SOMEONE had found this mammal skull and left it on one of the display boards at Ash Landing National Trust reserve, providing an impromptu quiz. What was it?
Even though the long canines at the front are missing, it’s obvious that this isn’t a rabbit or hare, it’s too large and long anyway, and to me it isn’t as broad and powerful as I’d expect for a badger so I’m going to guess at Red Fox.
And the answer is . . .
Yes, according to Mammals of Britain, Their Tracks, Trails and Signs (Lawrence and Brown, 1967), that’s what it is.
I’ve added their labels to my photograph. Alveoli are small cavities or pits, and here in an anatomical sense, that means the bony sockets for the root of a tooth. These three holes supported one tooth, as you can see from the opposite side of the jaw.
Oh, in case it’s not clear, the two lines are intended to indicate the cranium between the two eye sockets.
The Duck that held up the Traffic
This Mallard duck, followed by a companion drake, wandered over to the bench as we waited for the return ferry. As we had no bread to share we thought that she’d lose interest but she looked around then settled on the ground at Barbara’s feet, the drake standing close by. When the ferry arrived and the ramp rattled into place she stood up again and decided that now was the time to move – holding up the disembarking traffic as she waddled back unhurriedly to the waterside with her partner.
3.30 p.m.; View of Windermere from Costa Coffee at Pringles, Bowness.The small, sometimes winding, roads made sketching from the car difficult.
THE LAKE DISTRICT is so often moody, wrapped in clouds and mist, so today, with ranks of cumulus marching across a clear blue sky and sparkling panoramas unfolding before us, our regular journey was a different experience. After so many years of heading along the Leeds ring road to get on the road to the Lakes, the A65 via Skipton, we’ve found a short cut on smaller quieter roads following the ridges between some of the old woollen towns of the West Riding – Huddersfield, Mirfield, Halifax and Bradford – not far away in the valleys below.
It was so clear that already, as we approached Howarth over the moors, we got glimpses of the sphinx-like peaks of Ingleborough and Pen-y-Ghent crouching on the limestone plateau of the Yorkshire Dales National Park.
Coming this way, along the smaller but slower roads, the Dalesman Cafe at Gargrave, 1 hour 20 minutes but only 40 miles into our journey, makes a timely coffee stop. They specialise in ephemera of the 1950s and 1960s so as I tried a local speciality, buttered Chorley cake, the tins and packages of the period brought back memories for us.
I sketched this shrimping net from an earlier period, still with its canvas bag stencilled ‘W EGLON, NEPTUNE FISH STORES, WHITBY, TEL. 60’. I wonder whereabout in Whitby that was . . .
The Eglons of Whitby
A Google search turns up this reference to the Eglon family from the 1891 census (http://mdfs.net/Docs/Whitby/Census1891/Whitby10), when they were living in four rooms in Elephant & Castle Yard, between Haggersgate and Cliff Street, so very near what is still the fish quay at Whitby. I guess that Neptune Fish Stores would have been there or very near.
4 Elephant & Castle Yard (4 rooms)
Eglon, Christopher - Head - M M 41 - Fish Merchant - YKS, Whitby
Eglon, Eliza - Wife - M F 41 - - YKS, Whitby
Eglon, Mary E - Daughter - S F 21 - Dressmaker - YKS, Whitby
Eglon, William - Son - S M 19 - Fisherman - YKS, Whitby
Eglon, Christopher - Son - M 14 - Errand Boy - YKS, Whitby
Eglon, Esther - Daughter - F 12 - Scholar - YKS, Whitby
Eglon, James H - Son - M 10 - Scholar - YKS, Whitby
Eglon, Margaret E - Daughter - F 7 - Scholar - YKS, Whitby
William, born in 1872, must be the ‘W. Eglon’ named on the bag but sadly his business, Neptune Fish Stores (Whitby) Ltd, was wound up in 1969, at a time when the traditional English seaside resorts had lost out to competition from package holidays to the Mediterranean.
Sunset across the Lake
Barn owl from Walney Owl Sanctuary, which along with a Little and an Eagle Owl was proving a hit with visitors to the Tourist Information Centre at Bowness.
