Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
A low tide had exposed all the mud in Bridlington Harbour, attracting turnstones and redshank. This adult herring gull was in streaky-headed non-breeding plumage but it had raised a chick during the summer, which was still following, hunching itself up as it begged, fairly continuously, for food.
The adult looked embarrassed by the attention but I didn’t see it offer the youngster any food.
Lightning sketches from an engagement party, Normanton Market and a lightning-struck birch tree by the car park at the Seed Room, Overton. You can see the split running the full length of the trunk of one of these trees.
Up on the balcony at the Boathouse café with a panorama of the lower end of the lake at Newmillerdam on a fine autumn morning with black-headed gulls swooshing by was like being on a mini cruise, especially when accompanied by a pumpkin latte (well, you’ve got to try it once at this time of year).
There were 25 tufted ducks in a scattered group, mostly just resting, although I did see one tackling a medium-sized freshwater mussel.
Many of the gulls were in halfway, teenage, plumage with a shallow inverted ‘V’ on each wing.
The three cygnets of the resident mute swan family were at that halfway stage too, with bands of brown on wings and across the tail covets.
The lone great-crested grebe was probably one of this year’s young, or possibly an adult moulting into dull winter plumage.
“Who sings this one?”
“I can hardly hear it,” the waitress replies.
“You’re So Vain.”
“Oh … Carly Simon.”
“That’s it! Brilliant.”
“Shows my age.”
“I’m not surprised she knew,” chips in the other waitress, “She’s always singing. Every day is karaoke here.”
It’s the one with the line ‘I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee’, which is appropriate because I’m on to my second latté at the Thorncliffe Tasting Room, Emley, while Barbara does a round of the adjoining farm shop for a bag of shopping, including this cauliflower.
This was our first visit to the Tasting Room, although we’d often called at the farm shop but we’ll soon go back there. It’s only six miles from home but it’s another 150 metres in altitude. The panorama included Drax Power Station (currently burning wood pellets sourced from old growth forests in Canada according a recent BBC investigation).
Beachcombing along the strandline at Druridge Bay, 16 September: barnacles, wartime concrete, bladder wrack, kelp, keel worm, lichen, limpet, lyme grass, septarian nodules and serrated wrack.
Cod, Gadus morhua, washed up amongst the kelp from the strandline on Druridge Bay near Hauxley, Northumberland.
Another sketchbook page from our short break in Northumberland and it’s another view from a table in a cafe overlooking a lagoon in a restored landscape, this time at the Lookout Café at the Hauxley Wildlife Discovery Centre at the northern end of Druridge Bay.
Red admiral and speckled wood butterflies rested on willow and bramble in the afternoon sun in a sheltered corner at the foot of the wooded slope below the Wildlife Discovery Centre.
We took a break at the RSPB Saltholme wetlands reserve on our way to, and back from, Northumberland last week. The panoramic windows of the first floor cafe look out over one of the lagoons, so we were watching dunlin, godwits and gadwall as we ate our lunch.
On the return journey the birding highlight was a pectoral sandpiper a migrant that was a long way off course as it headed south as it breeds in Arctic Canada.
To the south east Roseberry Topping makes a craggy a punctuation in the looming bulk of the North York Moors.
On our way north along the M1 near Garforth we glimpsed two roe deer standing facing each other in a large stubble field. As we drove by they clashed antlers (10.20 a.m., 15 September).
It got a bit neglected during the heatwave but now’s a good time to strim back the vegetation around the pond and trim the hawthorn hedges.
I had a near miss as I strimmed around the pond when I disturbed a large frog, but fortunately it hopped away unharmed. I’ve left a fringe of vegetation around the edges of the pond.
Dipping back in my A-level field notebook and in those pre-digital days, I found that colour prints could be more useful than slides, as I could stick them in my notebook. Here I’ve indicated a fault in the wave-cut platform of Selwicks Bay, Flamborough Head.
Flints are exposed in the chalk of the wave-cut platform south of the fault. Flints like these may have formed when the silica-rich skeletons of sponges and other creatures formed a gel on the seafloor which was drawn down into burrows in the chalk ooze – hence the shape of the nodules.
We looked at a buttress of contorted chalk south of the fault. The chalk contorted by the fault has been re-cemented by calcite-rich fluids circulating through the rock and depositing veins of calcite.
Strengthened by this cement the chalk is harder than that surrounding it and it has withstood erosion and formed a buttress.
This vein is exposed on the wave-cut platform in front of the buttress.
