Not long now

Elmley was bleak this morning and it was cold. Not the crisp, clean cold of deep Winter, but a dirty, grey cold, one that no amount of layers seemed able to keep out. Across the grey landscape grey clouds scudded, ripped and torn to shapeless shreds by an urgent and insistent wind racing in from the grey Swale, laden with the tangy scents of salt and mud. Drizzle driven by the same wind was flung into my face, it felt like fine sand and made my eyes water with emotionless tears. The cries of curlew whined out across the marsh and even the bubbling laughter of little grebes seemed more mournful than cheerful.

But perhaps it shouldn't have sounded so. Perhaps their laughter should have had the ring of hope. Because these are the last days of the season, these are the last days of the dour hand of Winter that brings the grey rain and the spiteful winds.

Spring is trying hard now to shake Winter's grey mantle and begin colouring the days. Cleaning the drab olive grass to a bright and luscious green. Scouring the grey from the skies, polishing them to blue and decorating them with a dash of fresh cotton white.

Hares are gathering together, the females are tetchy and will soon begin to fight off the advances of the increasingly excitable males. There are coots brawling in the grey and choppy water and I have seen great crested grebes presenting gifts of vegetation to each other and dancing on the surface together like lovestruck teenagers. Geese are pairing off and blackbird males are becoming aggressive in defence of invisible but solid boundaries. Feisty blue tits have started chasing rivals and staking their claim to the nestboxes. Out on the Fleet the teal males raise their crests, flick their tails and bow to the, as yet, indifferent females. I watched a pair of peregrines playing together on the grey winds, treating the sky as a playground, riding the turbulent air like a toy.

Spring is here, but it awaits its moment to burst through and clear away the last dismal stutterings of a stubborn and belligerent Winter.

It won't be long now...

The painful truth

I was told it was about time that I updated my profile picture to one that was taken more recently. I'm told that the tired and saggy old bloke to the right is me! I think someone's telling porkies though. I can't possibly look that bad!

Three owls

Anyone who's read more than one of my posts (Is there anyone?) will probably know that little owls are one of my favourites. I can't resist them and, if I see one it almost invariably goes into the sketchbook or the camera.

Most of the time I like to paint birds as they go about their daily routines, unaware that they are being watched. Often, if viewing through binoculars or a scope, the birds will glance in my direction and decide that I'm far enough away that I don't constitute a threat and they will return to roosting or preening, safe in the knowledge that they could fly away in plenty of time if the situation demanded it. Just occasionally though it's nice to paint that point of contact with a bird, that moment of recognition and silent communication. This guy was perched in a yew tree behind the churchyard in Hucking. I'd stopped a good distance from the tree and scanned it with my binoculars and was lucky enough to spot the light patch of the owl's feathers where the sun reflected off of them. The owl had obviously seen me long before I'd seen him and he was watching intently. No binoculars needed! He didn't move off but he kept glancing at me, just literally keeping one eye on what I was up to, and what an eye!



This little painting is a bit of a landmark for me too because it is the first wildlife painting that I have completed in oils. I've enjoyed the paints and may use them in preference to acrylics in the future, I suppose that will depend on how well the next oil painting goes!

Owls as a group are so gorgeous to me that I sometimes wonder if I should call myself an owl artist who paints other wildlife from time to time. They are certainly a recurring theme in my work. They are not always the easiest of creatures to see though and despite knowing where there is a long eared owl roost it took literally years before I was able to spot this one. Long eared owl had become something of what birders call a 'bogey bird' for me. When I eventually did find him though he seemed content to pose for me almost as if I'd paid him! He was either confident that his camouflage was good enough to hide him or he was just too damn tired to move as his eyes barely opened beyond much more than a slit in all the time I watched him. Useful to me because I had plenty of time to do a detailed sketch which later became a painting.





