Category: Water

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

Coot on Eggs

coot sketches

Lake outlet, Newmillerdam, 10.15 a.m.: The sitting coot gets increasingly alarmed as the drake mallard gets nearer, dabbling around the nest. The coot’s repeated, scalding notes get more frantic until its mate swims over briefly to check things out, but the mallard soon moves on.

Back to the business of incubating, the coot keeps changing position and I get a glimpse of 8-10 greenish brownish eggs.

Its mate returns and presents the sitting bird with a spindly pencil-length twig sprouting fresh green leaves. This is accepted by the bird on the nest (I’m not saying ‘the female’ because I can’t tell the difference between the two birds) and incorporated into the car tyre-sized platform.

Kingcups

kingcups
greenbottle

A greenbottle settled on my sketchbook as I drew the first of the kingcups at the edge of the pond. Its blue-green metallic armour wouldn’t be out of place on a CGI robot but the it makes a living in the down-to-earth business of recycling: its maggot stage feeds on carrion.

The adult will also feast on carrion but is also attracted to flowers . . . and dung.

My macro photograph of a kingcup flower shows a cluster of stamens. The carpel, the female part of the plant, is almost hidden amongst them at the centre. The female carpels standing in the centre appear to be slightly notched on top, rather than rounded like the stamens and they’re very slightly greener.

kingcup flower

But is it Art?

pink-footed goose

Have you ever come across the idea that natural history illustration “isn’t art”? I remember you trained in design and illustration rather than fine art – have you ever had to defend your work against this charge?

My friend, writer Richard Smyth, in an e-mail today

Interesting question. It’s not anything that anyone has ever challenged me on but, like most creatives, I wouldn’t want to use ‘artist’ as a job description. I’d always describe myself as an illustrator/writer. Although I’ve had exhibitions of paintings, probably 99% of my work is illustration and intended to be seen on a page or screen with text. My sketchbooks are part field notebook.

It’s a relief to be off the hook as far as art is concerned. When I draw a flower, bird or snail, I love the idea that the creature has the right just to be itself. I can’t avoid being an observer and therefore having an implied presence in a drawing but I don’t want to burden the poor creature with how I was feeling that day, or with my views on Life, The Universe and Everything.

I feel that when Picasso draws a dove, a monkey, a horse or a bull, the critics have to scramble around to tell us what that symbolised at that stage in his career, whereas if I, as I did this morning, draw a pink-footed goose, I’d like the actions, appearance and personality of that particular goose on that particular day, to be the main subject: not to mention the energy and mystery implicit in said goose simply being a goose.

I know this is impossible, as I’m not a camera, but that would be my aim.