Tag: Cormorant

Cormorants, Crows and Coffee

crow

Boathouse Cafe, Newmillerdam, 11.20am, hazy sky alto-stratus, a few small spots of drizzle in a coolish breeze

A gulls gets the better of a crow, which stops to preen on the ridge tiles of the boathouse roof.

cormorant

A juvenile cormorant – brown with a light breast – splashes its wings as it makes its way down the lake in what I presume is some kind of preening routine. It then takes off, skimming low over the water to join seven adult cormorants on their favourite resting place, the boughs of a half-submerged fallen tree.

Sketchbook page, attempting to draw black-headed gulls as the wheel past the Boathouse Cafe balcony at eye level.

Low Tide

Sandsend Ness, 2 p.m.
Sandsend Ness, 3 p.m.

cormorantLow tide is around midday, so we’re enjoying the two mile walk along the sand from Sandsend to Whitby. It was high time that we came to see the sea again. The waves heave and sigh; the surf swishes and fizzes.

Whitby harbour, 12.25 p.m., 59ºF, 15ºC, cool breeze from sea, hazy: A cormorant flies low over the water and out to sea via the harbour mouth.

crowA crow probes around the barnacle encrusted rocks on the west side of the harbour. Three or four redshanks fly up from the water’s edge, piping as they go.

turnstoneNearer the bridge, the herring gulls have the mud bank staked out. A turnstone does just that – turns over a stone – as we pass. In fact in the minute or so that we’re walking by it turns over four stones. When we humans are rock-pooling the advice is to carefully replace every stone we turn so as not to disrupt the habitat. The turnstone doesn’t bother with that.

Private Fishing

heronHorbury Bridge, May Day Bank Holiday Monday, 9.30 a.m.; a heron gets up from the edge of the old weir and flies downstream. The sober grey livery, black wing-tips and ‘wing light’ white patches on the leading edge of the wings give it the appearance of an RAF transport plane. The ‘black goggles’ eye-stripe makes it look determined. Will it fly over the bridge or under the arch?

cormoranttreeIt veers towards the arch on the Horbury side and disappears beneath. Then we realise why; a cormorant appears and flies off up the river. The pool below the weir is evidently private fishing.

Looking down on the action from such close quarters, we get a better view of a cormorant than any we had in Scarborough last week.

Heron and cormorant were birds from another world in my school days; spectacular  images in the Observer’s Book of Birds in romantic, rugged settings.