It was just the pair of fins on the belly that I couldn’t name of when I drew this goldfish at the dentist’s last month. They’re the pelvic or ventral fins. It’s probably the fact that there are two names that I find it difficult to remember.
Members of the salmon family have an extra fin; the adipose, a small upward pointing fin between the dorsal and caudal.
This drawing is an amalgam of several fish that were in constant motion in the tank in the waiting room. They varied widely in fin length and colour patterns so I tried to keep coming back to the individuals that were closest to the standard goldfish.
2.30 p.m.; Common blue damselflies are mating down by the pond, the blue male clasping the olive female.
She rests on the water surface as she carefully lays an egg on a submerged leaf of pondweed then the pair move on to lay the next.
There are smooth newts lurking below. One grabs a female and swallows her head end first, the two wings protruding from its mouth.
I watch for a few minutes. The males zip around like little blue neon tubes, chasing each other and resting in the sun together on the leaves of plants around the pond.
The pairs flying in tandem continue to lay, often just inches from a waiting newt below.
Six jack snipe, bills tucked in, are resting right by the water’s edge, blending in perfectly with the dry reeds. They appear to be about the size of a starling.
It’s a good example of how useful it can be to have other birdwatchers about as we would never have picked them out and our binoculars don’t bring out the detail that the telescope, set up and trained on them, gives.
What I could see of the eyestripe doesn’t look very conspicuous but the stripes on the back showed up well, even through my binoculars. They’re white beneath with a dull brown breast that I’d describe as mottled rather than speckled like a thrush.
Jack snipe breed in northern Europe and join us in the winter.
Two pairs of gadwall are dabbling nearby.
A large flock of lapwings and two hundred or more golden plover wheel around. A marsh harrier has been hunting over the reedbeds but we don’t catch sight of one today.
The golden plover do their own version of the famous murmurations performed by flocks of starlings, though not in such tight formation. As the flock decides on what direction it will head, a V-shaped chevron forms along its margins.
They pass directly overhead, filling my field of vision as I look up.
Teal are dabbling around a little island.
Wigeon have come ashore to graze on a spit of land that divides the lakes.
We’re surprised to see a pair of shelduck upending on the wader scrape lagoon. In the background there’s a smaller, squatter drake shoveller, which sits lower in the water, so we have a chance to compare these two conspicuous ducks.
I’M IN LUCK as one of the ducks that I’d like to get more familiar with is there just in front of the hide at Pugneys reserve lake; I sketch a pair of gadwall dabbling and occasionally upending.
The male looks plain grey but when I get the binoculars on him the finely striped breast comes into focus. The female looks rather like a female mallard.
Tufted, Shoveller & Pochard
Most of the other ducks are resting. Pochard and tufted duck outnumber the gadwalls by about a hundred to one but all of them are resting, head tucked beneath the wing. Occasionally they’ll all move away from the willowy bank, perhaps because they become aware of a dog passing by on the nearby path.
They’re not adopting the sort of pose that would be useful in a field guide but I do my best to get the head-tucked-in pose down on paper and to take in their general shape and proportion.
They turn around as they float so that isn’t as straightforward as you might think that it should be.
The shoveller are more active and a small group of males and females crosses the lake, helpfully keeping that field guide pose as they move.
Inevitably my eye is drawn to the striking plumage of the drakes.
Grebe
I’m not used to seeing the great-crested grebe at this time of year so I take notes about its appearance and check it against the book later.
Usually we see them out on the middle of a lake where they seem larger. This one, that diving close to the hide, didn’t seem much larger than the black-headed gull which was following it around probably with the intention of stealing any tiddler that it might catch.
The grebe is a white as a penguin beneath when it turns to preen its breast between dives.
A morning walk on the western shore of Lake Windermere, from Ferry House to Wray castle.
Windermere looking north to Wansfell. The tree provided a frame and a lead-in to the panorama.
The fallen tree has lifted fragments of the flaggy bedrock.
In colour the contrast was the wrong way round from the point of view of atmospheric perspective with a high key background and a monochrome foreground. Converting the image to grayscale reminds me of the high contrast prints that I aimed to make in the darkroom when I developed my own film. Photoshop is streets ahead of anything that I ever managed to do. Although I notice that I’ve over-sharpened the image; pixels don’t behave quite like film grain.
After we’d photographed the tree we turned to see this bullock standing precariously on an adjacent rock.
The bullock soon decided that the shoot was over. I think that he could be a crossbreed with some Jersey in him
I couldn’t resist attempting this rock crevice with saplings but I knew the strong contrast of sun to shadow would be too much for the dynamic range of my camera.
I had to stand in the stream to photograph the sunlit ripples without casting my shadow across the frame.
Warmth and wet had brought out fungi in Heald Wood including these growing on a tree.
A perfect clump of fungi further up the same tree as the previous photograph.
I LOVE the 30x zoom on my new camera. There’s an element of luck in what the autofocus chooses to latch on to but you can take several shots and hopefully one will catch something. The 4600 pixel wide images give plenty of scope for cropping in to find some suitable composition, like this Greylag keeping a wary eye on me.
I knew the Canada Geese would head for the water if I got too near. Having the zoom on maximum flattened the perspective and emphasised the pattern of black and white, like musical notes on a stave.
If I can get such close ups as this in a few minutes just ambling along the lakeside path imagine what I might be able to do if I spent a morning in one of the hides at a wetland reserve.
It would be interesting to try a catch bird behaviour on film – like this juvenile Black-headed Gull diving into the lake, possibly to catch fish or perhaps even small freshwater mussels. A series of images might provide some clues. The camera has a continuous mode for capturing movement.
