10.30 a.m.: Snowdrops are at their freshest around the pond so I set up my pop-up tent and start a sketch in the gusting wind and passing showers.
Before the afternoon rain sweeps in I roll up the tent into its dustbin lid-sized bag. I can never quite work out how such as large tent fits into such a small bag but it does, in what seems to me like the most illogical and inelegant fashion. I resort to grabbing the writhing figure-of-eight coils and pushing them to the middle. I’ll try and practice with it on a regular basis until it becomes second nature.
Over the past couple of days we’ve seen a female blackbird resting in the middle of the blanket of duckweed that covers most of our pond. She’s not bathing or struggling to get out. This evening I realise what she’s up to.
She grabs a newt from just below the water surface in front of her and immediately flies to an open grassy patch at the edge of the pond to peck at it. I don’t see whether she eats it there and then or whether she takes it off to feed to her young.
I’ve seen her stalking along the edge of the pond on the look out, I now realise, for any unwary newt that might surface. Our resident newts are smooth newts. Unlike the great-crested newts they don’t have special protection under the Wildlife and Countryside Act but would this female blackbird care if they did? I think not.
I’ve seen her once before with a successful catch which she took to the raised bed behind the pond. I could see her prey was a long and flexible creature but at the time I couldn’t positively identify it.
Pond Pyramid
This female blackbird is at the top of a pond food chain, at the apex of a food pyramid, but she’s not the top predator around here; she runs the risk of being incorporated into the food chain of one of the local sparrowhawks or domestic cats.
The newts are predators in their own right; I’ve watched them eating newly emerged frog tadpoles. The tadpoles, at this early stage of their lives, are eating the algae that grows on the clump of frogspawn.
From thin air, just add water . . .
I find it amazing that you can start with sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and in a few links along the food chain end up with a blackbird.
wood pigeon
Although my aim is to build a little eco-system in the back garden, I do think that I ought to tweak the chances of survival for the newts by clearing some of the duckweed so that the blackbird can’t sit in wait at the centre of the pond.
Update
Two days later, on Saturday, Barbara spotted the blackbird catching a newts again, five in total. I spent five minutes raking the duckweed to the edges of the pond which should make it impossible for the blackbird to perch in the middle of the pond and give some additional cover to the newts when she is stalking around the margins.
IT’S OFTEN NOT recommended to transport frogspawn from one pond to another because of the danger of spreading infection but I feel that I’m safe accepting a couple of clumps from a neighbour across the road whose pond always gets more frogspawn in it than it can accommodate. Our new pond has plenty of room, although the tadpoles, now hatched but still no more than short black dashes resting on the mass of jelly, are going to be at risk of being gobbled by the Smooth Newts that are already settling in to the new pond.
The tap water has had a week now to lose the small traces of chlorine that it contained so I was keen to add some oxygenating pond weeds. My neighbour saved me the trouble and expense of a trip to the garden centre by letting me have half a bucket of strands from his pond. Now the newts have some vegetation that they can lay their eggs on.
THIS RATHER GLUM snowman has turned out looking as if he’s working for air traffic control. He’s from an exercise in Create 3D like a Superhero. This lesson was about ‘How to Mirror Objects’ and the way you do that is to ‘flip’ a copy of the first arm you’ve made. There wasn’t of course any necessity to add a carrot nose, coals for his eyes and an Alpine backdrop but I’m enjoying going through the book and I’m now getting familiar with where skies, textures and props like the dead tree can be found when you’re 3D modelling in Vue 10.
We’re making progress with the pond too. Today we partly rebuilt the raised bad behind the pond, the bed we made with the spoil when we dug the pond 25 years ago.
The first birds that we’ve seen drinking at the pond were House Sparrows. They were coming down to the gently sloping edge that we made with access for wildlife in mind.
As I’d expected, when I dismantled the low drystone wall at the back of the
pond, I found Smooth Newts, perhaps 10 of them, hiding away in various crevices and I released them out of harm’s way. I hope that they’ll find their way back to the pond as it begins to settle in and take on a natural look.
There was at least one newt in the pond, in the deepest section, with it’s head under an oak leaf that had blown in. It was as if it was thinking ‘if I can’t see them, they can’t see me.’
I’m keen to get oxygenating pond weeds in sooner rather than later, if only to give the newts a place to hide.
Wakefield Naturalists
This month’s observations at the Wakefield Naturalists’ Society include a record of an Eagle Owl taking Wood Pigeons at Nostell. The Eagle Owl isn’t of course a native and it’s thought that this one is a local escaped bird. It’s the size of a cat but with wings. The pigeons won’t have seen anything like it before.
