Goosander Central

You could imagine The Lady of the Lake emerging with Excalibur from the Lower Lake at Nostell Priory this morning. There’s a mist hanging over it, which melts away as we walk along the shore. In the shade of the trees, ice still covers half of the surface but it’s covered by a film of water so that mallards can stand about in groups in the middle of the lake.

Most of the Middle Lake is ice-free and eight drake goosanders have gathered in the middle of it, probably accompanied by as many females, but it’s difficult to make a definitive count as at any time one or more of them is likely to be underwater.

As we stand on the top of the banking, trying to count them, I’m aware that the lake’s resident pink-footed goose has started swimming towards us. As I lower my binoculars, I’m astonished to find that it’s waddling along beside us. While we were counting goosanders it must have walked up the near vertical banking!

Herons over the Viaduct

It’s gone midday but the gloom has never lifted. Two grey herons fly over the century old grey-brick viaduct.

A small group of long-tailed tits descend on the fat-ball feeder, leaving the sunflower hearts to the great tits.

The Man with the Silver Spade

 

Map from ‘Thornes Park’, a history trail (see link below).

Along the Victorian avenue of horse chestnuts in Clarence Park, Wakefield, a handful of trees that have been lost over the years have recently been replaced. The park is named after the Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, grandson of Queen Victoria (and second in line for the throne), who planted a tree – a ‘white chestnut’ – here on Thursday, 30 April, 1891, using a sliver spade presented to him by Lady Green, wife of Sir Edward Green, M.P., of Heath Old Hall.

The local fish and chip shop, Avondale Fisheries, is another reminder of his visit.

Continue reading The Man with the Silver Spade

Nuthatches

11.30 a.m.: In the woodland glade of the Menagerie at Nostell one nuthatch is chasing another. There’s an exchange of ‘tickety-tick’ type calls followed by a high-pitched repeated ‘Chuieee’ call.

What I take to be the male bird is posturing, following the female from tree-trunk to the bough of the neighbouring tree.

In subdued winter plumage, the yellow on the breast of a grey wagtail is a good match for the buff colour-wash on the buildings of the stable block that overlook the walled garden.

Molebusters

In the opening pages of The Wind in the Willows, the Mole ‘scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged’ his way to the surface. This winter there’s been a lot of scrabbling and scrooging around the lakes at Nostell Priory. Molehills have been popping up on verges, path edges and even under park benches, many of them just the size of a pudding basin but there are several that are the diameter of a dustbin lid, containing two bucketfuls or more of soil.

We’ve seen fieldfares using molehills as vantage points on the open parkland. Around the lakes, the resident robins often perch on them; they’ll give one that has been freshly excavated a close examination, picking out any food items (presumably invertebrates) that might have been brought to the surface.

Useful as they might be to some of the local birds, the mounds will present an obstacle when mowing starts again in the spring, so now is the time to rake them out. The freshly turned soil can serve as a mulch, bringing minerals back to the surface.

Sprouting bulbs uprooted in a molehill.

For regular-sized molehills a little footwork is all that is needed but for the mole-mountains there’s a garden power tool that can help. Leaf blowers can be eight times faster than traditional raking and sweeping and this morning one of the gardeners is using a powerful leaf blower to spread the earth of a mound over a lakeside verge. Noisy but effective!

Crow Courtship

10.30 a.m.: Four carrion crows are foraging towards the lower end of the parkland below the Obelisk Lodge at Nostell. I’m guessing that there are two males and two females because two of them are bowing and cawing: rival males. This genteel approach to courtship doesn’t last long.

 The rivalry erupts into a scrap as the males go for each other. At one stage, one of the males briefly ends up on his back, defending himself with legs and beak. Despite the fracas, the foursome stays together as we walk off up the slope.

Squirrel Baffle

8.45 a.m.: We’ve been waiting to see whether the squirrel baffle on our new bird feeding pole would defeat a really determined squirrel.

