Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
While pruning the Golden Hornet crab apple I became aware that someone was watching me. Directly overhead a buzzard was hanging in the air, about 100 feet above me.
At the top of the stepladder in the crown of the tree, I had a wood pigeon’s eye-view of our newly-built raised beds.
Stan Barstow Memorial Garden, Queen Street, Horbury, 2.30 pm, 65℉, 17℃: As soon as I sit on a bench beneath a weeping silver birch, aphids and plant bugs start trundling about on my knee and over my sketchbook page.
Rowan and maple leaves.
Otter spraints neatly deposited on a mooring bollard by the canal at the Bingley Arms, Horbury Bridge. I’ve yet to see one of the otters but I was told that they’d been picked up on security cameras near the river.
Soon after I finish picking up the rowan twigs I’d been pruning, a squirrel appears, carrying two peanut shells. It leaves one near the top corner of the bed and selects a spot near a plant in near the centre to bury the other.
Refilling the hole and ‘making good’ – to use a builder’s expression is a thorough process.
It picks up the peanut it left earlier and buries it with equal care near the beech hedge.
The song thrush is back again for another feed on the berries before they finally drop from the sumac.
These were taken on my iPhone.
Back in the summer we saw a large brown rat scuttling across our patio in daylight and decided to take a break from feeding the birds. Three months later this didn’t seem to have made any difference as we’d still occasionally one passing through so we’ve started filling the feeders again.
When I’m doing that I inevitably spill a few sunflower hearts, assuming that the birds will soon spot them.
This afternoon though it was a medium-sized rat climbing one of the garden chairs to search around for spilt sunflower hearts on our patio table.
I’ll be more careful next time I fill the feeders but we will keep on feeding the birds. The local rat population is something that we will have to live with. All our neighbours report the same problem.
I’m continuing to trim the hawthorn, holly and hazel in the hedge at the end of the garden. Neglected a bit in recent years parts are now towering out of my reach, so I’m steadily bringing it down to a reasonable size.
After recent wind, rain and the first overnight frost, next door’s maple is going down in a blaze of ochre yellow and one of the ash trees in the wood is now devoid of leaves.
This morning two blackbirds were fighting it out over the ever-diminishing supply of sumac berries. When a song thrush flies in the spray of berries it lands on instantly detaches, plummeting to the ground and, for a moment, taking the startled thrush with it.
The small male sparrowhawk is back, again swooping down by the feeders and then pausing to perch on the hedge and again failing to catch any prey.
This morning a distant chevron of geese headed down the Calder Valley but at the weekend a skein of twenty plus was heading in the opposite direction.
Many birders these days go to the trouble of carrying a DSLR with a long lens to record any mystery bird. I’ve always got my iPhone with me but it’s not much good for birds any distance away so I’ll try to make some quick field notes, as I did with this winter plumage great crested grebe a few years ago.
The Victorian naturalists were meticulous with their records but the ultimate proof of identity for them was to shoot the bird itself. That was the fate of this winter-plumage great crested grebe which turned up at Bretton Lakes.
Mr Wilkinson, a painter and decorator for the Bretton Hall estate, who presented it to me in 1964, explained that the bird had turned up and no one knew what it was, so they shot it. There’s no label on the case, so I don’t know the date. Presumably late Victorian or Edwardian.
11.15 a.m., drizzly and overcast: A male sparrowhawk swoops close to the bird feeders and lands on the hedge. Pheasant wouldn’t normally be on the menu for him but that doesn’t stop him looking down on two hen pheasants that have been foraging beneath the feeders.
Just in case he’s considering them as his brunch, they extend their necks and puff out their feathers to appear two to three times their regular neck size.
They strut and hop, half spreading their wings and fanning tail feathers, a hip-hop swagger that reminds me of prairie-chickens lekking.
As I trim the dripping hawthorn and holly, the misty droplets in the morning air gradually build into soft rain. A robin hops around me as I work.
The sparrow terrace nestbox gets its first ever clear-out. I’m surprised that the far compartment of the three-hole box is almost empty as this was always the one favoured by sparrow, blue tit and bumble bees. The middle box contains the remains of a nest although I don’t remember it ever having been used.
Clearing it out, I evict a tiny moth, several small green caterpillars and, below the surface layer of moss, hundreds of sticky, silky cocoons, perhaps those of bee moths.
The berries on next door’s stagshorn sumac have been attracting a pair of blackbirds. This afternoon, a song thrush came to feed on a cluster of berries in the upper branches.
4.15 p.m.: A buzzard flies up from the ash at the edge of the wood. In the 1980s we never saw buzzards here and the ash was a regular lookout post of a kestrel, a bird of prey we rarely see in recent years.