I’m certainly getting in holiday mood today, I’m beginning to feel like a different person, as if a burden has been lifted from my shoulders, as we approach the Lakes and leave the distractions of home and work behind. As the rugged peaks of the Borrowdale volcanics come into view a Buzzard circles above the road.
Bowness can be as busy as a traditional seaside town – the Blackpool of the Lake District – but, as we’ve booked in for a few days at the Belsfield Hotel overlooking the Lake Windermere, we can stay after the weekend trippers return home.
There’s a perfect sunset, a clear sky across the lake. In this old hotel, originally the home of a wealthy Victorian industrialist, you have the feeling that you’ve got away from everything; as if you’re aboard one of the old, opulent ocean liners. When we walk down for our meal in the sumptuous dining room, past the reception desk, we glimpse sparkling water through the lounge window. You feel that the whole hotel might be gliding over calm waters. Hopefully with no icebergs on the horizon. The bustling piers where the ferries come and go are hidden away behind the grassy banks of the hotel gardens.
TILLY the bookshop border collie was looking a little sheepish today, curled up in her den beneath the desk. A busy Saturday morning for the bookshop, partly because tomorrow is Mother’s Day.
IT’S OFTEN NOT recommended to transport frogspawn from one pond to another because of the danger of spreading infection but I feel that I’m safe accepting a couple of clumps from a neighbour across the road whose pond always gets more frogspawn in it than it can accommodate. Our new pond has plenty of room, although the tadpoles, now hatched but still no more than short black dashes resting on the mass of jelly, are going to be at risk of being gobbled by the Smooth Newts that are already settling in to the new pond.
The tap water has had a week now to lose the small traces of chlorine that it contained so I was keen to add some oxygenating pond weeds. My neighbour saved me the trouble and expense of a trip to the garden centre by letting me have half a bucket of strands from his pond. Now the newts have some vegetation that they can lay their eggs on.
THE NEW POND has become disputed territory and there’s a continuing battle between rival Blackbirds. Not only does the sparkling new pond serve as a prominent landmark, it’s also a valuable resource for nesting materials. A female Blackbird appeared to be gathering mud from between rocks we’ve put around the pond to anchor the liner. The mud cup in a Blackbird’s nest is further lined with dry grasses.
The Blue Tits are popping in and out of the nest box but we saw a large bumblebee fly to the hole and crawl inside, so I wonder who will end up in possession.
To the left of the pond I originally tried to create a bog area but I could never get it to work in practice and it never became anything in particular, just whatever became established which might include teasel and hosta but was just as likely to include bramble and hogweed, both of which have their value for wildlife but they can begin to take over.
We’ve levelled the area off ready for turfing, ideally with a wild flower lawn turf, but until we roll that out the House Sparrows are enjoying dust-bathing in the finely raked soil.
I started this mainly wildlife sketchbook in May last year. Hopefully I'll be well into my next wildlife sketchbook by May this year.
It was cooler than I expected this afternoon as I sat in the sun drawing the Periwinkle growing near the rhubarb at the foot of the hedge but it made me feel as if I was at last getting my life where I want it to be. Instead of constructing ponds, creating raised beds and weeding, it is at last getting to the stage where I can relax a bit and just enjoy being out there. Hopefully my sketchbook will start to reflect the arrival of spring.
WE’VE BEEN on the move today but without the car, which has taken a while to get through its MOT test, as things keep cropping up. After 12 years, it’s time to change it, so we took a test drive today in a small car that proved a little too small for me.
On the return journey from the dealers I sketched passengers on the bus. There’s something that you can’t do while you’re driving a car.
Curiously if both Barbara and I are travelling together it works out cheaper to go by taxi as we did on the outward journey. Most bus travellers buy a season ticket but for short journeys without a season ticket we’d always do better going in the car (which we feel we have to have to run our book business).
Once when we were without a car we had to take the bus to make a delivery on the other side of Wakefield and the bus fares of £16 or £17 more or less soaked up any profit we might have made on the order. Having a coffee when we arrived probably soaked up the remainder!
I’m not sure why we had to go together with the order. Guess it’s more fun with company.
Starlings love the dense foliage of the holm oaks which are neatly trimmed into fat topiary lollipops in the Cathedral Precinct in Wakefield.
