Author: Richard

Dalesman Diaries

I’ve got a stack of Dalesman magazines in the attic, a run of them from January 2013 (with a few breaks) when the editor, Adrian Braddy, invited me to start writing my Wild Yorkshire nature diary for the magazine.

Since then I’ve worked with Adrian’s successors, Jon Stokoe, briefly with Dan Clare and, for the last three years with the current editor Mick Smith.

I’ve completed more than 250 nature diary pages so far.

1991: Malham in Winter

In January 1991, when David Joy was the editor, I’d written an article for them on Malham. There were just two pages of full colour in the magazine, so it was an honour to have my pen and watercolour sketch of Malham in the snow included.

Adrian Braddy

Adrian Braddy, photograph by the Dalesman.

That venerable chronicle of Paradise on Earth, the Dalesman, has appointed a new editor, only the sixth since it was founded in 1939.

The man now sliding his feet under a desk made most famous by Bill Mitchell is Adrian Braddy, who at 34 has plenty of time and energy to steer the magazine through current challenging times.

It may be less challenged than many rivals, as possessor of a formula which sees it sell 36,500 copies a month at £2.60, nearly three times as many as its stablemate Cumbria and top of the remaining regional magazines in the UK.

Martin Wainwright, The Guardian, 14th November, 2012

2013: Pennine Peat

Adrian got in touch because he’d spotted my Wild Yorkshire blog, which I’d been writing for 15 years since 1998, and he thought that the magazine could include a regular nature diary. I got to work immediately and made the deadline for the January edition.

For the first year the focus was on my local patch – the garden, the river and Coxley Valley – with a few articles going further afield, to the coast and up onto the Pennine Moors at Holme Moss.

2014: Summer Visitors

With the Tour de France opening stages bringing a lot of attention to the most gruelling Pennine hill-climbs, I made a point of exploring the moors above Haworth and Ilkley. Back home, took a closer look at garden wildlife with my new camera with its 30x zoom lens, a 200x digital microscope and a UV moth trap.

2015: On the Reserve

I like flowers, fungi and landscapes because I can settle down to draw them without the frustration of them moving away before I’m finished, so to include a few birds in my nature diary I headed to RSPB Old Moor where you’re guaranteed to see wildfowl and waders loafing around for long enough to draw them. It’s also a great place to get close to marsh orchids.

Photograph by James Garlick, Pink Pig Sketchbooks.

Adrian had the idea of incorporating mugshots of the regular writers. My thanks to James Garlick of Pink Pig sketchbooks who photographed me at Cannon Hall, Pink Pig sketchbook in hand, as the cover star their 2015 Trade Catalogue (and, as a thank you presented me with a handful of their sketchbooks).

2016: Three Peaks

Despite its name, the Dalesman includes stories from the length and breadth of Yorkshire so Adrian was quite happy for me to include our go-to escape to the hills, Langsett, on the edge of the Peak District National Park, which straddles the border with Derbyshire.

2017: The Squirrels of Snaizeholme

This is the first of a series of sketchbook format Wild Yorkshire nature diaries, suggested by Adrian, which I enjoyed putting together. I photographed a blank spread of my A5 portrait Pink Pig sketchbook on a mossy background at Aysgarth and added my sketches and hand lettering in Photoshop.

2018: Hips, Haws and Yams

For the whole of 2018 I enjoyed concocting the sketchbook format spreads as they gave my drawings room to breathe, but this is for the Dalesman and Adrian started to get comments from readers that there wasn’t actually a lot to read here . . .

2019: Summer Meadow

Here’s one solution we tried, weaving the text into a spread. Adrian said this was the most difficult spread he’d ever dealt with as he had to set the length of each line individually to flow around the insects.

2020: Bolton Abbey Woods

A new editor at the Dalesman, Jon Stokoe.

In June our friends Clive and Jenny from Sussex were visiting and keen to see pied flycatchers so we set off for Bolton Abbey Woods. No pied flycatchers unfortunately but our walk through the woods gave me plenty of material for this nature diary spread.

2021: The Lockdown Naturalist

My May 2021 diary featured my friend Roger as the Lockdown Naturalist, from a homemade birthday card I’d drawn for him when non-essential shops were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. For a while we couldn’t roam far and wide in Yorkshire but on the one-hour exercise walk we were allowed each day, we saw species such as brown hare and skylark on our local patch in places that we hadn’t spotted them before.

2022: Animated Nature

Drawing ducks and gulls at Newmillerdam inspires me to make a short animated film.

2023: Winter’s Afternoon

I’ve chosen so many spreads from the summer and from further afield but my January 2023 spread featured part of my local patch that I’d known since I ran the school cross country (or walked, finding some interesting short cuts, once we were out of sight of the school).

Those rusty trackside junction boxes, daubed with a bit of graffiti, in the photograph aren’t the real thing: they’re part of a huge model railway layout, 200 feet long, which depicts the Dewsbury to Healey Mills line as it was about the time that my friend John and I ambled around the cross country route.

2024: Morels and Scurvygrass

Roadside flowers and fungi from March 2024.

