A great-crested Wild Yorkshire nature diary in the April Dalesman.
Great-crested
Tag: Great-crested Grebe
Penguin Dance
I’ve often seen great-crested grebes go through their head-shaking, ritualised preening display, but at last this morning at RSPB St Aidan’s, we got to see the presentation of beakfuls of water-weed and the penguin dance where the male and female rise from the water, breast to breast, paddling furiously and swaying heads. They appeared to drop the weed as they started this routine. They then returned to head-bobbing display.
We’ve yet to see the ‘ghostly penguin’ and the ‘cat display’ which apparently start off the whole routine.
Digital Colour
A juvenile great-crested grebe, drawn on the iPad with shadow areas and colour added on separate layers, which are set to ‘multiply’. Latest exercise in my Introduction to Procreate course.
Canada Goose Reference
I’ve just started a Domestika course, Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate
and illustrator and 3D modeler Román García Mora has asked us to choose an animal or bird and put together a reference sheet about it. As we were heading for the Thornes Park duck pond yesterday I decided to go for Canada geese, a bird that I can guarantee being able to find if I need to go back for further reference.
Photographic reference is fine but Román believes that the way to understand your subject is to draw it yourself, preferably from life in its natural habitat. Failing that the zoo or a natural history museum gives an opportunity to learn more.
I’d be surprised to find a stuffed Canada goose in any of our local museums but I do have a Victorian stuffed bird that I can use for the purposes of the tasks we’ve been set in this exercise so I’ve drawn this juvenile great-crested grebe.
The unfortunate grebe was shot on Bretton Park Lake at a time when the species was all but extinct in the area because its plumage was valued as ‘grebe fur’ in the fashions of that time. Unfortunately I don’t have an exact date.
I’m following Román’s technique for sketching in Procreate, working on a light grey background and starting with what he calls a ‘stain’, a rough tonal outline of the bird. I’ve downloaded the Procreate brushes that he used in the online demonstration and used them as you might use chalks, tonal washed and pencil.
Link
Domestika online art courses
Grebe, Gull and Heron
After recent heavy rain Newmillerdam is cloudy and khaki. A great-crested grebe pops up just yards from my table at the water’s edge at the Boathouse Cafe with a small silvery fish in its bill.
Down by the outlet a heron is watching, waiting and stalking its prey, so intent on fishing that it allows me to rest my iPhone on the railings just 10 yards away from it to take this photograph.
Halfway Plumage
Up on the balcony at the Boathouse café with a panorama of the lower end of the lake at Newmillerdam on a fine autumn morning with black-headed gulls swooshing by was like being on a mini cruise, especially when accompanied by a pumpkin latte (well, you’ve got to try it once at this time of year).
There were 25 tufted ducks in a scattered group, mostly just resting, although I did see one tackling a medium-sized freshwater mussel.
Many of the gulls were in halfway, teenage, plumage with a shallow inverted ‘V’ on each wing.
The three cygnets of the resident mute swan family were at that halfway stage too, with bands of brown on wings and across the tail covets.
The lone great-crested grebe was probably one of this year’s young, or possibly an adult moulting into dull winter plumage.
Groucho Grebe
Adding lip-sync to my last two characters. I’m going for more expressive beaks, so this is looking like a scene between Groucho and Margaret Dumont.
Grebe Screen Test
My latest Ode to a Duck screen test and the great-crested grebe is struggling with his motivation in scene 2.
Using Adobe Character Animator and Photoshop, I’ve used a sketchbook drawing as the basis for my ‘puppet’. So, just the beak-sync to add . . . all 14 mouth movements.
Grebe Display
A pair of great-crested grebes were displaying at Newmillerdam this morning. Their face-to-face head-shaking display was interrupted by a third grebe which was soon chased off by the male. The male has more prominent cheek-ruffs and ear-tufts than the female.
A second bout of head-shaking was soon interrupted by the intruder and then all three birds dived out of sight for what seemed like a minute. Later we saw a single grebe diving near the war memorial, so perhaps this was the intruder who had decided to give the pair a break.
The Bittern Hide
RSPB Old Moor, 10.40 a.m., 39ºF, 4ºC, Reedbed Hide: We passed through a snow shower on the way here but as we walk to the Reedbed Hide there are only a few sleety spots in the wind.
Two mute swans are upending by the reeds as they make their way to their nest site, a mound of reeds.
A great crested grebe motors over towards the swans, calling as he nears them (judging by the large cheek frills, this is the male). It’s a surprisingly loud call for what I think of as one of the quietest of wildfowl. My bird book describes the grebe’s spring calls as ‘a series of guttural far-reaching “rah-rah-rah” notes’. But, instead of skirmishing with the swans, as we thought he might do, he dives near them. Perhaps when he saw how large they are in close up he decided not to escalate the situation.
Mid-lagoon, two male and one female tufted ducks are diving.