THE SILHOUETTE was enough for me to instantly identify the bird; slightly stubby and with a sharp crest; a waxwing. It flew off from the weather vane on which it was perched and settled on the apex of the roof of the nearby bungalow, joining six more waxwings which were perched on the television aerial and chimney pot.
They’re a reminder that although we’re already into the three months that the meteorologists refer to as spring, spring proper isn’t quite with us.
We’re having odd flakes of snow here today and a cold breeze. My thermometer is showing that it’s 5 degrees above freezing but the breeze makes it feel much colder. Cars coming down from the hills are covered in inch thick snow. Perhaps this is the reason that these waxwings have turned up here today in the Calder Valley.
MEANWHILE in the meadow all is harmony. Well, that’s not strictly true, it’s more like the tense calm in the build up to the big three-way shoot-out at the climax of a spaghetti western. Two new ponies appeared in the meadow yesterday and you wouldn’t expect Biscuit, the resident, to share and share alike.
They appeared to be grazing happily together but then when they got down to the bottom corner there was some kind of disagreement. Biscuit chased the smallest pony, trying to bite it on its hindquarters. The small pony kicked its hind legs as it galloped away.
This morning the small pony was grazing some distance away from the other two, although when something surprised it at the top end of the field it galloped back to join them.
Biscuit’s plan seems to be to control the water supply. The other newcomer, the pony with a white flash and white socks on its hind legs, had taken a short break from grazing to drink from the plastic bath (it’s turquoise) that serves as their water trough. The small pony also made a move towards the bath.
At this stage Biscuit appeared to notice what was happening and he swaggered towards the bath to take a drink. He’s a stocky horse, especially compared to the smaller pony.
It was rather like the saloon scene in a spaghetti western.
Mole Hills
Good news about those ‘rats’. It looks as though, although we might have the odd sign of rat activity further down the garden, the concentration of excavations around the bird table are the work of moles.
This morning Barbara spotted a pink thing wriggling near one of the little mounds. No, it wasn’t a rat’s tail; it was a large worm, risking its life by coming to the surface in the daylight.
There was soil movement a few inches away from it and something grabbed the worm and attempted to pull it underground.
Somehow the worm escaped and did the equivalent of an earthworm Olympic sprint. It headed off and, I guess in less than a couple of minutes, made off in a straight line to the edge of the patio, a distance of about five feet. It didn’t use the S-shaped wriggling motion that you might associate with an earthworm and instead stretched out in a straight line. A worm in a hurry.
There was more earth movement amongst the mounds but we never glimpsed the creature that was burrowing.
I’m not saying that the omnivorous rat wouldn’t occasionally hunt worms but I feel that it would have been willing to emerge at the surface momentarily to catch this prize specimen. What we saw was precisely the behaviour that you’d expect of a mole. I moved the bird feeders a week or more ago so spilt sunflower hearts are no longer the attraction. I think that the spilt husks and the droppings of birds such as the pheasants must have built up the fertility of the soil here, resulting in a growing population of earthworms, which would attract any mole that happened to be passing through our garden.
And if I saw a series of little mounds anywhere else I wouldn’t hesitate to identify them as mole hills. Rat burrows, I feel, would normally have an entrance somewhere but no holes have appeared in this part of the garden.
Barbara had watched earlier as the small grey cat that visits our garden closely observed the earth movements. Cats traditionally chase rodents but this one, which is young and playful, would equally take an interest in a mole.
A few days ago I watched this cat, which reminds me of Tom from Tom and Jerry, on our lawn having great fun stalking, pouncing and playing with a pigeons feather.
THERE’S ICE on the pond this morning which has largely melted away by lunch time. At sunset Barbara thinks that she’s spotted our first frog of the year. I focus the binoculars on it but can’t make up my mind whether it’s a frog or a dead leaf that has been blown into the pond.
When I go out to take a closer look it has disappeared. If it was a frog it could soon hide itself amongst the luxuriant pondweed but I’m pleased to see two or three smooth newts.
