Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I MADE this zero calorie bar of chocolate using a recipe from Chipp Walters’ book Create 3D like a Superhero!, an entertaining introduction to the Vue 3D modelling program. A new – and free to use – version Vue Pioneer 11 is now available and having downloaded it I was inspired me to pick up the book and continue where I left a year ago.
My last Vue creation was Chipp’s Dolphin mini-submarine, but I remember struggling with the paint-shop part of the tutorial!
Link: Cornucopia 3D
IT MIGHT BE about a month late thanks to the cold, sometimes snowy weather but at last there’s a clump of frogspawn in the pond with at least 14 frogs, most of them gathered around the clump which is on the sunnier, shallower side of the pond.
IT’S UNUSUAL to be able so see your Victorian ancestors in colour but these two portraits that have been stored away since my mum inherited them in the 1960s give me an opportunity to do that. I’ve decided that, whatever their merits as paintings, it is worth giving them a new lease of life because they’re such central characters in the family sage that I’ve been unfolding in my genealogical research re so I’ve taken them to Robin Taylor in Wakefield for restoration.
Robin tells me that they’re painted photographs. The budget version of this would be a photograph with some of the features such as eyebrows picked out in charcoal by the photographer so these fully overpainted photographs would have been a more expensive option.
These aren’t wedding portraits because George and Sarah were married in the 1870s and the label on the back of the portraits suggests that they were photographed, then painted, in the 1880s.
THE WARMER WEATHER over the weekend has at last encouraged the frogs to return to the pond. There are at least nine, but probably more, of them lined up around the edges. These will be males waiting for the females to arrive.
HAIRY BITTERCRESS, Cardamine hirsuta, growing in the shady flower bed by the front door, is one of those little green jobs, a garden weed that looks so nondescript that you might think that it would be impossible to identify it.
The four-petalled cross-shaped flowers show that it’s a crucifer, a member the cabbage, cress and mustard family, formerly the Cruciferae but now known botanically as the Brassicaceae family.
The leaf-shapes and the sausage-shaped seed-pods help me narrow it down to hairy bittercress and a hand lens reveals that, as the species name hirsuta suggests, the stems and the backs of the leaves are covered in little hairs.
You also need a hand lens to spot that its flower has four stamens. This distinguishes hairy bittercress from a similar looking species, the wavy bittercress, Cardamine flexuosa, also known as greater bittercress.
AT LAST the frogs are back, well two of them, but when I spot them this afternoon they’re actually making their way out of the pond. It’s warmer today but it’s likely that it’s going to turn cold again so perhaps it is as well that no spawn has appeared as it could still at this late stage run the risk of getting frosted.
Two pied wagtails flitted about on the terra cotta tiles of the house roof opposite in this morning’s sun, which must have been enticing overwintering insects to emerge from the nooks and crannies. The wagtails briefly mate, or attempt to mate.
Today’s loaf is my attempt at at Paul Hollywood’s ale and rye bread. It proves quite a workout as the dough, to which you add a couple of teaspoons of black treacle, proved to be stubbornly sticky. Perhaps the froth on pale ale caused me to underestimate how much liquid I was adding.
But it’s got lots of character and flavour and it looks more or less like the one in the book.
I FEEL BAD walking out to discourage the pair of mallards from making themselves at home in our pond but mallards are doing fine on the river, lakes and dams locally but I’m getting increasingly worried about our local frogs. Will we see them return when the warm weather reaches us this weekend.
THE CLOCKS went forward at the weekend so we’re now into British summertime, despite the low temperature and the strips of snow lingering on the hills.
It’s 8pm and as the light fades there’s a lot of posturing and puffing up of plumage as the back garden blackbirds emphasise their claims to the lawn. A single male claims the flower border while a resident pair forage around the shed and the herb bed opposite.
The males play cat and mouse, mirroring each other’s postures but keeping a few paces away from each other on a band of disputed territory along the front of the herb bed and down to the pond.
The bluster doesn’t bubble over into outright aggression and the shed pair fade away beyond the hedge as dusk drains away the light. They’ll be bursting into song to establish their claims again at dawn.
CHICKWEED is bursting into life on flowerbeds, covering entire beds where it gets the chance. 
It’s an annual but it has the ability to overwinter and get ahead of the competition as spring arrives.
A wagtail trots about on a house roof in the morning sun.
In contrast to this waterside bird heading for the houses, a regular garden bird, a male 
blackbird, is down on the sandy bank by the river near a pair of mallards that are dabbling nearby.
Still no sign of frogs in our pond but that’s hardly surprising as despite the sun it’s still too cold. A neighbour across the road has a tiny pond that always attracts too many frogs and we transfer the spawn to my pond but the clump that had appeared there before the snow has now turned white, killed off by the heavy frosts.
This weekend will be the test as at last the warm air will be able to move in from the south-west. I’m anxious to see the frogs return.
WE SAW two great-crested grebes the last time we walked by the lake at Newmillerdam but I’m sorry not to spot them today. I hope they’re nesting in some hidden backwater. Much in evidence are the black-headed gulls, every one of them now in breeding plumage.
In our back garden this afternoon the grey male sparrowhawk zooms into the bottom of the hedge. Twenty or thirty seconds later he pops up again from our neighbour’s side arcing over so swiftly that for a moment he’s flying upside down.
Emerging unsuccessfully again from our neighbour’s side he leaves the hedge with nothing, sitting for a few minutes on next door’s sumac. If it wasn’t being anthropomorphic, I’d say that there was distinct look of grumpiness in his hunched silhouette.
He flies over the corner of the meadow to the wood, putting up a flock of goldfinches and sending the wood pigeons into clattering panic from the ivy-covered ash trees.
The ivy berries on next door’s front garden fence must be at their best because for much of the day a wood pigeon is contentedly eating them.
The blue tits are showing an interest again in the nestbox on the back of house.
With the snow gone and the pheasants and wood pigeons trampling the border beneath the bird feeder I was beginning to think that all mole activity had ceased. Late this afternoon the mole started re-excavating its tunnel system and we watched as it piled up the earth by the edge of the lawn, obviously coming very near the surface but never once showing itself.
