Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
This marginal illustration for one of my Dalesman diaries isn’t meant to be a trail map but you couldn’t go far wrong in finding your way to Danes Dyke Nature Reserve than starting at the harbour and keeping the sea on your right. Look forward to walking it again some time. And, when they come out of lockdown, there’s always the option of catching the Land Train at Sewerby Hall to get back to the harbour in time for fish and chips.
Another page from my Skokholm Island sketchbook, drawn on Thursday, 10th April, 1980, watching razorbills, wheatear, and grey seals. My drawing of the rocks didn’t get finished because:
“The puffins were enjoying the evening sun, standing in pairs outside their burrows, when I came back from a tea-break so I decided to leave them in peace”
Probably a first even for me, blaming the puffins for an unfinished sketch!
With an onshore wind blowing, it seemed as if the high tide lasted all day. Turnstones seemed resigned to sitting it out on the promenade.
Barbara spotted the blue and orange of a kingfisher on a parapet below the Spa but it flew down before I saw it, so we walked down a slipway for a better view. In the dull afternoon light, the streak of electric blue looked incongruous amongst the duller dunlins and turnstones, like a wisp of plastic litter.
As it perched on a seaweed-covered rock, it got caught in the overspray when a wave came in, forcing the waders to move.
This weekend’s homework in the University of Southampton’s ‘Exploring Our Ocean’ FutureLearn course. Some of the figures we had to work out for ourselves, so please let me know if I’ve gone wrong with them. For instance, the figure that I found on the internet for tons of rubbish going to landfill was 1.3 billion tons per year.
Comic strip designed on my desktop in Clip Studio Paint and drawn with an Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro in Procreate.
I’ve got to thank another FutureLearn course, the University of Dundee’s ‘Making and Understanding Web Comics’ for a few useful tips that I’ve used here: I’ve hand-lettered the strip but based on free fonts from the Blambot Comic Fonts and Lettering website. I set up the captions using two fonts from the site: Anime Ace 2.0 BB Italic and Noteworthy then used this as a guide, tracing the letters freehand, using the same pen tool in Procreate that I used for the drawings.
University of Southampton’s ‘Exploring Our Ocean‘ FutureLearn course.
The sea is fed by the rivers which run into it. These rivers by gradually wearing away all kinds of soft rocks which contain salt and limestone, carry the salt to the sea. Owing to the action of the sun, the sea is continually evaporating. The sea becomes more and more salty by this process of gradual evaporation by the sun and the continual deposits of salt from rivers
Card no.22 in the ‘What do You Know?’ series of tea cards published by Lyons, 1957.
I remembered the image on the tea card when I got to the section on salinity in the University of Southampton’s FutureLearn course Exploring Our Oceans.
University of Southampton’s FutureLearn course Exploring Our Oceans
We had a couple of nights at the Raven Hall Hotel, Ravenscar, earlier this month. This is the view through the fanlight window of our third floor room, room 303, which is the one up in the pediment of the Georgian facade, looking out across Robin Hood’s Bay.
4 p.m., Wednesday, 4th October: From the ramparts of the cliff-top gardens of the hotel, we had some difficulty spotting the seals below because, from six hundred feet above the grey sea, it was the similar-looking bobbing knots of seaweed and diving sea-birds that caught our eyes.
But we did see one grey seal which appeared to be relaxing, floating on its back, while another seal bobbed up its head nearby . . . or was that another knot of seaweed?
At the time that it was built, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Raven Hall overlooked a scene of industry; we looked down over the hotel’s golf course to the preserved ruins of an Alum Works that stood on the cliff top.
5 p.m., Wednesday, 4th October: The promontory of Bay Ness, beyond Robin Hood’s Bay village, vanished as the mist rolled down the slope and out across the headland.
Next day, in complete contrast, we sat out in the sun at Swell’s Café in Robin Hood’s Bay village. As I drew the cliffs of Ness Point, the tide came in surprisingly quickly, covering the black rocks that I’d been drawing before I could add a watercolour wash. Six or seven holidaymakers and dog-walkers were caught out and had to pick their way over the sea defence boulders to get back to the village from the cut-off bay.
The sides of the Hackness Valley, which I drew from the Everley Country House Café, are topped with conifer plantations, with broadleaved hedgerows and sheep pasture on the slopes below. The flat valley floor is given over the arable farming.
