Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
11.30 a.m.: In the woodland glade of the Menagerie at Nostell one nuthatch is chasing another. 
There’s an exchange of ‘tickety-tick’ type calls followed by a high-pitched repeated ‘Chuieee’ call.
What I take to be the male bird is posturing, following the female from tree-trunk to the bough of the neighbouring tree.
In subdued winter plumage, the yellow on the breast of a grey wagtail is a good match for the buff colour-wash on the buildings of the stable block that overlook the walled garden.
10.30 a.m.: Four carrion crows are foraging towards the lower end of the parkland below the Obelisk Lodge at Nostell. I’m guessing that there are two males and two females because two of them are bowing and cawing: rival males. This genteel approach to courtship doesn’t last long.
The rivalry erupts into a scrap as the males go for each other. At one stage, one of the males briefly ends up on his back, defending himself with legs and beak. Despite the fracas, the foursome stays together as we walk off up the slope.
Low sun, cool breeze picking up, 39°F, 4°C: Just when I feel I need a spot of colour our resident robin perches amongst the hawthorn stems. There’s a constant chirruping of sparrows in the hedge.
In addition to the evergreen holly and the ivy, there are green ferny leaves of cow parsley in the shady corner by the bench. Creeping buttercup straggles along the bottom of the hedge. 
Gold-tipped feathery moss grows luxuriantly on old timber and a house brick.
The lath of old timber visible on the left of my drawing is from Barbara’s dad’s car-port which we dismantled when he sold his last car. We built a fence from the recycled timbers when we cut back the original, rather overgrown, hawthorn hedge. The hawthorns have sprung back from the stumps and the small hollies we planted have thrived; one holly in the corner has a stem that is five inches in diameter. I can see only three red berries; there are never many as I keep it trimmed back.
Yesterday afternoon a fieldfare was fighting off blackbirds from the golden hornet crab apple; this afternoon a redwing is tucking into the pulpy brown frosted crab apples. It doesn’t appear to be as aggressive as the fieldfare; it seems more content to share.
There are thirty fieldfares on the south-facing slopes of grassland by the Obelisk Gate at Nostell. Redwings sometimes join them but today they’re amongst the trees nearer the house, probably attracted by holly and yew berries. Also on the parkland slopes, there are more mistle thrushes than we’d normally expect to see together: at least a dozen in total.
The open parkland is white with frost so parties of wood pigeons are gathering on the sheltered rings of leaf litter beneath oaks and beeches.
The resident family of mute swans and the local mallards have gathered on a small patch of open water on the sunny side of the iced-over Lower Lake.
The drumming of a great-spotted woodpecker on a tree in the Pleasure Grounds carries well in frosty air, as does the manic laughing ‘yaffle’ call of a green woodpecker in Top Wood.
The steady incline of the Long Causeway to Pinderfields Hospital takes you from the Victorian terraces of College Grove, alongside ivy-covered limes and sycamores at the edge of a playing field and some small shrubby gardens.
Black-headed gulls gather on the football pitch; blackbirds perch in the shrubs and house sparrows bicker in the hedges, gathering around a fatball feeder. There are plenty of berries on the ivy but they have yet to ripen.
We’re surprised how many birds are making use of this slender green corridor. A nuthatch flies down to the footpath in front of us next to a hawthorn hedge. Long-tailed tits and blue tits check out the overhanging branches. Collared doves are calling; chaffinches give a flash of white wing-bars as they fly up into the hedges.
There’s a hint of a sweet, nutty smell of autumn leaves as we walk through the woods at Nostell Priory. Redwings and a mistle thrush are feeding on the berries of the yew trees in the churchyard. Other mixed groups of redwings, long-tailed tits, blue tits, coal tits and a nuthatch are moving through hollies, beeches and a sycamores in the lakeside woodlands.
11.30 a.m., Lower Lake, Nostell Priory Park: As we walk into the wood behind the house at Nostell Priory, a mixed party of woodland birds is making its way through the trees ahead of us.
Each bird has its own approach to feeding, exploiting a different niche to the other birds in the party:
the blue tit hangs upside down to peck at an opened-up capsule hanging from the end of a slender twig on the beech tree. I suspect that it’s more interested in any invertebrates that might be sheltering in the crevices than it is in the beech nut itself
the great tit keeps flying down to ground level to probe amongst the leaf litter
a magpie follows the foraging group along. If there’s anything going on in its territory, a magpie will always want a piece of the action
Later we add another two birds to our woodland list for this morning: a dunnock flies out from beneath a conifer and, as another feeding party makes its way through trees and shrubs at the entrance to the Menagerie, a goldcrest flies in front of us to investigate the branches of a holly.