After nibbling a few spilt sunflower hearts from the lawn beneath, a grey squirrel looks up quizzically at the feeders. Taking a leap at the pole, it gets to within a foot of the steel cone and hangs there for a moment until gravity kicks in and it starts to slide back down, like a fireman on a pole.

It scampers off towards the patio then climbs to the top of the cordon apple and looks back towards the pole. After checking out the patio table and discovering the odd sunflower heart that I’d spilt there, it goes over to the shed and climbs to the apex of the roof, to check out the challenge from another angle.

You can imagine the thought processes that it’s going through. It completes a circuit of vantage points by climbing the clothes pole and the crab apple (where it samples one of the squishy apples).

Then it’s back to the feeding pole for one last attempt. Taking a running jump, it succeeds in propelling itself right up into the cone. For a few moments all that we can see of it is a bushy tail, dangling and swishing slightly. That’s as far as it gets, then it lets itself gently back down to earth via the pole.

I think that now we’ll be able to go back to using plastic feeders, in addition to the robust ‘squirrel-proof’ metal feeders that we had to start using a year ago.

Link

RSPB Pole-mounted Feeder Squirrel Guard

Corner Fern

2.15 p.m., 29°F, -3°C: I’ve switched to fibre tip pen this afternoon; it tends to speed up my drawing as moves about so smoothly in any direction. That is just as well because the temperature has dropped below freezing so I can’t get too involved with the intricacies of the fronds of the male fern growing at the corner of the raised bed behind the pond.

A dunnock delivers its thin trilling song from a perch in the hedge. A female blackbird gives a scolding alarm call from the crab. There’s a rattly call from a mistle thrush. The redwing has been back, feeding on the squishy brown crab apples.

There’s a monotonous song from a wood pigeon. It’s a five note phrase, repeated two or three times, which The Handbook of British Birds  gives as “cōō-cōōō-cōō, cōō-cōō “.

Making a note to remember the rhythm, I write ‘I don’t like plumbing’, but more memorable mnemonics that have been suggested are  ‘my toe bleeds, Betty’, ‘take two cows, Taffy’, or ‘a proud Wood-pig-eon’.

Robin in the Hedge

Low sun, cool breeze picking up, 39°F, 4°C: Just when I feel I need a spot of colour our resident robin perches amongst the hawthorn stems. There’s a constant chirruping of sparrows in the hedge.

In addition to the evergreen holly and the ivy, there are green ferny leaves of cow parsley in the shady corner by the bench. Creeping buttercup straggles along the bottom of the hedge. Gold-tipped feathery moss grows luxuriantly on old timber and a house brick.

The lath of old timber visible on the left of my drawing is from Barbara’s dad’s car-port which we dismantled when he sold his last car. We built a fence from the recycled timbers when we cut back the original, rather overgrown, hawthorn hedge. The hawthorns have sprung back from the stumps and the small hollies we planted have thrived; one holly in the corner has a stem that is five inches in diameter. I can see only three red berries; there are never many as I keep it trimmed back.

redwingYesterday afternoon a fieldfare was fighting off blackbirds from the golden hornet crab apple; this afternoon a redwing is tucking into the pulpy brown frosted crab apples. It doesn’t appear to be as aggressive as the fieldfare; it seems more content to share.

Winter Thrushes

There are thirty fieldfares on the south-facing slopes of grassland by the Obelisk Gate at Nostell. Redwings sometimes join them but today they’re amongst the trees nearer the house, probably attracted by holly and yew berries. Also on the parkland slopes, there are more mistle thrushes than we’d normally expect to see together: at least a dozen in total.

Foxglove leaf rosette.

The open parkland is white with frost so parties of wood pigeons are gathering on the sheltered rings of leaf litter beneath oaks and beeches.

The resident family of mute swans and the local mallards have gathered on a small patch of open water on the sunny side of the iced-over Lower Lake.

The drumming of a great-spotted woodpecker on a tree in the Pleasure Grounds carries well in frosty air, as does the manic laughing ‘yaffle’ call of a green woodpecker in Top Wood.