Wrenthorpe Park

Alverthorpe Beck
Balne Beck, Alverthorpe Meadows, Wakefield

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.

Blackcap in woodland at Wrenthorpe Park, 10.23 a.m.
poplar bark

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.

Alverthorpe Meadows

Wrenthorpe Park

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.

hawthorn blossom

In the meadow, flowers of yellow rattle are dotted about amongst the buttercups and the red clover.

wild flowers

Pignut is also in flower and, in a damper area near the ponds, marsh orchids are starting to show.

foxtail
sorrel

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.

speckled wood

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.

Common Shrew

shrew

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.

Common Toad


toad

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.

Down-looker Snipe-fly

Snipe-fly

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.

Cuckoo’s Nest Halt

Blacker Wood

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.

Denby Dale Walks

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.

Link

Denby Dale Walkers are Welcome leaflets, available as PDFs.

Bright as a Seedsman’s Packet

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.

Knapweed

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.

Lamy Safari with Z24 converter and broad nib, filled with Noodler’s Black ink.

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.

Sing, Rattle and Splutter

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.

Self-heal

self-heal3 p.m., 70°F, 22°C, 75% white cumulus, slight breeze: Where it grows on a well mown lawn, self-heal can put out tiny flower heads that stay low and escape the blades of the mower. My mother-in-law Betty objected to the self-heal dotted about her lawn. She said the little purple flower heads reminded her of pieces of ground beef sprinkled on a pizza. Amongst the tall grasses of my patch of meadow self-heal is growing to two feet, to the same height as the knapweed growing alongside it.

bird's-foot trefoilThe same is true of the bird’s-foot trefoil which is scrambling amongst the grasses rather than forming a low cushion of brilliant yellow flower as it might on rabbit-nibbled turf.

A bumble bee with ‘fur’ that resembles a brown bear in moult visits one of the flowers.

Townclose Hills

Hybrid orchid, pyramidal orchid, greater knapweed, hoary plantain.
Hybrid orchid, pyramidal orchid, greater knapweed, hoary plantain.

Townclose HillsPyramidal, common spotted and a hybrid orchid were in flower on the plateau at Townclose Hills Nature Reserve, also known as Billy Woods.

small skipper
Small skipper

Despite the breeze we saw ringlet, meadow brown, small tortoiseshell, small skipper and a few marbled white butterflies. Six-spot burnet moths were also active and a hebrew character moth lurked amongst the grasses.

Araniella curcurbitina

One of the smallest orb-web spiders, Araniella curcurbitina, was making its way across a grassy path. It’s Latin name, curcurbitina, means ‘a little member of the gourd family’;  its bright green and yellow striped abdomen looks like a water melon or gourd. It has a scarlet patch on its underside.

Restharrow, clustered bellflower and wild marjoram.
Restharrow, clustered bellflower and wild marjoram.
Field sketch of hebrew character moth.
Field sketch of hebrew character moth.

We spotted a brown hare in a field in the valley of Kippax Brook to the west of the reserve.

Townclose Hills, Kippax is a Leeds City Council Local Nature Reserve managed by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust.

Link: Townclose Hills Nature Reserve