Of course an owl's life is not all sleeping and roosting and another type of encounter that always thrills is one with a hunting owl. Using sketches done during my hour in a ditch back in May I wanted to show a barn owl hunting in territory familiar to me where I've often seen barn owls. In the early morning the sun is low enough in the sky that it lights up the feathery seed heads of the phragmite beds around the coastal marshes of Elmley and Oare. When a barn owl floats into the scene between the viewer and the sun it sometimes appears outlined in pure, white light an effect known as contre-jour, which is a French phrase meaning literally 'against the day'. A barn owl's body plumage is light enough that it will retain some detail even in these conditions, picking up reflected light from the ground and some of the light that filters through the translucent wing feathers. It is a beautiful and fleeting effect that artists have often exploited and one that I hope I've managed to capture some of in the painting 'Low light, low flight, highlight'.

Merlin defiant

On the afternoon of September 7th 1940 the phone rang in the dispersal hut at RAF Martlesham. 257 Squadron were scrambled to intercept an incoming force of enemy aircraft. For the fourth time that day Flight Lieutenant Hugh ‘Blue blood’ Beresford raced to his waiting Hurricane and fired up its powerful Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. He was quickly airbourne leading ‘A’ Flight. Out over the Thames Estuary 257 Squadron were vectored in on a flight of 50 German bombers and they met them head-on. As Flight Lieutenant Beresford began his attack an Me.109 fighter escort swept down from altitude to attack the defiant 257 Squadron and defend their own bombers. Flight Lieutenant Beresford frantically called a warning to his comrades below him; “Alert Squadron! Four snappers coming down!” These were probably his last words as he was hit by a cannon shell fired by one of the 109’s and his aircraft fell away from the squadron and plunged earthwards.

On the quiet marshland of Elmley on the Isle of Sheppey the Hurricane struck the ground at Spitend. Impacting nose first the aircraft disappeared into the marshy soil leaving just a small crater and two slashes where the wings had hit and sliced into the soft ground. There was no explosion, no flames nothing but a small wisp of smoke or steam drifting up from out of the hole.

For the next 39 years Flight Lieutenant Beresford remained in the cockpit of his Hurricane, buried 4-5 metres below the surface. Then, in August 1979 a team of volunteers recovered the aircraft and the pilot’s mortal remains along with a few remnants of his personal effects. Hugh Beresford was finally laid to rest, with full military honours, in the Brookwood military cemetery in Surrey.

On the day he died back in 1940 Hugh Beresford was just 24 years old, the same age as my eldest son.

Last year I was on Elmley one quiet Sunday morning in the middle of summer. There were swallows skimming low and skylarks singing high against the azure sky which was broken only by the contrails of even higher flying planes.

As I looked at the patterns of criss-crossing vapour trails the thought struck me that I could have been transported back to the 1940's when the skies above Kent were the scene of fierce fighting as the RAF fought the threat of Nazi invasion and the might of Hitler's Luftwaffe. Even as these battles raged, and brave young men of both sides lost their lives, the birds on the marshes of Sheppey continued, just as they have always done, oblivious to the struggles of men.

In early September this year I was lucky enough to catch up with a merlin on Elmley and the thought of the summer of 1940 returned to me and this painting was conceived. The Rolls Royce Merlin engine powered both the Spitfire and the Hurricane so I thought it would be an appropriate bird to place in the context of the Battle of Britain. The young male sits on a pile of boulders which are not naturally occuring in Kent. They have been brought in to be used in the coastal defences, so again I thought they were appropriate. I have used a little artistic license and the fighter planes depicted are Spitfires not Hurricanes simply because the shape of the Spitfire is more easily recognisable.

CLA Game Fair

I will be attending the CLA Game Fair at Ragley Hall in Warwickshire this weekend, Friday 23rd-Sunday 25th July. I'll be in the 'Birds, birds, birds' Stand P1213, where some of my work will be on show. If you're at the fair please do come and have a chat, it would be nice to meet anyone who reads this little blog of mine.

Gotta go pack!

