Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
As you can see, I’m really missing my occasional trips to London. Just before lockdown we’d been planning a Thames-side walk from Bushey Park to Greenwich Park, meeting up with friends at various stages, including Alistair, who celebrated his birthday at the weekend, hence this card.
My latest homemade birthday card is for my great nephew Zach. It celebrates the home movies that my brother, sister and I made in the days of Standard 8 cine. As you can see, Bill took the action roles, often at risk to life and limb, with my sister guest starring as the ‘Hostile Alien’, ‘The Thing’ and, no doubt hoping to break out of being typecast, a World Security agent scanning the skies for invaders from outer space.
Our friends were regularly in the cast, launching flying machines and hatching dastardly plots for world domination. Mostly we filmed in our garden; the rhubarb patch made a suitably lush jungle but for a more dramatic setting we headed for the local quarry.
But we did consider health and safety. I remember us discussing the possibility that our flying machine might overshoot and end up crashing down onto the railway line. In the event it plummeted vertically downwards when we launched it from the top of Horbury Quarry although I stood well back when filming, just in case.
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.
We’ve been saddened to hear of the untimely death of a member of Wakefield Naturalists’ Society, Karen Nicklin, who also – as in my cartoon – volunteered at the RSPB St Aidan’s reserve.
“As a really keen walker and hiker, Karen spent time planning and undertaking walks that combined nature and the landscape and I remember well the talk she gave recently at our members’ evening when she wowed us with views of the spectacular scenery and wild flowers from a recent trek in the Austrian Alps.”
John Gardner, President, Wakefield Naturalists’ Society, wakefieldnaturalists.org
It’s just three weeks ago that we last saw her on that pre-‘Rule of Six’ Naturalists’ field trip to St Aidan’s. As she served me a socially-distanced shade-grown coffee (shade-grown saves trees) afterwards, I asked her what the news was from the Loch Garten ospreys. She replied that, because of Covid, she’d missed out on volunteering there for the first time since 2004. She told me that she hadn’t even managed to add an osprey on her year list. She was obviously missing them, and we’ll miss her.
At the request of my sister, a character from the poem in yesterday’s post. As you might remember, Castro Rabbit appears in the final verse and, as far as I can understand it, he operates in ‘the meadow deep in the world squirrels’, so he’s got to be a bit of a tough cookie, surrounded by all those bright-eyed and bushy-tailed rodents.
I’m convinced that he has some connection with a scam involving ‘rattlebox-free shoes’, which gets a cryptic mention in verse 3.
Verse 1 sounds like the kind of hard-baked pulp-fiction dialogue he’d use, with more than a hint of a threat in it:
“Yeah, I know, but that is on the list,
Castro Rabbit, ‘Do you say . . .’, verse 1.
down there in the bulkhead . . .
and it’s not that ‘cauliflower’.”
But I think the line that he’s delivering here is: “Roger I’ll flax.”
A ‘flax’ must be the Squirrel Meadow equivalent of a fax, and as we’re veering towards Toon characters, Roger must be Roger Rabbit.
I’m looking forward to learning more about de Zee Cow, the one known for uttering the occasional grouse in verse 3.
The Alicante is supposed to be flamenco dancing. It’s difficult to get a tomato to look convincingly as if its flamenco dancing. I decided to limit the props for each variety to footwear. Obviously Tigerella has got those tiger feet.
The greenhouse looks like a jungle that has been lashed by tropical storm but we’ve never had a better year for tomatoes. As I was drawing the bowl of our beef and small plum tomatoes, I tried to draw each as an individual character. The calyx – the little crown of bracts – on each tomato was rather like a top-knot, which got me thinking about making them into cartoon characters.
Another birthday card, this one inspired by real-life events (no, not that event, Orville doesn’t really work for Boris).
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).
“Last week I was in Ilkley,” the waller tells me, “and had some lovely sandstone, but I’m making the best of this.”
The irregular fragments of limestone in the Greenfield Valley, Upper Wharfedale, don’t stack up as neat layers but there’s plenty of material available. Another waller is repairing a section and he simply digs up a piece he needs from the turf alongside the wall.
The hogget hole allows sheep to pass through. This one can be blocked by the slab lying beside the wall on the roadside verge. A hogget is a young sheep.
It’s been another exciting day down at the chicken coop.