Saturday, November 28, 2009

A proper artist...


Today was nice and fine but cold with a light northerly breeze.

This morning a short walk with Bunty around by the coast path had 1 Snow Bunting flying over S calling, 1 Red throated Diver S but strangest of all was when I was walking back through the village a Kingfisher flew north over the road, over the houses and on towards the coast. 37 Pink footed Geese flew S and 500 Woodpigeons were in the back field.

The rest of today was spent having a trip north of the border to Aberlady. Not for the long staying Lesser Yellowlegs, but to see an exhibition and demonstration by wildlife artist Darren Woodhead. Darren gave a good hour long demo to a small audience in the comfortable headquarters of the Scottish Ornithologists Club to launch his new book 'Up River'. It was a real inspiration.

Before the talk we popped in to the wooden bridge where the above mentioned Yellowshank had gone awol ( well it would be rude not to). The usual cry of 'it was there on that mud half an hour ago' did nothing to improve matters. An hours wait showed that we had just timed the tides wrongly and the dip was done.

Highlights here were masses of Pink footed Geese flighting over, a Peregrine flushing everything and loads of estuary wildfowl.


All in all a pleasant day out.

2 comments:

Emma Anderson said...

That looks like a lovely book, Stewart. John Steel came to the Redesdale Society recently and spoke about his work as a wildlife artists. It was a rather special evening with lots of John's drawings available to browse.

Stewart said...

John is a great artist Emma a real favourite of mine. I've known him for sometime too, see this link below...you might need to cut and paste it.

http://boulmerbirder.blogspot.com/2007/09/artist-at-work.html