Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Hoof fungus, also known as tinder bracket, Fomes fomentarius, on silver birch and wood anemones at Newmillerdam this morning. I headed via the Arboretum, through Kings Wood, down into the Lawns Dike valley and up through Bullcliff Wood to the top end of the lake.
We’ve gone for a traditional variety, Bunyard’s Exhibition, for our broad beans which I sowed this morning.
Last summer a fox family flattened our leeks. I harvested the last of them today but didn’t get much off them as they were starting to produce tough flowering shoots. We planted a second crop so I used a couple of rows of those instead.
They were smaller but perfect for leek and potato (and celery and pea) soup. Barbara found a leek and cheese muffin recipe on the internet.
A covering of snow this morning was a reminder that although we want to get ahead with our veg garden, it’s too early to plant out most of our crops.
Trees drawn from our morning coffee stops: an oak from Rivers Meet, Methley, and a poplar from the Coffee Stop at the Junction.
We were back there again this morning, walking alongside the river through a snow shower which soon gave way to blue skies and sun.
Thanks to Browning, I’m back in business with a replacement Strike Force Pro XD trail cam, so I’ve been catching up with the soap opera that is the wild side of our back garden.
As you can see, a male house sparrow has laid claim to the sparrow terrace nestbox, ousting the blue tits, who nested in hole 1 on the left last year. I love the puzzled expression on the blue tit’s face.
A persistent pigeon is waddling past the daffodils in pursuit of – he hopes – a mate.
Night visitors have included a cat and a vixen. I wonder if I’ll succeed in catching the cubs on camera this year?
We planted a single cowslip four or five years ago which bunched up into a clump, so we’ve into four plants, which are all doing well in the raised bed behind the pond.
2 p.m., 20℃, 69℉ in the sun – cloudless: I cleared a square metre of what will be a wild flower and plants for pollinators bed, discarding the creeping buttercup and chicory but keeping the knapweed, dog daisy and teasel.
Woodpecker drumming, wood pigeon cooing. Coma and peacock butterflies basking.
The pulmonaria was self-sown. It did so well under the hedge that it started to encroach on the path, so we moved it to the pollinators’ bed.
A small, 1.5 cm approx., dark bumblebee with no obvious stripes visits the pulmonaria flowers, shadowed by a smaller, 1 cm, light brown bee, watching, hovering a few inches away, in fact acting like a drone in the modern sense, It then briefly pounces on the larger bee but is rebuffed after just a second.
The larger bee checks out another pulmonaria flower and the smaller bee pauses at a nearby flower, but doesn’t continue shadowing the larger bee.
I’m guessing this is a male, a drone, following a female.
Snake’s head fritillary, planted in sunken pots for its own protection against rampant chicory.
It’s not set to last over the weekend but it felt like being in a continental city in Leeds yesterday, sitting sketching a bicycle on Brewery Wharf at the Cafe YumYum.
It was our first day browsing around Leeds since just before the first lockdown, so it was good to feel things getting back to some kind of normality.
In Holmfield Park, adjoining Thornes and Clarence Parks in Wakefield, this old beech has so far escaped damage in storms. So many beeches in the area are getting to that 150 to 200 year old stage when they start shedding boughs. Let’s hope that this one still has decades of life left in it.
On Saturday we met up with family at the Holmfield Arms, in Holmfield House, a Victorian mansion which was once gifted to the city and housed the local museum.
The cross-bedded sandstone is the wall of what is now an orangery style room in the Brewers’ Fair restaurant. It overlooks a terrace surrounded by shrubs and trees, including a lime (lower left on my sketch above). Varieties of lime that grew in a columnar shape were popular with the Victorians.
I drew more Victorian trees in Horbury. Some of these are getting to the end of their natural lives and have shed branches, or on the odd occasion been blown down in storms.
For my brother-in-law John’s big birthday plus one, a cartoon of our regular walk around Newmillerdam, which would be a quiet place if it wasn’t for all that birdsong and – on her My Yorkshire show last week – Jane McDonald singing Jessie Ware’s Remember Where You Are on the slope behind the Boathouse.
The Wakefield Naturalists’ Society had their first AGM since the pandemic on Monday but it was a case of blink and you’ll miss it, as the main event of the evening was Ron Marshall talking about Ardnamurchan, the Outer Hebrides and the Shetlands.
These sketches were drawn with a Lamy nexx with a B – bold – nib. I’m getting towards the end of my bottle of De Atramentis, an ink which soon dries, allowing me to add watercolour.
We almost gave up on this morning’s walk at RSPB Fairburn Ings as the rain seemed to be setting in but as it was so quiet there we were able to get good views of two roe deer, grazing just 50 yards from the Roy Taylor trail. This was the best of my iPhone shots, on the others they were heads down, white rumps towards us.
The reeds festooning the trees are an indication of flood levels but this morning most of the paths had dried out.
Confession time: the Parliament of Crows is a collage of four photographs. There were more crows than shown here but I couldn’t get them all to pose together for their group photograph.