Category: Water

Wild Goose Chase

Our (anti-clockwise) 6½ mile route via Anglers Lake (bottom right), Walton Park (top centre) and the woodlands, mainly coniferous, of Haw Park, highlighted in Google Earth.

WE’RE MISSING one of the regulars on our traditional and slightly delayed Boxing Day birding walk. My friend from schooldays David hasn’t been able to migrate back from Cumbria to his home town this year so this is the perfect opportunity for John (back from Plymouth) and I to add two brand new species to the list of Boxing Day birds that we’ve built up over the last 30 years or so.

On our way to the Main Hide at Anglers Country Park we meet local birder Peter Smith and ask him to point us in the direction of today’s star birds:

“Is the American Wigeon still around?”

Pete explains that it’s out towards the centre of the lake. And he directs us towards the Greenland White-fronted Goose which has joined a flock of Greylags in the fields beyond.

“We’d like to get them on our list, so that we can tell David, who’s been coming round with us for the last 30 years but can’t make it this year!”

“That’s ‘griping off’!” chuckles Pete.

Sadly, we don’t get the chance to ‘gripe off’ David. I’ve no doubt that we saw the American Wigeon and the Greenland White-front, but we didn’t have the birdwatching skills to pick them out amongst (a) the hundreds of European Wigeon on the choppy water’s of Europe’s largest pond-liner lined lake and (b) amongst the other 77 grey geese (we counted them!) in the field.

Mute Swans, Wintersett Reservoir (also known as Top Reservoir) south west of Anglers.

David also missed out on an us getting slightly lost. After puzzling over the geese for 5 minutes we decided to press on directly to Walton Park but soon found that the footpath started veering off unhelpfully in the direction of Crofton. Still, we can’t complain because we spotted around 33 species including Goosander, Tree Sparrow and Pink-footed Goose (the latter probably an escape but, as a native, it can still go on the list).

And there was a bonus; because we hadn’t managed to get out on the Boxing Day bank holiday we were able to finish our six mile circuit at the Squire’s Tearooms in the Anglers Country Park visitors centre.

Along the Towpath

IT’S HARD to believe that at last we’ve completed all our Christmas errands and finished off as many home improvements we need to before Christmas. The days are now getting longer, just two minutes a day, but that will soon add up. To celebrate this small but significant change and to draw a line in the sand (well in the mud at this time of year), we set off for a short walk along the towpath in the rapidly fading light.

A heron flies past Beckside Farm and over the old grey viaduct. Two Mute Swans bring grace and elegance to the canal basin at Horbury Bridge.

On one narrowboat, they’ve improvised a giant Christmas pudding by the tiller, using a black plastic bin bag and cut-out holly leaves.

We turn back when we reach the pylon wires, which are sizzling and crackling in the rain like sausages in a frying pan. The pylon, standing on the steep bank above a belt of broadleaves, makes a stark Christmas tree silhouette.

Just 15 minutes walk from our doorstep and I feel as if we’ve escaped into real countryside and experienced the wider world.

As we walk back up from the towpath alongside the Bingley Arms, I rub my fingers through the Wormwood to smell this bitterly aromatic herb. It’s appropriate that it should be planted here by the pub as it has been used in brewing and as a flavouring in absinthe and in some Polish vodkas.

The Bittern Hide

THIS IS THE VIEW looking east from the Bittern Hide at the RSPB’s Old Moor Wetlands reserve at Wath-on-Dearne, South Yorkshire. Temperature, a balmy 24°C.

We didn’t spot the reserve’s resident but elusive Bittern. During the summer it never ‘boomed’, so it’s thought to be either a juvenile or a female.

But, thanks to a birdwatcher sitting near us in the hide we saw the equally elusive Water Rail, emerging from the reeds and crossing a grassy gap. I’m pretty sure that it’s a lifer, a first for me. Oddly, it was a bird that I was very familiar with as a child; a terrace of old stone-built cottages on our street stood empty, awaiting demolition, and my friend Stephen went rummaging there. He rescued a leatherbound copy of Cassell’s Science Popularly Explained (1856) by David A. Wells, which I still have on my shelf, and a stuffed water rail in a glass fronted cabinet, long since vanished. A little time capsule commemorating some Victorian’s fascination with natural history.

There was a flock of well over a hundred of these waders in the scrape at the other side of the reserve. I’m not good at waders and these looked far from distinctive so I took notes and consulted one of the field guides in the visitor centre.

