Category: Water

A Long Ramble at Addingford, 1962

Addingford ramble

A post about the Hartley Bank Colliery mineral railway on the Horbury and Sitlington Facebook page today prompted me to go up into the attic to look out this spread from the spring of 1962. This must have been the first time that my brother Bill and I explored so far in Addingford, with our friends, the Cassidy brothers, Steven and David. We dressed for the occasion, armed with a couple of garden canes and with two of us wearing World War II tin hats.

My Exercise Books from 1960 to 62.

I’m glad still to have these exercise books, but unfortunately they don’t often take a diary form like this: I was more likely at that time to be turning the latest Biblical epic into a cartoon strip. I drew hundreds of Roman soldiers. Having said that, I have a complete run of diaries from my Grammar School years.

“It may not have been a long walk we went on but when we were back we had the benefit of playing commandos and learning how to swing on trees, seeing frogs mating, toads and a canal salvage boat in action.”

My summing up of the ramble (spelling corrected), spring, 1962

I don’t mention it in my comic strip but ‘learning how to swing on trees’ reminds me of an occasion, perhaps later that day, when all four of us were swinging over a water-filled ditch by the canal near our ‘Frogtown’. I ended up in the water and stormed off back home on my own, blaming Steven for my downfall.

The canal near Horbury Bridge, this morning.

Notes on the Panels

Panel 1: Gathering together at the end of our driveway, Smeath House, Jenkin Road, Horbury. Our family lived in the ground floor flat, the Cassidys in the first floor.

Panel 2: Setting off via Grove Road, crossing Westfield Road and down Addingford Lane (the A642 Southfield Lane Horbury bypass was constructed a few years later).

Panel 3: Addingford Drive hadn’t been built at the top of the slope, so the woods and scrub alongside Addingford Steps, with steep paths running through them were ideal for a game of commandos.

Panel 4: Crossing the bridge over the railway, the footway alongside the Hartley Bank mineral railway and the bridge over the canal at the foot of the Balk.

Panel 5: The open-ended shed is one of the coal loading bays alongside the canal at Hartley Bank Colliery.

Panel 6: Repairs to the canal. They did a good job: over half a century later, these interlocking steel sections are still holding up this section of the canal bank.

Panel 7: Steven.

Panel 8: Welder at work, note the goggles.

Panel 9: I think that this is my brother striding by in the foreground with long socks, short trousers and yellow pullover.

Panel 10: ‘Frogtown’, a notch cut in the canal bank to allow coal barges using the British Oak loading chute to turn around. This effectively cut off a stretch of a public right of way. The route of the footpath is still marked on the OS map but, 60 years later, the route hasn’t been reinstated.

Cuckoo Flower

sketching flowers

I’ve started a new sketchbook for an online illustration course (more of that later). We’re asked to sign our name on the first page and write the date . . .

flowers

The difficult ones first! I knew it was the 2nd.

I had an idea of how I’d like to draw the unfurling croziers of the male fern, growing by the pond. It didn’t work out the way I’d hoped, probably because I wasn’t close enough to take in the detail I’d intended to add.

But that’s an advantage of a sketchbook, as opposed to a commission, I can relax and move on to the next drawing. Really enjoyed drawing these.

Frogs

For three weekends running we had named storms sweeping in over Britain, causing widespread flooding, including here in the Calder Valley, so the weekend before last, when it turned calmer and milder, we started thinking when would the frogs reappear in the pond. Right on cue, later in the day we spotted a few males, waiting for the females to arrive.

frog

By the end of the week there were about twenty clumps of frogspawn in the sunnier, shallower corner of the pond which is always the favourite with them.

They’d finished for this year by the 12th March, when I took this photograph. Down at the bottom left corner of the clumps, a male smooth newt was performing his tail-wafting dance for the female. The mating season for newts goes on for weeks.

Greater Black-backed Gull

reeds

10.30 a.m.: On North Ings, RSPB St Aidan’s, a greater black-backed gull is feeding on the carcass of a brown hare. Two crows and several magpies, dwarfed by the gull, have gathered around it, like vultures at a kill on the savannah, waiting their turn in the pecking order. As the gull tears at the carcass with its large bill, we glimpse the long back legs of the hare and the black and white markings on the tips of the hare’s long ears.

