Spectacled Warbler

WITH SUCH a brief glimpse, this bird, which was checking out the leaves and the trunk of an olive tree, might have been an Olivaceous Warbler or an Olive Tree Warbler – two fairly indistinct birds. But I noticed a darker head and whitish breast and Barbara got an impression of an eye-ring and of chestnut on the wings, I’m going for Spectacled Warbler, Sylvia conspicullata, especially since neither of us noticed any eye-stripe.

Female Spectacled Warblers are less distinctive than males. It appeared to be chattering to itself.

Cleopatra

Cleopatra, Gonepteryx cleopatra, with a fluttery flight, touching down briefly on the geraniums in my sketch, was the most conspicuous butterfly of our holiday. It’s pastel yellow and larger that our Large ‘Cabbage’ White.

We got a better view (top) of what I’m now convinced is a male Spectacled Warbler. It was a softly chattering little trill and what looked like a small white pennant that attracted my attention to it on the top of a telephone pole. It then flew to the top of an olive.

It was greyer brown than I’d shown the bird this morning, with a markedly darker head. It’s silhouette was more ‘perky’ – tail up, larger head – than your average warbler.

And – the clinching detail – this time I could see a small white ring around its eye.

Woodchat Shrike

THE CONES of this cypress have 12 scales. On this fallen fragment the dark green scaly leaflets have dried to ochre brown. In colour, shape and texture these plates, and the tiny scales that cover the leaf stems when seen through a hand lens, remind me of the armour of an armadillo.

10.34 a.m.; the Woodchat Shrike is a summer visitor to Corfu. At 18 cm, it’s almost Song Thrush size.

This bird (right) looked very much like a buzzard but birds of prey are so difficult to identify, especially when circling against a bright sky. We saw two later and heard a buzzard-like peevish ‘mewing’ call.

As I drew this flower at the car parking area at our apartments I didn’t realise that it was a buttercup; the petals are more pointed than those of our British buttercups but I should have guessed as its mace-like seed-heads remind me of the largest of our native buttercups, Kingcups.

The nearest that I can find in the book is Jersey Buttercup, Ranunculus paludosus, which fits in almost every detail, except that I wouldn’t have described it as a ‘hairy perennial’.

I tried pencil when I started drawing the buttercup but soon resorted to the precision of a 01 sized nibbed Pilot Drawing Pen. I didn’t bring my favourite ArtPen with me because, as a fountain pen, it has a tendency to go blotty after being taken on a plane because of the pressure difference. A selection of Pilot Drawing Pens will be fine for the all too short time that we’re here.

11.40 a.m.; Soft quizzical two note call of a Jay. If flies down to a shady spot then up to the branch of an olive. It eats whatever it picked up – an olive or a snail? – then wipes its bill on the branch.

Temp. 29°C, 50% cumulus

Despite the name, Woolly Trefoil, Trifolium tomentosum, is hairless but as the flowerhead grows it becomes more rounded and woolly. These plants at the car parking area were up to 20 cm (8 inches) tall with flowerheads spreading to 1 cm. It is the dominant plant on areas where limestone chippings have been spread.

I draw these spiral seed-pods alongside my sketch of trefoil flowers later, thinking that they belong to it, but they’re actually those of the appropriately named Large Disk Medick, Medicago orbicularis. It grows alongside the trefoil by a path through the olives.

12.50 p.m.; A small, hovering bee-fly, 8 mm long with a straight tongue almost as long again, like a tiny flying kiwi, visits red and white clovers.

1.40 p.m., Benitses Taverna; A large black bumble-bee with blue on it’s rear end has a different, more direct flight to our bumbling varieties. It’s a Carpenter Bee, perhaps Xylocopa violacea.

The Canary Island Date Palm, Phoenix canariensis, introduced and planted widely around the Mediterranean, has inedible fruits.

I’m trying to get in holiday mood, so I feel that I should be trying media that I wouldn’t normally use for my regular work so I did try starting to draw the palm with an Artline ErgoLine Calligraphy Pen with a 2 millimetre nib, a pen that my illustrator friend John Welding is experimenting with at the moment. He gave me this one to try out but the unfamiliar feel made it seem a bit awkward for me, so again, as with the pencil, I went back to my everyday media.

Some day I will experiment! But I’m only here for a week and there is so much to draw so I need to get on with it in reassuringly familiar pen and watercolour wash. At least I drew the palm in pencil rather than ink!

Not so easy to identify when you see it in the water when its legs are hidden, this gull closely resembles our Herring Gull but, as we would have seen immediately if it had been standing on the rocks by the harbour, it’s actually a Yellow-legged Gull, a familiar species in the Mediterranean.

