Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
There’s a bit of a log jam where fallen crack willow debris has formed a leaky dam across Coxley Beck so after recent rain it’s overflowed amongst the alders.
Drawn in Adobe Fresco using the conté crayon, with a few lines ‘scratched’ into it using the eraser.
3.02 pm: A sparrowhawk swoops around the bird feeder, perches in the crab apple for a moment, then flies off without catching anything.
Early afternoon snow, an after effect of yesterday’s Storm Arwen, covers the seed heads of the plant formerly known as Sedum, now Hylotelephium spectabile. A female blackbird and dunnock forage beneath the feeders which attract great tits and blue tits, a coal tit and a nuthatch.
The snow soon starts to melt and these cyclamen, in the bed beside the patio beneath the cordon apples, look none the worse for it.
4.10 pm: A kestrel hover over the meadow and dives as if it’s about to make a kill but abandons the dive at tree-top height and flies off over the neighbour’s garden.
The buzzard was doing its rounds over back gardens and the meadow at breakfast-time this morning and it’s back again as the light fades, just thirty feet above me, as I sit at my desk by the skylight studio window.
Drawn this afternoon at Navigation Walk, Wakefield, colour added in Photoshop.
Sketches from Whitby and from ‘Yorkshire’s Food Capital’, Malton. Tone added in Photoshop.
This morning our pond had frozen over but a month from today the days will start getting longer.
On the little roof terrace at the Boathouse Cafe, Newmillerdam, black-headed gulls glide past the castellated balustrade a few feet away from me at eye level, a fluid, effortlessly elegant flight. A grebe preens out on the lake, a male goosander swims by, crisply black and white in the low winter sun.
A coot calls tetchily, mallards quack and the smell of fresh coffee drifts up from the kitchen below.
As we walked along the beach between Sandsend and Whitby on Friday morning, I spotted this ammonite fossil embedded in the boulder clay cliff. The closely spaced ribs are almost straight, so that it reminded me of a section of reinforced hosepipe.
Dactylioceras was a slow swimming ammonite from the Early Jurassic. This looks like a fragment of the shell of Dactylioceras tenuicostatum, a common fossil found in the Whitby Mudstone Formation at locations such as Port Mulgrave.
The hollow chamber inside the shell has been filled with calcite crystals.
Hildoceras, also from the Early Jurassic has sickle-shaped ribs and a groove along the triple-keeled groove along the outer edge of the shell.
Hildoceras features on the title page of my book Yorkshire Rock, a journey through time, which was published 25 years ago by the British Geological Survey (see link below).
There’s a folktale that they’re the fossilised remains of serpents, driven from the cliff top at Whitby by Abbess St Hilda.
Yorkshire Rock, a journey through time at my website Willow Island Editions
Drawing the dogs and trying the s’mores kronut, a cross between a croissant and a donut, at the ØL cafe in Horbury this morning.
The dogs took so much interest in their surroundings that they soon wound their leads around table legs and chair legs.
We had seven or eight Howgate Wonder cooking apples from our double cordon by the patio this year, enough to stew to add to our porridge for a week or two.
Beginner’s class for Border Collies, Low Hill, Hope Valley, Peak District. Two farmers are releasing the sheep in groups of four.
“How do you make sure that each group of sheep are consistent?”
“You don’t – that’s the point of it.”
“These four look well behaved?”
“Just wait until they get out there! They’ve come down from across the border: Scottish Blackface.”