I’m struggling to identify this polypore bracket fungus but I’m going for Smoky Bracket, Bjerkandera adusta, a common fungus on the dead wood of deciduous trees. Having said that, this sawn-off poplar hasn’t quite given up the ghost: it’s putting out new green shoots from epicormic buds beneath the bark.
With bracket fungi, it’s important to know what species of tree they are growing on. This is poplar, which has distinctive diamond-shaped lenticels (right), so another possibility is that this is the Poplar Bracket, Oxyporus populinus.
On our last visit to the Dales, I walked around Bilberry Wood in Langstrothdale, using my Olympus Tough TG-4 to take short movie shots of every plant and fungus that I found. So how am I going to put those 42 random shots together to make a coherent two-minute film?
The Freeform Project Panel in Adobe Premier Pro is proving useful: I can drag and drop thumbnails of the clips around the screen, so I’m arranging them in groups, such as habitats, flowers and mosses. Once I’ve got them in a suitable order they can go straight on to the Editing window and I can add titles and a commentary.
I’ve already scrolled through each clip and selected the best few seconds of each one, by adding an ‘In’ and an ‘Out’ point to each clip, so there shouldn’t be any redundant or out-of-focus footage in my first rough cut of the movie.
Wether Fell, seen from the causey stone path behind the Wensleydale Creamery. Gayle Beck at the foot of the slope in the foreground. A Roman road runs along the top of the fell.
I’m reading David Joy’s 2019 book Discover Your Woods, Trees in the Dales so this afternoon I had a walk around Bilberry Wood here as Nethergill Farm. There are pines, larches and firs but the only broadleaved species that I notice is rowan.
Birch, Goat Gap Cafe, Newby, 4/9/20
Rushes and sphagnum moss grow in the damper areas, with heather and polytrichum mosses on drier hummocks.
At the more exposed western corner of the wood, a swathe of pines has been flattened, the fallen trees revealing that they were shallow rooted.
The only bird that I notice is a wren, flitting about amongst the ground vegetation and it appears that a wren spotted my iPhone which I’d set to take a time-lapse sequence, flashing on the screen for a single frame.
Bumblebee on Devil’s-Bit Scabious
There are ferns, bracken and a few brambles but the ground layer consists predominantly of various kinds of mosses. Tormentil straggles around, dotting the ground with its four-petalled yellow flowers.
Squeeze stile on the causey stone path, between Gayle and Hawes church.
There are a few fungi and, as the name of the wood suggests, plenty of bilberry.
This Down-looker Snipe-fly,Rhagio scolopacea, was keeping watch from a fence-post at the edge of the parkland alongside Top Park Wood, Nostell, in May last year. It habitually rests facing downwards and it will dart off on short flights, like a snipe.
This was probably a male defending a territory as it waited for a female to appear but this common species of snipe-fly has occasionally been recorded snatching insects in mid-air. The larvae are predators, feeding on small earthworms and insects in leaf litter and in decaying wood.
Despite its impressive appearance, it is harmless to humans.
The day started with a frost but by lunchtime that had melted away as a warm front came through, although it didn’t turn mild enough to melt the ice on the pond.
As a change from the iPad, I’ve gone back to a real sketchbook, a Pink Pig with their own brand of 270 gsm watercolour paper, Ameleie. Also as a change, I’ve gone for a fibre tip, a 0.1 Pilot Drawing Pen in brown, and my larger studio set of Winsor & Newton Professional Watercolours.
There’s been a good variety of birds coming to the feeders this afternoon including long-tailed tits, nuthatch and two pairs of blue tits which seem ready to start falling out over the nestbox. We recently replaced the old blue tit nesting box with a sparrow nestbox, which is designed for three pairs to nest in. I can’t see the blue tits ever settling down in adjacent nestboxes, so my guess is that eventually the house sparrows will take an interest and move in.
Last April, after a winter that had lingered on and on, we were keen to get out as soon as the spring blossom started to appear. A friend, Philippa Coultish, was taking us around her local patch: the valley of Park Gate Dike, northeast of Skelmanthorpe. Because of the ‘Beast from the East’ snowstorms, we were a bit early for the flowers we’d planned to see in Blacker Wood.
On our way back towards the town, we walked parallel with the Kirklees Light Railway and watched one of the narrow gauge steam trains make a stop up at Cuckoo’s Nest Halt. I’ve yet to take a trip on the railway but hope we can return to walk from station to station alongside the line, then get the train back.
There’s an excellent pack of leaflets, Walking in and around Denby Dale with fourteen walks, centred on Denby Dale, Skelmanthorpe, Clayton West and Emley.
There’s a new bench at Newmillerdam Country Park by the bridge at the top end of the lake.
“Is it home grown?”, I ask the men who’ve assembled it. “Yes, it was grown here.” “What sort of timber did you go for?” “It’s larch: larch lasts longer.”
Causeway and top end of lake, Newmillerdam, September 1973, Agfacolor slide taken by Richard Brook. The lake is now entirely surrounded by woodland.
The conifers here were planted for use as pit props. Who would have thought at the time they were planted in the 1970s that, by the time they were mature, deep mining and opencast mining would have disappeared from the Wakefield area.
On our walk around Newmillerdam Lake this morning, it’s good to see the sun breaking through after so many gloomy, misty November days, especially as we get a brief glimpse of two kingfishers flying along the edge of the lake, apparently engaged in a bit of a dogfight, one swooping at the other. One (or possibly both of them, it all happens so quickly) heads out across the lake to the far side, where the drain enters the lake. We’re told that the drain is the place that you’re most likely to see them.
I see the sapphire blue on one of the bird’s backs and Barbara also spots the orange of its breast as it flies by.
Ducks and Drakes
A month from today – Boxing Day – the days will be getting longer. Drake mallards are already cruising around in noisy groups, displaying to females but they won’t start nesting until March.
One of the coots on the lake was cruising along calling – a sound which reminds me of a hooter on a child’s pedal car.
From our table in the cafe at Blacker Hall Farm, I can see the cattle grazing, a powerful-looking bull standing calmly amongst them.
I always go for the table by the French windows when we call for coffee, and in my case a date scone, at Blacker Hall Farm Shop cafe. The original of this sketch is 2.5 inches, 6 cm, across.
A few weeks ago we were commenting on how few goosanders we were seeing at Newmillerdam, but today there are twenty or thirty in loose groups scattered across the open water and the reedy narrow section.