The Beech Marten, Martes foina, was, as many of them unfortunately are, a roadside casualty. It was about the size of a slim, small cat.

This Whinchat was perching on a wire by the substantial ruins of the Roman baths on the slope behind the sea-front properties at Benitses.

Fern Grass

IT’S SO GOOD to have the time to sit and draw whatever I feel like drawing. I don’t aim to try to identify every flower, I’m happy just to get an impression of the Mediterranean flora. The grassy car parking area right outside our apartment is a good place to start. Because it had been wet here before we arrived it’s overdue for mowing, so that gives me a chance to take a close look at the commoner species, such as this distinctive grass, named Fern-Grass because of the shape of its seed-heads.

A grey brown locust was sunning itself on the pavement next to a similar looking twig. Either it had chosen to rest alongside it to provide camouflage or it had homed in on it in a search for another of its kind.

We saw the locust only once as we walked along the sea front pavement into the village but we always saw lizards sunbathing on the paving stones.

A lizard, 20 cm long, scurried up the wall of the ruins of the Roman baths in Benitses. It hid behind a clump of plant growing from a crack in the wall with only its long narrow tail hanging down giving it away.

The cigareli that we had as a starter this evening are spiced green leaves. A cigar is a cylinder of tobacco leaves so cigareli are small leaves. Penelope the waitress tells us that they aren’t cabbage or spinach, they’re leaves that you can find growing in the hills but also in olive groves and in gardens. We spotted some growing in a vegetable garden and they looked like what we’d call mixed salad leaves. She tells us that they’re available only at this time of the year.

P is for Pi

We’re eating at the Paxinos restaurant in Benitses which specialises in fresh fish dishes. It gets its name because it is run by people from Paxos, a small island to the south of Corfu. I’m intrigued by the name printed on the table cloths and I copy it into my sketchbook. When it’s pointed out to me it should have been obvious to me what it says; it’s the name of the restaurant;

The A, I, N and O are as they would be in English. The Σ, sigma or S and the X are very different to our own letters but the one I should have recognised is the initial letter; π, pi is our P, the Greek letter used in Pythagorus to represent the proportion of the circumference of a circle to its radius.

Fireflies

Although after the first night that we saw them I wrote that the ‘fireflies’ we saw on our walk back to the apartments were ‘yellowish white not greenish like a glow-worm’, we later decided that this was an optical illusion. They really did produce a greenish light but because this flashed on for such a brief moment the impression that stayed with you was of the after image. If you stare at a greenish light then the after image that you’re left with is red. I think that the ‘yellowish white’ we were seeing was the impression left by the brief but brilliant green flash.

On one occasion we spotted one of the ‘fireflies’ on the pavement. It was a beetle, about 1 cm long. With our British glow-worms it’s the female who produces the light, to advertise her presence to the male but she is wingless, so the Corfu ‘fireflies’ must be a different species. I wouldn’t like to guess whether it was the males or the females that we were seeing.

We never saw the bird (or toad) that made the ‘sonar blip’ noise but because of the variety of places that we heard it we’re convinced that it was a Scops Owl. I’ve shown it with twin peaks in my imagined sonagraph. Sometimes the male and the female call and reply to each other in a duet. BUT the Midwife Toad, which occurs on Corfu, sounds like a Scops Owl.

And, to confuse things still further, the Green Toad sounds like a cicada. We could hear something like a cicada but not as continuous coming from where a water course passes through the grounds of the apartments.

The next evening it was warmer and stiller and we saw lots of bats on our walk back from the restaurant.

Turn Right after the Alps

WE’RE ON the Ryanair flight from Leeds to Corfu and, from a geographical point of view, the route is simple to follow. It’s not so much a case of turn right after the Alps, it’s more just drawing a diagonal across Europe from Leeds to the island, off the north-east corner of Greece.

As we take off, heading towards Amsterdam, England is swathed in cloud.

Low Countries

I don’t get a glimpse of the North Sea but as we reach what must be the Netherlands I can see field strips, waterways and flooded gravel pits through gaps in the cloud. The long thin fields are so different from the usual patchwork of English midlands fields. They radiate out like huge chevrons from a central point and I suspect the reason for this pattern is to allow for drainage, so the centre of the chevrons might represent a ridge of slightly higher ground in a landscape that is so close to being flat that no slopes are perceptable from up here at 3700 feet.

Unfortunately we soon run into cloud again. I try to take in the overall pattern of clouds in a quick pen and ink sketch. This serves as a diagram but I try pencil in an attempt to show the tones of the expanse of cloud that we fly over next.

