Category: Water

Mink

minkA couple we meet on the towpath tell us they’ve just seen a mink amongst the tree roots on the opposite side of the canal. As we continue on our way we hear them calling behind us. A mink is swimming across towards some overhanging vegetation. It seems to vanish when it reaches the bank.

It’s a sleek predator but I wish that we could return to the days when I regularly saw water voles alongside the canal. As the introduced mink spread into valley, the water voles disappeared.

As we walk back later that afternoon we come across a young heron that stands at the edge of the canal looking intently at the water, its yellow eye unblinking. It’s so intent that it lets us get within a few yards of it before flying off and settling twenty yards further along the towpath.

Damselflies and Tadpoles

pond3.35 p.m., 71°F, 23°C, gentle breeze: Docks, brambles, dog daisies and grasses overhang the pond which is carpeted with duckweed. damselfliesA pair of blue damselflies are clasped together, hovering lightly over the pond and touching down to lay eggs just below the surface on the pondweed.

tadpolesIt’s been a good year for tadpoles. Some are now at the half way stage with limbs sprouting but still retaining a long tail.

A small white moth flutters around in a curlicue flightpath around the edge of the pond, a spectral presence. On still summer evenings there are often two or three hovering around.

white mothred tailed beeA small red-tailed bumble bee is systematically working its way around the geranium flowers.

Field Notes

My usual drawing kit: water-brush, Lamy Vista fountain pen filled with brown Noodlers ink and Winsor & Newton Professional Watercolours.
My usual drawing kit: water-brush, Lamy Vista fountain pen filled with brown Noodlers ink and a Winsor & Newton bijou box filled with Professional Watercolours.

Thank you Jane for the question (see comments for this post) about how I go about sketching. What I was trying to do here was sketch whatever came along during a short session watching the pond but I didn’t want to end up with just sketches so I started writing my field notes straight away, breaking off to draw damselflies, moths and tadpoles as I spotted them.

I didn’t get around to drawing red-tailed bee so I’ve popped in a sketch from a post I wrote six years ago: Summer Evening Sketches

Kielder Water

View from the cafe at Leaplish, Kielder Water
View from the cafe at Leaplish, Kielder Water

The track edges on the middle section of our walk from Leaplish to Tower Knowle look like illustrations from a field guide with a greater variety of wild flowers than you’d find many nature reserves.

Kielder Water from the ferry.
Kielder Water from the ferry.

greater knapweedGreater knapweed with its stout stemmed, wine-glass sized purple thistle-like flowers is the most impressive but there’s such a variety of colour and shape: pink ragged robin; yellow vetches and buttercups and mauve cranesbills but my favourite today has to be the bog asphodel growing in drifts on a boggy slope. I’ve never seen so much of it growing together. It’s small, narrow-petalled palish yellow flowers looks like chain stitch flowers in an embroidery.

swallowsswallowSwallows are nesting under the eves of the visitor centre at Tower Knowle.

Reivers’ River

Giant hogweed grows luxuriantly on the banks of the River Esk at Musselborough. One low-lying field has become a jungly thicket of hogweed, towering over my head to ten or twelve feet. I’ve got no intention of pushing in amongst it: the headline on the front page of our local paper this week was ‘Teenage Boy Scarred by Giant Hogweed’.

This year the Esk at Musselborough is to be the location for the traditional river crossing of the riders of the Border Reivers. The ceremonies include turf cutting at a number of traditional spots: the Reivers’ version of beating the bounds.

The Portobello Bus

Firth of Forthgull chickWe take the bus into Edinburgh. Up here on the top deck in the front seat we’re on level with a herring gull chick sitting on the roof of one of the shops on Musselborough High Street.

As the bus goes through Portobello we get views of misty hills across the Firth of Forth.

