T'was the last week of summer
And, down by the lake,
We hear the sad quack
Of a hungry old drake.
The grebes and the tufted ducks
Dabble and dive
But our poor drake is struggling
Just to survive.
The foraging moorhen Has plenty of luck, But that doesn't extend To the desolate duck.
In the woods, the grey squirrels Eat beech-nuts galore, But our poor drake is starving Down here on the shore.
I know what you’re thinking: ‘I’ll give him some bread!’ – But just one mouldy bread crust Can leave a duck dead.
This ode to a duck
Might not be the best,
But what were you expecting? -
I'm not Colin West!
Cartoon ducks drawn at Newmillerdam this morning. We didn’t see any drake mallards in breeding plumage, so my guess is that they’re all in eclipse plumage, and we’ll see their true colours appear in the autumn.
Newmillerdam, 10.30 a.m., 65℉, 17℃, a few high, hazy stratus: This backwater near the car park is a first call for people feeding the ducks. A family of four young coot chicks is being fed by an adult with delicacy and care, interspersed with aggression as the adult attacks one of the chicks, clasping its head in its beak several times as the chick paddles frantically to escape. Perhaps it’s a stray chick from another family – there’s another family foraging around the boughs of the crack willow, just yards away – but coots will attack their own young.
The chicks were smaller than the ones in my sketch, with dark red rather than yellow head-patches and darker downy plumage.
Another possibility is that the aggression was triggered because this particular chick didn’t have such bright colours on its head as its siblings. Could this be a sign that it wasn’t in the best of health and that therefore – in order to give the rest of the brood a better chance of survival – it wasn’t worth the effort of feeding? The adult was going for its head-patch, as if that was causing offence.
Enchanter’s Nightshade
Enchanter’s nightshade grows at my feet at the edge of the path. Unlike most other members of the willowherb family it doesn’t release parachute-type seeds but instead covers its seedpods with Velcro-style hooks, so that they get carried along by any passing furry animal. No shortage of those here at Newmillerdam.
For the Anglo Saxons, enchanter’s nightshade was ælf-þone (aelfthone), a charm against elves.
Take a 90-second break with elegant gulls, dabbling coots, preening ducks and a hesitant pigeon on a quiet backwater near the Boathouse at Newmillerdam Country Park, Wakefield, West Yorkshire.
Drawn with my new Lamy nexx with the EF nib, in brown De Atramentis ink, watercolour added later, as Barbara rang me to say that she and her brother had had to abandon their usual circuit of the lake.
The best place for me to draw at Newmillerdam on this rainy morning is the Boathouse Cafe, sitting looking out of the 200-year old gothic mullioned window with a mug of latte.
Swallows swoop and glide low over the glowering grey surface of the lake. Thirty pink-footed geese – probably two or three families combined – progress sedately across the placid waters, making surprisingly little noise, considering how excitable geese can be.
There’s a family of coots with three youngsters, now almost adult size but in charcoal-and-white penguin-style livery, instead of the jet-black of the adults
On the coots’ nest by the outlet of the lake, an adult is sitting tight. This is a popular little nesting platform, now with it’s own mini-garden of herbage, and I think several families of coots must have been raised here over the last few months.
In the shallow film of water cascading over the top course of masonry of the outlet, mallards are dabbling. The lake has its backwaters, opaque and eau-de-nile today, but here there’s always a flow, so always the chance of some invertebrate or seed being washed down.
Two ducklings are swimming nearby. I’ve seen smaller ducklings stuck below the horse-shoe cataract of the outlet, unable to make the leap back up again, but these two seem just about old enough to escape the dangers.
Growing by the entrance lodge near the war memorial at Newmillerdam Country Park, green alkanet, a native of south-west Europe, was grown in cottage gardens. The name alkanet comes from the Arabic name or henna as the plant, especially the roots, can be boiled to produce a cherry red dye, used by the Victorians in lip balm.
11.15 a.m., 70℉, 21℃, storm cloud looking threatening to the west, but we escape the worst of it: The triple flower-heads of Yellow Flag Iris look complicated, but they work perfectly when a bumble bee lands on them. I assume that it would take one of the larger bees to trigger the mechanism and enter the flower, but a smaller bumble bee manages just as easily.
The coots’ nest near the war memorial has been neatly built up since last week and there are at least three chicks.
