Dor Beetle

dor beetle

On Wednesday evening, I found this dor beetle lying on its back on the tiles near the back door, kicking its legs in a futile attempt to turn itself upright again. I rescued it and released it on the patio. They’re attracted to light so it may have flown in and made a crash landing when it collided with a cupboard door.

Working in pairs, the adults bury dung for their larvae to feed on.

This looks very like the species Geotrupes stercorarius except for the antennae. According to George McGavin in the RSPB Wildlife of Britain:

the club-ended antennae have 11 segments but are not elbowed”

George McGavin, RSPB Wildlife of Britain, The Definitive Visual Guide

These were elbowed. The beetle was almost an inch long, perhaps 2 centimetres. It was flattened in cross-section, compared to, say, a similar-sized bumblebee.

These beetles are often infested with mites, hence one old name ‘The Lousy Watchman’. I didn’t see any mites on this individual but it had been infected with a fungus and some tiny sporangia were growing from its left jaw and its mouthparts. Picking up spores must be a occupational hazard for a beetle that specialises in digging.

Drawn in Adobe Fresco with an Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro, using the ‘Natural Inker’ pen and the ‘Color fill’ brush.

Digitally Drawn

Sketches Pro

As for once I hadn’t taken my sketchbook with me, I literally drew with a digit yesterday, using a finger on my iPhone screen in Tayasui Sketches Pro (left) as we sat with a mint and lime drink in the shaded courtyard of Horbury’s Flamingo Teapot Cafe but after all the large-scale pen and watercolour work that I’ve done for my Redbox Gallery show, I felt that it was about time I tried drawing with my Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro again.

The man in the hat and the sumac were drawn in Adobe Fresco, using its virtual ‘Blake’ pen for the drawing.

Paperlike

Would I find it easier if I used a matt screen protector, like Paperlike, on my iPad, to give it a more natural feel? Or a rubberised tip for the Apple Pencil, to give it a hint of resistance as it moves over the glass screen?

Adobe Fresco sketch

Drawing on the iPad is never going to be as familiar to me as pen on paper but I’m keen to have the best possible image so I’d have to avoid any matt screen protector because it adds a very slight amount of colour fringing to the image.

Every Flower Counts #2

I didn’t have a ball to throw over my shoulder to select my random square metre for last month’s survey but since then a fox has deposited this cricket practice ball in our back garden. I must return it to Rogue, the springer spaniel two doors along from us.
The flowerheads of ribwort plantain and catsear fell just outside my square metre.

It’s the last day to take part in Plantlife’s ‘Every Flower Counts’ follow-up survey, in my case to see how our front lawn has progressed since its last mowing at the end of ‘No-mow May’.

In my randomly chosen square metre there are just 9 white clover flowerheads, most of them already partially going to seed, so my nectar score is a little disappointing:

But it is a lot better than my ‘No Mow May’ score because a handful white clover flowerheads can produce more nectar than the 75 germander speedwell flowers that I counted last month so the lawn is producing 10 milligrams of nectar per square metre, an improvement on the 1.7 at the end of May, and the whole lawn can potentially support 13 bees, up from 2 in the last survey.

Yorkshire Rock

Dalesman article

The July Dalesman arrived in this morning’s post and my ‘Wild Yorkshire’ nature diary has a suitably rocky theme, as this year my British Geological Survey paperback, Yorkshire Rock, a journey through time, celebrates 25 years in print.

Redbox Show

Redbox Gallery
chimnies

Thanks to my scale model, we found that my Addingford and Joby cut-outs just fitted into the Redbox Gallery, although we did have to do a bit of jiggling about with the lengths of 10lb breaking strain fishing line that are holding up the storks cut-out and the speech bubbles.

Redbox Gallery show
St Peter's Church, Horbury

On Tuesday I drew St Peter’s Church spire from the dentist’s waiting room, which is just around the corner from the Redbox.

Addingford Logo

logo

For my ‘Addingford’ logo for my Redbox show, I resisted the temptation to echo the Addingford Steps location by drawing 3D lettering chiselled from stone, like a Charlton Heston epic from the 1950s but I did feel that I needed something blocky so I’ve gone for what’s called an Egyptian-style hand-drawn font – one with squared-off serifs – and I felt that it should be slightly condensed.

cut-out lettering

The vermillion (Winsor & Newton ink) is a nod towards the telephone box setting of the show and intended as a colour contrast with all the green in the artwork. It also picks out, more or less, the colour of Joby’s pullover.

Horseshoe Geranium

pelargonium

The horseshoe geranium, more accurately known as the zonal pelargonium, is a hybrid species whose wild ancestors grew in Mediterranean climate zones. Because it wasn’t suited to surviving our winters, gardeners used to keep it going through the winter as stem cuttings. This can mean the expense of heating a greenhouse and there is the possibility of plants being susceptible to virus, so it’s more usual these days to grow it from seed.

Our neighbour has grown some this year and gave us this plant as a small seedling. It wasn’t too happy growing on our kitchen windowsill and its leaves turned red. We’ve discovered this was probably because it was getting too cold at night. It’s thriving now though in its small pot. Apparently if you give them too large a pot, they put their efforts into vegetative growth instead of flowering.

pelargonium flowerhead

The flowers have no scent but the leaves have a pungency that reminds me of dustiness. This probably dates back to my childhood experience of geraniums, which were often leggy plants growing on dusty windowsills in primary schools.

flowers from the garden

The cold hasn’t just affected our indoor geranium: the sweet peas have been very slow to start flowering and the three stems in this bottle are the first we’ve picked.

basil
Basil: we did grow some from seed earlier in the year, but this is a plant from the garden centre that we’re growing on.

The View from the Boathouse

Newmillerdam
Drawn with my new Lamy nexx with the EF nib, in brown De Atramentis ink, watercolour added later, as Barbara rang me to say that she and her brother had had to abandon their usual circuit of the lake.
swallow

The best place for me to draw at Newmillerdam on this rainy morning is the Boathouse Cafe, sitting looking out of the 200-year old gothic mullioned window with a mug of latte.

geese

Swallows swoop and glide low over the glowering grey surface of the lake. Thirty pink-footed geese – probably two or three families combined – progress sedately across the placid waters, making surprisingly little noise, considering how excitable geese can be.

coot family

There’s a family of coots with three youngsters, now almost adult size but in charcoal-and-white penguin-style livery, instead of the jet-black of the adults

On the coots’ nest by the outlet of the lake, an adult is sitting tight. This is a popular little nesting platform, now with it’s own mini-garden of herbage, and I think several families of coots must have been raised here over the last few months.

duck

In the shallow film of water cascading over the top course of masonry of the outlet, mallards are dabbling. The lake has its backwaters, opaque and eau-de-nile today, but here there’s always a flow, so always the chance of some invertebrate or seed being washed down.

Two ducklings are swimming nearby. I’ve seen smaller ducklings stuck below the horse-shoe cataract of the outlet, unable to make the leap back up again, but these two seem just about old enough to escape the dangers.

duckling

The Watchers by the Pond

cut-out figures
speech bubble
First rough for a speech bubble.

More unusual visitors at our garden pond and although my cut-out characters now bear little resemblance to the Patrick Stewart and Richard Tolan as Joby and his dad in the Yorkshire Television version of Stan Barstow’s Joby, they have the folksy quality that I was after for my Redbox Gallery show.

They’ll be sitting on a riverbank, a folding screen of two A1 sheets of foamboard. Time to get out my largest brush, a varnish brush, to add the indigo blue of the Calder.

river artwork