Mink

minkA couple we meet on the towpath tell us they’ve just seen a mink amongst the tree roots on the opposite side of the canal. As we continue on our way we hear them calling behind us. A mink is swimming across towards some overhanging vegetation. It seems to vanish when it reaches the bank.

It’s a sleek predator but I wish that we could return to the days when I regularly saw water voles alongside the canal. As the introduced mink spread into valley, the water voles disappeared.

As we walk back later that afternoon we come across a young heron that stands at the edge of the canal looking intently at the water, its yellow eye unblinking. It’s so intent that it lets us get within a few yards of it before flying off and settling twenty yards further along the towpath.

Ashfields and Half Moon

Rosebay willowherb and goldenrod
Rosebay willowherb and goldenrod

Ashfield signThe Ashfields, between Heath village and the River Calder (OS ref. SE 353 206), were settlement lagoons for the pulverised fuel ash from Wakefield power station which was decommissioned in 1991. In the past thirty or forty years the process of natural succession has transformed them from silty open ground to orchid meadow and then from scrub to woodland.

speckled wood
Speckled wood
A leafy stemmed hawkweed, common valerian, ribbed melilot and hare's-foot clover.
A leafy stemmed hawkweed, common valerian, ribbed melilot and hare’s-foot clover.

Longhorn Beetle

longhornlonghorn beetleTwo longhorn beetles, Stranglia maculata, rest on umbels of hogweed and in a sheltered clearings there are a few speckled wood butterflies but the most common and persistent insect is the mosquito.

Half MoonHalf Moon

bur reed

The Half Moon (SE 358 208) between Heath and Kirkthorpe is a cut-off meander of the Calder. A hundred or more whirligig beetles gyrate in a group on the surface close to the bank. Branched bur-reed grows amongst sweet-flag.

Whirligig beetles
Whirligig beetles

Amber Snail

amber snail
Amber snail, probably Succinea putris.

Amber snails graze on the sweet-flag. These snails are unable to fully retract into their shells. Their lower tentacles are much reduced.

The Harrogate Train

Harrogate station
Harrogate station

phone manUsually, as soon as I start drawing a commuter, he or she will change position or get on to a train but I thought that I had a chance with this man, sitting nursing his luggage and thoroughly absorbed with his phone. After five minutes our train started moving away but I’d made a mental note of the colours and I quickly added them. I like plain inky drawings but usually I feel that sketches like this come to life when I add a bit of colour; there’s so much more information in a drawing which includes colour.

‘You are now entering a great crested newt site’ a notice on the trackside near Hornbeam Park informs us.

Drab, Dry and Dusty

hill houseThe countryside has a late summer look to it. Oaks near Horsforth now look drab, dry and dusty. The flowers of creeping thistle have largely turned to downy seed heads. There’s a decadent feeling that the party is almost over, frothy creamy white flowers of Russian vine and trumpets of greater bindweed are festooned over fences. The waste ground flowers that I associate with the end of the summer holidays have appeared: Himalayan balsam, rosebay willowherb, common ragwort, goldenrod and, looking rather dull and mildewed even at its freshest, mugwort.Leeds sketches

park bloomIt’s the first time that we’ve visited Harrogate for years but we’ll certainly return. We walk up through the Valley Gardens then through the pinewood on Harlow Hill. We don’t get chance to walk around the Royal Horticultural Society gardens at Harlow Carr because we spend so long queuing for a leisurely lunch at the deservedly popular Betty’s Tearooms.

A Hare in Priory Wood

hare10 a.m., Nostell Park: As we reach the southeast corner of Priory Wood a brown hare runs right in front of us, only ten yards away, crosses the (filled in) cattle grid and hares off across the bottom corner of the wood.

“Did you see that?” I ask the man who’s just been putting a lead on his black labrador “I think your dog must have disturbed it.”

hare“It’s the farmer cutting this field,” he suggests, “I often see them around. There are a few setts around here.”

He’s wrong actually; a sett would be badgers, it’s just a form for a hare: a shallow depression in the ground. But I don’t like to be pedantic!