The bird that I looked up was Golden Plover – that was my first guess – but the field guide that I consulted showed summer plumage only; a striking golden yellow bird, as the name suggests.

The warden took a look at my sketch and confirmed that was what it was, but of course in winter plumage.

Back home, looking in my current favourite field guide, the Collins Bird Guide, there are several illustrations of various plumages and, helpfully, an illustration of a winter flock, looking just like the birds that we saw.

Rain Dance

A FEW MORE photographs from last weekend: this is the stream that joins the River Ness just below Ness Islands in Inverness.

There had been heavy rain on the Friday night and with the ground already soaking, this Herring Gull on the grassy banks by the Aquadome at Bucht Park was having some success with its ‘rain dance’. It was poddling the sodden turf, producing an effect which to any unfortunate earthworm below would have felt like heavy rain, prompting it to make its way to the surface to escape being drowned it in its burrow. The gull apparently caught two or three small earthworms in the few minutes that we watched it.

Tunnel Network

Something, a paving stone or a metal plate about two feet square, had recently been removed from a grass verge nearby revealing this tunnel network. A Yew tree grows close to it and the tunnels are full of Yew seeds.

You can see that many of these have been split open. Most parts of the Yew are poisonous but some birds eat the ‘berries’ (Yew is a conifer so it would be more correct to call the fleshy envelope of the seed an aril) and here, I guess, voles or Wood Mice have been collecting the ‘berries’, perhaps eating the red sticky flesh and storing the seeds, some of which have been split open. I guess that the seed case is the most poisonous part of the female yew cone but that its contents can be eaten by rodents.

It’s strange to think that one of these seeds might have germinated and grown to be a tree that might have lived to be some 3,000 years old, like the Fortingall Yew near Loch Tay, which might be the oldest tree in Europe, surviving until the year 5011 A.D. or beyond . . . if the vole hadn’t eaten it first!

Puffer

This Clyde Puffer, the S.L. VIC32 from Greenock, one the last coal-fired steam coasters, was moored on the Caledonian Canal at Merkinch. Puffers worked along the west coast, supplying the island distilleries, such as Laphroaig, which stands on the shore at Port Ellen, Islay.

I illustrated one for Stephen Cribb’s Whisky on the Rocks and was so fascinated by them that I made a folksy model for use in a Whisky on the Rocks assemblage – which also included shells, whisky miniatures and so on – that I thought might look good on the back cover of the book. Considering my skill as a model-maker it’s not surprising that they decided to stick with my pen and ink and watercolour artwork.

 

Ness Island

WE WALK along the towpath beside the Caledonian Canal for a lunch break at the café at the Floral Hall then return to the centre of town via the footbridges to Ness Islands. I draw the standing waves at the upstream tip of the first island. It’s like sitting at the prow of a ship. Anglers stand waist deep in the river.

Giant Sequoia

At the downstream end of the second, longer island, there’s a large Wellingtonia or Giant Sequoia, Sequoiadendron giganticum, with drooping lower branches which make an effective umbrella when there’s a passing shower.

The reddish bark feels slightly spongy which must provide effective insulation from winter frosts and from the forest fires that occasionally sweep through the tree’s native habitat on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada in California.

Each leaf scale is 2 or 3 millimetres long

Looking up into the branches (top photograph) it appears as if the tree has long slender needles like a pine or fir but if you look closely the leaves are scale-like, as seen in this photograph of a dry twig (they’re green when fresh) that I’ve taken with a low-power microscope.

The Top of the Tree


Sequoias can grow to 50 metres but how tall is this specimen?

I made a rudimentary clinometer using my hand lens (which hangs on a loop of string) as my plumb-line to establish the vertical and the long edge of my sketchbook, held to my eye, to point at the top of the tree, marking the vertical across the inside back cover of the sketchbook.

I measured the distance to the tree as 76 lengths of my hiking boots and added another four lengths to get me near the centre of the tree, which was probably an underestimate. Because the ground fell away sharply at one side I was unable to measure the girth of the trunk.

By drawing out the angle to the horizontal and the baseline distance to scale (right), I can measure the height as 96 hiking boot lengths so that’s 96 x 34 centimetres (they’re big boots, but very lightweight!); that’s 3264 cm, making the Sequoia approximately 32.64 metres tall, about 107 feet.

Errors include the gentle slope of the ground down to the river and my eye being about 1.8 metres above ground level but those two probably cancel each other out. Also from such an oblique angle I couldn’t actually see the top of the tree.

