Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Riverside hide, Nethergill Farm, Langstrothdale, 3.45p.m.; A common sandpiper preens itself on a rock on the far bank of the beck then it sets off probing along the edge of the river.
It’s joined by a second bird, which trots off up the grassy bank while the first bird continues downstream.
A pied wagtail perches on rocks in the beck, flitting out to take invertebrates from amongst the pebbles.
11.30 a.m.; The female blackbird has caught another smooth newt and is dealing with it in a corner of the lawn.
The orange on the belly of the newt shows that it’s a male.
Having killed the newt she hops to the middle of the lawn in front of the pond then flies directly to the hedge where she’s nesting amongst the elder, climbing rose, honeysuckle and ivy.
4.50 p.m.; it perches on the debris I’ve raked towards the edge of the pond. Watches for a minute or so then flits to the centre of the pond and catches a dragonfly larva. It takes this into the flower border to deal with, then flies over to the hedge then perches on the top of a gate-post next door before taking to it’s nest in the hedge, approaching from our neighbour’s side, rather than taking its usual route direct from the pond.
Over the past couple of days we’ve seen a female blackbird resting in the middle of the blanket of duckweed that covers most of our pond. She’s not bathing or struggling to get out. This evening I realise what she’s up to.
She grabs a newt from just below the water surface in front of her and immediately flies to an open grassy patch at the edge of the pond to peck at it. I don’t see whether she eats it there and then or whether she takes it off to feed to her young.
I’ve seen her stalking along the edge of the pond on the look out, I now realise, for any unwary newt that might surface. Our resident newts are smooth newts. Unlike the great-crested newts they don’t have special protection under the Wildlife and Countryside Act but would this female blackbird care if they did? I think not.
I’ve seen her once before with a successful catch which she took to the raised bed behind the pond. I could see her prey was a long and flexible creature but at the time I couldn’t positively identify it.
This female blackbird is at the top of a pond food chain, at the apex of a food pyramid, but she’s not the top predator around here; she runs the risk of being incorporated into the food chain of one of the local sparrowhawks or domestic cats. 
The newts are predators in their own right; I’ve watched them eating newly emerged frog tadpoles. The tadpoles, at this early stage of their lives, are eating the algae that grows on the clump of frogspawn.
I find it amazing that you can start with sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and in a few links along the food chain end up with a blackbird.
Although my aim is to build a little eco-system in the back garden, I do think that I ought to tweak the chances of survival for the newts by clearing some of the duckweed so that the blackbird can’t sit in wait at the centre of the pond.
Two days later, on Saturday, Barbara spotted the blackbird catching a newts again, five in total. I spent five minutes raking the duckweed to the edges of the pond which should make it impossible for the blackbird to perch in the middle of the pond and give some additional cover to the newts when she is stalking around the margins.
6.05 p.m.; There’s a limping wood pigeon that has been a regular at the bird feeders for a month or more, so much so that it has trampled a ring of beaten earth around the foxglove beneath the feeding pole. However, as soon as I sit down at the dining table to draw, it turns its back on me then flies off to the wood.
In the front garden, the rowan is at its best in fresh leaf and blossom. The flowers have a sweetish musky scent and attract a variety of species of flies. Because of all that happened this winter, I didn’t get around to pruning the new growth of straight upper branches but I’d like to do that because otherwise it will be on its way to towering over the house. I’d like to keep it to the height that I can reach with my telescopic handled pruner, about ten feet or so.
I’ll check with my arboriculturist friend Roger that pruning during the spring won’t cause the sap to run, leaving a sticky residue that might result in fungal damage.
We glimpse a large brownish bird swooping up into the branches at the edge of a small wood in the Smithy Brook valley. It can’t be a grey partridge as they wouldn’t perch so high in a tree and it wasn’t small enough to be a mistle thrush.
As we walk on there’s a commotion; a buzzard is circling, gaining height and it’s in dispute with two much smaller birds of prey. They both look like sparrowhawks. 
One flies off down the valley the other returns to the wood while the buzzard heads off up the valley, presumably happy that it has shown them who is boss.
