Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
The teasel has collapsed under 2-3 inches of overnight snow.
Three female pheasants join the goldfinches, house sparrows, blue tits, great tits, blackbirds, nuthatch and robin at the bird feeders.
They appear to hear a noise and freeze in alert mode. They remain motionless for five minutes or more, gradually relaxing, as if it’s a pheasant meditation session – an ideal opportunity to draw them.
At 3.30 pm the pheasants head off towards the wood as the light fades.
The male couldn’t quite get past the female pheasant as they came down the garden path this morning.
He strikes out to treat her to his magnificent display as he struts across the frozen pond.
But as soon as he steps onto the ice he sinks into the icy water in a gap at the edge.
He recovers as best he can and careers onwards over the ice.
The femle seems inimpressed as she ambles across the frosted lawn towards the bird feeders.
Amongst the regular birds at the feeders late this afternoon, a female blackcap – with a reddish rather than a black cap like the male – which fended off the sparrows and blue tits from the sunflower hearts feeder but deferred to the robin.
It returned later and was the last bird at the feeders. By then the light had faded so much that we needed binoculars to pick out the colours.
Recent winds had resulted in the water level in the pond dropping. Yesterday’s rain topped it up to its fullest, overflowing level and last night’s frost froze it over.
My favourite gardening gloves are worn through at the fingers, so a good subject for another textures drawing for my Procreate Dreams course.
The various texture brushes will have their uses but I like to be in control so my favourite way of creating a texture is to hand draw it, in this case with Procreate’s Dry Ink brush.
Seedheads of common knapweed, Centaurea nigra, from my patch of wildflower meadow at the end of the garden.
A couple of these striking-looking flies – black with sunburst spots on the wing bases – were basking around the ivy flowers in the south-facing shelter of the walled garden at RSPB Saltholme.
The female Noon Fly, or Noonday Fly, Mesembrina meridiana, lays a single egg on horse or cow dung. The larva is a predator, feeding on other fly larvae in the dung.
Growing beside our compost bins, Smooth Sow-thistle, Sonchus oleraceus, is a common weed of disturbed ground.
The Collins flower guide mentions the ‘acute, spreading auricles’ at the base of the leaves as a diagnostic feature.
It steadily flopped as I drew it but since I finished it has perked up again, so I might get another chance to add a drawing of the shape of the leaf.
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.