Pencil never seems to work as I’d like it to!

But I’m soon peering down through gaps in the clouds again. It’s still a landscape of low fields and lagoons but now there are more wooded areas. White fields may be covered in cling-film, or perhaps it’s some unfamiliar crop that I don’t recognise.

Ridge and Valley

We fly over a wooded ridge, broken at regular intervals by small valleys. Where you’d expect there to be a fan of debris from each tributary valley’s stream there are a series of small settlements.

This reminds me of a pattern of settlements that you’d find in parts of England settled by the Anglo Saxons, some of whom might have migrated to our country from this part of the Europe after the collapse of Roman rule.

In places where there’s a ridge like this, the western edge of the Cotswolds is, I think, an example, you’ll get parishes laid out in this way. Each village is sited on an alluvial fan which keeps it above the level of regular flooding in the main valley, each village gets a fair share of different land; perhaps for pasture on the hill, woodland on the scarp slope and arable on the alluvium in the valley.

We’re soon above hillier country, flying over parts of Germany, I should think. Again the steeper slopes are picked out with strips of woodland. The valley here is filled with a town but not far away on the hill it still looks rural with villages and green pastures.

Woodlands become a major feature of the increasingly hilly landscape. Perhaps this is the Black Forest.

Alpine Panorama

There are frosty-looking blue green forests of conifers as we reach the Alps. After getting to know a small area, from the Top of Europe down to Interlaken, on our holiday in Switzerland last year it’s great to have the opportunity to see the mountain range from a wider perspective.

The higher peaks and valleys are entirely snow-covered and I spot a glacier flowing through a high valley, cracks appearing in its surface as it turns a corner in its valley.

It’s strange to think that we’re heading for a Mediterranean holiday and that we’ll be touching down in a very different landscape in about an hour.

As I wrote in my sketchbook, ‘there was a cloud-filled gap at the eastern end of the Alps, then a range of lower mountains, still snow-capped peak but with more forest on the slopes.’

We were probably flying over the Brenner Pass then reaching the Hohe Tauern or High Tauern mountain range of the Central Eastern Alps.

Gulf of Venice

Over the years a lot of sediment has been eroded from these mountains, cutting down to create the valleys and enlarge the passes. You can see some of the sediment in this braided river channel. I think this is the river Tagliamento, or possibly the Bóite, which lies a little to the east.

Rivers like these have over thousands, probably millions, of years built up the Italian lowlands around the Gulf of Venice. I couldn’t spot Venice itself but these two rivers (the Piave, top, and Bóite?) reach the sea to the east of Venice.

The Dalmatian Coast

There’s quite a contrast as we continue south-east, along the Dalmatian Coast of the Adriatic Sea. After all the earthy colours of northern Europe, the islands look as if they’ve been designed by a Manga cartoon illustrator. They’re set in a sea which is as blue as the sky above and they’re outlined by a sandy shoreline, rounded in cartoon style.

There’s a string of little islands. In each case the village is set around a bay, sometimes with a satellite island just offshore, offering additional shelter from the elements and, perhaps in historical times, keeping them out of sight of pirates and predatory naval powers.

Albania

The last time we were here this was the coast of Yugoslavia, now this Croatia but the final country that we fly along the coast of before we descend is Albania. An appropriate name for a country where snow caps limestone mountains.

We pass a river mouth which, as fare as I can tell from my atlas, is the Vijosë, an Albanian river.

There’s a plume of sediment which looks sandy where the river enters the sea and darker in colour, and deeper underwater, further out. This is probably finer, muddier sediment. To judge from the direction this sediment disgorges into the Adriatic Sea, the prevailing current is northwards on this coast.

Descending to Corfu

The northern end of Corfu lies only a couple of kilometres from the Albanian coast so I’m not sure exactly in my sketchbook where the mainland ends and island begins. I think that the vertical strata of limestone, fringed by wooded slopes are mountains at the north end of Corfu. The highest point, Mount Pantokrator, rises to 912 metres.

There are inlets and marinas on the north-east coast of Corfu. I think this (right) is Gouvia Bay.

Corfu is long and thin, like a mishapen boomerang, so we’re soon passing over the west coast where Chalikounas Beach separates Korisson Lake from the sea.

We turn around over the southern tip of the island, Cape Asprokavos to approach the airport from the south.

Benitses

It’s a short taxi ride along the coast road to get to our apartment near Benitses and after checking we go for a late lunch – moussaka, what else? – at one of the tavernas near the little harbour.

Later, sitting on the veranda at the back of our apartment, I draw the crags on the hillside, rising amongst the terraces of olives.