2025: Fascinating Ferns

Last month’s page inspired me to do a short talk on the ferns of Wakefield for this month’s members’ night at the Wakefield Naturalists’ Society, with a bit of help from my friend Sue Gaynor on the biographical details of Thomas Gissing.

Skechers Arch Fit

My latest trainers, Skechers Arch Fit, made in Vietnam, so currently in line for a 46% tariff in the USA.

In 4 days in Paris we walked 33 miles from Batignoles in the 17th Arrondissment to Montmartre and as far as Shakespeare & Co in ‘Kilometre Zero’ by the Seine opposite newly restored Notre Dame.

The Anatomical Snuff Box

The hollow between my thumb and my wrist is the anatomical snuff box. The tendon on its outside edge is an abductor, it pulls the thumb outwards. This muscle and tendon, the APL, is the one that I need to strengthen and rehabilitate on my right hand.

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Categorized as Drawing Tagged

An Ear for a Bird

River Calder at Addingford, March 2023
warbler
Garden warbler

I’ve long struggled with soft, high-pitched bird calls. I’ve never been able to pick out the contact calls of redwings migrating after dark, despite a astonished birder friend insisting “You must have heard that! – they’re all over the place.”

And, sadly, the song of the grasshopper warbler, which reminds me of a fishing reel unreeling, is something I haven’t heard for over 25 years, although it’s possible that’s simply because they haven’t returned to the bushes and brambles by the river in my local patch.

So my latest NHS state-of-the-art hearing aids have been an eye-opener – or should that be ear-opener – for me. On a normally quiet stretch of tree-lined towpath in a cutting by the canal we’ve now got chiff-chaffs in stereo, just in from Spain, Portugal and North Africa, proclaiming their territories.

chaffinch
Chaffinch: 2

Equally strident, the ‘tee-cher, tee-cher, tee-cher’ of the great tit. Less strident, but loud and cheerful, the chaffinch hurries through an emphatically chirpy song.

Leeks

Our leeks are smaller than usual as we were late planting them out as we waited for our new raised beds to be constructed.

It’s rather late to be harvesting them but they’re fine. It’s encouraging to have such a good crop from the revamped veg beds.

They worked well in our leek, courgette and Boursin cheese tart.

Partial Solar Eclipse

solar eclipse

My studio window faces south-east so I was in an ideal position to set up my telescope to project the solar disc during a partial solar eclipse which reached its maximum at about 11 o’clock this morning, as the Moon passed in front of the Sun.

There was a single sunspot towards the ‘south-west’ limb of the sun.

Although I’ve messed about with these images in Photoshop and Lightroom, I think that some of the mottling in this close-up of the projected image – for instance the halo around the sunspot – are the actual granules of convection cells in the Sun’s photosphere.

Birds in the Valley

River Calder

There’s currently some landscaping going on on the far side of the River Calder here at Addingford, Horbury, but the biggest improvement to the river’s appearance would be if we could reduce the amount of plastic, hanging in tatters from the bankside vegetation.

Coxley Beck, 8 March 2025.

Plastic isn’t such a problem in Coxley Beck but there is occasional pollution from a small water treatment unit below the dam.

Spring migrants have arrived in Stoneycliffe Wood with dozens of chiff-chaffs singing their repetitive signature song alongside the equally strident great tits with their ‘tee-cher, tee-cher, tee-cher’ routine.

Only the robin adds a touch of wistfulness with its trickle of a song. If there were any early arrival willow warblers I couldn’t pick them out.

At Nostell, in the Pleasure Grounds woodland, we heard a great spotted woodpecker drumming. The old partly decayed sweet chestnuts make good sounding boards. As we entered the wood we heard one calling insistently – that’s not something we’re familiar with – and observed a pair come together on a branch high in the tree canopy and there appeared to be a rather formal presentation of some food item: a bit of courtship feeding.

We don’t see as many green woodpeckers as we used to. I don’t remember having seen one or heard its ‘yaffle’ call for a year or more so we were glad to see a pair just above the weir at Horbury Junction on Monday morning. As we walked along the riverside path we disturbed one on the ground. It flew up into one of the riverside trees and was joined by a second bird.

redwing

Spring migrants are arriving but the last of our winter visitors are still with us. A week ago we saw a small flock of redwings join a larger flock of starlings on the grassy slopes of the valley.

On the same day on a quiet stretch of the river 28 wigeon have gathered below the steep bank. We’ve seen them grazing in the adjacent field between the river and the canal.

Wigeon have been regulars, along with a few gadwall, but more unusual was the pair of teal we spotted, twirling around on a smooth section of the river and apparently snapping up insects.

Goosanders have been regulars too. We saw two pairs resting on a strip of shingle at the foot of the bank by The Wyke, looking as if they might be considering nesting there (which isn’t likely). Today there were two lone males there.

This morning a pair of oystercatchers were circling over the river and landing on the adjacent bank, piping enthusiastically.

A lapwing has been diving and calling over an arable field over the last couple of weeks. I hope it stays and raises a brood.

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Categorized as Birds