We puzzle over a bird call in the trees by the chalets in Top Wood. To me it sounds like something the size of a woodpecker, but it isn’t the mad laughing ‘yaffle’ call of the green woodpecker. We check it out with a search on the RSPB website; it’s a nuthatch. It’s got a loud call for such a small bird, one that can be difficult to spot as it makes its way along the trunk and branches of trees in the wood.
On the Lower Lake, amongst the wigeon, mallards, moorhens and tufted ducks, there are six female goosanders. We don’t see any males.
It’s been a good year for mute swans: the pair on the Lower Lake have three cygnets, the pair on the Middle Lake have four. Last year the Nostell swans weren’t so successful, with only two cygnets successfully reared.
Ragged wisps of grey cloud trail down from the edge of the moor.
Ravens make their way across the hillside. With primaries outspread like spiky fingers, one of them quarters the open ground then plunges down amongst the grasses and rushes.
Ravens mate for life and often stay together as a pair throughout the year so, as Bertel Bruun suggests in the Hamlyn bird guide: “two dots moving along a ridges are often Ravens.”
We get a chance to compare them when a small group of carrion crows fly up the valley and settle in a tree. They seem altogether more lightweight with a less powerful way of flying. Barbara’s instant reaction when the raven appeared over the ridge was that it was a buzzard (although she’s still not convinced that we really did see a pair of ravens, and not a pair of crows!).
Rooks and jackdaws which are congregating on the rough pasture below Nethergill Farm along with a flock of starlings, are generally more sociable than either carrion crows or ravens. I’d describe crows as cawing more raucously and harshly than rooks.
The pair of ravens fly over the valley and we briefly hear them vocalizing. To us it sounds like a rather nasal grunt but Bruun characterizes the call as a deep, resonant ‘pruuk’. They also have a ‘krra-krra-krra’ alarm call and, in the spring, a range of clucking noises.
We need to see ravens more often to get familiar with the character of the bird.
Kestrels are doing well in this stretch of Langstrothdale. We’ve seen them almost every time that we’ve been out. This morning two fly down the slope, the first with some scrap in its talons. The second dives down on it as they fly over the stream but the first retains its prize and settles in a tree.
On our way to Semerwater, as the road from Langstrothdale starts to drop from Green Side moor down Sleddale towards Hawes, we drive very gently through a small herd of hill cattle, a tough-looking bunch, who have gathered around some piles of rock salt at the road side. It’s the equivalent of the natural salt-licks which attract animals and birds in places like the African savannah and the Amazon rainforest.
Four whooper swans are relaxing on the narrow beach at the top end of Semerwater. They’re the first that I’ve seen, other than those at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust reserve at Martinmere, in over twenty-five years. 
They appear to be the same size as our resident mute swan but, even at a distance, I can see that triangle of brilliant yellow on their bins. I also get the impression that they have a straighter neck than the mute, with its gracefully curved ‘swan neck’, giving them a somewhat goose-like appearance.
We’re first made aware of the wigeons as we approach the lake by their whistling calls. I count thirty-eight but they’re outnumbered about ten times over by mallards. A flock of Canada geese leave the grassy eastern shore as we approach and launch themselves onto the lake in a leisurely fashion.
There’s a small flock of lapwings, perhaps twenty or thirty, by the inlet at the quiet western corner of the lake.
Swaledales have been described as ‘the hardiest of all British sheep apart from the Herdwick’.
We spot one roe deer running through the trees on the northeast shore of the lake and another, again amongst the trees, on the far side of Marsett Beck.
As we cross another beck, Cragdale Water, via an elevated footbridge I disturb a grey partridge which flies off over a marshy field. At that moment we hear an unfamiliar piping call and a 
kingfisher zooms across just yards in front of me, just below my eye-level, giving us a flash of its brilliant color in the bright afternoon sunlight.
A buzzard drifts over as we climb up towards the hamlet of Stalling Busk then a flock of 23 fieldfares flies up from a group of bushes on the hillside but the highlight of the afternoon is a fly past by a merlin. It’s a neat-looking grey and black male, zooming down the slope above the village at wall top level, with a nimbler style of stealthy flight than the larger sparrow hawk. 
