Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
We’re pleased with the way the flower bed by the rowan in the front garden has come on since we planted it out in spring last year.
The spiky ornamental grasses, the shrubby purple hebe and the tete-a-tete daffodils have all bulked up but the stars of the show are the primulas. They’ve been no more than a bedraggled rosette of leaves all winter but over the past couple of weeks we’ve seen more and more flowers appearing.
7.55 a.m.: A male reed bunting perches on a dried up purple loosestrife stem then flies down to the edge of the pond and stays there for a minute, not apparently finding anything to feed on.
If it’s checking out our small pond, it isn’t impressed, as it flies up into the crab apple, joining the regular tits and finches for another minute or two before flying off towards the lower end of the wood, perhaps to drop in on Coxley Beck. It takes no interest in the bird feeders.
We can’t see an accompanying female.
Reed buntings are regulars in the marshy fields by the river half a mile away but it’s a rarity for us to spot one in the garden. In fact, I don’t remember recording one before; if so it must have been over twenty-five years ago.
8.00 a.m.: A sparrowhawk flies over the rooftops followed by a loose flock of smaller birds, which appear to be mobbing it. The sparrowhawk swoops down on one of them, but misses out on its breakfast.
On the sunflower heart feeders, a pair of bullfinches are joined by a siskin.
8.45 a.m.: A buzzard circles over farmland beyond the houses. Buzzards are such regulars now but because I first got familiar with them in the Lake District and on Speyside, at a time when they were far less common than they are today, they still conjure up a feeling of wild places for me. It’s great to be able to sit on the sofa with a mug of tea after breakfast and see one soaring in the distance.
We had a single clump of frogspawn in the pond yesterday; today there are thirteen.
Moving flower pots under the bench in the greenhouse, I came across a black hunting wasp* with conspicuous white dots halfway along its antennae. There also appeared to be a white dot at the rear of its thorax. It’s been a mild day and it was even warmer in the greenhouse, even so I was surprised by how active it was. It didn’t appear to be just running for cover after I’d removed the plant pots, it appeared to be actively hunting on the surface of the damp soil. Its antennae were exploring all the time, moving independently of each other.
It was a little over a centimetre, about half an inch long, perhaps a little longer including the long antennae.
* It’s an Ichneumon – a relative of bees, wasps and ants – Ichneumon suspiciosus, a common species throughout the British Isles. Seeing it from above, I’d noticed a brownish tinge on its wings which was, in fact a broad red or orange band on its abdomen. The species also has pale spots to the rear, which I didn’t notice as it scuttled along.
The blackbirds have the lawn to themselves first thing in the morning, just as it is getting light. We counted eight on the back lawn yesterday. They concentrate on the area around the feeders, so I guess that they are primarily interested in spilt sunflower hearts.
At the top end of the lawn, a male has a bit of luck and seems surprised to have caught a worm. Soon a female notices what’s going on and tries to make off with his prize. He chases her off, then returns to the worm.
Before he can settle down to eating it, a rival male blackbird barges in. As the two males fight it out, the female spots her opportunity, dashes in and makes off with the worm.
The dawn patrol of blackbirds is soon ousted by a gaggle of female pheasants. It’s not unusual to see seven of them busy around the feeders but usually one or two of them will break off the main group to inspect the herbage around the pond, or to forage on the veg beds.
There’s evidently a pecking order amongst the females because as they pirouette around, pouncing and pecking any spilt seed they notice, one of them will make a quick lunge with her beak at another, momentarily shooing it away from her personal space.
South Ossett: By mid-morning, the sun has melted away the frost and fog. A blackbird makes considered progress across the lawn, pausing every couple of inches to closely inspect the turf.
A wren perches on the fence, then flies down to a row of bricks to forage around.
At the foot of the old wall, beneath the twisting stems of the Russian vine, a dunnock hops along, pausing to probe the soil.
A wood pigeon takes a break in the top branches of a sycamore.
‘Purple Stem’ Sweet Box, Sarcococca hookeriana var. digyna*, is now tasseled with sweetly fragrant blossom on the woodland bank behind the bench by the Druid Bridge below the Cascade at Nostell Priory. Each blossom has just two styles and one central stigma; with a scent like that, who needs petals?
The generic name, Sarcococca, is from the Greek, ‘sarc’ meaning flesh and ‘kokkos’, berry.