THIS RATHER GLUM snowman has turned out looking as if he’s working for air traffic control. He’s from an exercise in Create 3D like a Superhero. This lesson was about ‘How to Mirror Objects’ and the way you do that is to ‘flip’ a copy of the first arm you’ve made. There wasn’t of course any necessity to add a carrot nose, coals for his eyes and an Alpine backdrop but I’m enjoying going through the book and I’m now getting familiar with where skies, textures and props like the dead tree can be found when you’re 3D modelling in Vue 10.
We’re making progress with the pond too. Today we partly rebuilt the raised bad behind the pond, the bed we made with the spoil when we dug the pond 25 years ago.
The first birds that we’ve seen drinking at the pond were House Sparrows. They were coming down to the gently sloping edge that we made with access for wildlife in mind.
As I’d expected, when I dismantled the low drystone wall at the back of the
pond, I found Smooth Newts, perhaps 10 of them, hiding away in various crevices and I released them out of harm’s way. I hope that they’ll find their way back to the pond as it begins to settle in and take on a natural look.
There was at least one newt in the pond, in the deepest section, with it’s head under an oak leaf that had blown in. It was as if it was thinking ‘if I can’t see them, they can’t see me.’
I’m keen to get oxygenating pond weeds in sooner rather than later, if only to give the newts a place to hide.
Wakefield Naturalists
This month’s observations at the Wakefield Naturalists’ Society include a record of an Eagle Owl taking Wood Pigeons at Nostell. The Eagle Owl isn’t of course a native and it’s thought that this one is a local escaped bird. It’s the size of a cat but with wings. The pigeons won’t have seen anything like it before.
Grass Snakes and Great Crested Newts have emerged. On the third of March an early Sand Martin put in an appearance at Calder Wetlands. Red Admiral, Small Tortoiseshell and Peacock butterflies are on the wing, the early record for the Peacock proving that they’re overwintering here, rather than coming in as migrants each spring.
BLACKTHORN is now in blossom, buds are swelling on the trees and in the park the first tulips join the squill and crocus that are already in flower. Rosettes of familiar looking leaves, perhaps sowthistle or Nipplewort,are turning car park edges green. If the weeds have started growing that’s a reminder that we should start sowing vegetables.
Gorse has been in flower on Storrs Hill for a month or more. This morning a Kestrel hovers above the field below the scarp, using the updraft from the slope.
EVEN BEFORE we’d finished filling it, a frog had found its way into our new pond, plump-looking, so presumably a female ready to spawn. We had disturbed her as we went hunting for stones to cover the PVC liner around edges. I’ve been putting off the task of reinstating our garden pond for months but once we’d got our materials together and allowed ourselves enough time for the job, it was a reasonably simple process.
The worst part, which we completed yesterday, was dismantling the old pond which had sprung a leak, caused by damage to the liner I suspect. I thought that I’d have some pondweeds to rescue but after six months all that remained in the sump of the pond was smelly black silt and debris which I spread on the garden. I was pleased to find that there were no rodent burrows beneath the liner, a problem which led our neighbours to replace their leaky liner with a fibre glass pond, a more expensive option and more difficult to install.
Pond Liner
At the garden centre we found a Blagdon 0.5mm PVC small pond liner, 3.5 x 4m, precisely the size that I’d calculated that we would need, in a pack that included synthetic underlay. It comes with a lifetime guarantee.
The way to calculate how much liner you’ll need is:
Length plus twice the maximum depth x width plus twice the maximum depth
I took a photograph of the pond and printed it out with the dimensions when I set off to the garden centre.
We asked for advice on covering the edges and the man at the aquatic centre drew us this diagram to suggest a shallow shelf around the edges with stones resting on the liner, half in and half out of the water. The edge of the liner folds up behind the stones and you trim off the surplus when the pond is full. This has the advantage that the upstanding edge of the liner prevents water wicking away to the surrounding soil.
We already had the level of the previous pond to work from, but as I cut the 6 inch by 1 inch deep shelf along the far edge of our pond, I kept checking it with a straight edge and a spirit level.