It sweeps up into a tree but we can’t tell whether it settles there or not. Five or six crows appear a few moments later; they’re not calling but I can’t help thinking that they’ve been disturbed by the merlin.
Driving back over the moor with the sun low over Ingleborough, we see two short-eared owls flying low and briefly swooping at each other. We pull into the viewpoint lay-by and, resisting the urge to get out of the car to retrieve our binoculars from the boot, we use the car as a hide. This works well as one of the owls flies to within twenty yards of us as it crosses the road to join a third short-eared. Every hundred yards or so one will dip down into the moorland vegetation but we don’t see them emerge clutching any prey.
Nethergill Farm, Langstrothdale, 9.10 a.m.: The trees on the far side of Oughtershaw Beck have faded away as the morning mist fills the valley. I was keen to study clouds during our stay here, now we’re in one.
Barbara counts thirty-eight starlings which have cascaded out of the mist and settled along the power line; there are at least twice as many below – so a flock of more than a hundred in total – but as they are performing a Mexican wave of short leap-frogging flights to get to the leading edge of their feeding party on the rushy sheep-nibbled turf, it’s impossible to count them.
Attracted to the shrubs and the bird feeders in front of the farmhouse are a couple of blue tits, a robin and a blackbird. Five carrion crows perch on the cables of the power line pole nearby.
10.40 a.m.: The mist has closed in as we walk up Langstrothdale along the track to Swarthgill Farm, so we can’t see beyond the power lines a couple of hundred yards away down the slope. Droplets sparkle on the seed heads of grasses and on hammock-webs, slung a few inches from the ground amongst the stiff leaves of sedges.
A pair of wrens are checking out the crevices in the lichen-splashed drystone wall, pausing between sorties to meet up again, bobbing and perking up their tails as they face each other, perching on adjacent capstones.
A meadow pipit emerges from the mist in bouncing flight, twenty feet above the moor, calling as it goes: “Pi-pit! Pi-pit! Pi-pit!”
We hear but don’t see a red grouse calling “G-bak! G-Bak! G-bak!” from somewhere down near the beck.
More startling is the cock pheasant that explodes with indignant grockling in wall-top height flight as we reach the tree-lined drive to Swarthgill. Its rhythm is like a bicycle with badly damaged spokes careering along, alarmingly out of control as it passes us by:
“GerrROK! GerrROK! Gerr ROK!”
A small group of reed bunting fly to the tops of the small trees in the shrubbery around the garden of the farmhouse. There’s a male in winter plumage – brown cap, black bib – with at least two brown streaky companions: juveniles or females.
The reed bunting feeding technique this morning is to gently hop up a twig, carefully inspecting both sides of it and picking off food items (probably insects, spiders and any other invertebrate that they come across).
On this still, humid morning, a little cloud of mosquito-sized insects, probably winter gnats, hovers above us just after we’ve passed the shelter belt of trees growing alongside one of the gills (streams in a sometimes deep channel on the hillside) which give Nethergill its name: the farm sits between two gills.
2.30 p.m.: We get a good view of a dipper as it sits for a few minutes on the end of a mossy rock in Oughtershaw beck. It’s motionless except for its nictitating membrane: an inner eyelid, which keeps flashing white as it moves across the eye. To me this ‘third eyelid’ appears to pass over the eye from bottom to top but I believe it actually crosses from back to front. Diving birds use their transparent nictitating membrane underwater. The dipper’s eyelid appears to be white but I suspect that it is transparent or semi-transparent from the point of view of the dipper.
I didn’t catch the bird in my photograph of the beck (above), but tried to memorise the shapes and colours by watching it with binoculars for as long as possible and drawing it from memory later (left).
There are no grey wagtails or sandpipers, which we frequently saw along the beck during our visit here in June.
3 p.m.: A red-headed goosander (a female or a first year bird) waddles up through the rippling shallows of the wide, rocky stretch of the beck where the Nethergill sheep find their way across.
It dives as it continues into deeper water above the riffles then on a narrower, deeper bend, it dives midstream, emerging by the steep, undercut bank on the outside bank of the meander.
There’s a lot of splashing – as if it’s bathing – but it wouldn’t be doing that under an overhanging bank. Is it driving small fish under?
It thoroughly investigates under the bank, swimming around right under the overhang. The only prey that I briefly catch a glimpse of in its bill is broad and brownish, perhaps a bullhead.
At the top end of this stretch, where the beck broadens out a little, it goes through a bathing routine, this time in the middle of the stream.