The River Ness

Mas leat an saoghal, is leat daoin’ an domhain

If the world is yours, the people of the world are yours too.

Gaelic proverb on the wall of the Cuach Coffee Shop, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery.
(A Cuach or quaich is a shallow, two-handed drinking cup, still used on Burns Night in Scotland)

DOES THIS PROVERB mean that if you go out into the world and become a part of it people will accept you and welcome you? It could just as easily be the motto of Cináed mac Ailpín (Kenneth MacAlpine), “The Conqueror”, the ninth century King of the Scots who is reputed to have conquered the Picts.

Inverness, known as ‘the Capital of the Highlands’ is the only capital city that I know of where you can look down from a bridge and see the bottom of the river.

10.25 a.m.: A juvenile Herring Gull wheels down to the grassy bank on the far side of the river to peck and preen, oblivious of the people walking past yards away on the pavement at the other side of the wall. My sketches suggest that this is a juvenile that fledged last year because its back is beginning to turn grey (top left). In a first year bird, the back would be entirely mottled brown.

Some of the litter bins have posters on them asking you not to feed the gulls. The gulls are streetwise, hanging around on the bustling pedestrianised high street of the city, on the look out for scraps. They can recognise a bag of teacakes from a hundred yards away; a man and boy walk past, the man holding a white plastic bag of teacakes (for human, not gull, consumption) and soon three gulls and two crows appear.

These crows are black like the Carrion Crows we’re used to seeing in Yorkshire but we also see Hooded Crows which are grey with black head, breast-patch, wings and tail. Seeing this race of the crow always makes me feel that I’m in the Highlands. They’re also the crows that you’re likely to see in Europe to the south and east of the Alps. We see a number of hybrids of the two races.

An immature Grey Heron watches then strikes. I can’t see whether it actually caught a fish but I suspect that it did as it then wiped each side of its bill against the branch that it’s standing on.

Three Herring Gulls swooped down on the Heron and half-heartedly tried to dislodge it from its perch. They then took up look-out posts on the tops of buildings overlooking the river.


The Undesignated Countryside

I’M WORRIED about my local patch of countryside. What’s there to worry about, you might ask;  the old railway marshalling yards at Healey Mills were featured on a BBC Natural World film as a superb example of butterfly habitat; the Strands and the Wyke made it into the national press as a unique wetland area (the first place in Britain that wild White Storks have nested after an absence of 600 years) and, crucially for biodiversity, these Calder Valley habitats are linked to the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s nature reserves at Stoneycliffe and Stocksmoor by Coxley Beck – the only stream in the area with a population of bullheads – and the much-loved woods of Coxley Valley.

Well that’s just how naturalists like myself, local people and the national media see it. This particular stretch of the Calder Valley is also a literary landscape; it features in the novels of the late Stan Barstow who was born in Horbury. Addingford Steps on the path down into the valley take on a symbolic significance in a couple of his novels where characters move from their everyday urban existence to an inkling of a new life with a deeper meaning. I think that’s what a patch of countryside on our doorstep does for a lot of us. It gives us somewhere to think, to forget our everyday concerns for an hour or so.

The valley was where I roamed with my friends as a child and where I set out with my sketchbook as an art student to draw plants, birds and animals.

So much for stories and inspiration; planners and politicians take a different view:

How a Planner might see the Calder Valley

There’s currently a major review of planning legislation in England. We need to get the country’s economy back on it’s feet so the suggestion is that any planning application that can be shown to promote sustainable development should be approved unless it has environmental implications.

But the habitats that I have described above don’t enjoy any special protection. In that sense, they have no special significance in planning legislation. On paper there would be no environmental implications; we’re not talking about a National Park or a Site of Special Scientific interest. None of these habitats, despite their national fame, is recognised as a Local Nature Reserve (not that they enjoy any special legal protection). Approval of applications would, presumably, be automatic.

In the south of England the most biodiverse nature reserve in the country is on brownfield land. At the Olympic site in London, efforts have been made to integrate meadows and watercourses into the design.

We can encourage biodiversity in planning but only if local people, who know the area best, are encouraged to contribute to the planning process. The presumption in favour of development would make it almost impossible to save habitats like these.

Kingfisher

THIS MORNING I spotted a Kingfisher flying to a perch on a branch on a pebbly bank at the edge of the river by the Bingley Arms. It spent a minute or two bashing the small fish it had just caught against the branch.

