one pink-and-yellow cricket practice ball (which I must return to our neighbours’ spaniel, Rogue, two doors up the road)
three tennis ball in varying degrees of fluffiness and squishiness
two dead rats
In the veg beds they’ve flattened our seedling Musselburgh leeks, broken into the netting over our dwarf French beans and dug a series of small neat holes.
The fun and games didn’t stop with stolen tennis balls: they also dug up several of our ball-sized Sturton onions and stashed most of them at the bottom of the hedge but one was taken over to the middle of the path by the shed at the other side of the garden.
A single broad bean pod was neatly nipped off and left in the middle of the now flattened leek bed.
This meadow at the bottom of Hostingley Lane, Middlestown, was mainly mud by the end of a long, wet winter.
I usually say that May is my favourite month but cold weather has delayed blossom, birds and butterflies to such an extent that this year June is feeling as fresh as May, even though we’re not just nine days from midsummer.
Last page in my previous sketchbook, a seawhite A6 hardback.
Bumblebee on salvia. First sketch in my new Hahneműhle sketchbook.
I’m trying to focus on natural history this summer and to try and keep my main sketchbook – an 8×8 inch square spiral bound Amelie watercolour paper Pink Pig – as a nature journal but I do need a pocket-sized sketchbook for when we’re dashing about on errands, so this morning I started an A6 landscape Hahneműhle Watercolour book which is a sturdily bound hardback, so it slips into my little art bag more easily than a spiral bound version would.
There isn’t a handy bench in the library garden, so I’m trying a new pocket-sized (if you’ve got an extra-large pocket, that is) folding foam mat. It’s never going to replace my folding chair for comfort but it will just about do for ten minutes sitting on the concrete paving slabs, resting my back against one of the raised beds.
Fox Scat
It was a plastic plant label from our Musselborough leeks left lying in the middle of the back lawn that made me suspect that we’d had a fox in the garden. What else would take such an interest in a plant label?
Today we’ve got conclusive evidence of its presence with a dark, curled fox scat that has appeared overnight in the corner of the lawn by the pond.
Over the past week or so we’ve noticed a few fresh scrapes – about teacup size – mainly in the veg beds but also in the wood chip path.
One morning two weeks ago, shortly after we’d laid down a thick layer of wood chip on the path by my little meadow area, we saw a magpie eating carrion. We found the remains of a brown rat – by then just the vertebra were left, picked clean by the magpie – and we now think that it’s likely that this had been cached by the fox.
After the unpredictable floppy rabbit’s ears in my last animation, I decided to try a pencil stage with this alarmed chicken.
This wasn’t drawn directly in pencil in my sketchbook as suggested here – although a flick-book would be fun to try – it’s the pencil tool in Clip Studio Paint. I shall now move on to the inking stage.
Oh dear, it looks as if the game is up for our plucky little tenon saw. If there’s a moral to this folksy fable from Yes it is, it’s never put your trust in an even-toed ungulate.
Perhaps spring was the reason for the strange behaviour of a group of five grey squirrels, which we saw capering about under the beeches and oaks at Newmillerdam last February. We watched as they bounded playfully and rolled about on their backs. They weren’t bickering or chasing each as you might have expected at that time of year and they weren’t foraging or going through a grooming routine. They reminded me of children let loose in a soft play ball pool.
We couldn’t guess what they’re doing and nor could a dog, which stood motionless a few yards away, transfixed by their antics. Could that be a reason for their forest-floor frolics: to confuse predators?
If it had been the dog rolling around, I could have understood that, as they like to gather scents as a kind of badge of honour, but would squirrels do that?
Another character from the Do You Say . . . ? ‘poem’ and all that I really know about ‘de Z cow’ is that she’s been known to ‘utter’ the occasional ‘grouse’. Could it be that she’s rather proud of her ancestry? If she really is ‘de Zeeland’ that’s not so far from Freisland, so she could be a pedigree Holstein Friesian.
More likely ‘DeZee’ is a randomly generated name-tag number and she probably usually gets called ‘Daisy’. I have a feeling that she won’t like that.
Summer is over, it's turning cool,
It's time to go back to the Woodland School . . .
Owl seems to be sleeping, but I've a hunch,
He's dreaming of Dormouse for his lunch.
Just one missing, and that's the Mole,
Whoa! Here he comes now, popping up from his hole!
A birthday card for Florence (she’s the one in the woolly hat).
British summertime starts today and we’re making a start exploring our local patch. Rather than sketch or take photographs I’m drawing my comic strip from remembered details.
To try some unfamiliar features of Clip Studio Paint, I’ve followed a tutorial for drawing a black and white comic strip, adding tone, patterns and a sunburst effect to the frames. I drew using a graphics pad and desktop iMac, so my lines are wobbling about all over the place but I should now be able to do a final version on my iPad Pro.
I found this adult common shrew on one of the veg beds and my number one suspect for dispatching it has to be Basil a neighbour’s Himalayan Persian cat who currently seems to have exclusive hunting rights for our back garden. Shrews are distasteful so my guess is that Basil caught this one amongst the tussocks of grass in the meadow at the edge of the wood and abandoned it on his regular route back home.
Basil was making a half-hearted attempt to pounce on a hen pheasant yesterday, so a shrew wouldn’t present any challenges for him.
Shrews must 90% of their body weight in a day, but there are plenty of woodlice, spiders, beetles, slugs and worms in the meadow and around the edges of our back garden.
The virtual ‘dry brush’ is useful for painting fur in Procreate on an iPad, and you don’t have to mistreat your prized sable watercolour brush to get the desired effect!
One of the Rodley Nature Reserve harvest mice, drawn from one of the photographs that I took there earlier this month. Hopefully this will make it into print next year in one of my Dalesman nature diaries.
