Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
The fibrous scales on this small mushroom resemble those of the Blushing Wood Mushroom, Agaricus silvaticus, a common species that some writers say is good to eat, but there are similar-looking species that aren’t, so I won’t be giving it a try.
The alder is the nearest that we get to mangroves as it produces adventitious roots above ground which enable it to grow in very wet ground, even at the water’s edge. These female woody ‘cones’ are ripening and will attract seed-eating birds such as redpolls and siskins.
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.
Losing your way in the woods? My latest homemade birthday card.
YouTube version.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Denby Dale Walkers are Welcome leaflets, available as PDFs.
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.”
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.