Perhaps because I’ve been rattling off so many storyboard frames for my comic strip project, I felt relaxed when I took the opportunity to draw the customers during our coffee break this morning. Perhaps the prospect of a large latte was helping me get in a suitably laid back mood too.
I like the way my new fountain pen glides about on the paper, perhaps a bit out of control but that’s something that it can be good to go along with. In fact I’m getting so mellow that I even quite like the wax-resist effect of the paper in my Moleskine sketchbook, an effect probably accentuated by my hand resting on the paper as I draw.
On a cool breezy morning at Rabbit Ings country park, Royston, South Yorkshire, the only butterflies we see on our walk with Wakefield Naturalists’ Society are a small copper and dingy skipper which are sheltering on the south-facing bank of a ditch. They soon flit away and most of the wild flowers I film are equally restless, as they’re buffeted about by the wind.
Rabbit Ings country park is centred on the restored spoil heap of Monckton colliery. As you follow the path along the contour of the hill from the far end, a distant view of the gritstone moors of the Peak District opens up to the south-west, beyond Barnsley.
I’m guessing that the mystery object in my YouTube movie is a fox scat. It doesn’t look quite right for a short-eared owl pellet.
Simba is a dog, a sheltie, who needs constant reassurance but that’s not surprising as he has to share his home territory with two year-old Alex, who celebrates his birthday today.
I’ve drawn Simba in my pocket-sized Moleskine, using my new Lamy Safari with the extra fine nib.
Over the past couple of days we’ve seen a female blackbird resting in the middle of the blanket of duckweed that covers most of our pond. She’s not bathing or struggling to get out. This evening I realise what she’s up to.
She grabs a newt from just below the water surface in front of her and immediately flies to an open grassy patch at the edge of the pond to peck at it. I don’t see whether she eats it there and then or whether she takes it off to feed to her young.
I’ve seen her stalking along the edge of the pond on the look out, I now realise, for any unwary newt that might surface. Our resident newts are smooth newts. Unlike the great-crested newts they don’t have special protection under the Wildlife and Countryside Act but would this female blackbird care if they did? I think not.
I’ve seen her once before with a successful catch which she took to the raised bed behind the pond. I could see her prey was a long and flexible creature but at the time I couldn’t positively identify it.
Pond Pyramid
This female blackbird is at the top of a pond food chain, at the apex of a food pyramid, but she’s not the top predator around here; she runs the risk of being incorporated into the food chain of one of the local sparrowhawks or domestic cats.
The newts are predators in their own right; I’ve watched them eating newly emerged frog tadpoles. The tadpoles, at this early stage of their lives, are eating the algae that grows on the clump of frogspawn.
From thin air, just add water . . .
I find it amazing that you can start with sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and in a few links along the food chain end up with a blackbird.
wood pigeon
Although my aim is to build a little eco-system in the back garden, I do think that I ought to tweak the chances of survival for the newts by clearing some of the duckweed so that the blackbird can’t sit in wait at the centre of the pond.
Update
Two days later, on Saturday, Barbara spotted the blackbird catching a newts again, five in total. I spent five minutes raking the duckweed to the edges of the pond which should make it impossible for the blackbird to perch in the middle of the pond and give some additional cover to the newts when she is stalking around the margins.
6.05 p.m.; There’s a limping wood pigeon that has been a regular at the bird feeders for a month or more, so much so that it has trampled a ring of beaten earth around the foxglove beneath the feeding pole. However, as soon as I sit down at the dining table to draw, it turns its back on me then flies off to the wood.
Reach for the Rowan
In the front garden, the rowan is at its best in fresh leaf and blossom. The flowers have a sweetish musky scent and attract a variety of species of flies. Because of all that happened this winter, I didn’t get around to pruning the new growth of straight upper branches but I’d like to do that because otherwise it will be on its way to towering over the house. I’d like to keep it to the height that I can reach with my telescopic handled pruner, about ten feet or so.
I’ll check with my arboriculturist friend Roger that pruning during the spring won’t cause the sap to run, leaving a sticky residue that might result in fungal damage.
I upload photographs from my little Olympus Tough or the FujiFilm FinePix bridge camera every couple of days. When they’re not on my desk connected with USB cables to the computer they’re in one of the bags hanging behind me.
We glimpse a large brownish bird swooping up into the branches at the edge of a small wood in the Smithy Brook valley. It can’t be a grey partridge as they wouldn’t perch so high in a tree and it wasn’t small enough to be a mistle thrush. As we walk on there’s a commotion; a buzzard is circling, gaining height and it’s in dispute with two much smaller birds of prey. They both look like sparrowhawks. One flies off down the valley the other returns to the wood while the buzzard heads off up the valley, presumably happy that it has shown them who is boss.
Grey wagtails are flitting about collecting insect food below the Figure of Three locks where an overflow channel stirs up the still waters of the canal.
The bank behind is steep and covered with brambles and there are no midstream rocks to perch on so their technique involves at lot of hovering over the water surface.
Grey wagtails nest in rock crevices so the centuries old stonework offers plenty of possibilities for nest sites.
I’ve been tweaking the badge featuring Tilly, the bookshop Welsh collie. As I’m used to drawing her looking down on her, I’d missed the detail that she has a black beard and ginger throat. It makes a surprising difference to her character.
No room for a book, so we’ve given her a pair of reading glasses.
Link; the Rickaro Bookshop on High Street Horbury, home of Tilly’s Young Readers’ Club which is soon to be launched.
Perhaps because I’ve been rattling off so many storyboard frames for my comic strip project, I felt relaxed when I took the opportunity to draw the customers during our coffee break this morning. Perhaps the prospect of a large latte was helping me get in a suitably laid back mood too.
I find it amazing that you can start with sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and in a few links along the food chain end up with a blackbird.
As we walk on there’s a commotion; a buzzard is circling, gaining height and it’s in dispute with two much smaller birds of prey. They both look like sparrowhawks. 
The bank behind is steep and covered with brambles and there are no midstream rocks to perch on so their technique involves at lot of hovering over the water surface.
