Tag: Wood Pigeon

Laughs, Riffs and See-saws

bird sketches

There’s a bit more enthusiasm in birdsong now. The strident see-saw of the great tit, the varied riffs of the song thrush and more substance to the song of the robin. At Brodsworth this morning we heard the laughing call of a green woodpecker – but didn’t spot the bird itself.

A wood pigeon poddles along, following a potential mate. She’s not impressed. She keeps looking over her shoulder then waddling on. I’d describe her attitude as embarrassed. He is apparently taking these backward glances as a come-on. He keeps following her along the railway sleeper edging of our 6 foot-square raised bed, round and round like the figures walking endlessly around the stepped ramparts of an Escher illusion.

Wood Pigeons

spurge and woodland sketches

These sketches from the hospital and the one of the wood were drawn with one of my regular fountain pens, the TWSBI Eco T.

pigeons sketches

But I’ve gone back to a fibre tip for these wood pigeons and sparrows in the back garden.

pigeons and art bag

These were drawn with a Mitsubishi uni pin 0.3 fine line, which has water and fade proof pigment ink.

pigeon, sparrow and foxglove

Fox, Sparrow, Wood Pigeon

Thanks to Browning, I’m back in business with a replacement Strike Force Pro XD trail cam, so I’ve been catching up with the soap opera that is the wild side of our back garden.

As you can see, a male house sparrow has laid claim to the sparrow terrace nestbox, ousting the blue tits, who nested in hole 1 on the left last year. I love the puzzled expression on the blue tit’s face.

A persistent pigeon is waddling past the daffodils in pursuit of – he hopes – a mate.

Night visitors have included a cat and a vixen. I wonder if I’ll succeed in catching the cubs on camera this year?

Posturing Pigeon

wood pigeon sketches

A wood pigeon perches on the shed roof then swoops down to the lawn to chase off another pigeon that has just landed, chasing it around beneath the bird feeders with a menacing waddle punctuated with short jumps. The second pigeon soon realises that it isn’t going to get any peace and flies off.

I like drawing pigeons and that’s just as well because when they fly up from the wood the flock fills our field of vision as they wheel around, well over a hundred of them, probably 200. But we are going to have to net any seedling we plant in the veg beds.

Pond Cam

pond
house sparrow
House sparrow

We haven’t recorded a fox at the end of the garden on the trail cam for weeks now so, as we’ve recently trimmed back around the pond and scooped out the duckweed, I’ve set up my Browning Strike Force Pro XD trail cam there. This morning at 10 it recorded a dunnock (above) followed a few minutes later by a house sparrow.

greenfinch

Ten minutes earlier this greenfinch had been down at the pond’s edge.

greenfinch

It looks as if it’s drying itself off after bathing but, if it had been, the camera didn’t catch it. I need to clear out the last of the duckweed to give the birds better access.

At eleven o’clock yesterday the inevitable wood pigeon waddled by and a squirrel bounded along, slightly blurred on the photograph.

With a closer camera angle and a bit of stage management of duckweed and pebbles, this could be the perfect spot for a back garden stake-out.

Beech Backdrop

scene from cartoon

This morning at Newmillerdam I drew the fishing platform for the opening frame of my Ode to a Duck cartoon and photographed a beech tree for this background for the squirrel/wood pigeon duo. You can already sense the natural chemistry between them.

Beech roots
Beech roots backdrop

Wood Pigeon Screen Test

wood pigeon cartoons

For his waddle-on cameo in my Ode to a Duck cartoon, the wood pigeon is supposed to be empathic and concerned rather than ranting and irate, but, if you’re familiar with wood pigeons you’ll know that they have a limited repertoire.

wood pigeon roughs

The line work was drawn in Lamy fountain pen in my sketchbook. I’ve combined two of my sketches and coloured them in Photoshop. I kept testing the Photoshop PSD file in Adobe Character Animator, to make sure things were turning out more or less as intended.

I haven’t added the blink yet, as I did for the squirrel this morning, but this character is evidently the unblinking sort.

Next up, a foraging moorhen . . .

Wood pigeon mouth positions
Wood pigeon mouth movements – and yes, I know that they don’t really have teeth! – drawn same size as my original sketch.

Wood Pigeon Selfies

trail cam photo

Time to test my new trail cam by positioning it below the bird feeders and sprinkling a few crumbs and mealworms on the lawn.

wood pigeon photos
dunnock

The wood pigeon took 36 selfies and even photobombed the dunnock’s brief appearance.

Also captured on camera, a blackbird, house sparrow and what we think was a song thrush.

Next test is on the video setting through the night . . .

blackbird

Acorns

oakwood

This mixed oak wood at the top end of Coxley Valley is typical of woods on Coal Measures. In the background there are planted conifers: crops of larch and Corsican pine have been planted here, adjacent to Earnshaw’s Saw Mill, although some of them have been badly damaged by grey squirrels.

oak leaves

Even on our short walk around the wood, there’s always something to see. We got a chance to squeeze in a quick visit a couple of days ago and I was determined not to stop to take photographs, but when I saw these frost-rimmed oak leaves, I couldn’t resist getting out my iPhone.

acorns

There are so many acorns this year that in places you crunch over them and they look like pea gravel strewn along the edges of the path. The resident greys haven’t been able to squirrel them away and the flock of wood pigeons, hanging around at the corner of the wood this morning, has come nowhere near making serious inroads into the enormous quantities on offer.

pigeon feather
jay

Wood pigeons are great acorn eaters but jays are the real specialists. We’ve often seen a pair of them flying from a large oak, crops bulging with acorns. On this morning’s walk we hear them screeching somewhere in the background but we’ve yet to spot them here, collecting and caching.

holly

Berries are few and far between on the hollies, which provide some winter cover in the shrub layer of the wood.

earthball

There isn’t a lot of fungus around at the moment but I spotted these common earthballs, Scleroderma citrinum, growing amongst the leaf litter at the top corner of the wood.

badger scrape
badger

What made this scrape amongst the roots of a larch tree?

  • A squirrel? They’d usually make a neater job, they’re discrete in their excavations as they hide and recover acorns
  • A rabbit? Apparently there are some in the wood, so it’s a possibility
  • A fox? Again, you’d expect to see signs of them
  • A badger? Well, yes, I’d go for badger because of the scatter of debris. To me it looks as if it must have been a robust animal doing the digging. There are smaller excavations dotted along the side of the path. I can imagine a badger snuffling and scraping on its way through the wood.