Category: Habitats

Clouds in my Coffee

cauliflower

“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.”

The date and apricot flapjack was good too. It had a hint of bonfire night about it, made with dark brown sugar and, I’m guessing, black treacle.

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).

Link

Thorncliffe Tasting Room

Cod

cod

Cod, Gadus morhua, washed up amongst the kelp from the strandline on Druridge Bay near Hauxley, Northumberland.

cod

Hauxley

lagoon Hauxley

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.

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Hauxley Wildlife Discovery Centre

Saltholme

Saltholme

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.

gadwall

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.

pectoral sandpiper

To the south east Roseberry Topping makes a craggy a punctuation in the looming bulk of the North York Moors.

Roseberry Topping and the Hanger Bridge
Roseberry Topping and the Transporter (not Hanger) Bridge

Roe Deer Rutting

roe deer

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).

Cutting Back

briers gloves

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.

frog

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.

Published
Categorized as Garden, Pond

Selwicks Bay

Selwicks Bay

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 in Chalk

flints
Flints in chalk

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.

Buttress of Contorted Chalk

RockWATCH group guided around the features of the bay by geologist Richard Myerscough.

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.

Contorted Chalk with Calcite Veins

calcite vein

This vein is exposed on the wave-cut platform in front of the buttress.

Tilted layers near at the fault plane
Fault breccia: chalk crushed by movement along the fault
Fault and crush zone, Selwicks Bay, Flamborough Head

Walled Garden

Our visit to the walled garden at Temple Newsam brought back memories of working on the Readers’ Digest Guide to Creative Gardening, published in 1984. Rue and goldenrod, two of the plants that I needed to draw, are still growing there and I might have drawn a stately-looking Thalictrum here too, but I didn’t spot that on our visit.

Ice Plant

ice plant
bumblebee

Yesterday, 4.30 pm: The Ice Plant, formerly know as Sedum spectabile (will I ever remember that it’s now Hylotelephium?), sits in the last patch of sunlight on an early autumn afternoon as the house casts its shadow further down the back lawn. Its candy pink flower heads are constantly being visited by small bees and occasional bumblebee.

bee

The small bees are gingery light brown with 5 or 66 dark horizontal stripes on the abdomen, so they look like our regular honey bees.

buzzard
sparrowhawk

A buzzard circles over the wood and meadow, against a sky latticed with vapour trails alongside diaphanous swirls of cirrus.

dunnock

I’m eyed warily by a bird in the hawthorn hedge. I get a brief impression of an eye stripe, so a dunnock, a wren or perhaps even an autumn migrant warbler dropping in.

long-tailed tit

The blue tit and a long-tailed tit seem to have decided that I’m harmless and they’re coming to the sunflower heart feeders just a few feet away from me.

A comfortable 20℃, 69℉, here in the shade with a hint of breeze to keep it fresh.

Screen Mirroring

rhododendron stems

Clip Studio Paint on the iPad: experimenting with adding colour.

screen mirroring
Screen mirroring in Photoshop: iMac Retina, iPad Pro, Apple Pencil and Sketchboard Pro.
rhododendron

I’m also trying screen mirroring so that if I’m working in, for example, Photoshop on my iMac, and I’ve got something intricate to do, like erasing background texture on a scan of a sketchbook page, I can switch over to working with the Apple Pencil on my iPad.

It would be possible to do a whole drawing this way but with Adobe Fresco, Clip Studio Paint and even a version of Photoshop on the iPad there’s no need to, I can draw directly.

I haven’t noticed any delay when I’m drawing using screen mirroring; the marks appear in real time.

Graphics Pad

For years I’ve used as Wacom Intuos 4 graphics pad for erasing or drawing in Photoshop on the iMac but with the latest Apple operating system, Monterey, Wacom no longer support that model. Working on the iPad should be more flexible, once I’ve learned the ins and outs of it, as I can see the iMac screen on the iPad. The graphics pad was blank, so I got used to drawing on the desktop and seeing the results appear on the iMac.