Back home, I draw some of the visitors to the bird feeders. In additions to the greenfinch, blackbird, starling, blue tit, robin, wood pigeon and house sparrow that I’ve sketched here, we had a male great spotted woodpecker coming to the feeders and a grey squirrel with a very undernourished tail.
Newmillerdam Lake, War Memorial, Monday, 24 May, 2021, 10.50 a.m., 63℉, 7℃, 80% cloud: A coot swims to the shore and immediately sees off two snoozing mallard drakes. It preens and pods about a bit then goes back to the lake.
Two pairs of pink-footed goose come ashore, each with a single gosling.
Two weeks ago I drew the coot on the nest by the outlet sitting on eggs, last week there were about eight chicks and this week the nest is empty, with no sign of any addled eggs left behind. Nearer the war memorial there’s a coot still sitting on its nest, no sign of chicks peeping out as we passed.
Have you ever come across the idea that natural history illustration “isn’t art”? I remember you trained in design and illustration rather than fine art – have you ever had to defend your work against this charge?
My friend, writer Richard Smyth, in an e-mail today
Interesting question. It’s not anything that anyone has ever challenged me on but, like most creatives, I wouldn’t want to use ‘artist’ as a job description. I’d always describe myself as an illustrator/writer. Although I’ve had exhibitions of paintings, probably 99% of my work is illustration and intended to be seen on a page or screen with text. My sketchbooks are part field notebook.
It’s a relief to be off the hook as far as art is concerned. When I draw a flower, bird or snail, I love the idea that the creature has the right just to be itself. I can’t avoid being an observer and therefore having an implied presence in a drawing but I don’t want to burden the poor creature with how I was feeling that day, or with my views on Life, The Universe and Everything.
I feel that when Picasso draws a dove, a monkey, a horse or a bull, the critics have to scramble around to tell us what that symbolised at that stage in his career, whereas if I, as I did this morning, draw a pink-footed goose, I’d like the actions, appearance and personality of that particular goose on that particular day, to be the main subject: not to mention the energy and mystery implicit in said goose simply being a goose.
I know this is impossible, as I’m not a camera, but that would be my aim.
We’re getting towards the end of Women in History month but I couldn’t miss out Lady Kathleen Pilkington of Chevet Hall. A visitor in 1913 described her as ‘a fearless rider’ with the Badsworth Hunt and ‘a splendid rifle shot’.
She is fond of racing and is specially devoted to birds and her collection of foreign birds is one of the best in England.”
Charlton Jemmett-Browne, The French Bulldog, USA, September 1913
Lady Kathleen Mary Alexina Milborne-Swinnerton-Pilkington (Cuffe) (1872-1938), appeals to me as a character to draw because she spans the era of Sherlock Holmes – she’d be the plucky young gel who Doctor Watson would fall for – right through to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction when, with her champion French Bulldog, Chevet Punch, she’d be the formidable matriarch in an Agatha Christie country house party murder mystery.
I’m grateful to the Wakefield Historical Appreciation Site (WHAS) on Facebook: thanks to Keith Wainwright for posting the photograph of the Pilkington family in 1906, about to set out on a bicycle ride around the Chevet Estate. Lady K. is wearing her hunting pink complete with top hat!
Chevet Punch & Daisy
MINIATURE BULLDOGS “Champion Chevet Punch” & “Chevet Daisy” Owned by Lady Kathleen Pilkington Painting by Maud Earl, 1910
Lady K. was so renowned for her Champion French Bulldogs (and who could resist Chevet Punch and Chevet Daisy?!) that American short story writer and poet Bret Harte once requested a puppy from her in verse:
"Which I have a small favour to ask you,
As concerns a bull-pup, and the same,—
If the duty would not overtask you,—
You would please to procure for me, game;
And send her express to the Flat, Miss,—
For they say York is famed for the breed,
Which, though words of deceit may be that, Miss,
I'll trust to your taste Miss, indeed."
Bret’s ‘Flat’ was at 72/74 Lancaster Gate, Bayswater, so the bull-pup was going to a good home: Kensington Gardens is just five minutes walk away.
Colour version of the troublesome trio of Dewsbury lads, Henry Smith, William Crowther and Alfred Grace caught ferreting in the Boathouse Plantation at Newmillerdam in October 1870 by Chevet Estate gamekeepers, George Stephenson and William Mellor.
For the moment, I’m leaving the gamekeepers out of the final colour version. Wakefield Archives hold photographs of Chevet Estate including at least one portrait of a gamekeeper, so I would be interested to see those.
