Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I’ve been adding shading and hatching to the aerial view of Sandal Castle to create a more three-dimensional effect. I had intended to fade out the hedgerows around the perimeter but as the earthworks are looking so solid, I think that might be too much of a contrast.
I’ll probably add a few figures for scale and a few cars in the car park. I’m drawing with an Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro, using the program Adobe Fresco.
10.30 a.m.: On North Ings, RSPB St Aidan’s, a greater black-backed gull is feeding on the carcass of a brown hare. Two crows and several magpies, dwarfed by the gull, have gathered around it, like vultures at a kill on the savannah, waiting their turn in the pecking order. As the gull tears at the carcass with its large bill, we glimpse the long back legs of the hare and the black and white markings on the tips of the hare’s long ears.
At the field centre, there’s speculation about who was responsible for the kill. One possibility is a peregrine. For a peregrine, St Aidan’s isn’t far from the nest site on the tower of Wakefield Cathedral.
A few days ago, we were looking at the remains of what looked like a duck or goose, perhaps even a cygnet. Pellets left by the scattered feathers and bones could have been those of a peregrine.
A short distance, perhaps twenty yards, along the track we saw a sternum, the breastbone of a bird, which we thought looked large enough to be a goose or swan. We can’t be sure that it was part of the same kill.
There were fox droppings nearby, so the red fox was our number one suspect, but, as far as I know, foxes, unlike birds of prey, crows and herons, don’t produce pellets of indigestible material. In my photograph you can see that the two small feathers appear to have been flattened and nipped off at the quill, rather than plucked, which to me suggests fox.
It’s unlikely that the brown hare that we saw the gull feasting on had been killed by a fox, as it was on a part of the reserve that is surrounded by what is intended to be a fox- and badger-proof fence.
When we walked back past the kill nearly an hour later, the gull had moved and three magpies were picking over the remnants.