Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
My thanks to Zach (pictured below busy drawing) who reminded us all that there was a partial eclipse of the sun yesterday morning as we sat in the Coffee Stop at Horbury Junction.
I used my binoculars to project this image onto the wall, covering up one lens so as not to project two images.
As you can see, the excitement was all too much for this black Labrador, patiently waiting as its owner drank her coffee.
It’s time for a new start and in the supermarkets there’s no shortage of encouragement for us to get fitter with a bewildering amount of gym equipment on offer. I’ve gone for dumbbells. In last year’s get-fit special offers I went for a pair of 2 kilogram dumbbells, this year I’ve upgraded to 3 kilograms, that’s that’s three bags of sugar!
I’m convinced that my few minutes a day exercise with the 2kg dumbbells has given me a bit more strength in my arms and shoulders but unfortunately I haven’t seen any improvement in my shaky hands, which the doctor tells me are the result of familial, also known as essential, tremor. I guess it could also be caused by spending too much time drawing, but I’m not going to give that up!
Perching on the iron fence by the Lower Lake at Nostell, a carrion crow is struggling to extract the sweet chestnut nuts from their spiky green casings. Two of the spiny husks have become firmly Velcroed together.
The experts at nut gathering are the grey squirrels. They are so intent on burying their cache that you can walk past within a few feet of them and they won’t even bother to look up.
They’ll poke their heads down amongst the leaf litter in several spots in succession. One suggestion is that they’ll dig several ‘fake’ holes which they’ll leave nothing in, to confuse any rival squirrel that might be watching them.
The Pleasure Grounds by the Lower Lake are the most popular with squirrels, not just because of the sweet chestnuts but also because no dogs are allowed. Up by the Obelisk Lodge we’d seen a dog walker we know chasing her dog along the cycles-only path.
“She’d seen a squirrel,” she explained, “They’ll stand there, deliberately teasing the dog!”
We think that we saw the squirrel that the dog had chased. It dashed at a frantic pace across the driveway beyond the Obelisk Lodge and shot into the bushes, which resulted in a startled cock pheasant bursting out, grockling in alarm.
Some squirrels do seem to egg on the dogs. In the park, one spaniel was barking in frustration and straining on its lead but the squirrel it had spotted was on the other side of the electric fence (and probably knew that it could scamper about with impunity).
There’s a windy swirl of low pressure, the remnants of ex-Hurricane Oscar, approaching across the Atlantic. Over to the west we can see a distant bank of cloud but here it’s sunny and still with wisps of cirrus and streaks of con trails against the blue sky.
With high atmospheric pressure giving us a prolonged period of hot weather, it’s a good time to calibrate our barometer, something that I’ve never got around to doing since I inherited it from Barbara’s dad.
According to the Met Office website, the pressure today should remain stable at 1020 millibars, which is equal to about 30 inches of mercury, classed as ‘Fair’ on the barometer. Our reading was just 10 mbars out, so it needed no more than a quarter turn of the small screw on the back to put it right, which is pretty good after twenty or thirty years.
It’s an aneroid barometer so the adjustment changes the tension of a spring which is there to prevent the pressure-sensitive metal chambers inside it collapsing.
It would have been impossible to calibrate the thermometer on the day that I drew this sketchbook page in early spring, 2014, when a low pressure system was sweeping across Britain.
9.45 am, looking east, wind from south-west, 19°C: This altocumulus cloud has formed as a layer, so it is classified as stratiformis. The ripples mean that it’s also undulatus and, finally, because the sun is visible through the cloud, it’s translucidus.
10.30 am: Three-quarters of an hour later the sky has filled with stratocumulus. We don’t get thunderstorms but there are a few rain showers later in the day.
As you might have guessed, my current bedtime reading is Clouds by Eric M. Wilcox.
8 a.m.: Sunrise over Coxley Valley. The pond and the bird bath are frozen over. One of our neighbours is clinging to a gate post as she negotiates black ice on the pavement.
Sunrise this morning. We’ve had some wild weather with storms coming in from the Atlantic, but we’ve escaped the worst of them here.
10.15 a.m.: Wispy cirrus cloud is a sign of a change in the weather.
Sure enough, twenty minutes later on our walk around the valley, we’re already seeing cumulus moving in from the west below it.
As I write this, seven hours later at 5 p.m., the sky is completely overcast and we’ve had half an hour of light rain.
After my weekend watercolour workshop, it’s hardly surprising that Monday morning starts with me seeing potential subjects as the sun melts away the fog. But we’re setting out with places to go and people to see, so I’m sketching indoors again today.
The cushions provide me with a landscape in miniature.
Through the top of a window I can see the branches of an ash, which is still hanging onto a few of its keys.
I add some crayoned colour to my cushion landscape.
Late afternoon and I pull in at the viewpoint to photograph the cloudscape as we cross the moor top between Hawes and Langstrothdale.
“I think those clouds are caused by air rising as it moves over a hill,” I suggest to the man who has pulled in just behind us to photograph them on his iPad, “I’ve been reading The Cloudspotter’s Guide, but I can’t remember what they’re called.”
“Lenticular clouds?”
“That’s right; you are a cloud spotter?”
“No . . . just nutty!”
Just as I’ve got myself back in the car and out of the cool breeze, I notice another cloud-spotting feature to the left of the lenticular cloud that is hanging above Ingleborough and I grab my camera.
“Have you seen the sun-dog?” I ask the man with the iPad; “They’re caused by ice crystals in high clouds refracting the light and they always appear at a certain distance from the sun – I think it’s something like 23 degrees.”
“I wonder if that’s because we’re at 53 degrees north?” He surmises.
I wasn’t too far out, it’s 22° but the phenomenon is a halo effect caused by tiny ice crystals in translucent cloud, so the effect is independent of latitude.
Half an hour later I take the opportunity to photograph sunset over the top end of the dale from the first floor window of our barn conversion accommodation at Nethergill Farm.
It’s the first time that I’ve tried the ‘sunset’ setting on my camera. It might have warmed up the colours a little but it’s more successful than the camera’s default setting which attempts to adjust the exposure to make the scene resemble regular daylight.