Habitats – Page 60 – Wild Yorkshire

Thrush’s Anvil

8.30 a.m.: Our revamped front garden got a vote of confidence at breakfast-time; five birds of four different species were using the bark chip mulched flower border which slopes down to the lawn from the pavement.

A song thrush was using the upended paving slab that edges the bed as an anvil, expertly bashing a snail against it until it had removed the shell completely. It then ate it, so it probably hasn’t got any young in the nest clamouring for food. A second song thrush looked on from the hedge.

When we cleared this bed a month or two ago, I kept finding stripy brown-lipped snails amongst the ground covering ivy and rather than consign them to the compost bin, I gave them a second chance by tossing them into the bottom of the beech hedge.

At the time I thought that I would probably live to regret this as the snails will probably repay me by nibbling the flowers on the primroses that I was about to plant but I’m glad that they’re proving an attraction for our resident pair of thrushes. A few weeks ago they were taking nesting material into a thick leylandii hedge in next door’s front garden.

A male blackbird hopped between the plants, pausing to pull back the bark chippings mulch with a swift backward hop. The bark chipping are steadily rolling down the slope towards the lawn leaving bare patches so I’ll rake them back into place next time I’m in the front garden.

The other two species hopping about on the bark chip mulch were robin and house sparrow. I’m pleased with the way the new bed is shaping up and now that the miniature daffodils are fading away the next step is to add some ‘perfect for pollinators’ flowers to take us through the summer.

Bluebells

We follow the footpaths through the woods around the grassy clearing at the centre of Middleton Woods, Leeds. The drifts of bluebells are at there best within sight of the woodland edge.

These are our native bluebells, Scilla non-scripta, with drooping bells hanging down one side of the stem. The introduced Spanish bluebell, Scilla hispanica, is more robust and its bells point out from the stem in different directions.

A nuthatch is attracted to a sawn off tree trunk adapted as a bird table. A nuthatch has the ability to make its way up or down a tree but the treecreeper that we see later makes its way steadily up a tree then flies to the next tree and starts near the bottom again.

It’s joined by its mate; one of the birds pops into a crevice where a limb has broken away from the trunk of a tree.

As we stop to photograph a toad on the path I notice on a dead bough above our heads that a queen wasp is busy scraping away at the exposed wood, gathering material to construct the papier mâche cells of its nest.

Red Mason Bee

“Are you there?” I heard Barbara shouting, “Have I got a bee on my back?!”

No bee in sight: “I was ironing the quilt cover and I heard this buzzing, then it stopped . . . and started again.”

When I helped her fold up the quilt cover earlier we heard no buzzing but the bee must have been trapped in there all the time, narrowly escaping being crushed when we folded the cover and miraculously surviving being flattened by the steam iron. It must have found its way in when the cover was hanging on the clothes line.

We carefully turned the cover inside out and I scooped up the bee in a bug box, none the worse for its adventure.

It buzzed around franticly in the bug box so I sketched it as quickly as possible and snapped away, attempting to take a photograph of it (below).

Field Guide to Bees

bee book — Red mason bee in *Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland*.

This gives me my first opportunity to use my new Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland, by Steven Falk, illustrated by Richard Lewington.

It’s a female red mason bee, Osmia bicornis but from my photographs and very quick sketch, I’d labelled it in my sketchbook as a tawny mining bee. Tawny mining bees make their nests in sandy paths and on bare patches on sunny hillsides but I haven’t seen them in the immediate area however every year I see the mason bees nesting in old walls and cavities in the lime mortar between the bricks in our house wall. We usually have to rescue a few that have found their way into the house.

With apologies for the photography, it was buzzing madly around the bug box.

Links

Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland

Steven Falk, artist, naturalist and photographer.

Rowan Buds

Our neighbour Sandra tells us that she’s been enjoying watching our rowan, which she looks out on from her kitchen.

‘It’s beautiful, I’ve been watching it come into bud and it started from nothing just a few weeks ago.’

‘I like it at this stage,’ I tell her, ‘just as its opening up.’

This prompts me to draw the buds because most are already well on their way to unfurling. I notice that there’s a complete package in there: the unfolding leaves are protecting a flower spike.

It’s done well because last autumn we gave it a good trim back. We’d missed doing this in the previous autumn when my mum was in hospital and the tree which is about twelve feet tall was making a break for freedom, sending out vertical shoots to another three or four feet above the crown. We also cut out some of the crossed branches to allow more light and air in amongst the branches.

When I say ‘we’ I’m including Paul the gardener who comes and helps us out occasionally and offers expert advice. Not all of which I take because I aim to be 100% organic: no glyphosate here, thank you, even though it would save us an awful lot of work.

I’ve got a pair of tree lopping shears with a telescopic handle, so I’m taking that as the height to trim it to. I know that it could soon tower if not over the house at least as high as the gutters, so I’ll make sure to give it a light trim again this autumn.

3.55 p.m., 49°F, 9°C.

Blackbirds in Stereo

12.15 p.m., 60°F, 15°C: As I draw the blackthorn from the end of our garden, rival blackbirds are singing about a hundred yards apart at the edge of the wood. It’s a great stereophonic accompaniment for me as I work and it occurs to me that the less mellow, hurried song of the dunnock sounds like a tape being rapidly rewound.

I’m also hearing great tit, wood pigeon and a crow cawing.

