Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Thanks to a sharp-eyed birdwatcher we met at RSPB St Aidan’s this morning we’re on to species number 74 on our year list: a common scoter, a black drake, not much bigger than the black-headed gull dotted around it on the lagoon.
Plenty of noise from the black-headed gullery in the centre of the reserve.
We almost gave up on this morning’s walk at RSPB Fairburn Ings as the rain seemed to be setting in but as it was so quiet there we were able to get good views of two roe deer, grazing just 50 yards from the Roy Taylor trail. This was the best of my iPhone shots, on the others they were heads down, white rumps towards us.
The reeds festooning the trees are an indication of flood levels but this morning most of the paths had dried out.
Confession time: the Parliament of Crows is a collage of four photographs. There were more crows than shown here but I couldn’t get them all to pose together for their group photograph.
In the formal pond at Harlow Carr a carrion crow picks a newt from amongst water plants.
Hellebores on the Winter Walk and in the woodland.
A wood pigeon perches on the shed roof then swoops down to the lawn to chase off another pigeon that has just landed, chasing it around beneath the bird feeders with a menacing waddle punctuated with short jumps. The second pigeon soon realises that it isn’t going to get any peace and flies off.
I like drawing pigeons and that’s just as well because when they fly up from the wood the flock fills our field of vision as they wheel around, well over a hundred of them, probably 200. But we are going to have to net any seedling we plant in the veg beds.
From the trail cam footage, it looks as if we’ve got a pair of wrens roosting. Last year when there was snow on the ground we estimated somewhere between 7 and 11 wrens roosting, all in the nestbox on the left. The nestboxes don’t connect on the inside.
As they settled down there was a lot of flitting between all three holes and the pair seemed particularly interested in the middle hole but they eventually settled on the hole on the left to roost.
The last we see of the wrens on the trail cam is at 7.33 am when one of the wrens appears in the left hand hole and appears to be preparing to leave.
The blue tit arrives an hour later and makes a careful inspection of the first two nest holes, but doesn’t go in.
The roosting wrens are back, but how many of them are now crowding into the nestbox on the patio each evening? I’ve set up the trail cam, precariously mounted on a gorilla pod attached to Barbara’s dad’s cultivator which is fixed in the patio parasol stand, which itself it standing on the patio table.
Hope it works. At least my camera hasn’t put them off because as I write this just after sunset, Barbara tells me the wrens have already started to appear.
Drawn on my iPad in Clip Studio Paint, colour by the Clip Studio ‘colorize’ option. Not as camouflaged as the actual camera, but the cultivator does have orange prongs.
A favourite spot for Horbury’s feral pigeons to gather is the Co-op roof.
I drew these in my pocket-sized sketchbook and rearranged them in Photoshop before adding the tones in Fresco on my iPad Pro, using an Apple Pencil.
A guest diary from Barbara from three weeks ago:
Tuesday 23rd November 2021
A buzzard chased by a crow swoops between the houses across the road, it appeared to have something long in its talons, Richard said a snake, I doubt it but can’t imagine what it could be
Barbara Bell
We looked in the road to see if it had dropped anything. We now suspect that this must have been an escaped bird of prey with jesses still attached. We thought how unusual it would be to see a buzzard flying so low, even when mobbed by crows, so perhaps it was some other species, such as a harris hawk.
Later that morning we walked around St Aidan’s RSPB reserve in the Aire Valley:
After a welcome cuppa at Rivers Meet, Methley, we stride out back over the river bridge, lovely big blue sky and feeling quite warm in the sun.
We pause to watch a Jay at the side of the path. It seems to have found a cache of nuts and is unearthing them. We watch it from a short distance: the colours of the blue on its wing and the black moustache show up really well in the clear light. Meanwhile a perky robin forages around behind.
Barbara Bell
The jay removed six or more peanuts from each of several holes dotted around the turf within a few yards of each other. Had the jay previously cached them, or had it spotted a squirrel burying them?
We weren’t far from the village of Methley, so perhaps these had come from a garden feeder. In which case I think that it would more likely be a bird that cached them because the river would present too much of an obstacle to a squirrel and we were perhaps 200 yards along the path from the bridge.
4.10 pm: A kestrel hover over the meadow and dives as if it’s about to make a kill but abandons the dive at tree-top height and flies off over the neighbour’s garden.
The buzzard was doing its rounds over back gardens and the meadow at breakfast-time this morning and it’s back again as the light fades, just thirty feet above me, as I sit at my desk by the skylight studio window.
I decided that I needed a little sequence of sketches of the pheasants fighting, this is them squaring up to each other.
They circled, trying to outflank each other then they’d both leap up, sometimes striking out with their feet like a pair of heraldic beasts, then coming back low to the ground.