At the field centre, there’s speculation about who was responsible for the kill. One possibility is a peregrine. For a peregrine, St Aidan’s isn’t far from the nest site on the tower of Wakefield Cathedral.

Peregrine Pellets?

pellets and feathers
breast bone
Sternum, about 6 inches long.

A few days ago, we were looking at the remains of what looked like a duck or goose, perhaps even a cygnet. Pellets left by the scattered feathers and bones could have been those of a peregrine.

A short distance, perhaps twenty yards, along the track we saw a sternum, the breastbone of a bird, which we thought looked large enough to be a goose or swan. We can’t be sure that it was part of the same kill.

pellet
Pellet about an inch and a quarter long.

There were fox droppings nearby, so the red fox was our number one suspect, but, as far as I know, foxes, unlike birds of prey, crows and herons, don’t produce pellets of indigestible material. In my photograph you can see that the two small feathers appear to have been flattened and nipped off at the quill, rather than plucked, which to me suggests fox.

It’s unlikely that the brown hare that we saw the gull feasting on had been killed by a fox, as it was on a part of the reserve that is surrounded by what is intended to be a fox- and badger-proof fence.

When we walked back past the kill nearly an hour later, the gull had moved and three magpies were picking over the remnants.

Common Toad


toad

As I was weeding the bottom veg bed this morning, this common toad wandered along past me, heading for the greenhouse. I persuaded it to go back towards the shade and shelter of the compost bins.

To get to the veg bed, I’d trimmed a path along the edge of my meadow. I then continued alongside the hedge to the bench in the far corner. I was all set to trim back the whole meadow but as I started on the long grass in the shade of the hedge at the bottom of the garden I started coming across a lot of wildlife: two frogs hopping away from me, one white plume moth and a drone fly.

I’m leaving that area for the wildlife apart from snipping off the tops of the chicory, which I’m trying to keep in check to give other wild flowers a chance.

Grebe Display

grebes

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.

Bearded Tits

Bearded tits

A small group of birdwatchers have spotted a party of bearded tits by the path to the Reedbed Hide at RSPB Old Moor Reserve. At first I don’t spot them because I’m looking up amongst the seed-heads of the reeds, but they’re down on the ice at the the foot of the stems.

Soon they’re up feeding on the seeds and their colours harmonise perfectly. There are three males with moustachial stripes and three plainer-looking females, or possibly juveniles. I don’t hear any calls, but there’s a busy road not far away, so perhaps I missed the chirrs and pings that are usually the first sign that they’re around.

The lagoon that the Reedbed Hide overlooks is mainly ice-covered. Coot, dabchick, gadwall, mallard and a couple of female tufted ducks are making the most of the open water alongside the far edge. Shovellers are resting close to the reeds.

Ings hide

There’s an even greater expanse of ice over Wath Ings, alongside the River Dearne, with wildfowl confined to a small pool. On the river embankment, wigeon graze alongside Canada geese. A green woodpecker calls from the woods on the far side of the river.

Lesser Redpoll

redpoll
redpoll

The bearded tits were a new bird for me, I’ve looked for them before, but I don’t remember ever seeing them; I certainly haven’t seen them showing as well as they did today in the low winter sunlight. Lesser redpoll is also a new species for me – or at least it is under that name. It doesn’t appear in my older field guides because, when they were published, it was considered a subspecies of the North European common redpoll. It’s now a species in its own right and I like its Latin name, Carduelis cabaret: ‘cabaret’ is the French name for a kind of finch. The word cabaret also refers to a small chamber, so perhaps this was meant to refer to the kind of finch that was often kept as a caged bird at the time the German naturalist Müller gave it its name, in his translation, published in 1776, of  Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae.

Redpolls are happier in the tree-tops, nibbling at birch cones, as the three that we saw were doing today, next to the Visitor Centre at Old Moor, as we made our way out.

Alderfly

alderfly
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.

Kingfishers

Newmillerdam woods

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

mallards

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.

coot

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.

cattle

From our table in the cafe at Blacker Hall Farm, I can see the cattle grazing, a powerful-looking bull standing calmly amongst them.

Female Teal

juvenile teal

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.

Nostell Middle Lake
Wigeon, gadwall and mallard on the Middle Lake at Nostell in yesterday morning’s fog.