Grey wagtails are flitting about collecting insect food below the Figure of Three locks where an overflow channel stirs up the still waters of the canal.
The bank behind is steep and covered with brambles and there are no midstream rocks to perch on so their technique involves at lot of hovering over the water surface.
Grey wagtails nest in rock crevices so the centuries old stonework offers plenty of possibilities for nest sites.
Horbury Bridge, May Day Bank Holiday Monday, 9.30 a.m.; a heron gets up from the edge of the old weir and flies downstream. The sober grey livery, black wing-tips and ‘wing light’ white patches on the leading edge of the wings give it the appearance of an RAF transport plane. The ‘black goggles’ eye-stripe makes it look determined. Will it fly over the bridge or under the arch?
It veers towards the arch on the Horbury side and disappears beneath. Then we realise why; a cormorant appears and flies off up the river. The pool below the weir is evidently private fishing.
Looking down on the action from such close quarters, we get a better view of a cormorant than any we had in Scarborough last week.
Heron and cormorant were birds from another world in my school days; spectacular images in the Observer’s Book of Birds in romantic, rugged settings.
12 noon, Peasholm Park, Scarborough; We can hear the tapping and see the odd bit of bark dropping down but at first all we can see in the tree canopy is a wood pigeon preening in the branches above. After a minute or so we see a female great spotted woodpecker working her way up the multiple trunks of the adjacent tree.
Once again my monocular comes in handy because through it we can see that in the morning sun the red of her vent shows up well as she hangs almost upside down, pecking on the overhanging trunk. There is no red on the back of her head, which is how we can tell that she’s a female.
It was a calm morning but there must have been quite a swell because the waves at North Bay were crashing against the sea wall.
Despite having spent a day in Scarborough, this terrier looked distinctly hangdog as she commuted to Malton on the Scarborough/York/Liverpool coast to coast train.
Marine Drive, Scarborough, 11.50 a.m.; Thirty kittiwakes set off towards the sea from the Castle cliff, then we see what set them up; a peregrine flies along at mid-ledge level then arcs out above our heads, loops over the sea and returns to the cliff. I’m ready to watch it hunt but it soon settles on a commanding knoll on the cliff-face, which could be a potential nest-site.
Through the little monocular that I keep in my art bag, I can see that it’s a slate grey male. It sits there, facing the cliff with its back to us, calling for ten minutes; a plaintive mewing. Is it hoping to attract a mate or complaining that the restless kittiwakes are hard to surprise this morning?
A kittiwake chases a fulmar, constantly gaining height then swooping on it. Resembling a miniature albatross, the fulmar might win the prizes when it comes to effortless
gliding but the kittiwake is more aerobatic.
A turnstone is doing just what its name suggests; turning over pebbles as the tide ebbs in the harbour. I’ve drawn it as all brown here but there are white patches on its head.
Turnstones peck for scraps around your feet on the quayside, behaviour that seems surprising for a wader.
Chiff-chaffs are singing in the wooded valley in Peasholm Park. The pagoda island is awash with pale yellow primroses.
11.50 a.m.; a juvenile herring gull has a yellow plastic ring no. 5B6B on its left leg and on its right a metal BTO ring. It’s one of a group of juvenile gulls attracted to food offered by visitors to the park. In the town, gulls swooping to pinch sandwiches and chips from tourists are seen as a nuisance by some locals.
I draw the Mexican style entrance to MAP (Military Adventure Park) from our table at the Peaches and Cream cafe, North Bay.
Just back from Africa, the first house martin appeared today,
swooping up to the apex of the gable end of a house across the road. We’re setting off for our first little break since my mum passed away, heading off for a couple of nights in Scarborough.
There are drifts of wood anemones in the woods as the train approach Malton and, along the woodland edge, the fresh green of dogs mercury.
A hare lollops across an open field in the Vale of Pickering.
Sandy hillocks on the approach to Scarborough are yellow with gorse.
Haze obscures the horizon so this trawler looms just beyond the entrance to the harbour as if its free of the laws of perspective, like a boat on a diorama.
Its cool down by the Spa but on the south-facing slope below the castle, where I draw alexanders, we’re bathed in Mediterranean heat.