Pintails to Dotterels; An Orkney Year Begins

The past few months have been a blur with illustration work and commissions taking up a ridiculous chunk of my life, but from time to time I’ve allowed myself the indulgence of sneaking off to do some field study. Ducks come in many shapes and sizes but they are always challenging (and occasionally rewarding) to work from. An unprecedented number of pintails congregated at the Lock of Brockan during the early part of the year and, although very distant and quite wary, I managed a few sheets of drawings from my concealed vantage point in a low ditch 100 metres across the water.

February also brought waxwings to Stromness; somewhat later than is usual for this Scandinavian visitor. The suggestion that their homelands were providing a glut of berries on which they feed, encouraging them to stay in the north for longer seemed logical and a small party of four adults and a juvenile finally arrived at a time when we could normally be expecting them to be making the return trip. For a few days they brightened up a grey and cold February – a couple even making it into my own garden; an exhilarating sight. This watercolour is of one of the adults in an ash tree.

Two long-eared owls also decided that they would behave extremely co-operatively and showed beautifully in a bare-limbed sycamore tree in St Margaret’s Hope, South Ronaldsay. I made a few sheets of drawings and paintings on a freezing afternoon which culminated in this watercolour of one of the birds. It is destined to appear elsewhere at a later date (to be continued) . . .

I also started working in a slightly different manner recently. To try and keep a stronger element of drawing in my colour work, I resorted to a black ink marker pen; a tool which makes lines so far removed from anything in nature that it renders the pursuit of ‘realism’ obsolete. This allows me to concentrate more on exploring the structure and character of the birds, their behaviour and interaction and the elements of pure design in the work. And, although all the birds in the pictures are based on direct observation and drawings from life, they take on a fresh and contrasting personality through this medium.

May – the most exciting month of the year! Long absent friends return to breed, a few special winter visitors linger on and every now and then there’s the odd VIP who decide to drop into the isles on their route further north.
Last year I finally managed to connect with very long-lost friends; dotterels and, checking the ‘Rare Bird Alert’ distribution map last week I noticed there was a healthy sprinkling of these diminutive and exotic waders throughout Britain. Calling all ‘Orkbirders’ to arms I felt there was a really good chance of getting this species again. Hmmm – except I forgot Sally and I were already destined to make a weekend trip south. While I was enjoying a luxurious whirlpool bath in the hotel room a text message beeps through on the mobile – ‘Dotterels in Tankerness – NOW!’

Oh Shagggitttt!!! – not-a-fecking-gain! I know how lucky I was last year in connecting with this, my second favourite species, and were it not for the highly organised Orkney Rare Bird Alerter Mr Paul Higson, I would never have seen the seven in Tankerness in May 2009, but here he is on my mobile giving me the best news at the worst time. Ah well, nothing I can do but enjoy the short break and try to ignore the weekend’s football results.

On my return to Orkney I immediately check on the status of dotterel. None around! Anyhow life must go on (apparently) so off to the gallery I trudged. Halfway through packing a couple of paintings, I get a phone-call from Eric Meek – Mr. RSPB; ‘Tim, I’m watching these dotterels now – they’re in Tankerness’. Oh baby, baby – I hastily flick the ‘Closed’ sign in the window, chuck the‘scope, bins, sketchbook and a St Christopher in the car and a license-risking drive across the county puts me smack in front of the perfect foursome – 2 males and 2 sparkling females. The drawings don’t do anything like justice – but they are a viable account of the afternoon.

Birds & Beasts In The Depth Of Winter

Almost Christmas; another milestone ready to disappear into oblivion through the rear-view mirror as we hurtle forward through time at excruciating speed. Where the hell has this year gone to???

In three months time we’ll be celebrating out first anniversary in the Gallery and, I suppose the fact that we’re quite happy to continue with the business must mean we’ve gotten something out of it – albeit not much financially – but it has been a great way to meet folk (locals and visitors alike), and to exchange birdy tales. The last month has been very quiet, but has at least given me a bit of breathing space within which to concentrate on fulfilling a few commissions gleaned during the warmer months.

The peregrine portrait is a diversion from my usual work; I don’t tend to make straightforward portraits much nowadays, but this piece presented many challenges. I made several false starts to the painting until I found myself in accord with the way the piece was heading. The blocked-in feel of the background was difficult for me to achieve, not technically, but I had to stop myself going back in there and layering more detail and texture on. I thought the result fairly successful.

When a very nice couple came into the shop they seemed more interested in discussing the distribution of species (rather than my preferred topic; the re-distribution of wealth – theirs to me!) and they left with a smile and a promise to return at the end of their holiday. Hmmm – everyone always says they’ll be back. They won’t!
But they did return a week later, buzzing with the experience of connecting with a nice flock of snow buntings over at Mull Head. I’d been kicking a lovely snow bunt along the path at Ness Point on my twice-daily walks with mad-dog Donnie for about a week too and showed them the sketches I’d made one morning. Good move. We discussed a commission, sizes and prices.

