The title of this self-explanatory experiment is a tribute to Miles Kington’s Nature Made Ridculously Simple, which might be due for a reprint.
Comics made ridiculously simple
Arum Berries
The ripening berries of the cuckoo pint look like bunches of party balloons. These were growing in a small group by the roadside but in the wood, where it grew with tropical luxuriance in the spring, we don’t see any berries.
For English school children, it’s just the beginning of the long summer vacation but there’s an end-of-summer feeling as we negotiate an overgrown footpath between the seedheads of shoulder-high false oat grass, stooping to avoid overhanging stems of bramble.
This meadow brown, enjoying the honey-scented flowers of creeping thistle alongside the footpath, looks a bit the worse for wear. One theory is that the eye-spots save the butterfly from serious injury because a bird would peck at them but it looks as if whatever attacked this butterfly went for the hindwings.
The Water Margin
I’m reading James A. Michener’s The Hokusai Sketchbooks, so this morning at Newmillerdam, as a change from pen and watercolour, I’ve gone for Chinese brush and Noodler’s Black Ink.
Lying in the lakeside mud beside me, was a freshwater mussel shell, so I used that as a suitably oriental-looking palette to mix my grey ink wash. I dipped my cup in the water and, as I started to paint, realised that I’d caught two small water creatures – water beetles perhaps – which I released unharmed at the end of my session.
I wonder if the granular quality of the wash is a characteristic of Noodler’s, or whether it was debris in the water.
In England, our school holidays have now started and the lakeside path was a bit busier than usual however, in this willowy backwater, I had this corner of floating world to myself. Just me and a few passing mallards and a coot that came ashore within a few feet of me, apparently oblivious of me until I moved.
It’s there in the bottom right-hand corner of my drawing.
Bird, Man and Dog
A test for my new iPad Pro: a pencil rough of a cartoon walk drawn in Clip Studio Paint. Now that I’ve familiarised myself with the way it works again, I’ll go on to try something more ambitious.
Just one thing to work out is how to export the finished animation – it’s disappearing into a black hole at the moment instead of saving to a file – which is why I’ve had to show it in a movie taken with my iPhone.
Razor Shell
I picked up this pod razor shell, Ensis siliqua, on the strandline at Bridlington last month. The valves, still hinged to each other, are so brittle that they broke as I carried it, yet they’re are tough enough for this clam to burrow deeply into sand, extending a muscular foot to excavate its burrow. It extends a siphon to the surface for filter feeding and respiration.
I’ve identified it as the pod razor shell because it seems to be broader a straighter than the other species of razor shell found on British beaches.
This is my first drawing on my new iPad Pro, using the vintage pen in Adobe Fresco and the natural brush 1. It doesn’t feel as natural as real pen and watercolour but the updated iPad is about as good as it gets for digital drawing.
The Foxes’ Ball
They brought us:
- one pink-and-yellow cricket practice ball (which I must return to our neighbours’ spaniel, Rogue, two doors up the road)
- three tennis ball in varying degrees of fluffiness and squishiness
- two dead rats
In the veg beds they’ve flattened our seedling Musselburgh leeks, broken into the netting over our dwarf French beans and dug a series of small neat holes.
The fun and games didn’t stop with stolen tennis balls: they also dug up several of our ball-sized Sturton onions and stashed most of them at the bottom of the hedge but one was taken over to the middle of the path by the shed at the other side of the garden.
A single broad bean pod was neatly nipped off and left in the middle of the now flattened leek bed.
Shore Crab
The shell of this common mussel is encrusted with the calcareous tubes of keelworms, which have a prominent ridge, so that they’re triangular in cross section.
The carapace of this shore crab is encrusted with barnacles, these are the barnacle Semibalanus balanoides, which have a diamond-shaped aperture. Between the barnacles at the front of the crab’s shell there’s a flat, pockmarked whitish crust, which looks like sea mat, a marine bryozoan, a colonial animal, filter-feeding from tiny individual cells, like coral.
Like this small frond of bladderwrack seaweed, I picked these up on the beach near the harbour at Bridlington when we spent the day there last month.
Gatekeeper
After yesterday’s sun, this morning was overcast and cool enough for this male gatekeeper to stay perched on a bramble leaf as we photographed it. Gatekeepers are named because the males, distinguished by the dark band of scent glands on their forewings, were often seen patrolling their territory at the entrance to a wood.
Since we first started visiting St Aidan’s RSPB reserve a couple of years ago the main track along the foot of the hill has matured from what you might have called open scrub to something a little closer to woodland edge habitat. The gatekeepers appreciate that but perhaps it doesn’t suit the kestrel that was often seen hovering over this stretch, or the stonechat, which we saw on almost every visit, perching on top of a post. Today the posts have disappeared amongst the long grasses and willow bushes.
The reserve proved to be a good place to try out the Zeiss Victory SF 8×32 binoculars that I’ve got on a 48-hour loan. I was able to focus on the butterfly from as little as about seven feet away and see far more detail than I could with the unaided eye.
These common blue damselflies were clasping each other in tandem amongst the grasses.
The 8x32s have a much wider field of view than my regular pocket-sized 8x20s, so I found could quickly focus on any bird: a common tern diving, a linnet perching at the edge of the reedbed and, the most spectacular, a bittern flying high down the valley in the direction of Fairburn Ings.
Back home, as I reluctantly prepared to pack away the 8x32s for the courier to collect tomorrow, I was able to use them one last time as a buzzard performed a lap of honour, circling over the meadow.
Zeiss Victory 8×32
Trying out some Zeiss Victory 8×32 binoculars and they’re impressive for looking at the sparrows, goldfinches and tits on the feeders but if it’s cool enough tomorrow I look forward to taking them out on location on an RSPB reserve.
It looks like being a clear night, so I’ll turn them on the night sky, with a waxing moon and the ‘Summer Triangle’ of the bright stars Deneb, Vega and Altair over the wood, so we’ll be looking towards the Milky Way. The the ratio of magnification to the size of the objective lenses, 8×32, gives them good light-gathering powers, better than the same binoculars in the more powerful 10×32 version.
They’re equally impressive for close-ups: at 6ft 4inches tall, I can’t quite focus on my feet, but if there was a dragonfly on the ground just three feet in front of me I could easily focus on that.
Crack Willow
Newmillerdam, 10.30 a.m., 65℉, 17℃, a few high, hazy stratus: This backwater near the car park is a first call for people feeding the ducks. A family of four young coot chicks is being fed by an adult with delicacy and care, interspersed with aggression as the adult attacks one of the chicks, clasping its head in its beak several times as the chick paddles frantically to escape. Perhaps it’s a stray chick from another family – there’s another family foraging around the boughs of the crack willow, just yards away – but coots will attack their own young.
Another possibility is that the aggression was triggered because this particular chick didn’t have such bright colours on its head as its siblings. Could this be a sign that it wasn’t in the best of health and that therefore – in order to give the rest of the brood a better chance of survival – it wasn’t worth the effort of feeding? The adult was going for its head-patch, as if that was causing offence.
Enchanter’s Nightshade
Enchanter’s nightshade grows at my feet at the edge of the path. Unlike most other members of the willowherb family it doesn’t release parachute-type seeds but instead covers its seedpods with Velcro-style hooks, so that they get carried along by any passing furry animal. No shortage of those here at Newmillerdam.
For the Anglo Saxons, enchanter’s nightshade was ælf-þone (aelfthone), a charm against elves.