It’s great to see a hare so close up, close enough to see the prominent black and white markings at the tips of its long ears and its black and white tail.

hareAccounts suggest that hares aren’t doing well in the English countryside. Traditionally managed parkland, as here at Nostell, gives them a refuge and hopefully there isn’t too much lamping: hunting at night using powerful spotlights, which is thought to have led to a decline in their numbers in some areas.

Mam Tor

Mam Tor

Mam Tor from the Castle Inn, 1.30 p.m., 20°C, 69°F: You can see how Mam Tor got it’s name; it sits there like a mother hen looking down over the Hope Valley. The line running along the righthand side of the summit plateau is the line of the ramparts and the silted up ditch of an Iron Age hill fort.

The exposure of alternating layers of shale and sandstone cuts across the southeast corner of the hill fort. The scar is the result of a series of landslips. The piles of debris at the foot of the hill are still unstable and this resulted in the closure in 1979 of the road that ran across them: the A625 from Sheffield to Chapel-en-le-Frith.

Riverside Birds

birds
Young coal tit and robin and an adult male siskin (lower left).

11 a.m.: There are a lot of young coal, great and especially blue tits visiting the feeders at the Riverside Café, Hathersage, this morning. They look washed out, as if the colour saturation had been reduced in Photoshop. They’re not such sharp dressers as the adults, lacking some of the more emphatic markings like the breast stripe of the male great tit.

Published
Categorized as Birds Tagged

Waiting Room Sketches

watch and fasteningshandWe’ve got an appointment at the doctors’ this morning. As a change from drawing my hand, I start drawing the clasps and fastenings on my art bag and the back of my watch, which is the type that recharges its battery kinetically.

We’re back again in the afternoon. This time I revert to drawing my hand. I prefer drawing something organic to something mechanical.

Serpentine Birds

grebe diving
Grebe

Twelve ring-necked parakeets join a wood pigeon pecking on the turf by Rotten Row in Hyde Park. A great-crested grebe dives on the Serpentine, a lake created for Queen Caroline in the 1730s. At the lake’s edge, a coot pecks at a bedraggled scrap of fabric that it has retrieved from deeper water, seeing off a rival that soon appears.

Moorhen

A moorhen stands breast deep, scrutinising the film of algae on the stonework at its feet, pecking down at some morsel. A flotilla of grey geese sail by in single file, heading up the lake.

carnationKings Cross to Wakefield

We get caught in a downpour after walking through Regent’s Park so head for a bus shelter at Great Portland Street and take the number 30 bus to Kings Cross. After lunch at Leon and a browse around Hatchard’s, I draw this carnation at a cafe table in front of the bookstore.

This ramp in a concrete building at Kings Cross reminded me of the false perspective in a de Chiricco painting.
This ramp in a concrete building at Kings Cross reminds me of the false perspective in a de Chirico painting.

There are almost as many people queuing up to be photographed pushing a shopping trolley into Platform 9¾ as there were waiting for trains.

Passengers at Kings Cross
Passengers at Kings Cross

On this overcast afternoon the greens of the trees have a late summer heaviness.

train sketchestrain sketchesAfter Hadley Wood station we plunge into a tunnel and then, before the next tunnel, there’s a short section, a shallow ‘hidden’ valley, with nothing but trees, hedges and slopes of ochre grasses. It’s a welcome relief after three days in the city, much as I like it.

Buddleia has colonised the ballast alongside the track on the approach to Peterborough. There are yellow daisy-like flowers on fleabane and pinkish trumpet flowers on the lesser bindweed.

Land of the Lions

bearded piglangurLondon Zoo: The bearded pigs, Sus barbatus, are native to Borneo, Sumatra, Malaysia and the Philippines. This morning they’re pushing around chunky plastic feeders, a little larger than a football, which are dispensing food amongst the wood chip of the enclosure. This gives the pigs a lot more entertainment than gathering around a trough. Occasionally one of the feeders will pass from one pig to another with, presumably, the pig which is higher in the pecking order winning the prize.langur

In the evocatively designed Land of Lions, a langur monkey relaxes in the top of dead tree in a convincing replica of  the dry scrubby Gir Forest Reserve in India.