Fairy whispers and chasing dragons

The weatherman had promised cloud after a week of pure blue skies and soaring temperatures. But he was wrong. The sky was clear and the air had the delicious taste of a morning's clarity before it thickens to hang heavy with the sun's heat.

Always at this time of year I hope to see Hobbies on my travels. Those dashing little falcons like miniature peregrines with every edge honed to sharpness. So my first port of call was the old schoolhouse to scan the familiar territory of the resident pair. However there was no sign of them, either on their favourite perches or in the empty sky. I stayed for over an hour and, as the sun worked her magic, the temperature began to rise and the air began to hum and buzz with the busyness of insects. The horizon became a shimmering, ephemeral thing and looking for distant Hobbies through the heat haze was like trying to see through a pane of glass running with the heavyest of heavy rain. The air thickened, as I'd known it would, and took on the heat of those near forgotten dream Summers of my childhood.

As I went down the track that leads back down to the farmhouse the bushes to the sides were moving. Each twig and leaf it seemed was a perch for a smiling, bejewelled, yellow dragon and my passing put them to the air. Their glasslike wings whirred and clattered, maneuvering them to perceived safety on a branch perhaps a foot or so away from their first position. Benign to us but snatching death to their small insect prey, these grinning beauties are superb fliers, twisting, turning, banking and hovering with perfect precision. But even such mastery cannot always save them. The Hobbies that fly here hunt these hunters, grabbing them in swift talons and deftly removing their leaded glass wings before offering them up to the sharp and decisive beak to be devoured in flight with barely an interruption. The yellow dragons (Common Darters) are the most numerous dragonflies on the reserve but there are others there too. Azure damselflies with their needle thin bodies glowing in blue as bright as Chinese turquoise, and delicate, irridescent, green/blue Banded Demoiselles with their distinctive black wingspots always seeking the bottle green and spotless females. And the larger Black-Tailed skimmer, dusky blue and impressive but they are all dwarfed by the massive Migrant Hawker.


Common Darter


Azure Damselfly


Banded Demoiselle


Black-Tailed Skimmer


Migrant Hawker

The heat brought other creatures to the brambles, nettles and thistles; A huge hatch of meadow brown butterflies in even greater profusion than the dragonflies. Understated, velvet-winged and beautiful they adorned the undergrowth in their thousands. As I walked by they lifted and fluttered all around me and I was surrounded by a cloud of Summer with wings as soft as the whispers of fairy secrets. Moving on, the cloud of butterflies seemed to move along with me as some settled and others took their places in the dance. There is only one way to describe encounters like this; Pure Magic.


Meadow Browns

Enchanted by the meadow browns and heady with the Summer I sought out other butterflies and was rewarded with a glorious Small Tortoiseshell basking in the sun. His bright colours shone like sweets in a glass jar against the grey stone gravel of the path. A Large White was busy among the brambles and nettles by the path. As she fluttered from one bramble to another it was almost as if one of the pure white blooms of the bramble itself had taken to flight. And finally atop a giant thistle, a comma, ragged edged wings radiant in burnished copper, he drank nectar with his elegantly caligraphic tongue.


Small Tortoiseshell


Large White


Comma

The Hobbies never did show, but it didn't matter because, like the butterflies, I had tasted the sweet nectar of Summer and, anyway, I knew that they were out there somewhere in the vast open sky...Chasing dragons.


High Summer Hobby

BBC Wildlife Magazine Wildlife Artist of the year 2010

I was very pleased to find out that my painting 'Too late!' had won the 'British Birds' category of the BBC Wildlife Magazine Wildlife Artist of the year competition 2010. It's a huge honour to have been judged the winner in this hard-fought category and I don't think I've stopped grinning since I heard.

The painting will be exhibited at Marwell later in the year along with the other category winners which include my friends, Tim Wootton for the 'World Birds' category and Nick Derry for the 'Visions of Nature' category. Congratulations to the both of them.