Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Riverside hide, Nethergill Farm, Langstrothdale, 3.45p.m.; A common sandpiper preens itself on a rock on the far bank of the beck then it sets off probing along the edge of the river.
It’s joined by a second bird, which trots off up the grassy bank while the first bird continues downstream.
A pied wagtail perches on rocks in the beck, flitting out to take invertebrates from amongst the pebbles.
11.30 a.m.; The female blackbird has caught another smooth newt and is dealing with it in a corner of the lawn.
The orange on the belly of the newt shows that it’s a male.
Having killed the newt she hops to the middle of the lawn in front of the pond then flies directly to the hedge where she’s nesting amongst the elder, climbing rose, honeysuckle and ivy.
4.50 p.m.; it perches on the debris I’ve raked towards the edge of the pond. Watches for a minute or so then flits to the centre of the pond and catches a dragonfly larva. It takes this into the flower border to deal with, then flies over to the hedge then perches on the top of a gate-post next door before taking to it’s nest in the hedge, approaching from our neighbour’s side, rather than taking its usual route direct from the pond.
Over the past couple of days we’ve seen a female blackbird resting in the middle of the blanket of duckweed that covers most of our pond. She’s not bathing or struggling to get out. This evening I realise what she’s up to.
She grabs a newt from just below the water surface in front of her and immediately flies to an open grassy patch at the edge of the pond to peck at it. I don’t see whether she eats it there and then or whether she takes it off to feed to her young.
I’ve seen her stalking along the edge of the pond on the look out, I now realise, for any unwary newt that might surface. Our resident newts are smooth newts. Unlike the great-crested newts they don’t have special protection under the Wildlife and Countryside Act but would this female blackbird care if they did? I think not.
I’ve seen her once before with a successful catch which she took to the raised bed behind the pond. I could see her prey was a long and flexible creature but at the time I couldn’t positively identify it.
This female blackbird is at the top of a pond food chain, at the apex of a food pyramid, but she’s not the top predator around here; she runs the risk of being incorporated into the food chain of one of the local sparrowhawks or domestic cats. 
The newts are predators in their own right; I’ve watched them eating newly emerged frog tadpoles. The tadpoles, at this early stage of their lives, are eating the algae that grows on the clump of frogspawn.
I find it amazing that you can start with sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and in a few links along the food chain end up with a blackbird.
Although my aim is to build a little eco-system in the back garden, I do think that I ought to tweak the chances of survival for the newts by clearing some of the duckweed so that the blackbird can’t sit in wait at the centre of the pond.
Two days later, on Saturday, Barbara spotted the blackbird catching a newts again, five in total. I spent five minutes raking the duckweed to the edges of the pond which should make it impossible for the blackbird to perch in the middle of the pond and give some additional cover to the newts when she is stalking around the margins.
Grey wagtails are flitting about collecting insect food below the Figure of Three locks where an overflow channel stirs up the still waters of the canal.
The bank behind is steep and covered with brambles and there are no midstream rocks to perch on so their technique involves at lot of hovering over the water surface.
Grey wagtails nest in rock crevices so the centuries old stonework offers plenty of possibilities for nest sites.
Horbury Bridge, May Day Bank Holiday Monday, 9.30 a.m.; a heron gets up from the edge of the old weir and flies downstream. The sober grey livery, black wing-tips and ‘wing light’ white patches on the leading edge of the wings give it the appearance of an RAF transport plane. The ‘black goggles’ eye-stripe makes it look determined. Will it fly over the bridge or under the arch?
It veers towards the arch on the Horbury side and disappears beneath. Then we realise why; a cormorant appears and flies off up the river. The pool below the weir is evidently private fishing.
Looking down on the action from such close quarters, we get a better view of a cormorant than any we had in Scarborough last week.
Heron and cormorant were birds from another world in my school days; spectacular images in the Observer’s Book of Birds in romantic, rugged settings.
Some memories of Ardsley Reservoir, north-east of Wakefield, from Brian Asquith, a reader of my booklet ‘Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle’;
From 1938 – 1947 my mother and father ran Thirlmere Stores, at the entrance to Thirlmere Drive (now a private house). From my bedroom window I looked out across what we called the Red Wood (you call it Westerton Wood) to the reservoir. During the war trees were felled in the wood and strung across the reservoir to prevent seaplanes landing there.
