Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
3.50 p.m., 91℉, 34℃ in direct sun, which is filtered through a veil of cloud with lower cumulus coming in from the south-east: A small hoverfly is fascinated by the lime green top of my pen and explores it as I draw.
A blackbird is softly scolding and a female sparrow eyes me warily from the hedge.
Most unusual sighting is two Typhoons flying over, turning about on manoeuvre.
A slightly battered meadow brown feeds on creeping thistle flowers at the edge of the meadow in The Pinewoods between Harlow Carr and the Valley Gardens, Harrogate. They’ve been mowing the meadow this morning, leaving the hay in rows to dry in the sun.
Management in The Pinewoods and at the top end of Valley Gardens aims to increase the biodiversity of woodland, meadow and parkland but as you get nearer the town there’s a Victorian formality to the carefully tended carpet bedding.
The displays of scarlet geraniums and variegated coleus aren’t going to win any prizes for subtlety, but, along with the restored pavilions, park shelters and the Old Magnesia Well Pump Room, they’re a nostalgic delight.
Not surprisingly, as we’re into the summer holidays, there’s a one-hour queue at Betty’s Tearooms (both in town and up at RHS Harlow Carr) so, following a tip-off from our friends Roger and Sue, teashop connoisseurs, we headed to the Palm Court Cafe, above Farrah’s Olde Sweet Shop, for a latte and apricot-and-almond scone, and I drew the White Hart Hotel across the road.
No Mow May is over but these dog daisies in the top corner of our back lawn have escaped the mower.
This morning’s visit to Alverthorpe Meadows, six miles from home, is the furthest that we’ve been since lockdown began nine weeks ago. We’re meeting up with our friends, or rather Barbara is meeting with Sue and I’m meeting with Roger, as one-to-one with social distancing outdoors is as far as we’ve got in England with the easing of restrictions.
Wrenthorpe Park and the adjoining Alverthorpe Meadows are good for social distancing as there’s plenty of space and most of the paths are wide. Roger and I head up the slope. As we walk by a nestbox on a London plane tree, a blue tit pops out.
Along the top path, close to the railway, I record a blackcap singing. There’s another bird in the recording but we didn’t identify it. We later get a good view of a blackcap singing from the top branches of a willow in a hedgerow near the settling ponds.
A young white poplar in the wood has rows of diamond-shaped scars on its bark. The Collins Tree Guide describes white poplar as ‘the whitest tree in the landscape’.
My friend Roger remembers when the wood was planted during the restoration of the landscape here, twenty or thirty years ago. The wood has established itself well but he feels that it needs some management now so that some of species that were planted can continue to thrive. For instance, he thinks that the hazels might get shaded out at the tree canopy closes in.
We walk down the slope crossing Balne Beck and through a belt of trees to the central meadow.
Elder is now in flower and a pink-flowered hawthorn is still hanging onto its blossom.
In the meadow, flowers of yellow rattle are dotted about amongst the buttercups and the red clover.
Pignut is also in flower and, in a damper area near the ponds, marsh orchids are starting to show.
Growing alongside the orchids, I think that this grass is foxtail, Alopecurus pratensis. Timothy grass, also known as cat’s-tail, is very similar but it flowers a bit later than foxtail.
Common sorrel, Rumex acetosa, was a popular vegetable in Tudor times and was used to make a fish sauce.
This speckled wood was sunning itself on the leaf of a hazel down by the stream. We saw several of them in the dappled shade of woodland edge habitats, along with a few white butterflies. There are extensive nettle patches but Roger commented that there were no signs of damage from caterpillars. The tops of the nettles were slightly wilting but that was because of the morning sun.
I found this adult common shrew on one of the veg beds and my number one suspect for dispatching it has to be Basil a neighbour’s Himalayan Persian cat who currently seems to have exclusive hunting rights for our back garden. Shrews are distasteful so my guess is that Basil caught this one amongst the tussocks of grass in the meadow at the edge of the wood and abandoned it on his regular route back home.
