Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
The teasel has collapsed under 2-3 inches of overnight snow.
Three female pheasants join the goldfinches, house sparrows, blue tits, great tits, blackbirds, nuthatch and robin at the bird feeders.
They appear to hear a noise and freeze in alert mode. They remain motionless for five minutes or more, gradually relaxing, as if it’s a pheasant meditation session – an ideal opportunity to draw them.
At 3.30 pm the pheasants head off towards the wood as the light fades.
The male couldn’t quite get past the female pheasant as they came down the garden path this morning.
He strikes out to treat her to his magnificent display as he struts across the frozen pond.
But as soon as he steps onto the ice he sinks into the icy water in a gap at the edge.
He recovers as best he can and careers onwards over the ice.
The femle seems inimpressed as she ambles across the frosted lawn towards the bird feeders.
11.15 a.m., drizzly and overcast: A male sparrowhawk swoops close to the bird feeders and lands on the hedge. Pheasant wouldn’t normally be on the menu for him but that doesn’t stop him looking down on two hen pheasants that have been foraging beneath the feeders.
Just in case he’s considering them as his brunch, they extend their necks and puff out their feathers to appear two to three times their regular neck size.
They strut and hop, half spreading their wings and fanning tail feathers, a hip-hop swagger that reminds me of prairie-chickens lekking.
When I was drawing them in action from a distance yesterday the female pheasants seemed fairly plain – light tan with streaks – but drawing in close up from a photograph I took yesterday with a telephoto lens there’s lots of complexity in the pattern of the plumage.
Five female pheasants alternated from pecking around the feeders for spilt sunflower hearts and crumbs from the fat balls to drinking at the pond (and one unwisely tried to run across the surface of the water!) then going down to the veg beds to rest for a while.
One pheasant, feeding on its own at that time, suddenly burst into a ‘mad half hour’ routine, as my mum used to describe similar behaviour in a cat; darting around and flouncing its feathers as if it was being threatened by some invisible enemy. This lasted less than a minute, not a full half hour.
I decided that I needed a little sequence of sketches of the pheasants fighting, this is them squaring up to each other.
They circled, trying to outflank each other then they’d both leap up, sometimes striking out with their feet like a pair of heraldic beasts, then coming back low to the ground.
Back in January, we watched these cock pheasants squaring up to each other in Coxley on a slope in Sun Wood between the upper and lower dams. It started like a Sumo contest with the rivals bowing as low as possible but simultaneously fluffing out their feathers to look intimidating, all the time nodding menacingly and occasionally making a rapier-like thrust with the beak at the opponent’s throat.
This would bubble up into sparring a foot or two from the ground. Considering how vocal male pheasants can be, there was surprisingly little grockling to accompany the bluster, just a short call as they came back down to the ground.
Just time at 4.30 for a quick session drawing the pheasants that have been gleaning spilt sunflower seeds beneath the feeders for most of the day.
Working in fountain pen with regular ink speeds up the process of drawing. I’d normally use Noodlers waterproof ink because I find it so useful, being able to add a wash of watercolour without the ink running but, in the time available today, regular ink seems to flow more freely. Besides, I’m in the mood for a drawing with an inky quality to it. For once, I won’t add the red, green and red gold of the cock pheasant’s plumage.
I enjoyed watching The Great Painting Challenge from ZSL Whipsnade Zoo yesterday. The warm-up exercise that Pascal Anson gave the contestants, urging them to spend 60 seconds looking at the elephants, then only 8 seconds drawing, is more or less what I’m trying here – except without Pascal standing there with his stopwatch: the pheasants are so active that I’ve got no choice other than to try and take a mental snapshot of a pose, then draw the whole thing. But I do then work on the details of the plumage in short bursts.
The blackbirds have the lawn to themselves first thing in the morning, just as it is getting light. We counted eight on the back lawn yesterday. They concentrate on the area around the feeders, so I guess that they are primarily interested in spilt sunflower hearts.
At the top end of the lawn, a male has a bit of luck and seems surprised to have caught a worm. Soon a female notices what’s going on and tries to make off with his prize. He chases her off, then returns to the worm.
Before he can settle down to eating it, a rival male blackbird barges in. As the two males fight it out, the female spots her opportunity, dashes in and makes off with the worm.
The dawn patrol of blackbirds is soon ousted by a gaggle of female pheasants. It’s not unusual to see seven of them busy around the feeders but usually one or two of them will break off the main group to inspect the herbage around the pond, or to forage on the veg beds.
There’s evidently a pecking order amongst the females because as they pirouette around, pouncing and pecking any spilt seed they notice, one of them will make a quick lunge with her beak at another, momentarily shooing it away from her personal space.
The old country saying is ‘when the furze is out of flower, kissing’s out of favour’, but the gorse has been in flower for a few weeks, at least one bush on Storrs Hill has been, where it overhangs a south-facing embankment wall.
The female great spotted woodpecker is a regular on the sunflower hearts: it prefers them to the fatballs.
We hadn’t seen the pheasants in the garden for months but the recent wintry weather brought a male in. He settled down in the shelter of one of the plants in the border as the rain lashed.