The pond has never looked better. We replaced the liner last year and I added plenty of oxygenating pondweed which has successfully established itself in the deepest section. It’s hard to believe that a year ago this was nothing more than a hole in the ground.
All we need now is those refugee frogs from next door to find their way here.
I go out later with a torch which isn’t powerful enough to enable me to see deep into the pond but I do spot a single newt in the shallow section.
TWO WEEKS ago one or two small mounds of earth appeared near the bird table. I tried to persuade myself that they might be molehills but I realised that it was more likely that they were the work of brown rats attracted to the quantities of sunflower hearts spilt by the birds that use the feeders.
We’ve stopped feeding which is a shame as it’s been such a pleasure to see the regular goldfinches, greenfinches, blue tits, great tits, house sparrows and siskins, up to 20 of the latter at a time.
Am I making a mountain of a problem out of molehill? A hole has also appeared beneath the compost bin and that must be the work of a rodent. Our neighbours report that the rats have actually nibbled holes to get into their compost bins. They’ve put a couple of baiting boxes down.
I’m going to move our compost bin to a more open position. Hope they’ll get the message and move on.
Lost Pond
More bad wildlife gardening news; our neighbours have filled in the pond in the corner by the hedge as their garden has to accomodate a growing number of young children. When our previous neighbours originally put in this pond almost 30 years ago I was convinced that this was too shady a site for a healthy pond. I was wrong because the pond was always more popular with the frogs than ours was, despite all my efforts to create the perfect habitat.
I’m really hoping that all the local frogs weren’t hibernating in the pond when it was removed. It’s the first day of spring today and I’m hoping that any returning frogs will hop along to my pond when they find their favourite spot has been destroyed.
IT’S GOOD to be back at Charlotte’s ice cream parlour where I drew this cockerel and the Soay sheep a couple of weeks ago. The distant moor tops are lost in the mist today but the blue skies and sunshine that the area of high pressure has brought are a welcome change from the uninspiring weather that we’ve been used to during the past month.
My mum celebrated her 95th birthday at the weekend but we’re getting back to normal taking her for her regular appointment and to our current favourite coffee stop to take in the wide open spaces of the view over a broad curve in the Calder Valley.
Tilly the bookshop Welsh border collie.
We watch a buzzard circle to gain height over a sunlit slope then make its leisurely way down the valley. I say leisurely but no marathon runner could cover the ground in anything like the time that the buzzard takes.
I haven’t been drawing as much as I’d have liked recently as we’ve been doing so much on the house, in the garden and with my business and I’ve been writing a couple more instalments of my Wild Yorkshire nature diary for the Dalesman magazine.
AFTER LASHINGS of rain overnight and this morning it’s refreshing to look out on a green lawn rather than on the snow that has lingered for the past twelve days. When the rain stops at 9 a.m. there’s a sudden influx of Goldfinches and Siskins so we decide to start our one hour RSPB Garden Birdwatch straight away.
I do a few distracted sketches but feel the need to be continually scanning the whole of the garden. A Magpie briefly touches down on the fence near the greenhouse and pecks at something – a spider perhaps.
A Nuthatch, usually the most conspicuous of visitors when it flies in, bullying other birds from their perch on the sunflower feeder, flies in sneakily, hiding itself briefly on the other side of the small feeder.
As I add the colour to my sketches who should turn up too late to be included but a Collared Dove, which touches down briefly on top of the shepherd’s crook feeder pole, and a Wood Pigeon that waddles alongside the watering hole provided by the still half-frozen pond, oblivious that if it had flown in just 10 minutes earlier it could have contributed to our record of the biodiversity of our garden!
Full list and maximum number recorded at any one time: Blackbird 2, Blue tit 2, Chaffinch 9 (as large a number as I ever remember having seen in our garden), Dunnock 2, Goldfinch 8, Great tit 3, Greenfinch 2, Magpie 1, Nuthatch 1, Pheasant 1 male, 3 female, Robin 2.
