Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
While pruning the Golden Hornet crab apple I became aware that someone was watching me. Directly overhead a buzzard was hanging in the air, about 100 feet above me.
At the top of the stepladder in the crown of the tree, I had a wood pigeon’s eye-view of our newly-built raised beds.
Soon after I finish picking up the rowan twigs I’d been pruning, a squirrel appears, carrying two peanut shells. It leaves one near the top corner of the bed and selects a spot near a plant in near the centre to bury the other.
Refilling the hole and ‘making good’ – to use a builder’s expression is a thorough process.
It picks up the peanut it left earlier and buries it with equal care near the beech hedge.
The song thrush is back again for another feed on the berries before they finally drop from the sumac.
These were taken on my iPhone.
Back in the summer we saw a large brown rat scuttling across our patio in daylight and decided to take a break from feeding the birds. Three months later this didn’t seem to have made any difference as we’d still occasionally one passing through so we’ve started filling the feeders again.
When I’m doing that I inevitably spill a few sunflower hearts, assuming that the birds will soon spot them.
This afternoon though it was a medium-sized rat climbing one of the garden chairs to search around for spilt sunflower hearts on our patio table.
I’ll be more careful next time I fill the feeders but we will keep on feeding the birds. The local rat population is something that we will have to live with. All our neighbours report the same problem.
I’m continuing to trim the hawthorn, holly and hazel in the hedge at the end of the garden. Neglected a bit in recent years parts are now towering out of my reach, so I’m steadily bringing it down to a reasonable size.
11.15 a.m., drizzly and overcast: A male sparrowhawk swoops close to the bird feeders and lands on the hedge. Pheasant wouldn’t normally be on the menu for him but that doesn’t stop him looking down on two hen pheasants that have been foraging beneath the feeders.
Just in case he’s considering them as his brunch, they extend their necks and puff out their feathers to appear two to three times their regular neck size.
They strut and hop, half spreading their wings and fanning tail feathers, a hip-hop swagger that reminds me of prairie-chickens lekking.
As I trim the dripping hawthorn and holly, the misty droplets in the morning air gradually build into soft rain. A robin hops around me as I work.
The sparrow terrace nestbox gets its first ever clear-out. I’m surprised that the far compartment of the three-hole box is almost empty as this was always the one favoured by sparrow, blue tit and bumble bees. The middle box contains the remains of a nest although I don’t remember it ever having been used.
Clearing it out, I evict a tiny moth, several small green caterpillars and, below the surface layer of moss, hundreds of sticky, silky cocoons, perhaps those of bee moths.
The berries on next door’s stagshorn sumac have been attracting a pair of blackbirds. This afternoon, a song thrush came to feed on a cluster of berries in the upper branches.
4.15 p.m.: A buzzard flies up from the ash at the edge of the wood. In the 1980s we never saw buzzards here and the ash was a regular lookout post of a kestrel, a bird of prey we rarely see in recent years.
Swiss chard at Harlow Carr, drawn with my non-dominant left hand.
Our first early Maris Bards, growing in a corner of the patio next to the water butt.
I like to leave overgrown corners for wildlife but it’s time to cut back the nettles, hogweed, blackberry and sorrel behind the pond before they take over.
Orange stipples of rust fungus, Puccinia urticata, have caused a swelling on a stem of stinging nettle. This fungus has an alternate generation which grows on sedges, which doesn’t result in swellings. This nettle was growing next to a pendulous sedge, Carex pendula, behind the pond.
When I started my Wild Yorkshire blog, harlequin ladybirds had yet to be recorded in Britain. The first records were in 2004 but now they’re our commonest ladybird.
Dozens of them spend the winter gathered snuggly in the narrow gap between our back bedroom window and its frame. There’s a great variety in their markings. A harlequin might have red spots on black or black spots on red. They can vary from having zero to as many as 21 spots.
I’m going for flea beetle, possibly Altica lythri, as the identity of the small beetle I found on a sorrel leaf.
The UK Beetles website describes it as a common beetle of parks, gardens, wasteground, dunes and salt marsh. The food plants of its larvae include willowherbs, loosestrife, enchanter’s nightshade and evening primrose.
The rat jawbone may be the remains of a fox kill but the foxes haven’t succeeded in eradicating every last brown rat in the area.
We had one of those sudden drenching showers this afternoon with hailstones falling amongst the heavy rain. As I walked across the back lawn later it was squelching underfoot. The run-off noticeably topped up the pond and it will have refilled the water butts attached to the fall pipes from our roof.
The local rat burrows were probably flooded too as we saw a large brown rat run across the patio, only to change its mind and run back again a minute later. It was the first we’ve seen for months, if not years.
After 15 or 20 years the raised veg beds are beginning to come apart at the corners and rot through in places.
I like the L-shaped beds as they are but wheeling a barrow down the garden is a bit of an obstacle courses, especially steering past the greenhouse.
So our plan is to widen the central path – and perhaps the side paths to give better access to the beds. It’s a big job but we’re getting Earnshaw’s the local timber and fencing centre in to give us a quote for the doing the work.
Planting veg and covering it with netting or cloches to keep the pigeons off should then be a whole lot easier.
And then I can turn my attention to the rampant chicory that has, as always, taken over my patch of what should be a wild flower meadow.
Still a bit too early to put these in as we’re still having the occasional overnight frost.