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 . . .
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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’sSystema 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.
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.
View from Charlotte’s Ice Cream Parlour, Whitley, on Monday.
We’ve recently started feeding the birds again after taking a break over the summer. This was partly to reseed the bare patch in the lawn trampled by the pheasants that had spent so long pacing about in tight circles below the feeders, pecking at the spilt sunflower hearts but also because two or three small mounds of earth had appeared at the edge of the lawn.
We thought that this might be a sign that brown rats were moving in but a neighbour has since told me that at that time there was a lot of mole activity in his garden, which is the most likely explanation as there were only piles of soil but no sign of any entrance holes.
Today the feeders were visited by coal tits, blue tits, great tits, nuthatch and greenfinch but outnumbering all of them were goldfinches. At one stage all eight perches on the feeders were occupied by them, with another ten on the ground below and six or seven waiting their turn in the branches of the crab apple.
Pigeon Food Pyramid
At breakfast time, a loose flock of wood pigeons flew over the house, followed later by a grey heron, which appeared to be struggling to clear our roof.
Top Predator
Calder & Hebble Navigation at the Strands, Horbury Bridge.
This evening down by the canal, a sparrowhawk perched briefly in a tree then flew off on its rounds. I suspect that a sparrowhawk killed the pigeon that we found on our back lawn a few days ago. It’s not going to be short of prey with so many wood pigeons about.
