Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
A covering of snow this morning was a reminder that although we want to get ahead with our veg garden, it’s too early to plant out most of our crops.
Trees drawn from our morning coffee stops: an oak from Rivers Meet, Methley, and a poplar from the Coffee Stop at the Junction.
We were back there again this morning, walking alongside the river through a snow shower which soon gave way to blue skies and sun.
Thanks to Browning, I’m back in business with a replacement Strike Force Pro XD trail cam, so I’ve been catching up with the soap opera that is the wild side of our back garden.
As you can see, a male house sparrow has laid claim to the sparrow terrace nestbox, ousting the blue tits, who nested in hole 1 on the left last year. I love the puzzled expression on the blue tit’s face.
A persistent pigeon is waddling past the daffodils in pursuit of – he hopes – a mate.
Night visitors have included a cat and a vixen. I wonder if I’ll succeed in catching the cubs on camera this year?
Thanks to a sharp-eyed birdwatcher we met at RSPB St Aidan’s this morning we’re on to species number 74 on our year list: a common scoter, a black drake, not much bigger than the black-headed gull dotted around it on the lagoon.
Plenty of noise from the black-headed gullery in the centre of the reserve.
We planted a single cowslip four or five years ago which bunched up into a clump, so we’ve into four plants, which are all doing well in the raised bed behind the pond.
We have mixed success with bulbs but a few of the iris made it into flower and the scilla seem to have settled in.
Snowdrops are the bulbs that have really made themselves at home, spreading behind the pond and along the hedge and tête-a-tête daffodils do well too. They’ve lasted for a month or more but are now fading away.
2 p.m., 20℃, 69℉ in the sun – cloudless: I cleared a square metre of what will be a wild flower and plants for pollinators bed, discarding the creeping buttercup and chicory but keeping the knapweed, dog daisy and teasel.
Woodpecker drumming, wood pigeon cooing. Coma and peacock butterflies basking.
The pulmonaria was self-sown. It did so well under the hedge that it started to encroach on the path, so we moved it to the pollinators’ bed.
A small, 1.5 cm approx., dark bumblebee with no obvious stripes visits the pulmonaria flowers, shadowed by a smaller, 1 cm, light brown bee, watching, hovering a few inches away, in fact acting like a drone in the modern sense, It then briefly pounces on the larger bee but is rebuffed after just a second.
The larger bee checks out another pulmonaria flower and the smaller bee pauses at a nearby flower, but doesn’t continue shadowing the larger bee.
I’m guessing this is a male, a drone, following a female.
Snake’s head fritillary, planted in sunken pots for its own protection against rampant chicory.
It’s not set to last over the weekend but it felt like being in a continental city in Leeds yesterday, sitting sketching a bicycle on Brewery Wharf at the Cafe YumYum.
It was our first day browsing around Leeds since just before the first lockdown, so it was good to feel things getting back to some kind of normality.
Despite what my pantomime version of Will Gompertz is saying, there really are people who are daft enough to take a Loony Dook in the Firth of Forth on New Year’s Day. Happy birthday to Leo.
You couldn’t accuse me of lacking in ambition. As a seven year old my first attempted book project was to write and illustrate Prehistoric Animals, my own take on the history of our planet.
I enthusiastically drew Tyrannosaurus striding past a tree fern. So far, so good, but now for the difficult bit. With my wobbly lettering the text was going to be a challenge.
‘Tyrannosaurus,’ I wrote and – phew – I got the spelling right, but then I continued: ‘had 200 theet.’
In my efforts to produce my neatest writing I’d misspelled ‘teeth’.
Boris Romantschenko, a survivor of the Buchenwald, Mittelbau-Dora, Bergen Belsen and Peenemünde concentration camps, who died aged 96 during Russian shelling of his apartment block in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Friday.