Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
This common plume moth, Emmelina monodactyla, was resting on the garage door. Despite appearances ant its ‘monodactyla‘ species name, it does have the usual two pairs of wings but it rests with them tightly rolled. Also tucked in are its long rear legs, held lengthwise alongside its abdomen.
Common plume caterpillars feed on bindweed. The adults are attracted to ivy and sallow blossom and, later in the year, to ripe blackberries.
Because of the wet autumn and winter, I’ve only just cut the long shoots off our Golden Hornet crab apple. Recycling some twine from a wigwam that I’d made for climbing plants last year, I’ve tied them into bundles to create a habitat which I’m hoping might attract solitary bees, beetles or other invertebrates.
I would have done the same if I’d got around to cutting back the long shoots on the rowan in the front garden too but a pair of blue tits are showing a lot of interest in the nestbox there, so I’ll leave that job until the autumn.
We cut the Joan Jay autumn-fruiting raspberry canes down to 18 inches last autumn and now in spring they can be cut right down to two or three inches, as they flower on new growth. I’ve cut them in half to produce a couple of bundles, one of which I’ve inserted into a cavity between the rocks at the edge of the raised bed.
Robin’s pincushion growing on wild rose in the hedge along the Balk, Netherton. It is caused by the gall wasp Diplolepis rosae, which lays its eggs in a bud in springtime. The larvae develop in chambers in the gall and the next generation of gall wasps will emerge in the spring, almost all of them females. Males of this species are very rare but the females can lay fertile eggs without mating.
It’s also known as the bedeguar gall, from a French name which is derived from a Persian word meaning ‘brought by the wind’.
Yesterday, after taking out a few weeds, I swept sand into the cracks between the paving slabs by the front door. Already this morning, there are signs of activity. Could these be tracks left by an insect? Or a woodlouse?
Something has been active in the corner. I didn’t notice this tiny snail shell until I spotted in the photograph. It might have been dislodged from a crevice yesterday but I suspect that it’s been introduced along with the sand.
The sand is from Denmark. The grains are small, mostly less than a millimetre, and well-rounded, so perhaps this is windblown sand from a former dune system. Denmark has extensive dunes along its western, North Sea, coast and, further inland, extensive areas of glacial sand and gravel.
In my photograph, the glassy grains are quartz and I think that the larger, fleshy-looking ochre fragments are feldspar.
The seven species that I disturbed as I weeded around the paving stones yesterday come from seven different families, four classes and three phyla, so, within inches of our front door, we have an annelid worm, a gastropod mollusc, an isopod crustacean and a social insect.
I disturbed a large ant as I swept the driveway, which I guessed was a queen. The queen disposes of her wings after her nuptial flight, then sets about finding a suitable site – such as here under the paving stones – to start her colony.
Coincidentally, later, a few yards away, I spotted a worker ant carrying a single transparent wing, which looked like one that had been discarded by a queen.
| Common Name | Family or Order | Class or Subphylum | Phylum |
| Earthworm | Lumbricidae | Clitellata | Annelida |
| Garden Snail, Helix aspersa | Helicidae | Gastropoda | Mollusca |
| Keelbacked Slug | Limacidae | Gastropoda | Mollusca |
| Woodlouse | Isopoda | Crustacea | Mollusca |
| Shield Bug | Hemiptera | Insecta | Arthropoda |
| Rove Beetle | Staphylinidae | Insecta | Arthropoda |
| Ant | Formicidae | Insecta | Arthropoda |
I’m going back to pen and watercolour. I was looking at the sketch that I made in 1972 for my Greenhouse Mural, which I featured in my previous post. The drawing is rather messy and the media rather mixed – dip pen, watercolour and a touch of acrylic – and is applied with more enthusiasm than skill but the sketch has a lot of life in it. Coming back to it after over forty years, I can remember the exhilaration of the challenge that I’d been presented with.
After a year of practicing drawing on my iPad I’ve got to the stage where I can illustrate my Dalesman magazine articles with digital versions of my regular drawings, so I think it’s good time go back to traditional media and try to apply what I’ve learnt.
But that doesn’t mean that I’m not making use of my iMac. Ideally, I’d sit in a sunlit meadow with my sketchbook and draw whatever came along but in this case I’ve got dozens of photographs taken last summer to bring together in a double-page spread. This Photshop CC 2019 collage looks disjointed but I’m convinced that I can make it all flow together as I draw. It’s not intended to be a snapshot of life in the meadow, instead I’d like to evoke the experience of strolling through the grasses on a summer’s day.
There are some excellent new field guides around including one on hoverflies and another on bees. When I’ve completed my illustration, I’ll drop it into a page layout in InDesign to check that my text will fit in, which will hopefully run to about 600 words. Being able to identify the insects means that I can be more specific in the stories I tell about their habits.
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.
If Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen was asked to design an aquatic insect, this is what he might come up with. The smoke-tinted wings of the alderfly are folded like a roof and supported by a tracery of veins, in the style of a Tiffany lamp. Despite these stylish wings they don’t venture far from the water’s edge.
The alderfly larva is a predator, using powerful pincer-like jaws to to prey on aquatic insects such as caddis and mayfly larvae.
It’s now twenty years since I started writing this online version of my nature diaries and sketchbooks and I remember my first ever post on my Wild West Yorkshire website included a sketch of wasp visiting the flowers of the ivy.
Today wasps and flies were busy visiting the flowers on next door’s ivy. The clusters of male and female flowers might not be showy but there are plenty of them. The decadent fusty-ness of ivy is a scent that sums up autumn for me, as much as flowering privet does for late summer.
It seems like one last party for the assembled wasps and flies before the onset of winter.
Insects on ivy from my first blog post (although the word blog hadn’t been invented then) for Sunday 8 October 1998.
The drawings were scanned from my A5 page-a-day diary and coloured in Photoshop, probably, at that time, using a mouse rather than a graphics pad.
I quickly moved on to drawing in an A4 sketchbook, which saved having to erase the ruled lines in the diary. I didn’t start using watercolour until three months later, which was far less fiddly than adding colour with a mouse.
I realised that I stood a chance of photographing this male common darter, Sympetrum striolatum, because, as its name suggests, its hunting technique was to keep darting out from the corner of the herb bed then returning to sit in the same spot, soaking up the sun on the stonework.
Thinking that it would be too restless for me to get close to it, I went for my 40-150 mm zoom lens but, when it went on to settle by the pond, I could have got close enough to use the macro. The zoom couldn’t focus any closer than a couple of feet.
The female common darter yellow, which gradually fades to dark olive.
When I cleared duckweed from the pond in the early summer, I came across perhaps a dozen dragonfly larvae which were about the right size to become darter dragonflies, each of which I coaxed back into the pond.
The highlight on its compound eye is hexagonal, as are the individual lenses that make it up.
It has yellow stripes running along the length of its black legs.
This poplar hawk-moth was attracted to the ultra-violet light of a moth-trap that I set up in our garden a few years ago. They like willows, watersides, woodlands and gardens, so our location here at the lower end of Coxley Valley offers a perfect habitat.
Unlike other hawk-moths, it holds its hind-wings out at right angles so that they project in front of the fore-wings.
Drawn from a photograph on the iPad using Adobe Sketch, my first drawing using the program.