Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
10.05 a.m.: I’m counting about 85 Canada geese this morning but a passing dog walker tells me that for two days last week he thought that they’d deserted, there were none on the lake.
Two passers by comment on the single drake mandarin that is looking immaculate but sadly hasn’t yet attracted a mate. I’m here for the geese but if he swims over towards me I won’t be able to resist drawing him.
Meet my Great Aunt Eliza, one of the Blaco Hill Bell family from Mattersey, Nottinghamshire, my grandad Robert Bell’s elder sister.
She married William Henry Mitchell, a local postman, on Sunday 23 April 1899 at Sutton-cum-Lound Church.
She was 31 years old and he was 36
Witnesses were her eldest brother, George William Bell, aged 36, and Hannah Bell, who had flowing copperplate handwriting, which I rather envy, but who I’ve yet to add to my latest dip into family history.
In the register William Henry’s father George Mitchell is listed as a ‘Labourer’ and Eliza’s father, my Great Great Grandfather John Bell, then 57 years old, was working as a ‘Groom’.
Seven years earlier, as recorded in the 1891 census Eliza was working alongside William Henry at the house of Sarah E Hunt, a lady ‘living on own means’. William Henry, then 29, was the butler while Eliza, 23, was one of three female domestic servants at the house, number ’53, Sutton’.
Moving forward, by the time of the 1911 census the couple are living in Bardney, Lincoln. Henry is still working for the Post Office. They have a son George William aged 8, and born in Bardney.
I wonder if little George William added this decoration to the census form?
Or was it John Bell, also aged 8, his nephew who was staying with them and who had been born in Mexborough, Yorkshire.
The wedding photograph is stamped ‘Caleb C. Smith’.
Caleb’s photographic studio was at Norman Place, Lincoln.
11 am: All the geese leave the pond and a flock of about 50 graze on the grassy slope.
After two hours I’d almost finished this spread in my sketchbook but the last Canada goose was drawn back home from a photograph on the big screen of the iMac. I’m pleased that it looks equally as messy – let me rephrase that ‘equally as spontaneous’ – as the sketches done on location, sitting by the outlet of the Thornes Park Fish Pond, sometimes under an umbrella as fine rain fell.
When I was drawing them in action from a distance yesterday the female pheasants seemed fairly plain – light tan with streaks – but drawing in close up from a photograph I took yesterday with a telephoto lens there’s lots of complexity in the pattern of the plumage.
Five female pheasants alternated from pecking around the feeders for spilt sunflower hearts and crumbs from the fat balls to drinking at the pond (and one unwisely tried to run across the surface of the water!) then going down to the veg beds to rest for a while.
One pheasant, feeding on its own at that time, suddenly burst into a ‘mad half hour’ routine, as my mum used to describe similar behaviour in a cat; darting around and flouncing its feathers as if it was being threatened by some invisible enemy. This lasted less than a minute, not a full half hour.
Canada geese at Newmillerdam this morning.
We’ve never needed to sow marigold seeds over the past few years as they seed themselves in the flower border and around the veg beds.
I’ve drawn one of the seed heads from different angles seen in close up through my magnifier desk lamp.
Drawn with my TWSBI Eco-T pen filled with De Atramentis sepia brown ink.
Male fern, knapweed and teasel from behind the pond and the meadow area. As I slowly walked down the garden, five female pheasants kept an eye on me but didn’t walk off under the hedge until I started snipping off a small teasel head in our little ‘meadow’ area.
It’s good to see the cascade between the Middle and Lower Lakes at Nostell in action again after years when the overflow was diverted because of problems with the dam.
A goose wing and duck skeleton drawn from the DK Eyewitness Guides, Bird and Skeleton.
28th December 1972: ‘Why doesn’t he clear those books away instead of wasting his time drawing them?’ Well I’m in a rather an unsettled state at the moment and my other shelf unit is down in London.
If you read this picture carefully you might find hidden in it; clock from Horbury station, an unfinished model of a village built on a rock which I started before O-levels and a Victorian writing box which Grandma Bell gave us when they moved house.
Today I date every drawing in my sketchbook, because it’s such a help when I’m trying to track down a drawing later. Apart from references to Christmas and the new year I wasn’t so consistent at that time.
But I did mention in my diary that I ‘did a sketch in the bedroom’ on Thursday, 28 December 1972. Probably more details than you need here! Even so, you may be wondering what I dreamt about that night?
What do you mean ‘No!’?!
Well, I recorded it, so here it is anyway . . .
