Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
It’s lovely to catch up with old friends as Christmas approaches but by the time we’ve caught up on all the news and gone out to find a late lunch (and run into yet more friends and relations) the afternoon is almost over, so it’s dusk by the time I draw the wood in the fading light.
11.30 a.m., Lower Lake, Nostell Priory Park: As we walk into the wood behind the house at Nostell Priory, a mixed party of woodland birds is making its way through the trees ahead of us.
Each bird has its own approach to feeding, exploiting a different niche to the other birds in the party:
the blue tit hangs upside down to peck at an opened-up capsule hanging from the end of a slender twig on the beech tree. I suspect that it’s more interested in any invertebrates that might be sheltering in the crevices than it is in the beech nut itself
the great tit keeps flying down to ground level to probe amongst the leaf litter
a magpie follows the foraging group along. If there’s anything going on in its territory, a magpie will always want a piece of the action
Later we add another two birds to our woodland list for this morning: a dunnock flies out from beneath a conifer and, as another feeding party makes its way through trees and shrubs at the entrance to the Menagerie, a goldcrest flies in front of us to investigate the branches of a holly.
We puzzle over a bird call in the trees by the chalets in Top Wood. To me it sounds like something the size of a woodpecker, but it isn’t the mad laughing ‘yaffle’ call of the green woodpecker. We check it out with a search on the RSPB website; it’s a nuthatch. It’s got a loud call for such a small bird, one that can be difficult to spot as it makes its way along the trunk and branches of trees in the wood.
On the Lower Lake, amongst the wigeon, mallards, moorhens and tufted ducks, there are six female goosanders. We don’t see any males.
It’s been a good year for mute swans: the pair on the Lower Lake have three cygnets, the pair on the Middle Lake have four. Last year the Nostell swans weren’t so successful, with only two cygnets successfully reared.
Hundreds of knopper galls are scattered beneath the oaks in Nostell Park. On some you can see the way that the acorn has been transformed into the home and the food source for the larva of the gall wasp Andricus quercuscalis. The acorns have stalks, botanically penduncles, so these are the acorns of the common or pendunculate oak, Quercus robur.
It’s the asexual generation of this gall wasp that produces the knopper gall; the alternate sexual generation produces tiny galls on the male catkins of the Turkey oak, Quercus cerris. Turkey oak acorns have ‘mossy’ cups, that remind me of the furry Russian hat that Ivan the Terrible might have worn. There are several Turkey oaks at Nostell.
This species of bracket fungus is sprouting on deciduous stumps in the woods around the lakes.
The head gardener is adding wire mesh to the newly restored iron gate to the walled garden.
“Is that to stop the ducks getting in?” (It’s been a good year for the mallards on the nearby lakes).
“No, rabbits.”
“I worked on the film of Watership Down, so I’m always rooting for the rabbits.”
“There’s plenty of grass out there!”
The fresh greens of spring are now over and trees have filled out with lush deep green foliage. Already I have to lean over as I pass the car in the drive because the rowan has put out so many soft ferny sprays of leaf.
Strings of yellow keys – pairs of ‘helicopter’ seeds – are hanging from the sycamores.
A song thrush is taking food to a nest hidden in the beech hedge at the front of the house. A month or so ago, I watched them taking nesting material into the leylandii hedge next door but when the beech came into a leaf a week or two later they started nest-building there instead.
The hummocky ground layer of Bilberry Wood is carpeted, as its name suggests, with bilberry which is dripping with globular pink flowers, a few of which are beginning to set berries. It has flourished in the years since the wood was fenced off to prevent sheep grazing here.
Recently red squirrels have moved into the wood. They have been caught on camera attracted to feeding boxes (see link below).
Bumble bees are busy in the wood but on the strips of acid grassland around it small heath butterflies are the most conspicuous insects, flitting about over damp sedgey ground pockmarked with the hoof-prints of sheep and cattle. Two green-veined whites have paired up and come to rest among the grasses, giving us a chance to take some close-up macro shots.
In a calm section of Oughtershaw beck, large red damselflies, Pyrrhosoma nymphula, are laying their eggs, perching on a leaf of pondweed, Potamogeton.
Red squirrels at a nut feeder in Bilberry Wood, Nethergill.
There’s an arch of hawthorn blossom over the path at the entrance to Stoneycliffe Wood Yorkshire Wildlife Trust reserve. Silver birch and oak are in fresh foliage ; evening sunlight dapples the path.
It’s been cool all day then at four the sun came out and it’s turned into a glorious summer evening.
As we walk down into the wood there’s a waft of wild garlic ; some of the leaves are starting to turn yellow and shrivel but some plants are still in flower.
Another path side plant, wood avens, also known as Herb Bennet, grows alongside. It’s currently in yellow flower but will later have clusters of hooked seeds which can hitch a ride on a passing dog to be transported along the network of paths through the woods.
There’s a lot of Herb Robert too: it’s hooked cranesbill seeds are transported in a similar way. The limestone chippings used in the path provide it with a suitable habitat as it’s a plant that tends to avoid acid soils.
There are a few patches of yellow archangel at the top end of the wood, a plant that is taken as an indicator of ancient woodland.
Song thrushes are calling in alarm or more probably in a dispute over territory.
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.
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.
10.45 a.m., 48ºF, 9ºc, overcast, cool; Hemlock water dropwort grows on a silty, gravelly inside bend of the stream by the sawn-off bough of a crack willow. Its luxuriant, fresh-looking rosettes spring up along the banks and even in a few places from the stream bed itself. It’s not surprising that none of the leaves has been nibbled because every part of this plant is extremely toxic.
The harsh chatter of magpies contrasts with the restful rhythmic babbling of the brook. That’s a cliche but babbling is the only way to describe it this morning.
A smart looking grey wagtail, a male, performs a mid-air pirouette when I disturb it and its mate flitting about over a gravelly section of the stream at the entrance to the wood.
A grey squirrel has been leaning over to reach our solid-looking ‘squirrel proof’ sunflower heart feeder. As it hangs upside down from the pole, it rotates the feeder with its front legs, always in a clockwise direction. Eventually this unscrews the feeder from its hook and the lid comes off as it crashes to the ground. I pick 
up what seed I can and replace the feeder. Blackbird, robin, goldfinch and pheasant appreciate the bonus of spilt seed but it’s the wood pigeon that steadily gets through it.
This polypody fern is growing as an epiphyte on a crooked old hawthorn on by the nature trail at the National Coal Mining Museum, Caphouse Colliery. Epiphyte is simply a plant that grows on another plant: the fern isn’t parasitic on the hawthorn. This reminds me of the mysterious Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor where old stunted oaks grow up amongst massive tumbled slabs of granite and every surface, rock and tree, is covered with moss, lichen and fern. This is on a much smaller scale of course but it has the advantage for me that its just a couple of miles up the road.
As I shelter under an umbrella, I realise that to draw all the pinnate indentations on each leaf is going to take me a lot longer than the time that I’ve allowed, so I outline all the fronds and decide to come back another day to complete the drawing and add some colour.
Link: National Museum for Coal Mining for England, Caphouse Colliery.