Those are a couple of tall cypresses at the top of the crag.

Bluebells

I WOULDN’T have thought that a south-west-facing bank below a quarry face would be ideal for Bluebells but they’re growing like weeds on this slope by Addingford Steps. Although they’re a woodland plant they don’t do well in full shade.

Spring goes by so quickly and each year I find myself missing out on drawing woodland flowers so, as I’m walking back this way anyway, I decide to give myself half an hour drawing the flowers on a mossy bank between the railway and a derelict railway embankment.

This can’t be ancient woodland but the dark soil appears to be rich in leaf mould. The Bluebells here are growing beneath small Ash trees. Brambles run through the herb layer without dominating the habitat by forming a dense tangle. There are a lot of seedlings with bright green toothed leaves which I guess are Himalayan Balsam.

House-hunting Bee

As I’m drawing, a Red-tailed Bee lands on a bare patch of soil and starts digging. It turns around and pushes soil out of its thimble-sized excavation. Three minutes later it cleans its fur by rubbing with front and back legs but it then gives up on the hole.

It flies a short distance further up the bank and I photograph it at work, but after a few minutes it gives up on that hole too. I assume that this is a young queen which has recently emerged and that it’s prospecting for a suitable bank in which to start a new colony.

Broad Buckler Fern

One fern looks very much like another but I know that something to take a closer look at is the colour of the scales on the stem, if there are any. These had a dark brown streak along the centre with pale margins, so this is Broad Buckler Fern, Dryopteris filix-mas, a common fern of woods, hedgerows and shaded rocky ledges.

I recently bought a Victorian book, Ferns of Great Britain, by Anne Pratt, so I checked out the species in it. I was surprised that, despite that traditional sounding name of ‘Broad Buckler’, at that time it then went under the name of Broad Prickly-toothed or Crested Fern, and had a different genus name; Lastréa instead of Dryopteris.

Although the streaked scales are described in the text, they aren’t shown as streaked in this illustration.

The illustration is credited to ‘W. Dickes del et sc.’. ‘Del. et sc. is an abbreviation for ‘delineavit et sculpsit’, meaning ‘drew and engraved’.

Much as I like Victorian natural history books, they wouldn’t be of much use as field guides. An attached poem doesn’t really help with identity but it does evoke the Victorian attitude to natural history:

“The feathery Fern ! the feathery Fern !
It groweth wild, and it groweth free,
By the rippling brook, and the dimpling burn,
And the tall and stately forest tree ;
Where the merle and the mavis sweetly sing,
And the blue jay makes the woods to ring,
And the pheasant flies on whirring wing,
Beneath a verdurous canopy.”

The merle and the mavis are the Blackbird and Song Thrush. I don’t hear them today but there’s a Chiff-chaff singing almost continuously and, briefly, a Wren.

Ground Ivy

Three members of the mint family, the Labiates, that I tend to get mixed up are Bugle, Skullcap and Ground Ivy, so I draw this plant by the path side with some care. It’s Ground Ivy, Glechoma hederacea, a common plant of woods, hedges and disturbed ground. It is softly hairy and, according to the field guide, smells strongly when crushed. I must try crushing a leaf next time I see it.

Grey Monday

IT’S A SHAME that after all the settled dry weather that we’ve had that the Easter bank holiday has turned out so grey but it’s a good opportunity for us to head to town for some shopping we had to do. I painted this terrace of houses from a table in MacDonald’s while Barbara waited in the queue for our veggie burger wraps. MacDonald’s don’t take so very long to serve you; by launching straight into watercolour without any preparatory drawing I got this far in 5 or 10 minutes.

I replenished the bird feeders at lunchtime. Starlings soon came to the mealworm/fat block but the Great Spotted Woodpecker doesn’t seem to like it when its just been put out. It flew in as if it wanted to land then thought better of it and went off to explore the trunk and branches of the crab apple. Perhaps because the block is too slippy for it. It clings to the plastic stem once the Starlings have nibbled down the block a bit.

A surprise visitor was a Nuthatch coming for sunflower hearts an overly cute ‘Little House on the Prairie’ style feeder which our goddaughter Helen bought for us. If it keeps attracting the Nuthatch, I’m prepared to tolerate a little bit of cuteness in our garden.

Easter Day

AS YOUNG babies don’t run about you’d think that they’d make ideal subjects for drawing but, as our latest great-niece, Holly, demonstrates, they tend to be constantly active. She was moving her hands continuously in subtle gestures, like a Balinese dancer.

It’s easier, as always, to draw my own hand, because I can keep that still.