How to Construct a Pond
With apologies for the illustrations – I’m still experimenting with filters in Photoshop!1. Remove all stones and roots from the hole, trample around to make the ground as smooth as possible then (and this is optional) spread a layer of sand around the hole. Our pond is an inch or two more than 3 metres x 2 metres (10ft x 6ft 6in) with a maximum depth of 45cm (18 inches). That’s sufficient for a wildlife pond but a pond for fish should be 6 inches deeper. It slopes very gradually from the left to allow access for birds and animals. On the other three sides there’s a ledge about 20 cm (8 inches) deep for pots of water plants. 2. Spread a fleece liner across the hole. This is simpler, though more expensive, than the layer of damp newspaper that we used for our first pond, along with an old carpet. Barbara pressed the wet newspapers into place with her bare feet. I guess it’s a sort of therapy. But the soft synthetic fleece is better because it never rots and it adapts easily to the shape of the hole.3. Next comes the pond liner. Make a couple of large tucks or folds (a dressmaker would call them darts) to allow the liner to adapt to the contours but you don’t need to precisely fit the liner into the hole as the weight of the water to do that. Place a large stone, one without sharp edges, at each corner to prevent the liner flapping about in the breeze.
At this stage it’s hard to believe that this will ever become a natural-looking pond.
4. Fill the pond
5. As the pond fills add rocks around the edge.
6. Cut off the corners and any surplus liner around the edges and cover the edges with flat stones and turf.
At the left-hand edge where we had used some mossy rocks, the pond looked as if it had been there for years. We’re going to leave it for a few days before adding pondweeds, to allow the chlorine in the tap water to dissipate.
My first attempt at a pen and wash effect using the filters in 'Photoshop'.
MY ILLUSTRATOR friend John Welding was telling me about a science fiction short story from years ago about a world where instead of having to go to the trouble of drawing things artists had only to dial up the appropriate rubber stamp.
That day has arrived because the new version of Photoshop that I’m using includes a stamp filter (left). So much quicker than making your own lino-cut.
Filter Gallery
I’m new to this version of Photoshop so this is the first chance that I’ve had to play around with the Filter Gallery, which is useful as you get instant full size previews of the effects of the filters on offer. By using slider controls you can fine tune the effect.
The Watercolour Filter (left) simplifies the photograph to blocky colour.
To get the effect of a pen and watercolour wash drawing you need to add line. In Photoshop, as with most other image manipulation programs, you do this on a new layer.
Find Edges
This time the filter you need, ‘Find Edges’, doesn’t appear in the Filter Gallery; you’ll find in the Filter Menu under ‘Stylize’.
This gives you rather more than the pure line that you’re after (right), even if you try converting the image to grayscale before you start as I did in this example. There are no slider controls to filter out the tones. You now need to go to . . .
Threshold
To reduce this to pure black and white you need to use the ‘Threshold’ command from the image menu, something I’ve used a lot when scanning my pen and ink artwork when I wanted to print it in line rather than tone.
Just to keep you on your toes, the Threshold command can’t be found amongst the Filters. It’s in the Image menu under Adjustments. Like most of the filters this has a slider control so you can go from almost black to almost washed out.
The ‘pen’ layer, as you might expect, needs to go on top of the ‘watercolour’ layer but to make it transparent you have to set the ‘pen’ layers properties to ‘Multiply’ instead of ‘Normal’ (top).
The finished result wouldn’t convince anybody that I’d used real pen and ink and watercolours but I love that chunky effect and I’d be tempted to use it when I’m painting real watercolours.
SOMEONE had found this mammal skull and left it on one of the display boards at Ash Landing National Trust reserve, providing an impromptu quiz. What was it?
Yes, according to Mammals of Britain, Their Tracks, Trails and Signs (Lawrence and Brown, 1967), that’s what it is.
This Mallard duck, followed by a companion drake, wandered over to the bench as we waited for the return ferry. As we had no bread to share we thought that she’d lose interest but she looked around then settled on the ground at Barbara’s feet, the drake standing close by. When the ferry arrived and the ramp rattled into place she stood up again and decided that now was the time to move – holding up the disembarking traffic as she waddled back unhurriedly to the waterside with her partner.