The land use corresponds to the underlying rock: the conifers are planted on poor soils on the steep upper slopes of Jurassic gritstone while the gentler lower slopes and the flat valley floor have been cut into the underlying Oxford Clay.
Raven Hall Country House Hotel
Swell Café Bar, Gift Shop, Robin Hood’s Bay
Portobello, ‘Edinburgh’s Seaside’, looks rather dour and solid as you drive through on the Musselburgh Road, but walk along the two mile promenade and there are views across the Firth of Forth and along the East Lothian coast. In my watercolour the conical hill just left of centre is North Berwick Law with Traprain Law inland on the far right.
I drew this while waiting for the breakfast special, toasted banana bread with whipped mascarpone and berries, at The Beach House: the perfect place to write our postcards. This postcard, from a watercolour by one of the customers, captures the relaxed atmosphere of the cafe and the light reflected from the sea.
Link: The Beach House Cafe
I draw Craigleith, the bird island three quarters of a mile to the north of North Berwick from the rocky promontory at the end of the harbour. I’m waiting for the catamaran to return from its lunchtime trip around the Bass Rock because on this morning’s trip I dropped my lens cap. Luckily when the boat returns, the crew have spotted it; they say that I’ll find it listed on eBay!
In the Scottish Seabird Centre you can watch the seabirds by operating remote control webcams overlooking colonies on Craigleith, Fidra, the Bass Rock and the Isle of May.
I can’t see many fish in the large salt water aquarium in the Centre, not until it’s feeding time. Three plaice rise up from what looked like a vacant patch of sand; they’d been there in front of me for the last ten minutes and I’d never spotted them.
Like the freshwater stickleback, the male corkwing wrasse builds a nest, persuades the female to lay her eggs in it and then guards and tends the eggs until they hatch. In my sketch I’ve missed two key features of this wrasse: a dark patch behind the eye and a black spot on the tail.
The long-spined stickleback or scorpion fish is well-camouflaged as it rests amongst rocks and seaweeds.
Link: Scottish Seabird Centre webcams
I go for the seat at the edge of the boat on our seabird cruise around the Bass Rock because I want to try out my new telephoto lens but as the catamaran picks up speed on the way there I have to hastily put my non-waterproof Olympus OM-D E-M10II under my coat and revert to the Olympus Tough, but all the sea birds were photographed with the Olympus, with its 40-150mm zoom lens.
Trying to catch gannets in flight was tricky with the limited field of view that you get with a telephoto especially as the boat was bobbing up and down but by cropping in to some of the photographs I’ve been able to get a few close ups. The built in five-way image stabilisation has worked well, even in these challenging conditions.
Quarter of a million seabirds nest at Bempton Cliffs RSPB reserve. Each species has a preference for a particular niche on the cliff.
The ledges are bedding planes in the chalk. Vertical joints break the cliff face up into blocky units. In my photograph (above) the block that the herring gull is nesting on looks as if it’s well on its way to becoming detached from the cliff face.
There’s an eye-wateringly stiff breeze this morning so this is a challenging place to try out my new telephoto lens. Although I’ve mounted the camera on a monopod/walking pole it’s still getting buffeted around so I leave the image stabilisation switched on.
Puffins are the stars of the show at the reserve but one of the wardens is having difficulty pointing them out as they keep flying off.
I get a distant view of a pair checking out a crevice at the top of the cliff. At Bempton puffins nest in crevices rather than in rabbit burrows.
Also near the top of the cliff, this razorbill’s mate looks as if it too is considering nesting in a crevice but you’re more likely to see them nesting on the smaller upper ledges.
In an adaptation to nesting on cliff ledges, the razorbill’s egg is tapered at one end so that, if knocked, it will roll in a tight circle. The chicks are born with an innate fear of heights, so they don’t stray too near the edge.
At Bempton the guillemots tend lower down the cliff, sometimes getting together in nesting colonies on the larger ledges.
Kittiwakes can make use of the smallest ledges, building up a nest with seaweed and grass.
I just miss the perfect photo opportunity: six or seven gannets have landed on the cliff top to gather beak-fulls of grass; they’re just yards away from a group of birdwatchers but by the time I’ve set up my camera they’ve all flown off again.
Link: RSPB Bempton Cliffs reserve.