The species name honours botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) who collected this winter-flowering shrub on a plant-hunting expedition in southern China. Hooker was a friend and confidant of Charles Darwin; Benedict Cumberbatch appears as Hooker in Creation, the biographical movie about Darwin. This weekend he appears in the final episode of Sherlock, so perhaps he’ll now be able to get back to playing Victorian botanists, which he does so well.
The newly planted Sweet Box by the bench should spread by suckers to form a thicket a metre in height.
* I guess that it’s possible that this is a garden hybrid, closely related to S. hookeriana.
After a week of wintry and sometimes very windy weather, it’s good to be walking through the parkland under blue skies with low winter sun picking out the textures on the trunks of the old beeches and oaks. It’s also picking out the bark-like layers in the sandstone of the old quarry in the Menagerie garden.
In the walled garden the first snowdrops have appeared and the winter aconites that we first saw opening midweek are continuing to come into flower.
In the shady shelter of the far northeast-facing wall of the garden, Timperley Early (right) is one of the few rhubarb varieties to have started sprouting leaves but Victoria is just ahead of it, with some of the leaves already opening out.
8.45 a.m.: We’ve been waiting to see whether the squirrel baffle on our new bird feeding pole would defeat a really determined squirrel.
After nibbling a few spilt sunflower hearts from the lawn beneath, a grey squirrel looks up quizzically at the feeders. Taking a leap at the pole, it gets to within a foot of the steel cone and hangs there for a moment until gravity kicks in and it starts to slide back down, like a fireman on a pole.
It scampers off towards the patio then climbs to the top of the cordon apple and looks back towards the pole. After checking out the patio table and discovering the odd sunflower heart that I’d spilt there, it goes over to the shed and climbs to the apex of the roof, to check out the challenge from another angle.
You can imagine the thought processes that it’s going through. It completes a circuit of vantage points by climbing the clothes pole and the crab apple (where it samples one of the squishy apples).
Then it’s back to the feeding pole for one last attempt. Taking a running jump, it succeeds in propelling itself right up into the cone. For a few moments all that we can see of it is a bushy tail, dangling and swishing slightly. That’s as far as it gets, then it lets itself gently back down to earth via the pole.
I think that now we’ll be able to go back to using plastic feeders, in addition to the robust ‘squirrel-proof’ metal feeders that we had to start using a year ago.
2.15 p.m., 29°F, -3°C: I’ve switched to fibre tip pen this afternoon; it tends to speed up my drawing as moves about so smoothly in any direction. That is just as well because the temperature has dropped below freezing so I can’t get too involved with the intricacies of the fronds of the male fern growing at the corner of the raised bed behind the pond.
A dunnock delivers its thin trilling song from a perch in the hedge. A female blackbird gives a scolding alarm call from the crab. There’s a rattly call from a mistle thrush. The redwing has been back, feeding on the squishy brown crab apples.
There’s a monotonous song from a wood pigeon. It’s a five note phrase, repeated two or three times, which The Handbook of British Birds gives as “cōō-cōōō-cōō, cōō-cōō “.
Making a note to remember the rhythm, I write ‘I don’t like plumbing’, but more memorable mnemonics that have been suggested are ‘my toe bleeds, Betty’, ‘take two cows, Taffy’, or ‘a proud Wood-pig-eon’.
Low sun, cool breeze picking up, 39°F, 4°C: Just when I feel I need a spot of colour our resident robin perches amongst the hawthorn stems. There’s a constant chirruping of sparrows in the hedge.
In addition to the evergreen holly and the ivy, there are green ferny leaves of cow parsley in the shady corner by the bench. Creeping buttercup straggles along the bottom of the hedge. 
Gold-tipped feathery moss grows luxuriantly on old timber and a house brick.
The lath of old timber visible on the left of my drawing is from Barbara’s dad’s car-port which we dismantled when he sold his last car. We built a fence from the recycled timbers when we cut back the original, rather overgrown, hawthorn hedge. The hawthorns have sprung back from the stumps and the small hollies we planted have thrived; one holly in the corner has a stem that is five inches in diameter. I can see only three red berries; there are never many as I keep it trimmed back.
Yesterday afternoon a fieldfare was fighting off blackbirds from the golden hornet crab apple; this afternoon a redwing is tucking into the pulpy brown frosted crab apples. It doesn’t appear to be as aggressive as the fieldfare; it seems more content to share.