It watched from the perch for a while then dived down into the shallows beneath, emerging without catching a fish. Back on its perch but looking the other way, it watched, then dived again, once more without success, before flying off downstream.

It’s a long time since I saw a Kingfisher and I don’t remember ever seeing one dealing with a fish but it’s good to know that they’re still about.

Monkeying about with Elements 5

As I listened to the radio, I started doodling on the back of an envelope. Envelopes are often pleasant to draw on, smoother than the cartridge I’m used to but still with enough grain on the surface to provide some character.

I’ve recently loaded up Photoshop Elements 5 on my computer. It came bundled with the scanner but I’ve never given it a try. I’ve yet to find a program that makes animated GIFs as simple as they should be. The Elements version won’t allow me to vary the speed between frames so this ape is doomed to roll his eyes continuously at a rate of 0.2 seconds between frames.

Fossil Shells

22°C, 5.50 pm.
THESE PIECES of sandstone at the corner of the pond provide access to the water for birds and perhaps some cover for newts and frogs. They also help disguise the edge of the black plastic pond-liner. The first pond that we dug when we moved here was lined with builder’s damp-proofing plastic – blue polythene sheeting – which wasn’t resistant to ultra-violet light. I covered the edges with turves and spread garden netting across the bottom of the pond and pressed sub-soil from the hole we’d dug into it. This produced a more natural-looking pond than our present one but it had a tendency to wick water away and the netting wasn’t a good idea; on one occasion I saw a frog that had been drowned when it had gone down into the mud and got caught in it.

Brachiopods

I noticed these impressions of fossils shells in the rock on the far right (top). Superficially they look like cockle-shells but these fossil creatures weren’t bivalve molluscs; the Brachiopods (the name is from the Greek meaning ‘arm-foot’) appeared in the Cambrian explosion of life on Earth and have been around for 570 million years. Three thousand fossil species have been described but today only about 100 living species remain. They have suffered from competition with bivalves such as cockles, oysters and mussels.

Modelling clay cast of brachiopod. I can't decide whether this is a complete shell or whether these are two valves from separate individuals which just happen to have fossilised together.

These fossils are negative impressions of the shells so I pushed a piece of modelling clay into the hole and made this positive  cast of the original shell. When this shell was last visible on the surface of the earth it was on the seabed at a time when our part of the Earth’s crust lay close to the equator, some 300 million years ago in the Upper Carboniferous period. As the fossil is in sandstone, I guess these brachiopods must have been living near the mouth of a river.

The ribs on the shell bear this out as they indicate that this species of brachopod was adapted to live in shallow water in a strong current. A smooth shells would indicate a species that lives in deeper, calmer waters. That zig-zag line which marks the opening of the shell is known as the commisure (below right); brachiopods developed a folded commisure to increase feeding area while preventing sand particles entering.

Brachiopods stood on a pedicle stalk anchored on the seabed and opened and closed the two valves of their shells to feed. The hole in the shell where the stalk protruded led to them being given the name ‘lamp-shells’, as the larger valve resembles a Roman oil-lamp, with a hole for the wick.

Heron at the Pond

7.15 a.m.; AS I OPENED the blind on the window in the studio I was puzzled by a shape like a Grecian urn reflected in the pond. It was only after I’d seen the reflection that I realised that there was a juvenile Grey Heron standing behind the pond. It flew off towards the wood. As far as I remember, this is the first time in over 25 years that we have seen a Heron by the pond, although we’ve had them in the garden before.

It’s a reminder to me that I need to continue adding marginal, emergent and floating water plants to the pond to give the frogs and newts some cover.

Yesterday morning and again this morning we heard the high-pitched ‘mewing’ of a bird of prey. When I heard it yesterday, all that I could see in the air were a couple of crows. Today we saw a Buzzard soaring over the wood and I wonder if it has been perching somewhere down at this end of the valley, causing commotion amongst the local crows.

I’ve been working down by the compost bins. I opened the lid of one of the bins to add more compost and there, sitting at the top of the pile was a small Toad. It’s rare for me to do much work on a compost heap without coming across one.

Moriarty in Colour

With all the clearing up I had to do in the garden there’s not much time to immerse myself in the world of Sherlock Holmes today but I did have time to add a spot of colour to Moriarty. There’s a black and white engraving by Paget that I’d also like to draw from. It has the caption ‘He turned his rounded back on me’. In it Moriarty looks like a cross between a black beetle and a Marabou Stork. A colourful character even in black and white.