Category: Water

Branched Bur-reed

ivy-covered trunk of ash tree

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.

bur-reed

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.

mycena fungi on alder

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.

Goose Feather

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.

duck

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.

alder

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.

The Water Margin

brush drawing

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.

Noodler's Ink and Chinese brushes

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.

close-up of brush drawing

I wonder if the granular quality of the wash is a characteristic of Noodler’s, or whether it was debris in the water.

drawing by the lake

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.

Crack Willow

crack willow sketchbook page

Newmillerdam, 10.30 a.m., 65℉, 17℃, a few high, hazy stratus: This backwater near the car park is a first call for people feeding the ducks. A family of four young coot chicks is being fed by an adult with delicacy and care, interspersed with aggression as the adult attacks one of the chicks, clasping its head in its beak several times as the chick paddles frantically to escape. Perhaps it’s a stray chick from another family – there’s another family foraging around the boughs of the crack willow, just yards away – but coots will attack their own young.

coot family
The chicks were smaller than the ones in my sketch, with dark red rather than yellow head-patches and darker downy plumage.

Another possibility is that the aggression was triggered because this particular chick didn’t have such bright colours on its head as its siblings. Could this be a sign that it wasn’t in the best of health and that therefore – in order to give the rest of the brood a better chance of survival – it wasn’t worth the effort of feeding? The adult was going for its head-patch, as if that was causing offence.

Enchanter’s Nightshade

Enchanter's nightshade

Enchanter’s nightshade grows at my feet at the edge of the path. Unlike most other members of the willowherb family it doesn’t release parachute-type seeds but instead covers its seedpods with Velcro-style hooks, so that they get carried along by any passing furry animal. No shortage of those here at Newmillerdam.

For the Anglo Saxons, enchanter’s nightshade was ælf-þone (aelfthone), a charm against elves.

books and folders
Books and folders at John’s.

The View from the Boathouse

Newmillerdam
Drawn with my new Lamy nexx with the EF nib, in brown De Atramentis ink, watercolour added later, as Barbara rang me to say that she and her brother had had to abandon their usual circuit of the lake.
swallow

The best place for me to draw at Newmillerdam on this rainy morning is the Boathouse Cafe, sitting looking out of the 200-year old gothic mullioned window with a mug of latte.

geese

Swallows swoop and glide low over the glowering grey surface of the lake. Thirty pink-footed geese – probably two or three families combined – progress sedately across the placid waters, making surprisingly little noise, considering how excitable geese can be.

coot family

There’s a family of coots with three youngsters, now almost adult size but in charcoal-and-white penguin-style livery, instead of the jet-black of the adults

On the coots’ nest by the outlet of the lake, an adult is sitting tight. This is a popular little nesting platform, now with it’s own mini-garden of herbage, and I think several families of coots must have been raised here over the last few months.

duck

In the shallow film of water cascading over the top course of masonry of the outlet, mallards are dabbling. The lake has its backwaters, opaque and eau-de-nile today, but here there’s always a flow, so always the chance of some invertebrate or seed being washed down.

Two ducklings are swimming nearby. I’ve seen smaller ducklings stuck below the horse-shoe cataract of the outlet, unable to make the leap back up again, but these two seem just about old enough to escape the dangers.

duckling

Lagoon

lagoon
Original sketch about 3×3 inches square.

It’s been a good year for the pink-footed geese at St Aidan’s. Two families swam by along one of the drains with a total of 16 goslings between the two pairs.

tree

Not so visible were swallows, which I expected to be zipping around above us during our walk, but the warden explained that they do seem to come and go and that the sand martins were still busy at their colony in the sand martin wall.

The kestrels have yet to hatch any young and it’s possible that a grey squirrel seen on the jib of the huge dragline excavator where they nest has done a bit of nest-robbing. There’s still time for them to start again.

Yellow Flag

flag iris

11.15 a.m., 70℉, 21℃, storm cloud looking threatening to the west, but we escape the worst of it: The triple flower-heads of Yellow Flag Iris look complicated, but they work perfectly when a bumble bee lands on them. I assume that it would take one of the larger bees to trigger the mechanism and enter the flower, but a smaller bumble bee manages just as easily.

The coots’ nest near the war memorial has been neatly built up since last week and there are at least three chicks.

birds

Back home, I draw some of the visitors to the bird feeders. In additions to the greenfinch, blackbird, starling, blue tit, robin, wood pigeon and house sparrow that I’ve sketched here, we had a male great spotted woodpecker coming to the feeders and a grey squirrel with a very undernourished tail.

Newt Survey

smooth newts in washing up bowl
newts

My thanks to Connie, Sofia and Annabelle for doing a bit of pond dipping in our back garden yesterday. They reported a single large water beetle and the odd damselfly larva but they made no mention of tadpoles or young frogs. That might be because of the numbers of newts in the pond.

Final Results

Smooth Newts 22, of which only 5 were female, so in this sample less than a quarter of the population is female. On the occasions that I’ve seen a newt caught by a blackbird I’ve often spotted the bright orange belly of the male.

Goslings

coot

Newmillerdam Lake, War Memorial, Monday, 24 May, 2021, 10.50 a.m., 63℉, 7℃, 80% cloud: A coot swims to the shore and immediately sees off two snoozing mallard drakes. It preens and pods about a bit then goes back to the lake.

gosling

Two pairs of pink-footed goose come ashore, each with a single gosling.

mallard drake

Two weeks ago I drew the coot on the nest by the outlet sitting on eggs, last week there were about eight chicks and this week the nest is empty, with no sign of any addled eggs left behind. Nearer the war memorial there’s a coot still sitting on its nest, no sign of chicks peeping out as we passed.

wildfowl