The ensuing watercolour is one of my favourite pieces of work from the past few months and it was enthusiastically received. The returning cheque was more than enthusiastically received by the paupers of Stromness (us).

An unfortunate incident presented me with yet another corpse to study from;

A teacher at Edie’s school had noticed a bird being flushed a short way by a passing car and, as she went to see where it ended up, re-flushed it and it flew directly into a neighbour’s window. The house-owners came out and identified it as a young curlew and I was telephoned to collect it, if I wanted it. Walking up the drive I could see the bird draped over a window ledge. I could also see it was a woodcock. Straight home and to work.

The second was a beautiful ‘alba’ barn owl – a rarity up here – that had been fund in the South Parish of South Ronaldsay. My good friend Paul Higson was good enough to collect the bird and I made a start on a study. I didn’t, however. Feel I was doing the bird justice so I curtailed my work and popped the body in the freezer for another day.

It’s always good practice for any artist to tackle subjects which take them out of their own personal comfort zone and commissions often do this. Up here, agriculture is a way of life and most families have a connection with the land and livestock. The sheep are north country Cheviots and were owned by the father of a friend who wanted to surprise his dad on Christmas.

The hares and lapwing painting is a similar scenario; a husband’s secret pressie for his wife (added pressure n the painter, knowing a marriage could be at stake!)

Other self-motivated pieces from recently are the brown trout painting and this observational piece of a local hooded crown on the beach

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

American Plovers, Vireo and a Sandhill Crane

Wow! Autumn is always eagerly anticipated by all birders; the promise of north European migrants being flipped slightly westwards by easterly winds and onto our isles, there to be savoured and enjoyed, is the stuff of dreams. But we rely on the right conditions; these have to be conducive for the birds setting off on their migratory routes south through Scandinavia, then for easterly winds to blow them squint towards us and finally for precipitation of some sort to force them to land once they are in proximity. All we have to do then is go out and find where they are! It’s a fine plan. Sometimes though, it doesn’t work out like that.

This autumn for instance, the prevailing weather systems have been continually and aggressively from the west and, although we have had a few classic drift migrants (barred warbler etc) flounder to our shores, most have managed to make their way south, unhindered.

But what Mother Nature takes with one hand, she appears to have more than compensated with the other. Following on the kite-tails of the last hurricane, the airflow has been almost incessantly from the west and with it have come visitors not seen in these parts for many-a-year. American Golden Plovers are frequent if unreliable tourists to Britain – we’ve got at least three, two adults and a juvenile, merrily swanking around out li’l ol isles and showing the local greeny-yellow guys just what the meaning of ‘smart’ is. Just this week our near-neighbours in Shetland have been playing host to dapper chappies such as buff-bellied pipit and the mega-rare Veery; two deciding Zetland was as good a place as any to spend a wee break. I found a Pectoral Sandpiper whilst taking mad-dog Donny out for his morning constitutional along the Stromness golf course and just yesterday local birdwatchers were thrilled to get the call from our own Rare Bird Alerter, Paul ‘Mega’ Higson that he had cunningly enticed a Red-eyed Vireo to reveal itself from a Tankerness Plantation by ‘pishing it out’. This is the first record for Orkney!



However the prize for the bird that really captured the imagination has to go to the Sandhill Crane. With just two records for Britain in 1981 and 1991 (Shetland and Fair Isle) and an archaic one from Cork in 1905 (shot), Orcadians were delighted to have this leggy stunner strut her stuff around the stubble fields of South Ronaldsay. Although it almost wasn’t to be.

Y’see, the bird happened to drop into a field in the middle of nowhere and the local farmer, not caring too much about which species of wildlife wanted to share his land, just let the bird alone and got on with is own work. For ten days! After nearly two weeks of nodding courteously at this strutting wonder, he elected to find out what it was. Several interconnecting phonecalls ensued resulting in Mega’ Higson chucking brother Mark in the back of his saloon and venturing to the South Parish, fully expecting a Common Crane at best, heron more likely. On his arrival, and after checking his state of awakedness, he identified the bird as a Sandhill Crane and subsequently fell in a ditch. He may still be there!

The bird has now earned its place in British Birding lore; hundreds of enthusiastic folk having made the not-inconsiderable journey north (some less-so south-bound from Zetland and a few from Denmark and further afield) and almost all having connected satisfactorily with our friend from the west.