In the wood was a mine shaft with a wall around 10/12 feet high and we used to lob stones down it and they made a loud noise as they descended the shaft. The larger the stone the louder the noise. Apparently the shaft was sunk around the same time that the reservoir was constructed and the owners were not allowed to tunnel under the reservoir. This apparently ended in a court case which eventually went to the House of Lords. The mine owners lost and the shaft was never used.
There were several ponds in the area, all gone now with the building of so many houses, where we caught sticklebacks. I seem to remember some stringy looking spawn with black hyphens in the middle rather than the spherical black dots of frogspawn which we took to be newt spawn. Later on I think we found it to be toad spawn.
One of the ponds was what we called the Jowett Pond, in Haigh Moor Road, near the entrance to the reservoir but on a map I have, dated 1938, it is shown as Jude’s Pond. Around the reservoir was a ditch where we used to find crested newts but I don’t know if they are still there. We had to climb over the wall surreptitiously as the reservoir was not open to the public in those days.
No doubt you know about Lee Gap Fair, which was a horse fair held at Upper Green, (the western end of Westerton Road, which started with a Royal Charter, in the 12th century and was still going when I was a boy.
The fields it was held in were built over many years ago.
I asked Brian if he was related to the rhubarb-growing Asquith family, or to the prime-minister of a century ago, H H Asquith;
Sorry I am not from a rhubarb family (we used to call rhubarb “tusky” – I don’t know if that is a West Ardsley word or a Yorkshire word). My grandparents worked in the pits. My grandfather Asquith was a miner at Topcliffe pit (Tingley) in, I think, the 1900 census but in the next one for 1910 he was a screen operator, which usually meant you weren’t fit to go down the pit. My mother’s father was also a miner.
My father worked at Armitages Brick Works at Howley Park. I don’t think I am related to HH although, if asked, I usually say that I was born in the same town as him but he was born in the big house, which is now a furniture shop (probably a bit of poetic license), whilst I was born in a terrace house, near Morley park, which is still a terrace house near Morley park.
Link; My booklet Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle
Heading back from a book delivery, leaving motorway and ring-roads behind us we once again use the Peak District as the perfect escape route from everyday routine. We’ve called at the Riverlife Cafe at Bamford many times before but today we’re in luck and we spot new bird for our Riverlife Cafe list. A dipper flits downstream to perch on a fallen bough at the edge of the river. It flies a short way back upstream to a partially submerged bough then launches itself into the fast-flowing water. I don’t see it again until it pops up near the fallen bough, five or six metres downstream.
As we wait for our cinnamon toast and lattes, I draw siskin and coal tit.
I looked out the other day and there were at least twelve frogs in the pond. Today I counted nine clumps of frogspawn. Usually the spawn is laid at the shallow, sunnier end of the pond. This year it’s all at the overgrown, deeper end, partially shaded by the shed.
Since I wrote this, my neighbour 
Jack across the road has offered me a bucket of spawn which he always clears from his tiny pond. I don’t really need any more but I’d rather take it because otherwise he’d put it in the stream, which is fast flowing so it would just get flushed away into the river. I’m trying to work out if I can fit in a mini-pond or two into the odd corner of my garden as I know ponds have been filled in in adjacent gardens and the frog population will soon start struggling.
Hedgehog Dropping
On a mossy patch of back lawn near the pond there’s a single hedgehog dropping and, a foot or so from that, a clayey fox scat with the typical pointed end.
I tried out my new Leki monopod/walking pole on Sunday, attaching my Olympus Tough to it to film Janet’s Foss, near Malham. Even with this small camera mounted on it, the pole was useful when stepping over damp limestone boulders to get nearer to the waterfall.
Although a lot steadier than handheld, I found that it swayed slightly as I clung to it, so I used the camera shake adjustment in iMovie to reduce this effect.
The image quality of the Tough isn’t as sparkly as my regular camera (plus I still had it on the macro setting, which can’t have helped) so I tried using iMovie’s ‘romantic’ filter to soften the pixelated effect. This filter adds a soft vignette to the frame. The gradual zoom-in was also added in iMovie, using the ‘Ken Burns’ effect in the cropping tools section.
The poplar leaves by the lock on the Leeds Liverpool canal at Gargrave have all but turned to leaf mould, leaving fragmentary leaf skeletons.
On a south-facing bank by the road I see my first celandines of the year bursting into flower, pushing up amongst their dark green heart-shaped leaves and the dried stems of last year’s growth.
At the foot of this gritstone wall I pick up a couple of garden snail shells to draw. Inside a third shell I find another species of snail sheltering. Compared to the garden snail this one has a more flattened spiral, rather like an ammonite.