Basil was making a half-hearted attempt to pounce on a hen pheasant yesterday, so a shrew wouldn’t present any challenges for him.
Shrews must 90% of their body weight in a day, but there are plenty of woodlice, spiders, beetles, slugs and worms in the meadow and around the edges of our back garden.
As I was weeding the bottom veg bed this morning, this common toad wandered along past me, heading for the greenhouse. I persuaded it to go back towards the shade and shelter of the compost bins.
To get to the veg bed, I’d trimmed a path along the edge of my meadow. I then continued alongside the hedge to the bench in the far corner. I was all set to trim back the whole meadow but as I started on the long grass in the shade of the hedge at the bottom of the garden I started coming across a lot of wildlife: two frogs hopping away from me, one white plume moth and a drone fly.
I’m leaving that area for the wildlife apart from snipping off the tops of the chicory, which I’m trying to keep in check to give other wild flowers a chance.
This Down-looker Snipe-fly, Rhagio scolopacea, was keeping watch from a fence-post at the edge of the parkland alongside Top Park Wood, Nostell, in May last year. It habitually rests facing downwards and it will dart off on short flights, like a snipe.
This was probably a male defending a territory as it waited for a female to appear but this common species of snipe-fly has occasionally been recorded snatching insects in mid-air. The larvae are predators, feeding on small earthworms and insects in leaf litter and in decaying wood.
Despite its impressive appearance, it is harmless to humans.
Last April, after a winter that had lingered on and on, we were keen to get out as soon as the spring blossom started to appear. A friend, Philippa Coultish, was taking us around her local patch: the valley of Park Gate Dike, northeast of Skelmanthorpe. Because of the ‘Beast from the East’ snowstorms, we were a bit early for the flowers we’d planned to see in Blacker Wood.
On our way back towards the town, we walked parallel with the Kirklees Light Railway and watched one of the narrow gauge steam trains make a stop up at Cuckoo’s Nest Halt. I’ve yet to take a trip on the railway but hope we can return to walk from station to station alongside the line, then get the train back.
There’s an excellent pack of leaflets, Walking in and around Denby Dale with fourteen walks, centred on Denby Dale, Skelmanthorpe, Clayton West and Emley.
Denby Dale Walkers are Welcome leaflets, available as PDFs.
After a long, dull winter, Sainsbury’s know how to get you as you stroll into the supermarket: I couldn’t resist these bright packs of bee and butterfly meadow mixes. All I’ve got to do now is clear several square metres of ground, plant the bulbs and sow the seed mixes, and wait for the flowers to attract the local pollinators.
There are plants that I would never have selected for our garden, such as gladioli, dahlia and delphinium, so it will be fun to see what works. As the labels suggest, they’ll all be attractive to bees, butterflies, hoverflies and other insects.
2.55 p.m., 51°F, 11°C: I didn’t get around to mowing my small meadow area this autumn but I’ve got plenty of time to catch up with that before it bursts into growth again in the spring. As a bonus, I’ve got these bedraggled stems of knapweed to draw: a perfect subject for pen and ink.
There’s no breeze so I can get involved in mapping out the relative positions of leaf, seed-head and stem without the plants getting fidgety. The stems are the most difficult to get right as they have to curve gently but still end up at the appropriate junction of leaves. It’s like drawing a freehand map of major cities and joining them with gently the meandering connections of rail and motorway links.
I’m using my Lamy Safari with the broad nib, as it moves easily across the paper, building a spidery network of stems and leaves.
This is common knapweed, Centaurea nigra.
A song thrush at the edge of the wood runs through some outlandish improvisations, in contrast there’s a dry rattle from a mistle thrush in a neighbour’s garden.
There’s the usual explosive spluttering outburst of indignation from a blackbird. A male blackbird flies down briefly to a nearby veg bed then it flies up into next door’s apple tree and settles on a perch, just watching the world go by for a few minutes.