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Coffee Break Birds

Richard Bell’s Wild West nature diary, Thursday,  28th  May 2009

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Collared dove - once a constant presence in our back garden you’re more likely to see wood pigeons.

This black-headed gull touched down in the car park. Even seeing it so closely, I got the pattern of grey on its wings wrong in my first sketch; the bird on the left is closer to what I saw than the bird above.

I sketched black-headed gulls again in the afternoon, this time at Newmillerdam Country Park. Those stark, drowned trees evoke a sense of wilderness that the view from MacDonald’s can’t match.

I ENJOY another half hour coffee break at MacDonald’s while Barbara and the mums do their tour of Morrison’s supermarket. Beyond the car park there’s a grassy slope and a variety of trees and shrubs, ruffled by the wind. A great improvement - from what I remember - on the industrial units that stood here on the site of Westgate brickworks 20 years ago.

Swifts, rooks, wood pigeons, blackbirds and a variety of smaller birds which I couldn’t identify from a distance are making the most of this green space.

There’s a high, distant bank of stratus with lower cumulus moving over Wakefield in a wind that is blowing from the north or north west.