The two Robins that we saw today, one on the ground by the hedge and one visiting the feeder, were tolerant of each other so presumably they are a pair. Two of the Blue Tits flew over to the nest box, so perhaps they will be nesting before too long.
THERE’S BEEN snow on the ground for twelve days but it’s only at sunset, after a day of chores, that I’ve made any attempt to sketch it. As the light fades and the snow takes on a hint of a pinkish tone, as Blackbird gives its alarm call.
Today we’ve had Nuthatch and Treecreeper in the garden. Will they turn up tomorrow when we record our garden birds for the RSPB birdwatch?
A Google search soon turned up images of the steamship Tuinai (see links below). I’m guessing that Fred and Heather didn’t enjoy the opulent surroundings of the First Saloon.
WHATEVER HAPPENED to great uncle Fred?
Last summer, I found a 1901 census record for my great grandad, George Swift, his second wife Sarah Ann and their youngest son, my grandad, Maurice, then aged 24, living at 198, Hanover Street, Sheffield. Just as I’d expected; but I’d never heard any mention of their son Frederick James Swift, aged 36, also recorded on the form, who was then working as a ‘Stock Brokers Clerk CC’.
Time to phone someone who’d be sure to know;
‘Mum, you remember your Uncle Frederick? . . .’
‘What Uncle Frederick? I never had an Uncle Frederick. There was a George and a John . . .’
We’ve been puzzling over this mysterious missing uncle ever since. Taking census records as our starting point, we requested copies of the his certificate (19 October 1864), his marriage certificate (to Heather May Harrison, 30 April 1903) but after that he disappears. Reports of his death in 1914 proved to be exaggerated; it just happened that a Frederick Swift of the same age died in the same town in December of that year.
Swifts on Migration
Luckily, flipping over a photograph in an album, I discovered in a caption written by my grandad Maurice recording that ‘Fred Swift’ died on 8 July 1948, aged 84.
Having drawn a blank searching for death certificates in the British records, it dawned on us that we should try checking passenger lists. Within minutes on findmypast.co.uk.we discovered that Fred, then aged 61, and Heather, 52, had boarded the steam passenger ship Tainui at Southampton on 8 October 1926 and set sail for a new life in Wellington, New Zealand.
As a young girl, my mum remembers talk of an uncle who emigrated to New Zealand but she always assumed that this was her uncle John. Why were her uncle Fred and auntie Heather in New Zealand never mentioned?
I hope that I can find out a little more about their retirement in New Zealand. Perhaps Fred or Heather worked there for a while in Wellington when they arrived. Perhaps Heather had family out there already. Was my mum right after all and did great uncle John join them out there?
So why have we heard so little of great uncle John? Or John Bellman Thomson Swift, to give him his full name. I’ve requested his birth certificate and marriage certificate (to Lydia Coupland) which will hopefully provide some clues.
U-boat
The steamship Tuinai was rescued from the breakers’ yard during the second world war and had a second incarnation as the Empire Trader. Falling behind in a trans-Atlantic convoy she was torpedoed by the U-boat Adof Oelrich.
In Sheffield Fred’s stepmother’s (my grandma’s) house received a direct hit in the Sheffield Blitz and she moved in with my grandad and grandma and my mum. I’m afraid that I’d have been with uncle Fred, setting sail for New Zealand as Europe started heading towards the next world war. But that’s with the benefit of hindsight. It was a big decision to make and I’d like to know more about how things turned out for Heather and Fred.
Links; My thanks to the people who took the trouble to make postcards, poster and passenger lists for the Tuinai available online. It brings a previously unknown episode in my family history vividly to life.
GIVE OR TAKE a few colours that have been swapped around since, this is the box of Winsor & Newton’s artists’ watercolours that I took with me on a tour of England, Wales and Scotland, when I compiled my Britain sketchbook for Collins (1981). One review commented on ‘the brownish greenish charm’ of my sketches. That was partly due to my choice of colours, including so many greens and earth colours in my selection, but also because, in the mainly off season periods when I drew on location, Britain really does have a certain brownish greenish charm.
