Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
This hoof fungus, Fomes fomentarius, appears to have powdered the roots of the beech it is growing on with a film of rusty spores.
It’s also known as the tinder bracket because it has been used as in fire-starting since prehistoric times.
From my student sketchbook, South Kensington, February 1973: I bought this Bromeliad from a plant shop on Gloucester Road for 80 pence. Bromeliads are epiphytes from Brazil . . . but as to which species this is . . . I don’t know. I water it by filling the central rosette.
These crumbly, flakey, croissants are splendid to draw and tasted as good as they looked . . . reminding me of Petit-dejeuner on sunny mornings on the balcony of the Hotel de Centinaire in the Dordogne.
I’ve dipped into my winter 1973 student sketchbook because this morning I had to decide on one book to throw out – no not the sketchbook! – as I’m trying to send one book to the charity shop for every new book that I buy.
Difficult decision as even books that I’m never going to read again have some nostalgic value for me. I bought Town Gardening by Robert Pearson for 15 pence from a bookshop on a quieter back street somewhere near the Kensington end of the Earl’s Court Road and, like the house plants, it was part of my attempt to create my own little green space in the city.
In the student hostel at Evelyn Gardens had a window ledge where I grew sweet corn in cut-down milk tetrapacks. I started – but never finished – constructing my own version of a Wardian case with built-in fluorescent lights.
So the advice in Town Gardening, to use Mowrah meal, derris, DDT or lead arsenate to get rid of that ‘troublesome pest’ the earthworm, when it disfigures your lawn, wasn’t, thank goodness relevant to me.
Yes, probably a wise move parting with this book.
When birds revert to their dinosaur origins . . .
Two pectoral sandpipers feeding in shallow water on the Eastern Reedbed at RSPB St Aidan’s are migrants, probably blown off course by an Atlantic low on their migration from their breeding grounds on the east coast of North America to their wintering quarters in South America. They’re slightly larger than the dunlins feeding by the small muddy islands nearby.
Some of the dunlins have slightly indistinct black bellies as they moult out of their summer breeding plumage into the ‘dunlin’ – the name means ‘dull brown’ – winter plumage.
We’re encouraged to make gardens accessible to hedgehogs by ensuring there’s access for them under fences. This animal run under the perimeter fence at St Aidan’s serves the same purpose. It looks about rabbit size but apparently foxes can make their way through a hole no larger than a fist, so this could be a multi-species animal highway. If it wasn’t so far from home, I’d be tempted to set up my trail cam here.
We walked beyond the boundaries of the reserve on our circuit today, taking the path alongside the River Aire as far as the weir below Lemonroyd Lock.
I’m drawing this with a scratchy dip pen with an F. Collins & Co. Tower Pen brass nib, made in Manchester. The elegant pen holder, which I bought in France, has a satisfyingly robust brass ferule at the business end and a dangerously sharp point at the end that is nearest your eye.
I’m using Rohrer’s Black which, of course, isn’t as free-flowing as the inks that I use in my Lamy fountain pens but it has a dense ‘inky blackness’.
It felt awkward drawing the pepper, as if I was drawing everything overhand. Perhaps if I’d been drawing it facing the other way, the curves would have felt more natural to draw: they might have sloped more naturally, like the slope of cursive handwriting.
But the scratchy line suited the wayward growth of the plant. I grew it from the seeds of a pepper from the supermarket, using our own home-made compost.
We’ve had only two peppers and we’ve used them green as they were showing no sign of turning yellow or red. They’re not as fleshy as the supermarket variety, but they’ve got more of a fresh crunch to them.
We grew peppers last year from seeds that a neighbour gave us. This year’s have a better flavour: last year’s were rather bitter, perhaps because of the weather or the variety.
Dragonflies zoomed around us and rested briefly on the path as we made the full circuit of RSPB St Aidan’s reserve. They were flying high too and a hobby was making the most of it, arcing high above the reedbeds to catch and eat them on the wing.
A few spoonbills were resting amongst the reedbeds by one of the lagoons.
Alongside three ringed plovers on one of the lagoons was a little stint, a wader no bigger than a robin.
We took a break halfway around at the Rivers Meet Craft Cafe, crossing the railway at a level crossing by the former station and passing this Victorian postbox.
Just in case you couldn’t find everything you needed in the craft shop at the Rivers Meet, the Mobile Haberdashery van had called.
As I walk into the woods above the Boathouse at Newmillerdam, I feel as if I should be switching a light on. The leaf mosaic – still green – of the tall, straight-trunked beeches cut out so much of the light on what is already a dull and overcast morning. Not surprisingly, it’s this white fungus on a sawn-off stump that catches my eye.
On the pond cam, apart from the usual wood pigeon, the goldfinches have been coming down to drink, one of them fluttering low over the surface before realising that the duckweed isn’t going to be a safe surface to land on.
We feel that we’re getting some of our autumn regulars back at the bird table: a regular nuthatch, a single long-tailed tit and, swooping through at top speed, a large (so probably female) sparrowhawk, which soon went off and put up a flock of goldfinches which were probably feeding on thistle seeds in the meadow.
We haven’t recorded a fox at the end of the garden on the trail cam for weeks now so, as we’ve recently trimmed back around the pond and scooped out the duckweed, I’ve set up my Browning Strike Force Pro XD trail cam there. This morning at 10 it recorded a dunnock (above) followed a few minutes later by a house sparrow.
Ten minutes earlier this greenfinch had been down at the pond’s edge.
It looks as if it’s drying itself off after bathing but, if it had been, the camera didn’t catch it. I need to clear out the last of the duckweed to give the birds better access.
At eleven o’clock yesterday the inevitable wood pigeon waddled by and a squirrel bounded along, slightly blurred on the photograph.
With a closer camera angle and a bit of stage management of duckweed and pebbles, this could be the perfect spot for a back garden stake-out.
The last of the supporting players, the tufted duck is taking shape and I’ve made a start on the main character, the hungry duck.
Ode to a Duck shouldn’t take long to put together now that I’ve got all the elements together. The animation shouldn’t be much longer than 60 seconds.
The dappled markings of the speckled wood, resting on a bramble leaf, echo the dappled sunlight in the welcome shade of The Pinewoods, as we walk up from the Valley Gardens, Harrogate, on the hottest day since July.