Immediately prior to the first of the pioneering birding troops arriving, I had the good fortune to spend a couple of hours in the early morning of the 23rd of September, all alone, just enjoying the tranquil beauty of a splendid bird, lost but contentedly feeding in a stubble field on a farm in South Ronaldsay, Orkney, watched and ignored by a posse of great black-backed gulls and a couple of lapwings.

And this is a painting worked from the sketches which I have published as a limited edition print. I think it encapsulates the essence of that first encounter with a superb and enigmatic bird – one I’ll certainly never forget.

As Plain As Black and White

The summer is moving inexorably into autumn, with winter peeking around the corner at every turn. The vibrancy of colour and clamourations of the seabird cities are a fresh but passing memory and my thoughts are turning to darker days.
All the energy and effort of working towards the Summer Sketchbook exhibition has been quite draining and in antithethis to this I wanted to work much larger and without the constraint of colour (this may sound curious, but colour can be restrictive - certainly to me). I embarked upon a series of drawings from round about and further afield.
Charcoal is a wonderful medium - instant and unfussy. The drawings are approximately 3 feet across.

A Summer Sketchbook - An Exhibition

During the spring and summer of 2009 I was employed by the RSPB to monitor the breeding birds of the north isles of Orkney. I was living out of my campervan; no family ties, kids neither demanding attention, nor dog walking to do, I was alone in unusual lands ripe for exploration. The work entailed visiting the breeding areas during the early morning and at evening time, thus leaving the bulk of the daylight hours for watching the birds. And for drawing them. Occasionally I would seek out new, unexplored areas, but more often I would return to my survey sites and observe my subjects at a more leisurely pace and from a less intrusive distance. This is when I got to see the birds just ‘being themselves’; I really started to get to know them just a wee bit. I also accumulated further data which contributed to a more complete assessment of the birds’ breeding status.

When the opportunity to stage an exhibition was offered, I turned to the many sketchbooks full of scribbles, written notes and colour studies. Re-visiting these images, sometimes several weeks after the event, allowed me to take a new and fresh look at the drawings and the birds which I had portrayed. In some cases I felt the original drawing which I had made in situ was relevant and I reworked the piece only slightly (if at all), adding little to the source image; other pieces, although derived from an encounter with an individual bird or experience in the field, have benefitted from being able to glance back from distance; the salient elements of the experience distilled and refined somewhat. Almost all of the paintings are annotated with the notes made at the scene of the original observation, placing a particular event in time and location. This is my way of interpreting the visual delights of an Orkney Summer.

Here is a selection of works destined for the exhibition. Incidentally, I am going to be publishing a limited edition commemorative catalogue of the exhibition. It will be A5 landscape, 32 pages in colour and will be limited to 50 copies signed and with a unique inscribed vignette. If anyone's interested and would like to reserve a copy, they will be £12.50 +p&p.
Please email (tim.wootton@tiscali.co.uk) to order.

Gulp – doesn’t time just whizz by?!
Already halfway through 2009 and barely an update to the blog (sorely missed, I’ll bet) but, unlike previously when I had been trapped in the studio, this time is because I have been out-a-doors most of the time. My contract with RSPB was renewed just at the point when time was plentiful but cash was, as ever, in short supply. So the surveys start but almost simultaneously, we get the opportunity to take on the lease for a shop on the local high street (well, the only street, really!) and we then find ourselves having a full-time job each and in addition having to set up a new venture and provide stock for it.
So, many hours of painting slates, framing prints and nicking paintings off the walls at home and we open the shop. For one week.
Then we have to take a trip south to see mum (already scheduled) and manage to miss the most potentially lucrative week of the year; Easter.
Anyway – stuff happens and you just have to get on with it, don’t you?
Working for the RSPB this year is somewhat different as it entails plotting up on the North Isles for several days at a time. Luckily we have recently invested some of our overdraft in an aging motorhome (more of which elsewhere, at another time) which gives me the perfect base from which to work and also a haven to return to. It also functions perfectly as a mobile bird-sketching hide; something which added an extra reason for me fetching the van all the way from Glasgow one wintry night early this year.
Anyway the trip to see mum worked out well – particularly the return jaunt up the west coast; camping in the van at Loch Ness, Fort William and Ullapool (three highlights of many scenic eye-poppers). The Ullapool stop being spent at the campsite at Ardmair – a wonderfully evocative place, more so for me because it was here that I first ever came to Scotland – and fell in love with the place irrevocably. A few things had changed in the intervening 26 years (!) but the place still holds all the mystique and romance that I felt when a wee nipper. We saw an otter in the bay, too – another old friend from west coast trips. Talking of old friends, whilst at mum’s she ferreted out an old painting that I did many years ago (1987 to be precise, when I was 24 years old. Jeeps, I can’t even remember being 24 years old!). It’s of sanderlings and I know for a fact that I had only ever seen one before – and that at Broomhill Flash, Wombwell in South Yorkshire. Anyway, pride aside, here it is;

