Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Latest trail cam shots from our back garden: pheasants, blackbird, a pair of robins and – what are you doing there?! – Butch (yes, he really is called Butch), next door’s Labrador but my favourite shot is the wood pigeon at dawn, looking hopefully up at the feeders.
Now hitting the news stands, my latest article for the March Dalesman, featuring botanical illustrations by John Edward Sowerby for Thomas Gissing’s Ferns of Wakefield (1862).
These three barrel-like drums must have played some part in processing the textiles that Addingford Mills once produced.
Recycled material in farm sheds, Dudfleet Lane, Horbury.
I spent an hour clearing algae, moss, grass and duckweed from our pond yesterday. The pheasants seem to appreciate my efforts.
The aim was to clear the pond before frogs started arriving but on my first sweep with the net I caught a large frog amongst the pondweed. It played dead but with a little gentle encouragement it hopped back into the water.
That was the only frog and I didn’t come across any newts, which I invariably catch in the net when I’m clearing duckweed in the summer.
The pheasants and a blackbird rummaged and pecked about in the debris that I’d left in piles around the pond to give any creatures that had got caught up in it a chance to escape.
With the end of meteorological winter is less than a couple of weeks away this is my last chance to complete some of the seasonal tasks in the garden. There’s no shortage of tidying up jobs such as weeding veg beds and clearing paths but they can wait. More urgently, I need to trim this corner of the hawthorn/holly hedge to more manageable proportions before the birds start nesting.
It won’t be long before the frogs gather to spawn in the pond again, so I’d like to clear out some of the duckweed, overgrown plants and fallen leaves before they return.
To give our autumn-fruiting raspberries the best chance I want to dig them up before growth gets started again, raise the level of the raised bed with riddled compost, replant them and finally cut them down to ground level.
There’s more cutting back needed behind the shed too before birds, such as our resident dunnocks, start nesting.
At the top end of Coxley Valley this belt of trees runs close to the 130 metre, 425 feet, contour. I’m told that if you’re here early in the morning you’ll see roe deer.
New Hall Wood, Midgley, 40℉, 5℃: The holly sapling next to this twin trunk of silver birch already has a stem of honeysuckle climbing up it, twisting loosely anti-clockwise as seen from above. As you’d expect, the patch of moss is on the shady north-facing side of the tree.
Great to be back drawing on location. Robin singing from a holly bush, crows cawing. As I attach my sketchbook to my drawing board it drops onto damp moss, leaving a greenish smear across the page, providing a patina for my drawing.
Yesterday I completed the last spread of a year’s worth of my nature diaries for the Dalesman. I’ve been writing for the magazine for 12 years now, once a month or bimonthly, so it now runs to 132 articles, more than 250 pages.
This is the first time that I’ve managed to get so far ahead. The icy weather at the start of the year gave me the opportunity to put in a good session and I completed six articles, which just made me all the more determined to get on with the remaining six so that I’d be a full year ahead.
My deadline is always 6 or 7 weeks before the month that I’m writing about so in that way I’ve always been thinking ahead but at the same time I’ve always looking back, looking through my wildyorkshire.blog posts for ideas from nine months ago.
At last I’ll be able to write and draw my articles in real time, in the present! But I’ll have to wait a year to see them in print.