Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Ducks and geese are beginning to gather again on the lake at Newmillerdam with a small flotilla of Canadas hanging around the war memorial. Three drake mallards surround a duck as she swims along with her ducklings following behind. One of the drakes mounts duck, grabbing her by the head and pushing her underwater. The ducklings form a tight circle and the duck manages to head for the cover of overhanging branches and extricate herself from the drake. The ducklings soon follow her.
I usually say that May is my favourite month but cold weather has delayed blossom, birds and butterflies to such an extent that this year June is feeling as fresh as May, even though we’re not just nine days from midsummer.
I’m trying to focus on natural history this summer and to try and keep my main sketchbook – an 8×8 inch square spiral bound Amelie watercolour paper Pink Pig – as a nature journal but I do need a pocket-sized sketchbook for when we’re dashing about on errands, so this morning I started an A6 landscape Hahneműhle Watercolour book which is a sturdily bound hardback, so it slips into my little art bag more easily than a spiral bound version would.
There isn’t a handy bench in the library garden, so I’m trying a new pocket-sized (if you’ve got an extra-large pocket, that is) folding foam mat. It’s never going to replace my folding chair for comfort but it will just about do for ten minutes sitting on the concrete paving slabs, resting my back against one of the raised beds.
It was a plastic plant label from our Musselborough leeks left lying in the middle of the back lawn that made me suspect that we’d had a fox in the garden. What else would take such an interest in a plant label?
Today we’ve got conclusive evidence of its presence with a dark, curled fox scat that has appeared overnight in the corner of the lawn by the pond.
Over the past week or so we’ve noticed a few fresh scrapes – about teacup size – mainly in the veg beds but also in the wood chip path.
One morning two weeks ago, shortly after we’d laid down a thick layer of wood chip on the path by my little meadow area, we saw a magpie eating carrion. We found the remains of a brown rat – by then just the vertebra were left, picked clean by the magpie – and we now think that it’s likely that this had been cached by the fox.
Mr Brooke was a stickler for pencil and rulers, Mrs Johnson was the school’s hedgehog wrangler, Mrs Manning was noted for getting in the groove on the school’s upright piano and Mrs Argent – in those pre-mobile days – apparently had the job of summoning teachers to the phone, but I think my favourite member of staff from St Ignatius R.C. Primary School, 1994, would be Mrs Claypole, cheerfully pushing the the school dinners trolley.
After more than half a century, our tea towel is gradually fading and getting thinner, so I thought that it was time to scan it, as it’s now a bit of a historical document.
It was produced by Stuart Morris Textiles of Hadleigh, Suffolk. It dates from when one of our nephews was in his last year there. Haven’t spotted him yet amongst the self-portraits.
This Early Bumblebee, Bombus partorum, was making brisk work of checking out the chives flowers in the Horbury Library garden. It’s one of our most widespread and common bumblebees. The queens emerge in March.
No Mow May is over but these dog daisies in the top corner of our back lawn have escaped the mower.
There’s a bit of a battle going on this morning at the tree bumblebee nest in the corner of our roof. A pair of bees drops to the ground, locked in combat.
I’m guessing that another species of bumblebee is raiding the nest but I don’t get enough of a look at it to identify it. My impression is that it is redder than the tree bumblebee and has just one band, so I’m wondering if it was a species of cuckoo bumblebee.
Must keep my mobile phone handy next time I’m working in the front garden.
The Serpentine Lake at Wentworth Castle has silted up over the centuries and been colonised by willows. Last time we were here we met an 80-year old man who started work as a gardener here aged fourteen. A week after his retirement, he returned as a volunteer. He remembered when there was more open water on the Serpentine and, as a boy, he could paddle and swim his way down, taking the occasional egg from the nests of the waterbirds on his way.
A mallard duck leads her brood of young ducklings amongst the dense cover of the willows.
Alongside the tracks of the birds in the soft mud at the water’s edge, there are the slots of fallow deer. I can be sure of my identification: there are no sheep to confuse the issue in this section of the park.
11.15 a.m., 70℉, 21℃, storm cloud looking threatening to the west, but we escape the worst of it: The triple flower-heads of Yellow Flag Iris look complicated, but they work perfectly when a bumble bee lands on them. I assume that it would take one of the larger bees to trigger the mechanism and enter the flower, but a smaller bumble bee manages just as easily.
The coots’ nest near the war memorial has been neatly built up since last week and there are at least three chicks.
Back home, I draw some of the visitors to the bird feeders. In additions to the greenfinch, blackbird, starling, blue tit, robin, wood pigeon and house sparrow that I’ve sketched here, we had a male great spotted woodpecker coming to the feeders and a grey squirrel with a very undernourished tail.
My thanks to Connie, Sofia and Annabelle for doing a bit of pond dipping in our back garden yesterday. They reported a single large water beetle and the odd damselfly larva but they made no mention of tadpoles or young frogs. That might be because of the numbers of newts in the pond.
Smooth Newts 22, of which only 5 were female, so in this sample less than a quarter of the population is female. On the occasions that I’ve seen a newt caught by a blackbird I’ve often spotted the bright orange belly of the male.
The blue tit chicks left the nest box this afternoon while we were out but sadly not all of them made it. As I sat drawing the clover and wood avens, I noticed that one unfortunate chick had ended up in the pond but, better news, I heard, then saw another chick from the bottom of the hedge, right next to me. I packed up immediately and one of the parents soon came down to feed it.