Author: Richard

Chickweed Leaf

chickweed leaf

Even at the lowest magnification of 10x, you can see the cells in this chickweed leaf, which is just one centimetre from base to tip.

chickweed leaf x60

Zooming in to 60x you can see how the cells line up to make structures, along the vein and the edge of the leaf.

chickweed leaf x200

At 200x there’s isn’t much depth of field but it looks to me as if there’s a single line of cells forming a tube along the edge of the leaf.

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These were taken on a Traveler USB microscope, which I bought in 2009 at Aldi’s. The software that came with it is long out of date, so it’s taken a bit of ingenuity by my computer expert friend Martin to find a workaround to get it working on my iMac, via a virtual Windows 10 installation.

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Under the Microscope my Wild West Yorkshire nature diary for 20 September 2009.

Runner Beans

We had so many nights of frost last month that we’re leaving it until the last possible moment to plant our runner beans. Having lost tomatoes to the frost down in the greenhouse, we’re keeping these on the kitchen windowsill, just in case. They’re visibly growing every day.

Coot on Eggs

coot sketches

Lake outlet, Newmillerdam, 10.15 a.m.: The sitting coot gets increasingly alarmed as the drake mallard gets nearer, dabbling around the nest. The coot’s repeated, scalding notes get more frantic until its mate swims over briefly to check things out, but the mallard soon moves on.

Back to the business of incubating, the coot keeps changing position and I get a glimpse of 8-10 greenish brownish eggs.

Its mate returns and presents the sitting bird with a spindly pencil-length twig sprouting fresh green leaves. This is accepted by the bird on the nest (I’m not saying ‘the female’ because I can’t tell the difference between the two birds) and incorporated into the car tyre-sized platform.

Brownie-gate

brownie cartoon

As it’s our council leader Denise Jeffery’s birthday, I couldn’t resist a homemade birthday brownie cartoon. Congratulations too to Tracy Brabin, M.P., who celebrated her birthday yesterday by becoming West Yorkshire’s first elected mayor. By the way, her ‘vote Labour’ brownies turned out to be perfectly legal.

And commiserations to a talented bunch of runners up. What a shame that all seven couldn’t get together like the mismatched heroes of a comic book series to pool their superpowers, perhaps mentored by a wise old leader, played by former Dewsbury Reporter journalist, Patrick Stewart, to ‘promote ideals of tolerance and equality for all’ in West Yorkshire, just like he does in Marvel’s X-Men movies.

Ironstone Concretions

ironstone concretion

Natural sandblasting has hollowed out the softer sandstone and left the resistant bands of ironstone standing to give a Swiss cheese effect to this block in an old sandstone wall.

Iron-rich deposits can be precipitated as a scummy layer where a river meets salt water in an estuary. Perhaps that happened 300 million years ago when this sandstone was laid down.

Without knowing exactly what happened, you can still sometimes deduce the sequence of events. Sometimes a rolled pebble – a mini-Swiss roll of ironstone – suggests that a layer of iron had begun to form on a river bed but that it was rolled away by the current before it got covered by the next pulse of sediment.

In other cases, target-shaped nodules conspicuously cut across multiple layers of sandstone, suggesting that the layers came first and that the iron precipitated out as mineral-rich solutions percolated through the sediment.

Mini-Brimham Rock

mushroom-shaped rock

My dad was in North Africa during World War II, and I remember him telling me that in the desert it dropped so cold during the night that you’d hear rocks exploding: a form of freeze/thaw weathering. I can’t promise exploding rocks in Yorkshire but you can see the effects of the weather on even the toughest of our gritstones and sandstones.

On an old garden wall, I spotted this mushroom-shaped rock that looks like a miniature of one of the Brimham Rocks. Like them it has been sculpted by wind action.

Tortoise

tortoise

I was looking for a character with a bit of pizazz for my next homemade birthday card, but I guess that this guy’s going to have to do.

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Categorized as cartoon

Nature’s Palette

Nature's Palette

It’s that time of year again when I realise that I need to improve my plant drawing so I’ve just started Sarah Simblet’s Botany for the Artist and Nature’s Palette, introduced by Patrick Baty. Nature’s Palette was published last month to celebrate the bicentenary of the publication of Scottish artist Patrick Syme’s expanded edition of Werner’s Nomencclature of Colours. Syme suggests a system of 110 standard colours in relation to zoology, botany, mineralogy and anatomy which include ‘Siskin Green’, ‘Flax-flower Blue’ and ‘Gallstone Yellow’.

It’s a book that I need to browse through in a good light, to appreciate the difference between ‘Snow White’ and ‘Skimmed-milk White’, ‘Olive/Clove Brown’ and ‘Liver Brown’.

Howgate Wonder

blossom

Breakfast time: A female squirrel tries several times to climb the bird feeder pole but soon works out that she’s not going to get beyond the baffle. She climbs one of the cordon apple trees to assess the possibilities then climbs onto the hawthorn hedge and leaps across.

She’d make short work of our plastic bird feeders so I’ve relocated the pole a few feet further from the hedge, making sure that it’s not too close to the clothes prop holding up the washing line, a route that we’ve seen squirrels use to get to the feeders in the past.

blossom

Afternoon: A few honey bee-sized bees are continually visiting the blossoms of our Howgate Wonder double-cordon apple, sometimes chased off by a second bee or by a small, dark, cigar-shaped hoverfly.

Golden Spire, apple beginning to form

The blossom has now gone from our single cordon Golden Spire and the apples are just beginning to form.

Golden spire

The Eternal Optimist

cartoon

Scientists have conclusively proved that being a Huddersfield Town supporter is good for your health: researchers have discovered that optimists are 11 to 15% more likely to live longer. For Townies make that at least 22%!

A supporter of Huddersfield Town
Remarked to his wife with a frown,
"If the lads don't buck up,
We'll be out of the Cup,
And the Terriers are going to go down!"