Unfortunately no sketching is allowed in the Scottish Parliament, not without the permission of the Presiding Officer. The mace, which is made from silver and gold panned from Scottish rivers, was designed and crafted by Michael Lloyd. It’s the first time that I’ve seen any of his work since my Royal College of Art days. He was in the silversmithing department but we both attended the general studies environment group run by Christopher Cornford and my tutor in natural history illustration John Norris Wood. You can see the influence of natural form in his design for the mace which is more like a giant thistle than the traditional gothic mace in the House of Commons in London.

He has engraved the words ‘Wisdom, Justice, Compassion and Integrity’ on the head of the mace. Not words that we’d normally use when discussing politicians but a great mission statement to aim for.

Link: Michael Lloyd – This is my story – The Silversmith’s Art

Little Egret

egret4.30 p.m.: A little egret flies up from the marsh on the Strands, a field between the river and the canal. It’s a bulkier bird than the black-headed gulls which are also flying over the marsh but its wingspan is about the same; the striking difference is that the egret is completely white: no black wing-tips, no grey back. It’s the first time that I’ve seen a little egret on my home patch in the valley.

Sandpiper

Oughtershaw BecksandpipersEvery time we drive over the cattle grid, a sandpiper pipes at us in obvious annoyance and arcs around in an ostentatiously level flight, flashing its wing-stripes. It’s on sentry duty again this afternoon as we walk down the track. It perches on a fence post to pipe at us until we leave its marshy patch but a little further along a pair of sandpipers fly up from the rushes alongside Oughtershaw Beck.

We find a spot downstream where we can sit at the beck-side, undisturbed by waders. The beck, which is rather low at present, plunges over a bed of limestone. The blocks and cracks remind me of the clints and grykes of the limestone pavement at Malham Cove.

Oughtershaw BeckWhen I’m drawing a subject like this which is almost abstract with its interlocked, repetitive shapes, I keep finding distinctive features to act as landmarks as I map out the adjacent sections of the formation, briefly giving them names so that I can plot a point as “level with ‘The Brow'” or “directly below ‘The Triangle'”.

I’m wishing that I had a length of string so that I could strap my spiral bound sketchbook around my neck. I really wouldn’t like it to drop in the beck.

As I look down I notice water avens growing from the turf that projects out over the water. Here, probably somewhat beyond easy reach for browsing sheep, there are probably half a dozen species within a square foot, including lady’s mantle, birdsfoot trefoil, plantain and a sedge.

Redstart and Redpoll

redstart6 p.m.: perching on a tree guard by the edge of the birch wood alongside Oughtershaw Beck, a male redstart sits preening. It occasionally darts up for insects.

redpollOnce again siskins outnumber other birds at the feeders. A more unusual visitor is a redpoll. It isn’t much bigger than the siskins and is considerably smaller than the occasional goldfinches and chaffinches which fly in to feed.

Tawny Owlet

tawny owl chick

owletThere’s a single tawny owl chick sitting in the morning sun perching on the lower section of the barn door. The owls have nested under the roof beam in the barn, stuffing sticks into the end of a piece of sacking that had been draped beneath.

The resident blackbird scolds it. This is the farmyard’s resident blackbird that, Fiona tells us, has been angry ever since it arrived.

Askham Bog

Slender tufted sedge, Carex acuta
Slender tufted sedge, Carex acuta

longhorn moth green veined white11 a.m.: Orange tips and green veined white butterflies are attracted to the flowers of jack-by-the-hedge which grows in swathes along the edge of the swampy woodland at Askham Bog Yorkshire Wildlife Trust reserve, southwest of York.

Its white flowers have also attracted a longhorn moth Adela reaumurella, a metallic green micro moth, less than a centimetre in length. My photograph shows a female; the male’s antennae are twice as long, three times the length of its forewing.

Sedges

Slender tufted sedge, Carex acuta (above), has sharp corners on its triangular stems. In my photograph, the male flower spikes are the dangling ochre tassels while the female spikes, below them in the flower head, have two styles growing from each ovary, like the forked tongue of a serpent.

