Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
This is not the ideal way to grow peppers. I took some seed from a red pepper in early spring, dried it, then planted it in garden soil from the greenhouse. First to germinate were garden weeds, mainly chickweed but also red deadnettle, spurge and what I think is nipplewort.
The pepper seedlings are now looking yellow and undernourished, so it’s time for me to pot them on and give them a chance to grow, flower and fruit.
Newmillerdam, 10.55 a.m., 100% cloud, 7℃, 45℉, rain: Three mallard drakes are soon chased away by the second, non-brooding bird, which soon returns to feed the chicks. Unfortunately the nest platform is festooned with soggy white bread but the young are also getting natural food as the second bird dives nearby, which is more popular than the gloopy, soggy bread.
From 10 or 12 feet away, I can’t see the flanges that are already starting to develop along the toes of the coot chicks’ feet. Three of the chicks are noticeably larger than the others and already coming out for a brief swim around the nest. The smaller chicks stay under the brooding bird.
When it comes on to rain all the chicks somehow find room in the nest, one of them just poking its head out from the shelter of ‘mum’s’ (I’m guessing it’s mum) wing and getting fed when the other adult swims in with the odd morsel of food. I can’t tell what the food is but one bit looked a bit wispy as if it was waterweed.
You could describe it as biological erosion: a few weeks ago I noticed a small group of house sparrows ‘gritting’ on an old sandstone wall in Horbury.
The sand grains are used in the bird’s gizzard to help grind down the seeds and grain that form its staple diet. Sparrows will also peck at mortar on walls, which gives them an extra mineral, calcium carbonate, in the cement.
Like other aspects of sparrow life – such as feeding, drinking, dust bathing and courtship – this is an opportunity for a bit of a social gathering and the inevitable chirruping dispute.
I thought that I’d give my laidback lepidopterist friend Roger a bit of a challenge with his birthday card this year. This is going to be difficult if you’re not familiar with British butterflies, so answers at the foot of this post.
And if that isn’t enough here are four bonus species – all different species of a group of small butterflies that hold their forewings at an angle above their hindwings, so they look a bit moth-like.
Top cartoon, back row, left to right: Red Admiral, Purple Hairstreak, Painted Lady
Front row: Small Tortoiseshell, Purple Emperor, Comma, Small Copper
Bonus species, left to right: Large Skipper, Small Skipper, Dingy Skipper, Essex Skipper (and yes, as Roger pointed out, Dagenham is no longer in Essex, it became a part of Greater London in 1965!)
I didn’t get around to including the Chequered Skipper, shame about that.
Even at the lowest magnification of 10x, you can see the cells in this chickweed leaf, which is just one centimetre from base to tip.
Zooming in to 60x you can see how the cells line up to make structures, along the vein and the edge of the leaf.
At 200x there’s isn’t much depth of field but it looks to me as if there’s a single line of cells forming a tube along the edge of the leaf.
These were taken on a Traveler USB microscope, which I bought in 2009 at Aldi’s. The software that came with it is long out of date, so it’s taken a bit of ingenuity by my computer expert friend Martin to find a workaround to get it working on my iMac, via a virtual Windows 10 installation.
Under the Microscope my Wild West Yorkshire nature diary for 20 September 2009.
We had so many nights of frost last month that we’re leaving it until the last possible moment to plant our runner beans. Having lost tomatoes to the frost down in the greenhouse, we’re keeping these on the kitchen windowsill, just in case. They’re visibly growing every day.
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.