As I mentioned the other day, I’ve now filled one of my ArtPens with ArtPen ink and I think this is freer flowing than the Noodler’s ink that I use when I’m adding watercolour, making it ideal for a fluid subject like a baby. And of course I can dab the line with with my water-brush for a wash effect, as I did with my drawing of my hand.

I’d like to draw people more but I’d prefer to draw in some public place like at a street market, rather than at a family gathering.

Later, at my mum’s I draw cushions and newspapers.

Pidglings

THERE’S BEEN a strange looking pigeon around, one that looks as if it’s been sprayed with a coat of grey undercoat. It’s been pecking around below the bird table where it was joined by an adult Wood Pigeon. As the mystery pigeon then started flapping its wings in the ‘feed me! feed me!’ mime adopted by most fledglings, it was obvious that the two were related. This evening the adult was accompanied by two plain grey youngsters.

They’ve taken to the sunflower hearts so adult will now be able to introduce them to the greens available; yesterday three adults Wood Pigeons were nibbling the leaves of our purple-sprouting broccoli. We’ve been using the broccoli flower-stems in stir-fry. The Wood Pigeons know a good thing when they taste it, although they seem to be intent on nibbling the leaves to shreds, but probably the flowers are equally acceptable.

The Dolphin Paint Shop

The finished model should have had a tessellated texture. I'm not sure what happened to that, or why my altitude specific 'go-faster' stripe has turned out to be green, black and white.

My attempt at the Create 3D like a Superhero! metablob tutorial has reached the virtual paint shop. It hasn’t quite turned out like author Chipp Walters’ Dolphin underwater recon vehicle, partly, I think, because my version of Vue Pioneer isn’t quite the same as the one referred to in the book but it’s been interesting going through the process and discovering where certain functions of the program are stowed away.

Links; Chipp Walters’ blog

Cornucopia 3D where you can currently download the latest version of Vue Pioneer for free.

Instant Meadow

IT MIGHT not look very impressive but after all the planning, weeding and preparation this is my mini-meadow; a small area of turves from a friend’s wild flower meadow surrounded by an area sown with a mix of wild flower and grass seed collected in the same meadow. I’ve left the fringes as they are; a tiny strip of woodland edge where Cow Parsley and Snowdrops are already well-established.

We sowed about a litre of seed, a third of which had been kept in the freezer until today. This should convince it that after a long hard winter spring is really here and it’s time to burst into life.

I’ve seen photographs of my friend’s wild flower meadow in full flower and it appears to be dominated by Red Clover, Dog Daisy and Yellow Rattle. The latter is important because it is semi-parasitic on grass-roots, so it helps prevent the grasses becoming lushly dominant and shading out the wild flowers.

We’ve covered the seeded area with garden netting because I know our House Sparrows will love to dust-bathe in the fine tilth and they’ll then discover the seeds and start feasting on them.

Metablobs

After all that work in the garden I felt indulging in another tutorial from Create 3D like a Superhero, making a start on this ‘Dolphin Underwater Recon Vehicle’, simply constructed from ‘primitive’ shapes – squashed spheres, a torus and a skewed cube – which you can melt into each other by hitting the ‘Metablob’ button. Just the canopy and the shark style vents to add and I can take my model to the paint shop.

Much easier than installing a wild flower meadow.

Blackthorn Winter

8.40 a.m. THIS MORNING’S snow, settling briefly on the Blackthorn blossom by the wood when I drew this, seems out of season after the weeks of dry, settled weather we’ve been had, recently with summer temperatures. Cold air is moving in from the continent as a couple of high pressure systems over the Atlantic weaken and retreat. At least that’s as I understand it from the Met Office sequence of maps that I’ve been looking at. Warm fronts (indicated on the map by a red line with semi-circles facing in the direction of travel) followed by cold fronts (indicated by a blue line with triangles) have been moving down across the country but today the map shows an occluded front (a purple line with alternate triangles and semi-circles) across southern England.

An occluded front occurs when a second mass of air moves in so quickly that it overtakes the first. If colder air is catching up with a warm front it will plough under it, wedging itself beneath the warmer air.

If warm air is forced upwards it’s going to cool, resulting in rain, and if the rain falls through the wedge of colder air, that would, I guess, turn it to snow.

Weather maps show the situation from above but to understand a swirling meeting of air masses like an occluded front, you’d really have to see it from the side or in three dimensions.

Occlude means to block, stop up or obstruct and in today’s case I think that would refer to the cold wedge of air swirling in and cutting off the warm air from the centre of the low pressure system, a cyclone, which in the northern hemisphere moves in an anti-clockwise direction when seen from above.