dabble and dive But our poor drake is struggling Just to survive.
The foraging moorhen
Has plenty of luck,
But that doesn't extend
To the desolate duck.
In the woods, the grey squirrels
Eat beech-nuts galore,
But our poor drake is starving
Down here on the shore.
I know what you’re thinking:
‘I’ll give him some bread!’ –
But just one mouldy bread crust
Can leave a duck dead.
This ode to a duck Might not be the best, But what were you expecting? - I'm not Colin West!
Cartoon ducks drawn at Newmillerdam this morning. We didn’t see any drake mallards in breeding plumage, so my guess is that they’re all in eclipse plumage, and we’ll see their true colours appear in the autumn.
Goose Feather
Out of the goose feather quills that I’ve cut, my favourite is the thinnest and most flexible, so it’s quite suited to the curvy shapes of ducks, willow branches and alder leaves, drawn this from a fishing platform at Newmillerdam.
But it isn’t practical for field work because the ink goes on so thickly that I can’t close the sketchbook. Over three hours later I’ve put it on the scanner and blots of ink have stuck to the glass.
Even carrying back my open sketchbook I managed to leave my thumbprint on the wet ink of the drawing. It’s part of what makes drawing with a quill more spontaneous than drawing with my usual fountain pen, but for field sketches, that’s what I’ll be going back to.
The Water Margin
I’m reading James A. Michener’s The Hokusai Sketchbooks, so this morning at Newmillerdam, as a change from pen and watercolour, I’ve gone for Chinese brush and Noodler’s Black Ink.
Lying in the lakeside mud beside me, was a freshwater mussel shell, so I used that as a suitably oriental-looking palette to mix my grey ink wash. I dipped my cup in the water and, as I started to paint, realised that I’d caught two small water creatures – water beetles perhaps – which I released unharmed at the end of my session.
I wonder if the granular quality of the wash is a characteristic of Noodler’s, or whether it was debris in the water.
In England, our school holidays have now started and the lakeside path was a bit busier than usual however, in this willowy backwater, I had this corner of floating world to myself. Just me and a few passing mallards and a coot that came ashore within a few feet of me, apparently oblivious of me until I moved.
It’s there in the bottom right-hand corner of my drawing.
Crack Willow
Newmillerdam, 10.30 a.m., 65℉, 17℃, a few high, hazy stratus: This backwater near the car park is a first call for people feeding the ducks. A family of four young coot chicks is being fed by an adult with delicacy and care, interspersed with aggression as the adult attacks one of the chicks, clasping its head in its beak several times as the chick paddles frantically to escape. Perhaps it’s a stray chick from another family – there’s another family foraging around the boughs of the crack willow, just yards away – but coots will attack their own young.
Another possibility is that the aggression was triggered because this particular chick didn’t have such bright colours on its head as its siblings. Could this be a sign that it wasn’t in the best of health and that therefore – in order to give the rest of the brood a better chance of survival – it wasn’t worth the effort of feeding? The adult was going for its head-patch, as if that was causing offence.
Enchanter’s Nightshade
Enchanter’s nightshade grows at my feet at the edge of the path. Unlike most other members of the willowherb family it doesn’t release parachute-type seeds but instead covers its seedpods with Velcro-style hooks, so that they get carried along by any passing furry animal. No shortage of those here at Newmillerdam.
For the Anglo Saxons, enchanter’s nightshade was ælf-þone (aelfthone), a charm against elves.
Newmillerdam Summer Morning
Take a 90-second break with elegant gulls, dabbling coots, preening ducks and a hesitant pigeon on a quiet backwater near the Boathouse at Newmillerdam Country Park, Wakefield, West Yorkshire.