One of my favourite pages was a double page spread of Rannoch Moor, where I let heather, bog and misty hills fill the entire field of view. You can’t get much more greenish brown than that! The book was printed on slightly tinted paper which muted the colour still further.
I scratched away at brown watercolour washes to suggest some of the lighter stems of rushes and the wake of a Water Vole, swimming across a peaty pool. I’d forgotten that Water Vole until I took the book off the shelf just now.
I can see why these colours appealed to me at the time. If I was making up a similar box today, I’d definitely include a cooler red – alizarin crimson for example. I’ve just added four colours that I happened to have spare, to fill in a few gaps. I could take a guess at the names of most of the remaining original colours – sap green, sepia, burnt sienna and so on – but at least painting these swatches familiarises me with the general layout.
Why have I dug out this battered old paintbox from the back of the watercolours drawer? I’ve got 4 art bags and one art passport wallet on the go at the moment, with sketchbooks ranging from postcard to place-mat in size but it’s frustrating when, like Goldilocks, I grab a bag that is ‘just right’ for the location I’m heading for, then later realise that I’ve forgotten to transfer the watercolours. Hopefully I’ll end up with 5 bags with a reasonable box of watercolours in each.
AS I’M TRYING to get familiar with hills & dales of Yorkshire at the moment, it’s not surprising that this drawing of a farmhouse loaf has ended up looking like a landscape; I’m reminded of geologist P.F.Kendall’s description of the Cleveland Dome, gouged into by the deep dales of the North Yorks Moors, as resembling a ‘slashed doublet’ (doublet; a close-fitting medieval/Tudor jacket).
Breadmaking
I’m currently enjoying making our own bread, partly inspired by our new oven (the old one was getting through an element every six months) but also our large Ikea beechwood worktop that is such a pleasure to work on.
At the moment I carefully weigh out the five ingredients of a farmhouse loaf into a mixing bowl;
four different kinds of flour, strong white, strong wholemeal, multi-seed or granary and rye
yeast
honey
warm water
a pinch of salt (less than the recipe suggests)
and, if I remember, a few extra mixed seeds. There’s no oil or margarine in this recipe.
Once I get familiar with the quantities, I’d like to try the method of making a circle of the flour on the worktop and adding the liquid until I get the right consistency.
Kneading the dough is a relaxing process and gives my arms and shoulders a much needed ten minute work-out. Something that I don’t get when I’m drawing or sitting at the computer.
Machine Made
We first started making homemade bread in a bread machine and did it that way for about ten years. It’s lovely to wake up in the morning to the smell of freshly baked bread but it’s a shame that apart from a little window in the machine you’re cut off from the process. You hear it clunking around as it mixes and kneads and it makes it seem a mysterious rather complicated and precise process.
Two years ago we bought a food mixer with a dough hook and decided that was a simpler way to make bread. Getting so familiar with how the mixer handles the dough, we realised that the next step was to do the whole process by hand (and save a bit of washing up in the process).
If you miss out on the ‘knocking back’ process, you can produce a loaf in about an hour but the new oven has a rising setting so we knock the dough back after the first rising (in the oven) and let it rise again (out of the oven) as the oven heats up to 190°C.
Knocking back is part of the fun, as is slashing the dough with a sharp knife before the last rising. I like a cross for a round loaf and three slashes for a longer loaf.
The pond has never looked better. We replaced the liner last year and I added plenty of oxygenating pondweed which has successfully established itself in the deepest section. It’s hard to believe that a year ago this was nothing more than a hole in the ground.
As I add the colour to my sketches who should turn up too late to be included but a Collared Dove, which touches down briefly on top of the shepherd’s crook feeder pole, and a Wood Pigeon that waddles alongside the watering hole provided by the still half-frozen pond, oblivious that if it had flown in just 10 minutes earlier it could have contributed to our record of the biodiversity of our garden!