At the edge of the meadow, a small tortoiseshell flies past, low over the grasses, bramble and the ferny rosettes of emerging cow parsley.

Later I see a magpie fly down to our garden hedge, alarming the resident male blackbird. The magpie disappears into the hedge but emerges, I’m relieved to see, without any evidence that it has located and robbed the blackbird’s nest. Keeping an eye on the fracas, a carrion crow flies down to next door’s apple tree, a song post for the blackbird.

My bridge camera, a Fujifilm FinePix S6800.

Blackbird in the Bins

Not quite a blackthorn winter: a passing hail shower whitens the ground but as hail turns to sleet and rain it soon melts away.

4.15 p.m., 43°F, 6°C: The blackbird loves what I’m doing with the compost bins. It wrecked the new heap that I was building up in neat layers sprinkled every few inches with Garotta compost activator by tugging out pieces of moss, which I guess it has been using for nest building. Now it’s getting into the bin with the old heap of well rotted compost which I’m in the process of spreading onto the onion bed. It’s scouring the bin for food items but it breaks off briefly to fly to the top of next door’s apple tree, bursting into melodious song in mid flight.

It's cool enough this afternoon for me to get out my silk gloves again! — It’s cool enough this afternoon for me to get out my silk gloves again!

Meanwhile the sparrows keep up a consistent chirping, a reassuring backing track to sketching in the garden.

A wood pigeon flies over, getting up enough speed on the downhill section of its flight to ‘freewheel’, stiff winged, up the apex of a neighbour’s roof. I’m not sure if the intention was to impress the wood pigeon sitting on the television aerial but they’re soon joined by a third pigeon and there’s a lot of bowing and cooing. So much pigeon courtship takes place on ridge tiles.

I like the 150 gsm cartridge paper in my new Collins & Davison A6 Travel Journal. It takes Noodler's Ink better than my previous pocket sketchbook. — I like the 150 gsm cartridge paper in my new Collins & Davison A6 Travel Journal. It takes Noodler’s Ink better than my previous pocket sketchbook.

Wood Forget-me-not

Comparison with the illustration in 'Wild Flowers of the British Isles', Garrard & Streeter, 1983. — Comparison with the illustration in ‘Wild Flowers of the British Isles’, Garrard & Streeter, 1983.

Look in a field guide and you’ll find a bewildering variety of forget-me-nots. I resorted to picking a stem and comparing it with the life size illustrations by Ian Garrard in The Wild Flowers of the British Isles, enabling me to identify it as wood forget-me-not, Myosotis sylvatica, which, as the name suggests, is found in damp woodland but also on rocky soils in mountain areas.

It is also found naturalised in grassy places as a garden escape and this plant, growing by the pond, may have arrived with a plant that we’ve brought from my mum’s, as she had drifts of it in amongst her shrubs and flower borders.

10 a.m., 51ºF, 11ºC, 75% cloud, slight cool breeze.

Spanish Bluebell

10.45 a.m., 50ºF, 10ºC, cool breeze, 90% cloud: As I draw there’s only one brief visit by a pollinator – a bumble bee – to these Spanish bluebells, so perhaps there’s not much in the way of nectar this morning.

When we revamped the border earlier this year we took out a dense clump of Spanish bluebells by the hedge that never produced much in the way of flowers. They were already here when we moved in over thirty years ago and since then they have multiplied vegetatively by producing offset bulbs. I’ve seen no evidence of them spreading by stolons (creeping stems), which some websites say is possible. The bulbs are able to pull themselves down into the soil by shortening their roots, so the clump went down to about a foot below soil level, one bulb piled on top of another.

Unfortunately this introduced species is capable of crossbreeding with our native bluebell to produce a vigorous hybrids which can spread into woodlands. The bumble bee that visited our garden bluebells could easily make its way into the wood a hundred yards away where native bluebells are starting to flower.

I need to remove all our Spanish bluebells as I wouldn’t want to be responsible for the decline of its woodland relative.

2.00 p.m.: A bumble bee visited all the dog violets in a group amongst the grasses but paused only briefly at one or two bluebell flowers next to them, which suggests to me that, today at least, they’re not offering much of interest to passing pollinators.

Kingcups

3.15 p.m., 50ºF, 10ºF, 85% cloud, 30.1 inches, 1022 mb: My first job this morning at 6 a.m. was to flip open the studio skylight window and emphatically bang it shut again to shoo off a pair of mallards who were tucking into the tadpoles in our back garden pond. Yes, I know that all of those thousands of tadpoles can’t possibly survive but I somehow feel responsible for them. As I draw these kingcups, I can see them constantly coming to the surface, so the ducks haven’t made much of an impression on their numbers.

Dandelion

4.40 p.m.: This dandelion has sprung up amongst the chives at the edge of the herb bed. Although the Noodler’s brown ink that I’m using is waterproof, I do struggle with adding a yellow wash; it seems to pick up just a hint of the brown ink.

I was recently reading Exotic Botanical Illustration with the Eden Project and noted that authors Thurstan and Martin advise, in the context of botanical illustration, never to choose any yellow that is described as ‘cadmium’ as it will be opaque. Alternatives include ‘transparent yellow’ which I’ll try when my cadmium yellow and cadmium lemon run out.

As I’m working, a nuthatch visits the sunflower feeder at the other end of the lawn.

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