Lake outlet, Newmillerdam, 10.15 a.m.: The sitting coot gets increasingly alarmed as the drake mallard gets nearer, dabbling around the nest. The coot’s repeated, scalding notes get more frantic until its mate swims over briefly to check things out, but the mallard soon moves on.
Back to the business of incubating, the coot keeps changing position and I get a glimpse of 8-10 greenish brownish eggs.
Its mate returns and presents the sitting bird with a spindly pencil-length twig sprouting fresh green leaves. This is accepted by the bird on the nest (I’m not saying ‘the female’ because I can’t tell the difference between the two birds) and incorporated into the car tyre-sized platform.
Have you ever come across the idea that natural history illustration “isn’t art”? I remember you trained in design and illustration rather than fine art – have you ever had to defend your work against this charge?
My friend, writer Richard Smyth, in an e-mail today
Interesting question. It’s not anything that anyone has ever challenged me on but, like most creatives, I wouldn’t want to use ‘artist’ as a job description. I’d always describe myself as an illustrator/writer. Although I’ve had exhibitions of paintings, probably 99% of my work is illustration and intended to be seen on a page or screen with text. My sketchbooks are part field notebook.
It’s a relief to be off the hook as far as art is concerned. When I draw a flower, bird or snail, I love the idea that the creature has the right just to be itself. I can’t avoid being an observer and therefore having an implied presence in a drawing but I don’t want to burden the poor creature with how I was feeling that day, or with my views on Life, The Universe and Everything.
I feel that when Picasso draws a dove, a monkey, a horse or a bull, the critics have to scramble around to tell us what that symbolised at that stage in his career, whereas if I, as I did this morning, draw a pink-footed goose, I’d like the actions, appearance and personality of that particular goose on that particular day, to be the main subject: not to mention the energy and mystery implicit in said goose simply being a goose.
I know this is impossible, as I’m not a camera, but that would be my aim.
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.
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
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.
A pair of great-crested grebes were displaying at Newmillerdam this morning. Their face-to-face head-shaking display was interrupted by a third grebe which was soon chased off by the male. The male has more prominent cheek-ruffs and ear-tufts than the female.
A second bout of head-shaking was soon interrupted by the intruder and then all three birds dived out of sight for what seemed like a minute. Later we saw a single grebe diving near the war memorial, so perhaps this was the intruder who had decided to give the pair a break.
Drawn from a photograph taken by the Middle Lake, Nostell Priory, April 2018
If Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen was asked to design an aquatic insect, this is what he might come up with. The smoke-tinted wings of the alderfly are folded like a roof and supported by a tracery of veins, in the style of a Tiffany lamp. Despite these stylish wings they don’t venture far from the water’s edge.
The alderfly larva is a predator, using powerful pincer-like jaws to to prey on aquatic insects such as caddis and mayfly larvae.
On our walk around Newmillerdam Lake this morning, it’s good to see the sun breaking through after so many gloomy, misty November days, especially as we get a brief glimpse of two kingfishers flying along the edge of the lake, apparently engaged in a bit of a dogfight, one swooping at the other. One (or possibly both of them, it all happens so quickly) heads out across the lake to the far side, where the drain enters the lake. We’re told that the drain is the place that you’re most likely to see them.
I see the sapphire blue on one of the bird’s backs and Barbara also spots the orange of its breast as it flies by.
Ducks and Drakes
A month from today – Boxing Day – the days will be getting longer. Drake mallards are already cruising around in noisy groups, displaying to females but they won’t start nesting until March.
One of the coots on the lake was cruising along calling – a sound which reminds me of a hooter on a child’s pedal car.
From our table in the cafe at Blacker Hall Farm, I can see the cattle grazing, a powerful-looking bull standing calmly amongst them.
There were plenty of mallards, gadwall and nine shovelers (three drakes, six females/juveniles) on the Lower Lake at Nostell this morning, but it was this little duck, which didn’t look much bigger than a dabchick, that had us puzzled. It’s a teal, and the conspicuous triangular pattern on its back suggests that this is a female in breeding plumage. Juveniles have dark feathers on the back, with just narrow, lighter margins.
The note I’ve written on my sketch, that the female should always show a speculum, is something we read (or perhaps misread) on the Internet, but it’s incorrect according to Noel Cusa’s illustration in The Birds of the Western Palearctic, which shows the female with speculum completely covered by the surrounding breast and back feathers. I’ll go with that as you can’t get any more authoritative than The Birds of the Western Palearctic.
The female was on her own but when we returned forty minutes later there was no sign of her. Although this duck looked so petite compared with the nearby mallards and gadwall, the teal is in fact about 25% bigger than a dabchick.
We saw just one goosander this morning, a drake on the Upper Lake.
Wigeon, gadwall and mallard on the Middle Lake at Nostell in yesterday morning’s fog.