Water birds are good subjects to experiment with as they’re large and usually not hidden by foliage so when we saw a Carrion Crow in a waterside willow I tried photographing it.
Grey Heron
I was struggling to keep the camera steady when I tried to photograph the Grey Heron preening itself in a willow at the other side of the lake. The image is rather blocky but it would be useful if I was gathering reference for an illustration.
It’s good to see a heron engaged in some kind of activity rather than standing at rest.
Fungi
Not surprisingly after the warm humid weather that we’ve been having there were one or two fungi about. The toadstool with the scaly cap is a relative of the Fly Agaric while the purplish, smooth capped and much eaten into toadstool (below, right) looks to me like one of the Russulas.
But today I’m content to get to know my camera. I’m looking forward to using it to get to know the names of a few more fungi in the autumn.
This smooth newt is a male; note the banner-like tail.
WE CAUGHT smooth newts, freshwater leeches and pond snails in one of the ponds at Hassacarr nature reserve, Dunnington Common, near York on this morning’s Wakefield Naturalists Society field meeting. This is only the second occasion on which I’ve tried out the possibilities of underwater movies using my Olympus μ Tough so using the iMovie app I’ve put together a few clips in this YouTube video.
Sketching the newt as it swam around the tank gives some impression of its movements but you can’t improve on the video clip in the way it shows the looping movement of the leech.
Tubular Water Dropwort
Seed-heads of tubular water-dropwort.
Tubular Water-dropwort, Oenanthefistulosa, grows around the edges of the largest pond. It one of the rarer species to be found on the reserve, declining as its wetland habitats disappear.
Around York, a city long famous for its flooding, wetlands is sometimes seen as prime real estate. Earlier this year one developer was frustrated that his plan to build an out of town department store was held up for several months because the resident population of great crested newts had to be relocated.
We found no great crested today at Dunnington but they are often found on pond-dipping days on the reserve.
IT’S GOOD to be back at Newmillerdam and on a morning like this I can’t resist at least trying to paint a lightning watercolour (below) when we stop for coffee and, as we set off back along the lakeshore, I’m tempted to try to photograph a couple of families of waterbirds.
Much as I like my Olympus Tough, it does struggle with anything animate as several seconds can pass between pressing the button and the photograph actually being taken, so there’s always an element of luck involved.
Newmillerdam lake from Becket’s Cafe.
A few weeks ago we saw one of the mute swan cygnets tucked between the wings of one of the parents as it swam along, a wise precaution as some of the pike in Newmillerdam are enormous and would be capable of pulling a young cygnet below the surface. The other cygnet followed closely in it’s lake with the other parent bringing up the rear and keeping a watchful eye on the family.
I notice in this morning’s photograph that the male, the cob, is leading. He’s got that projection above his bill.
Counting Coots
I squat down to see if the coots near the boathouse will feed their young on freshwater mussels again, as they did last month. One of the parents dives down a couple of times but in the short time that I’m watching catches nothing. As I’m kneeling there a toddler, who has just picked up a feather, and his mum come and stand alongside us.
‘Can you tell me how many baby birds there are?’ she asks him.
‘One, two, three, four . . . and two mummy birds.’
‘They could be a mummy and a daddy?’ suggests his grandad.
‘Are you allowed to say that nowadays?’ I ask.
‘It’s not P.C.’ says grandad, ‘but I think with coots we can be fairly sure.’
‘Even a coot is entitled to life choices.’ I suggest.
‘We’re not doing mummies and daddies yet,’ explains mum, ‘just the babies.’
It’s good to hear parents and grandparents encouraging young children to explore the world of nature and not to put them off with too much health and safety.
This brood of coot youngsters have lost their ginger top-knots and the hint of red on their beaks that they had a month ago and they’re now in the sober plumage of adolescent chicks.
Further up the lake we see a single great-crested grebe. We’ve previously seen a pair here and I hope that some day we’ll see them with their stripy young again.
Newmillerdam, edge of lake near the boathouse, early June:
A PARENT COOT is introducing its brood to a new food; fresh shellfish. It dives and comes up with a small nutlike object which I soon realise is a freshwater mussel.
The young chicks are ‘tween-age’, no longer fluffy little infants with bright markings on their head and not yet in the sober black and grey ‘school uniform’ of older chicks. They’ve still got a sparse punkish ginger top knot while their bills, once bright red, have now faded to a fleshy pink, like lean bacon.
The parent turns the small shell in its beak before presenting the morsel to a youngster then dives again and in seconds pops back up with another bite-sized mussel.
After turning it around in in its beak it presents this reluctant to open mollusc to one of the chicks. The chick fumbles with it and soon drops it and another chick picks it up but also struggles with it.
The parent takes it back and gives it a few more turns in its beak, returning it to the youngster which makes an extra effort and, with some difficulty, swallows it whole.
It reminds me of the sort of scene you might get in a restaurant where a parent is trying to show their children the way to tackle some unfamiliar food. I still remember the steaming tureen of mussels, some of them still flapping their valves that was brought to the table when we were on a family holiday in an old-fashioned seaside resort in France. We were equally clueless about how we should tackle them.
IT MIGHT BE about a month late thanks to the cold, sometimes snowy weather but at last there’s a clump of frogspawn in the pond with at least 14 frogs, most of them gathered around the clump which is on the sunnier, shallower side of the pond.
It was just the pair of fins on the belly that I couldn’t name of when I drew this goldfish at the dentist’s last month. They’re the pelvic or ventral fins. It’s probably the fact that there are two names that I find it difficult to remember.
I knew the Canada Geese would head for the water if I got too near. Having the zoom on maximum flattened the perspective and emphasised the pattern of black and white, like musical notes on a stave.