Grass Snakes and Great Crested Newts have emerged. On the third of March an early Sand Martin put in an appearance at Calder Wetlands. Red Admiral, Small Tortoiseshell and Peacock butterflies are on the wing, the early record for the Peacock proving that they’re overwintering here, rather than coming in as migrants each spring.
22°C, 5.50 pm. THESE PIECES of sandstone at the corner of the pond provide access to the water for birds and perhaps some cover for newts and frogs. They also help disguise the edge of the black plastic pond-liner. The first pond that we dug when we moved here was lined with builder’s damp-proofing plastic – blue polythene sheeting – which wasn’t resistant to ultra-violet light. I covered the edges with turves and spread garden netting across the bottom of the pond and pressed sub-soil from the hole we’d dug into it. This produced a more natural-looking pond than our present one but it had a tendency to wick water away and the netting wasn’t a good idea; on one occasion I saw a frog that had been drowned when it had gone down into the mud and got caught in it.
Brachiopods
I noticed these impressions of fossils shells in the rock on the far right (top). Superficially they look like cockle-shells but these fossil creatures weren’t bivalve molluscs; the Brachiopods (the name is from the Greek meaning ‘arm-foot’) appeared in the Cambrian explosion of life on Earth and have been around for 570 million years. Three thousand fossil species have been described but today only about 100 living species remain. They have suffered from competition with bivalves such as cockles, oysters and mussels.
Modelling clay cast of brachiopod. I can't decide whether this is a complete shell or whether these are two valves from separate individuals which just happen to have fossilised together.
These fossils are negative impressions of the shells so I pushed a piece of modelling clay into the hole and made this positive cast of the original shell. When this shell was last visible on the surface of the earth it was on the seabed at a time when our part of the Earth’s crust lay close to the equator, some 300 million years ago in the Upper Carboniferous period. As the fossil is in sandstone, I guess these brachiopods must have been living near the mouth of a river.
The ribs on the shell bear this out as they indicate that this species of brachopod was adapted to live in shallow water in a strong current. A smooth shells would indicate a species that lives in deeper, calmer waters. That zig-zag line which marks the opening of the shell is known as the commisure (below right); brachiopods developed a folded commisure to increase feeding area while preventing sand particles entering.
Brachiopods stood on a pedicle stalk anchored on the seabed and opened and closed the two valves of their shells to feed. The hole in the shell where the stalk protruded led to them being given the name ‘lamp-shells’, as the larger valve resembles a Roman oil-lamp, with a hole for the wick.
LEAVING my mum for her physiotherapy session at Dewsbury Hospital, I set off in search of a takeaway coffee then head off with it, via a gap in a stone wall, into a pocket-sized park, no larger than a football pitch.
As I sit down to draw this Water Mint, Mentha aquatica, growing in the pond, I crush some of its leaves that are growing on the bank in the mown turf, releasing a delicious cool, clean aroma of spearmint.
Three juvenile and one adult Moorhen dabble around the pond and come out to peck about on the grassy slope. A Blackbird sings from the trees in the leafy margins of the park.
Yellow Flag
The heads of Great Reedmace, Typha latifolia, are bursting into feathery white seeds, while behind them a few Yellow Flag Iris, Iris pseudacorus, are starting to unfurl their flowers.
Still on my learning curve, I refer to a book and add a few botanical terms and Latin names. Iris was the Greek goddess of the rainbow but pseudacorus means false.
Typha is from the Greek name for the Reedmace, while latifolia means broad-leaved.
Landscape Format
This little park is the perfect place to take a short break from a morning spent in or on our way to waiting rooms; in the doctor’s earlier I’d had to make do with drawing my hand – again!
I’m inspired, as I often am, by starting a new sketchbook. I gave up on my previous sketchbook – a birthday present from a kind friend – because I didn’t like the absorbent and rather thin paper. For my pen and watercolour wash work I prefer a thicker, smoother cartridge, so it’s back to a Pink Pig, made at a factory not far from home up at Emley, and this time, with travel to wilder places (rather than travel to waiting rooms!) in mind, I’ve gone for a spiral bound A5 (about 8 inches x 5.5 inches) sketchbook in landscape format. It seems perfect for the drawings and notes I’ve got in mind but it’s a format that I’ve used only once before, as far as I remember. With printed booklets in mind I usually go for portrait format.
I’d like to go for colour whenever I can (I finished off the sketch of my hand in colour later) and for wildlife . . . whenever I can escape through a gap in the wall.
10.30 a.m.: Snowdrops are at their freshest around the pond so I set up my pop-up tent and start a sketch in the gusting wind and passing showers.
illogical and inelegant fashion. I resort to grabbing the writhing figure-of-eight coils and pushing them to the middle. I’ll try and practice with it on a regular basis until it becomes second nature.
I find it amazing that you can start with sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and in a few links along the food chain end up with a blackbird.
