Tag: Canal

Kat Kong

On our walk along the towpath yesterday afternoon, I tried photographing the Canal House cat – well one of the Canal House cats, there are several – as it sat on a shed roof and it’s ended up looking giant-sized compared with the old barge-horse stables, like Kitten Kong in The Goodies, which rampaged around London and demolished the Post Office Tower. Barbara and I saw Jack Black in Gulliver’s Travels in 3D last week so perhaps that influenced my viewpoint.

Flowstone

I’ve never taken so many photographs as I have since I got my little Olympus Tough a year ago; it’s almost always with me. I’ve drawn this deposit of flowstone in my Wild West Yorkshire diary before but yesterday I took the opportunity to photograph it on the camera’s macro setting. It’s such a small camera that all I need to do is lean over, holding it at arm’s length, to get near the outflow, which comes out of the canal bridge on a steep banking. In close-up it looks like deposits that I’ve seen in limestone caves. I assume that water is dissolving lime in mortar between the stones of the bridge piers.

Hoar Frost

Yesterday afternoon the shadows were white – white with frost. The towpath is something of a sun trap, even when the sun is so low on a winter’s day, but the ridge of trees opposite casts a long shadow so in places the path is muddy but just inches away the ground is frozen solid and the vegetation rimed with hoar frost where it has remained in shadow all day.

Towpath Birds

Each bird has it’s distinctive way of getting across the canal;

The Moorhen has the most amphibious method, combining land, air and water for the short journey. As it sees us approach, it pauses on the towpath, stalks a few tentative steps to the bank, launches itself into the air with limited effect then staggers along the water surface for a few paces – with the out of control momentum of someone jumping onto the platform before the train has stopped – before settling to swim the last yard or so to the seclusion of the bankside vegetation.

The Wren zooms along, wings a-whir, from the undergrowth on the towpath side to the hedge on the far bank.

A small group of Long-tailed Tits take a roller-coaster flightpath from the tops branches at one side to those on the other. Repeated wing-beats interspersed with short rests result in their bouncing flight.

A pair of Mallards swim across with a surreptitious air. The drake might be trying to avoid the attention of rival males. Later we see a duck closely pursued by two drakes flying up river.