Tim Wootton Wildlife Art: End of Summer

Tim Wootton Wildlife Art: End of Summer
Great site with wonderful artwork. Inspiring me to get on with new work.
Stumbled on the road killed buzzard and dead Fulmar on-line back from 2008, then you can link back-up-to-date with Tim's ongoing blog. Also some terrific links to other artists. Rather distracted by teaching at the moment and keen to make some more space to draw so it's inspiring to see other artists at work, I must get out there, I will, I will..... Loving having the screaming circling swifts back in the village wheeling in fast circles over the garden.

Song of Songs

With the spring sluggishly rolling forward, various migrants are returning. Chiff-chaffs have been dropping their repetitive song for weeks and swallows and house martins are feasting on the drowsy insects. I finally saw a swift this evening, so for me things are pointing towards summer.

But one returner has excited us locally over recent evenings; a nightingale that has chosen to stop and make its play for a mate nearby. Although not unknown in Norfolk, these are by no means common, and I have never heard one before. Having been tipped off that he was about, we jumped in the car to see if we could hear him. On stepping out of the car at around 10pm, we immediately heard the song standing out, simply being the only songbird to be heard at that time of night. Although about quarter of a mile away, the sound was carrying comfortably on the windy night air and we stood listening for 15 minutes or so. I managed to record it, but the combination of distance and wind meant it was not a great recording.

Returning a couple of days later on a stiller evening to see if I could get a better recording, I positioned myself before dusk near to where the song had seemed to come from. Waiting and listening to the night sounds through the headphones of my digital recorder, I was immersed in a soundworld of extraordinary drama; songs of blackbirds, robins and chaffinches all around were invested with an intensity absent when heard in the daytime; the cough of deer and pheasants were like bombs going off, and the tawny owl hooting completed the soundtrack perfectly. As I stood there, shadows darkening on each side, I saw a barn owl flick silently out of a copse, before returning minutes later with prey, passing mere yards from me. But no nightingale.

And then, just as I was ready to go, resigned to the fact that it had moved on, it started. And I was stood right next to it! As you can hear from this recording, I was then treated to a bravura performance, of trills, swoops, chirrups and buzzes.



Nightingale song is a somewhat tired poetic shortcut for beauty, but I'm not sure that I would class the song as outright beautiful. Other birds have more mellifluous and sweet-sounding song (the larks I recorded recently for one). But the power and range of sound produced was startling, and as any musician knows, it is what you don't play that matters as much as what you do, and the gaps around the sound heightened the drama of the song further.

In some ways, the song is actually reminiscent of many other bird's - it has some of the same repetitive phrasing of the thrush, the rich tone of the blackbird and the powerful trills of the chaffinch. In that way it is somehow the quintessence of birdsong, as if all of the birdsong in the world has been packed into this little drab, brown bird and is bursting forth in case it should burst.  It is certainly a uniquely captivating song, and the whole experience is one that I shall remember for a long time.

Cycling back from the pub the evening after, the nightingale was still going, the sound filling the whole valley in the still evening. "There's the nightingale" we said. From rarity to old friend in a few days...

New Naturalists

I was given a beautiful book this weekend, the new 'Bumblebees' edition from the Collins New Naturalist series. I have seen the older editions of this series but had not seen these newer versions which feature cover art by Robert Gilmor, a new name to me. The new covers continue the spirit of the original series, but bring something new to them, and I think are quite beautiful.  It transpires that Robert Gilmor lives and produces these gorgeous linocuts in North Norfolk. Here's an example of his work, from the cover for the 'Dragonflies' edition from New Naturalists:

I can understand how people could easily become obsesssive collectors of these wonderful books...I shall endeavour not to become one of them.

Another Dead Goldfinch

Rain and more rain. A neighbour kindly dropped off a dead goldfinch that had flown into their window on Friday and I was given the feet and head of a long dead blackbird by a student last week also, it beats an apple. Driving back across the levels this afternoon I finally saw my first swallows, returned from Africa to 'enjoy' being battered by the sheeting rain and wind.

The Cruellest Month?

T S Eliot's 'cruellest month' is certainly doing its best to live up to that description - after a balmy March, torrential rain and chilly winds have beset us for weeks now. But nature continues its oft-repeated patterns and spring is well underway, with the fields and lanes increasingly verdant. This year I have been struck by the profusion of dead nettles (Lamium purpureum and alba). These are easily overlooked, although were probably the first wildflowers I learnt due to the crucial difference from their stinging counterparts, and their little nectar sweetness that as children we would sup. The bumblebees clearly enjoy their nectar load as well, as early flowers when few other options present themselves. As ever, I am not sure whether it is a good year for the species, or whether I just happen to have noticed them more this year...

The other wonderful sign of spring's progress over the weekend was the returning martins and swallows. I saw a solitary House Martin last Thursday (19th) and then the first swallow this morning (22nd), followed by several others resting on wires, and recouping their strength feeding on insects after their huge migration. As ever I think of Owen Sheers's delightful lines that 'the swallows are italic again'. This was slightly later than the first swallow I saw last year (16th April), maybe an actual delay due to the unsettled weather or again down to my observation. 

Either way, there was a slight desperation in my scanning the skies over the last few days (where are they? Why aren't I seeing them?) followed by a palpable relief and joy when their familiar sky-flit appeared again as if they had always been there, how could I have doubted them? Ted Hughes describes the sight of returning swifts proving that 'the globe's still working'. For me that thought chimes with another, that the sight of these birds connects us physically to the south, their migration suggesting a notional line on the globe linking our little patch of south Norfolk with sub-Saharan Africa, which I find humbling and strangely reassuring.

First House Martins

As we left the garden centre this afternoon I saw a group of four house martins tumbling about in the sky, the first of the year.

A friend on Facebook said that she saw a swallow last week but I haven't seen one yet, or any swifts, but these were certainly martins. I have however seen a lot of buzzards recently and many being mobbed by crows with jackdaws also full of beans stealing moss from our roof and other nesting materials or food from the garden. I've also unusually seen three foxes in the daylight in the last 10 days, the one yesterday on the back road near Mere, stopping to look at us nonchalantly as it trotted across the road 20 yards ahead of us. Adam and I found fox scat on the marshland in Claxton, and in it a small claw, possibly another young owl fallen from a nest and scavenged perhaps ? The foxes have presumably got the wind in their sails as they busily support young cubs in their dens and have to keep food on the family table.

Releasing Cellar hostages

I took the children down my Mum's cellar with torches on a traditional holiday adventure and we found a number of newts and frogs. As a child I used to find loads of frogs in the cellar but we had the wherewithal to largely block up the hole into the garden to stop this happening as they crawled under the concrete cover and fell through the grating in what was a very effective amphibian pit-fall trap. Even with this resolved a small number still clamber into the hole every few months, fall through the grate and are unable to get back out. There are always hibernating mosquitoes in the cellar but these are probably pretty thin pickings and so the trapped frogs and newts have little to eat and their diminished bodies are evidence of this. We carefully caught 7 young smooth newts and two pale common frogs and released them into the pond in the garden which felt like a triumphant success after the sadness of the dead baby owl.