The vegetable samosas from the street food vendor in the zoo’s colourful version of Sasan Gir village are equally convincing.

pelicanspelicanWhite pelicans are sitting together resting but they spring to life when a keeper appears with a bucket of fish. They each save several fish for later consumption in their pouches. Two herons have been hanging around and they’re also successful in grabbing a fish each. I think of herons as being one of our largest birds but compared to the pelicans they’re lightweights.

tigertigerThe Sumatran tigers have two small cubs. One tiger – the male I guess – checks out the perimeter while the other stays with the cubs in a shrubby corner of the Tiger Territory enclosure.

Link: Land of the Lions, Zoological Society of London. For my Royal College of Art degree show in June 1975 I produced a hand-coloured print of the Victorian Lion House at the London Zoo which was then scheduled for demolition. At the suggestion of my tutor John Norris Wood, I sold the print in aid of the conservation of Asiatic lions at the Gir Forest Reserve. I remember thinking that some day I might get to the Gir Forest with my sketchbook. Visiting Land of the Lions has been the next best thing!

His Peculiar Menagerie

Prommers gather in the arena of the Royal Albert Hall, 7.25 p.m.
Prommers gather in the arena of the Royal Albert Hall, 7.25 p.m.

tubaWe’ve gone for seats in the grand tier, in the last box to the right of the orchestra, giving us the closest view but arguably not perfectly balanced sound, however I can hear every instrument and follow the action from solo violin, to cor anglais to glockenspiel. The Prommers, the members of the audience who stand, sit or lie down in the arena, might be closer to the conductor but they don’t have the unrestricted view of the entire orchestra that we’re getting.

Some of the players don’t have the option of tuning their instruments off stage so during the interval I get a chance to draw the harpist tuning up. The kettle drum player has a method of tuning his drum during the performance, turning the keys and keeping his ear close to the edge of the drum. I think of a drum as a background beat that doesn’t really need any tuning but when it comes to finishing off some of the pieces the kettle drum really does have to hit the right note.

kettledrum

harpistRavel’s Mother Goose and Debussy’s La Mer are the old favourites that brought us here but the British premiere of a Symphony for Violin, Chorus and Orchestra by Lera Auerbach, The Infant Minstrel and His Peculiar Menagerie, is an event in itself.

Edward Gardner conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra but I decide to miss out on the chance to sketch him in action because I don’t want to miss a note of the music. His conducting style combines the necessary precision and expression with a touch of wry humour and just a hint of mime. His peculiar menagerie of performers includes several glockenspiels, a musical saw, two harps and five vocal soloists including countertenor Andrew Watts. I’d have liked to have drawn them too.

East Coast Mainline

Hedges near RetfordDoncaster railway buildingWakefield Westgate to London King’s Cross, 10.18 a.m.: The embankments are splashed bright yellow by clumps of common ragwort, magenta with rosebay willowherb.

In the sidings at Doncaster there are a few spikes of mullein and a sprinkling of pale yellow evening primrose. Buddleia is in full flower but it’s only when we stop at Newark that I see two butterflies (peacocks?) chasing each other around its purple bottle brush spikes of blossom. There are white butterflies at Grantham where birdsfoot trefoil grows on the trackside ballast.

train sketchesAfter a steady climb up the Jurassic limestone scarp at Grantham the countryside opens out south of Peterborough. There’s a glimpse of cattle grazing in water meadows near Sandy, Bedfordshire, and of stag-headed oaks near Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire.

One of the catering staff compliments me on the watercolours in my sketchbook.

“I always take it with me.”

“You’ve got very steady hands,” she says.

“I wish I had!”

It’s part of the challenge of drawing for me, especially at 125 m.p.h. on the Virgin East Coast train to London.

A Walk Across Town

treesA bank of cloud hangs over the city but it’s just as well that it’s a bit cooler here as there’s 100 mile cycle race from Pall Mall into Surrey and back and they’re expecting 10,000 riders.

The journey into London for me is a journey back in time – to childhood visits and to my student days here and to when as a freelance I took my portfolio and my book ideas to publishers. There were always expectations and I still always feel that I’m going to come away inspired.

blossomAs usual we make our way to South Kensington via Regent’s Park, Baker Street and Hyde Park. We find a shady bench by the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens where I draw a tree, about 35 feet tall, which is in blossom.