Askham Bog has the largest colony of gingerbread sedge, Carex elongata, in England. In autumn the floppy tussocks of this sedge and its spikes of seeds turn reddish brown. Is that how it gets its name? Is it the colour of gingerbread? Or did it once have some use as a food or herbal remedy?

The colony is in Far Wood, east of the reserve’s boardwalk so wellies are recommended if you go in search of the sedge.

Water Plants

amphibious bistort

water violet

The pink flowers of amphibious bistort, Persicaria amphibium (above), are still in bud. It’s floating leaves are pointed at the tip and blunt at the base.

Despite its name water violet, Hottonia palustris, is a relative of the primrose. In my photograph you can see the stigma of the flower in the yellow centre of the foreground flower. In primroses this is what botanists refer to as ‘pin eyed’. Water violet has finely divided fern-like leaves beneath the surface of the water.

Violets

Dog violet
Dog violet
Marsh violet
Marsh violet

Dog violets grow alongside the duckboards and a few marsh violets, Viola palustris, which have paler flowers with dark veins. Marsh violet has long creeping rhizomes so when we spotted one, we soon found a few more scattered around nearby amongst the marsh plants.

Royal Fern

royal fernRoyal fern, Osmunda regalis, is just starting to unfurls its fronds. This is one of the tallest of European ferns, growing to several metres.

Link

Askham Bog Yorkshire Wildlife Trust Reserve.

After the Floods

Calder valleyAlong most of this stretch of the valley the River Calder is kept within its course by flood embankments except after exceptionally heavy rain, such as in last winter’s Boxing Day floods, but once it has overtopped these manmade levees there’s no direct way for the water to make its way back to the river as the flood subsides.

Increasingly, the canal, the Calder & Hebble Navigation, which runs parallel to the river, acts as an overflow channel but downstream from the Figure of Three locks the canal itself has what effectively acts as an embankment possibly built up in part by the navvies tipping spoil alongside the channel when they excavated this stretch of the navigation in the 1830s.

Following the Boxing Day floods, the farmer’s solution appears to have been to flatten a short stretch of the banking and to cut an overflow notch so that the field can drain across the towpath into the canal.

alluvial depositalluvial depositThe excavations have exposed alluvial deposits which are typical of this stretch of the Calder valley: sandy silt containing pebbles of what appears to be local sandstone.

As I understand it, these deposits were laid down after the last ice age in a valley that had been deepened because the river that occupied it was heading down towards a lower sea level. Sea levels were so much lower during the ice age that most of the North Sea was dry land.

Swollen by meltwater, this precursor of the Calder was more powerful than the river as we see it today, which meanders over its flood plain re-sorting the alluvial deposits by cutting into the riverbank on the outside of a meander and depositing a sandbar elsewhere. I imagine that flash floods were more powerful in the treeless landscape of the ice age.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, stretches of the river were channeled into a straighter course by canal building navvies and much later in the early 1960s the river was diverted during the construction of Healey Mills railway marshalling yards.

Kingcups

kingcups3.15 p.m., 50ºF, 10ºF, 85% cloud, 30.1 inches, 1022 mb: My first job this morning at 6 a.m. was to flip open the studio skylight window and emphatically bang it shut again to shoo off a pair of mallards who were tucking into the tadpoles in our back garden pond. Yes, I know that all of those thousands of tadpoles can’t possibly survive but I somehow feel responsible for them. As I draw these kingcups, I can see them constantly coming to the surface, so the ducks haven’t made much of an impression on their numbers.

The Dance of the Smooth Newt

tadpoles

smooth newt dance

The tadpoles have gathered in the last remaining patch of sunlight in the corner of the pond, the same corner that the frogs gathered in when they spawned.

A male smooth newt stirs up sediment. He’s enticing a female who has been hidden away amongst the pondweed. He starts wafting his tail towards her then upends as if he’s breakdancing. The pair disappear amongst the vegetation.