Lake outlet, Newmillerdam, 10.15 a.m.: The sitting coot gets increasingly alarmed as the drake mallard gets nearer, dabbling around the nest. The coot’s repeated, scalding notes get more frantic until its mate swims over briefly to check things out, but the mallard soon moves on.
Back to the business of incubating, the coot keeps changing position and I get a glimpse of 8-10 greenish brownish eggs.
Its mate returns and presents the sitting bird with a spindly pencil-length twig sprouting fresh green leaves. This is accepted by the bird on the nest (I’m not saying ‘the female’ because I can’t tell the difference between the two birds) and incorporated into the car tyre-sized platform.
As it’s our council leader Denise Jeffery’s birthday, I couldn’t resist a homemade birthday brownie cartoon. Congratulations too to Tracy Brabin, M.P., who celebrated her birthday yesterday by becoming West Yorkshire’s first elected mayor.By the way, her ‘vote Labour’ brownies turned out to be perfectly legal.
And commiserations to a talented bunch of runners up. What a shame that all seven couldn’t get together like the mismatched heroes of a comic book series to pool their superpowers, perhaps mentored by a wise old leader, played by former Dewsbury Reporter journalist, Patrick Stewart, to ‘promote ideals of tolerance and equality for all’ in West Yorkshire, just like he does in Marvel’s X-Men movies.
Natural sandblasting has hollowed out the softer sandstone and left the resistant bands of ironstone standing to give a Swiss cheese effect to this block in an old sandstone wall.
Iron-rich deposits can be precipitated as a scummy layer where a river meets salt water in an estuary. Perhaps that happened 300 million years ago when this sandstone was laid down.
Without knowing exactly what happened, you can still sometimes deduce the sequence of events. Sometimes a rolled pebble – a mini-Swiss roll of ironstone – suggests that a layer of iron had begun to form on a river bed but that it was rolled away by the current before it got covered by the next pulse of sediment.
In other cases, target-shaped nodules conspicuously cut across multiple layers of sandstone, suggesting that the layers came first and that the iron precipitated out as mineral-rich solutions percolated through the sediment.
My dad was in North Africa during World War II, and I remember him telling me that in the desert it dropped so cold during the night that you’d hear rocks exploding: a form of freeze/thaw weathering. I can’t promise exploding rocks in Yorkshire but you can see the effects of the weather on even the toughest of our gritstones and sandstones.
On an old garden wall, I spotted this mushroom-shaped rock that looks like a miniature of one of the Brimham Rocks. Like them it has been sculpted by wind action.
It’s that time of year again when I realise that I need to improve my plant drawing so I’ve just started Sarah Simblet’sBotany for the Artist and Nature’s Palette, introduced by Patrick Baty. Nature’s Palette was published last month to celebrate the bicentenary of the publication of Scottish artist Patrick Syme’s expanded edition of Werner’s Nomencclature of Colours. Syme suggests a system of 110 standard colours in relation to zoology, botany, mineralogy and anatomy which include ‘Siskin Green’, ‘Flax-flower Blue’ and ‘Gallstone Yellow’.
It’s a book that I need to browse through in a good light, to appreciate the difference between ‘Snow White’ and ‘Skimmed-milk White’, ‘Olive/Clove Brown’ and ‘Liver Brown’.
Breakfast time: A female squirrel tries several times to climb the bird feeder pole but soon works out that she’s not going to get beyond the baffle. She climbs one of the cordon apple trees to assess the possibilities then climbs onto the hawthorn hedge and leaps across.
She’d make short work of our plastic bird feeders so I’ve relocated the pole a few feet further from the hedge, making sure that it’s not too close to the clothes prop holding up the washing line, a route that we’ve seen squirrels use to get to the feeders in the past.
Afternoon: A few honey bee-sized bees are continually visiting the blossoms of our Howgate Wonder double-cordon apple, sometimes chased off by a second bee or by a small, dark, cigar-shaped hoverfly.
The blossom has now gone from our single cordon Golden Spire and the apples are just beginning to form.
Scientists have conclusively proved that being a Huddersfield Town supporter is good for your health: researchers have discovered that optimists are 11 to 15% more likely to live longer. For Townies make that at least 22%!
A supporter of Huddersfield Town
Remarked to his wife with a frown,
"If the lads don't buck up,
We'll be out of the Cup,
And the Terriers are going to go down!"
The daisies are hardly bothering to open up on such a cool dull morning but at least I don’t get a spot of rain until the end of my brief sketching session as Barbara and her brother John make their three-circuit – one mile – exercise walk around the park. A man, accompanied by his young son on a bike, has set himself the target of four miles: twelve times around Illingworth Park.
It rains properly in the afternoon, which our garden really needs after such a dry April. Hopefully we’ll now get a bit of warmth and things will burst into life.
Every Flower Counts . . .
Leave your lawn unmown for the month of May and let the flowers bloom on your lawn. Then, at the end of the month, find out how many bees your lawn can feed with our Every Flower Counts Survey.
Plantlife Every Flower Counts survey
Well that’s all the persuasion that I need, it’s got to be worth a try, although we might need a mown path across our back lawn to get to the veg beds and to hang out the washing.
I am of course a bit biased and I even think of garden weeds as wild flowers, however troublesome, so I’m not the one to judge when it comes to a dilemma between tidy management and wild & free.
Spray or Strim?
“What do you think of the change from strimming to using herbicides?” I ask a couple from the allotments alongside the park.
The man with the barrow isn’t convinced: “They’ve gone along the fence, but we’ve got bindweed down there, you think that was what needed doing.”
“We used to grow a blackberry along the fence,” adds the woman, “so people could pick the berries on the other side, but they said that we’d be liable if anyone was ill, so they’ve taken it out.”
Foothpath to the park and allotment sfence.
At first when I saw rings of dead grass around posts and litter bins, I blamed the local dogs, but it’s the result of the council making the change to spraying as an alternative to the expensive business of strimming around obstacles – which can be damaging to young trees.
I know how long it takes me to edge the lawn and to try and stop the chicory in our little meadow area taking over the paths and veg beds in the immediate vicinty, so I can imagine the scale of the problem of keeping things tidy over the whole Metropolitan District.
Plantlife is celebrating the way Wakefield and eight other councils are leading the way in better managing their road verges for wildlife, so I’m sure that the strimming versus herbicides dilemma has been carefully thought out, but however environmentally friendly the herbicide is that they’re using, there’s a lot of it being applied and inevitably there must be some impact on biodiversity.
A Red deadnettle, Lamium purpureum, has sprung up in a pot of soil taken from the greenhouse, growing more luxuriantly than the sweet peppers that I’d sown. It’s one of the first garden weeds to emerge at the start of the season.
