Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
The last of the supporting players, the tufted duck is taking shape and I’ve made a start on the main character, the hungry duck.
Ode to a Duck shouldn’t take long to put together now that I’ve got all the elements together. The animation shouldn’t be much longer than 60 seconds.
My Addingford show in the Redbox Gallery in Horbury comes to an end later this month but I’m following up its theme of the importance to us all of having a ‘local patch’ in my November ‘Wild Yorkshire’ column in The Dalesman.
Rather than it being just me saying how much I value this stretch of the Calder Valley, I thought I should quote one of the many studies that suggest that being in nature can benefit our physical and mental health. This study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA was made before the pandemic, but seems even more relevant now:
Green space can provide mental health benefits and possibly lower risk of psychiatric disorders. This nation-wide study covering >900,000 people shows that children who grew up with the lowest levels of green space had up to 55% higher risk of developing a psychiatric disorder independent from effects of other known risk factors.
Residential green space in childhood is associated with lower risk of psychiatric disorders from adolescence into adulthood, PNAS, 2019
We’ve got most of the Newmillerdam ecosystem appearing in Ode to a Duck. It took me a while to work out how to stop my characters floating around – you simply pin their feet to the background – but that hasn’t been a problem with these two.
Joining the swan for the prologue, this Canada goose. I haven’t given him moving eyes and eyebrows, but he seems suitably goose-like without them.
I think that you can see that John Smeaton, engineer on this stretch of the Calder & Hebble Navigation, had previously worked on lighthouses. This 250 year-old stonework withstood the ravages of the Storm Ciara floods in February last year, but the spillway and the island were scoured away. A £3 million repair project took a year to complete, delayed by the coronavirus outbreak.
On our school cross country, my friend John and I used to jog – or more probably saunter – through this echoey underpass beneath the railway. As we were wearing our football kit we could imagine that it would be something like this in the tunnel at Wembley on Cup Final day. Not that we were keen on football: for me 90 minutes wandering along the school cross country route was preferable to running up and down the pitch. We knew all the short cuts, so we didn’t have to run all the way.
We cross the Calder here, at Healey Mills, but at that time there was a riveted steel footbridge, now replaced by this box girder bridge.
Our cross country route took us down the hill behind the gasworks and through the hamlet of Healey Mills. At that time people lived in this small terrace at the entrance to the mill yard.
We sometimes had a bit extra to our route because the school playing fields were another quarter of a mile from the school in South Ossett.
My Ode to a Duck animation is going to be a biodiversity hotspot: here are the latest recruits, the moorhen and coot. It’s surprising how these characters take on a life of their own: I’d never thought of a moorhen as being a bit of a spiv or of a coot being an ingenue.
On Friday at St Aidan’s we saw spoonbill, ruff, heron and bittern. A birdwatcher suggested that the adult spoonbills from the small colony at Fairburn Ings fly over to St Aidan’s to take a break from the juveniles.
As the ruff had a black bill, it was probably a female. We’re now into the autumn migration, so hopefully we’ll see a few more waders at the shallower ponds.
Growing by watersides, reed canary-grass, Phalaris arundinacea, looks like a diminutive version of the common reed, Phragmites, and has been dubbed canal grass. At this time of year, some of the seedheads are flushed with purple, so it deserves its nickname of designer Phragmites.
Growing alongside the Phalaris, gipsywort, Lycopus europaeus, which has been in herbal medicine and to produce a black dye.
There are dozens of dragonflies about and a few butterflies, including this common blue, taking a brief rest on the path.
T'was the last week of summer And, down by the lake, We hear the sad quack Of a hungry old drake.
The grebes and the tufted ducks Dabble and dive But our poor drake is struggling Just to survive.
The foraging moorhen
Has plenty of luck,
But that doesn't extend
To the desolate duck.
In the woods, the grey squirrels
Eat beech-nuts galore,
But our poor drake is starving
Down here on the shore.
I know what you’re thinking:
‘I’ll give him some bread!’ –
But just one mouldy bread crust
Can leave a duck dead.
This ode to a duck Might not be the best, But what were you expecting? - I'm not Colin West!
Cartoon ducks drawn at Newmillerdam this morning. We didn’t see any drake mallards in breeding plumage, so my guess is that they’re all in eclipse plumage, and we’ll see their true colours appear in the autumn.
As we walk down the Balk from Netherton on a still, grey Sunday morning, the only sound coming across the Calder Valley is the peel of bells from the spire of Horbury’s Georgian Church of St Peter’s. The bells were recast a year ago and we can hear the difference in harmony. Not that I thought they were out of tune before but there was a bit of a clanking abruptness when they were ringing; the arpeggios are smoother now.
On the bank of the stream at the lower end of The Balk, ivy stems climb the trunk of this ash tree as luxuriantly as a strangler fig in a rain forest.
Branched bur-reed, Sparganium erectum, grows by the canal bank, alongside The Strands, in the valley at Horbury Bridge. After engineering work to repair locks and drains damaged by flooding in February last year, the Canal & River Trust did some dredging along this stretch of the Calder and Hebble Navigation. Floating vegetation and marginals have soon colonised this quiet stretch but now most Covid restrictions have been lifted, we’re seeing more narrowboats, which help keep it clear.
A little further along, where trees grow alongside the canal, Mycena fungi grow on the stump of a sawn-off alder growing from the bank.
Out of the goose feather quills that I’ve cut, my favourite is the thinnest and most flexible, so it’s quite suited to the curvy shapes of ducks, willow branches and alder leaves, drawn this from a fishing platform at Newmillerdam.
But it isn’t practical for field work because the ink goes on so thickly that I can’t close the sketchbook. Over three hours later I’ve put it on the scanner and blots of ink have stuck to the glass.
Even carrying back my open sketchbook I managed to leave my thumbprint on the wet ink of the drawing. It’s part of what makes drawing with a quill more spontaneous than drawing with my usual fountain pen, but for field sketches, that’s what I’ll be going back to.
I’m reading James A. Michener’s The Hokusai Sketchbooks, so this morning at Newmillerdam, as a change from pen and watercolour, I’ve gone for Chinese brush and Noodler’s Black Ink.
Lying in the lakeside mud beside me, was a freshwater mussel shell, so I used that as a suitably oriental-looking palette to mix my grey ink wash. I dipped my cup in the water and, as I started to paint, realised that I’d caught two small water creatures – water beetles perhaps – which I released unharmed at the end of my session.
I wonder if the granular quality of the wash is a characteristic of Noodler’s, or whether it was debris in the water.
In England, our school holidays have now started and the lakeside path was a bit busier than usual however, in this willowy backwater, I had this corner of floating world to myself. Just me and a few passing mallards and a coot that came ashore within a few feet of me, apparently oblivious of me until I moved.
It’s there in the bottom right-hand corner of my drawing.