Back in Orkney and straight into the RSPB job. Always wonderful to get out to the isles, just occasionally being in the wrong place at the wrong time causes a lot of heartache. I’ve never seen a snowy owl in the wild and when one turned up in the county I was buzzing. But the bird (a young female) spent several weeks playing with my head; it was seen in two different locations not ten minutes from my home in Stromness several times over a period of four weeks, and each time I succeeded in missing the bird. It then turned up on the Island of Shapinsay – not only one of the islands I am working on as part of my contract, but also the island we lived on when we first moved to Orkney. And where was it seen, this be-speckled white northern beauty? Sitting on an old fencepost, in a field at the farm that I used to bloody-well own!!!! Talk about taking the Michael!
Eventually, however, I received a call. The call. Snowy owl showing well in a field in Holm (pronounced Ham, up here). Only 25 miles but starting to get dark and I know Sally’s not going to be happy with my suggestion that I abandon the kids’ bathtime, and the evening meal, erm, and her and go and look at a bloody bird!.
“Fine – just GO!” she suggested. “But if you don’t effing see the effing thing, don’t effing come back!!!” she quietly advised.
I exchange the Freelander for a teleporter and zap into the field within half an hour (don’t forget, not only does Orkney have no motorways, there isn’t even one metre of dual carriageway in the county, so travel can be a tad laborious at times). Not tonight though. And there’s the owl. But it’s not the little minx that’s been toying with my birdy emotions all the while; nope, it’s a pristine male bird, doing all he can to look like a white feed-bucket beside a square concrete strainer.
A very pleasant and most satisfying 45 minutes of drawing later and one happy chappie on the road back home. No dinner, I grant you; but fulfilled in every other sense.

So, having got a ‘life-tick’, birding was bound to be straight forward from here-on in. Yes? Nope!
Just one more species was to send my dials spinning before the end of May – and this one was a really old friend; one that I saw only ever-so briefly 30 years ago, it standing in a ploughed field, 200 metres away from me, somewhere near Hoyland (I think – the memory is somewhat shaky).
I’m on the north isles – Shapinsay to be quite precise (yep – wrong time again) and the phone bleeps with a text ‘dotterel in South Ronaldsay’. ‘Jayzzusss Feckkkk-ittt’ I scream, frightening the curlews. By the time I’ve done the surveys and caught the boat back, these birds have long gone – probably mincing about on some upland tundra hilltop enjoying their curiously inverted summer nuptials.
I write them off, thinking I’ve done without them for thirty years, I can manage another thirty; no bother. I then ‘do the math’ as our Am. cuzzins say and image me-self at seventy-six, chasing a bunch of fancy plovers across a wheat field. Hmmm.
But, once again, the phone goes into sex-mode. Top birder and all round good-egg Paul (who runs the bird alert service in the county), knowing my personal plight with these birds has arranged for a small party of seven dotterel to conveniently land in an open field, right by the airport in Tankerness, and here he is giving me the tip-off.
What he’s unaware of, of course, is the fact that I’ve been out all morning and half the afternoon, wasting ‘quality-time’ and fecking-expensive fuel looking for – erm – dotterel.
Aaaarrrgghhh! I replace the handset very carefully, knowing I am in grave danger of ripping the whole communication device off the wall.
I glanced at darling wife whose face told something of a story, so I sulked for half an hour, at which point she told me to “Piss off and don’t come back!”.
Well, I thought, this an opportunity too good to miss and with her 'blessing' I sped off to the airport. No fecking sign - Brrastid! Quick call to Mr Higson who told me to go to the house with the washing (?!) I did and was there allowed wonderful access to their land and superb, if distant views of the birds.
I realise they are fairly settled, and are having difficulty leaving the site ‘cos of the wind, so I settle down for a session. I hear a cardoor slam and three very perky dotterel-spotters in high spirits tramp across to me 'Ssshhhhh!! - shut the duck-up' - I rather irritably snarl - but too late and the birds are offski. I sit jaw-clenched and white knuckled as apologies spill forth, but I decide to pack up, go the house to offer my thanks and phone Sal to see if I would be getting any dinner.
“They're back”, Ian has chased me to the car. I phone Sal back and plead for a little more time. Strangely the line goes dead. Hmmm, must be out of battery, I think - so go back to the dotterels for another hour and a half, during which time they’re harassed by a cock lapwing (who had a nest approximately four miles away); they attempt to continue their migration, but the wind just keeps blowing them back, so settled back down in the field. They were still there when I left at six o'clock.
I thought I'd better check if I still had a marriage to go home to. The jury's still out . . .

A few field drawings and a ‘finished’ piece from the same;

Some other stuff from ‘the field’ over the past few weeks;