The Mob

birds

“As we head down the track we spot a buzzard being mobbed by a magpie and kestrel. As it dips and soars fending off the two birds another buzzard soars carefree over the ridge.”

From Barbara’s nature diary, 30 January 2020

I needed to inject a bit of drama into my next (January 2021) Wild Yorkshire diary for The Dalesman, so I’m illustrating the incident Barbara described, along with a male stonechat perching on a fence post. The pen and watercolour of the reedbed and lagoon will go right across at the foot of the double-page spread. I was busy with Sandal Castle and the Rhubarb Festival last January, so I’m having to recreate what my sketchbook might have looked like if I’d had time to draw on the day.

lagoon

Illingworth Park Woodcuts

For this morning’s stroll around a foggy Illingworth Park, Ossett, I’ve gone for a woodcut effect. These were taken on my iPhone, using an art filter in the Adobe Photoshop Camera app. You get a preview of the effect, so I soon found myself looking at the world through woodcut-tinted glasses. Amongst my favourites are the drystone wall, the fungi and the allotment fence.

Velvet Shank

velvet shank

Another iPhone drawing, this is velvet shank fungus growing on an old stump at Nostell last January. The effect of Adobe Fresco’s natural inker in various opaque colours reminds me of oil pastels, which I briefly experimented with in my student day. I like the out-of-control energy of the swirling line, which was literally out-of-control as I struggled again with my Wacom Bamboo stylus slipping about on the protective glass screen of the phone.

It’s so different to my usual nature diary sketches for The Dalesman but I’ll drop it into the layout and I think that it might work in the context of the article, I’m not producing a field guide and this article is about the way life seems to be waiting to burst forth once we get to January.

Survival Sandwich

On an online course I’m doing, Become a Better Presenter, a free FutureLearn course from The Royal Observatory, Greenwich, we’ve been asked to write a script for an imagined talk about making a sandwich pitched to a specific audience. I’m going for our local naturalists’ society:


So, you’re heading for the Peak District: what are the essentials for fieldwork?

OPENS HAVERSACK

Notebook? yes, got that . . . binoculars? Check! . . . waterproofs . .
And, yes, thought someone would suggest it: lunch! But this is no ordinary packed lunch . . .

OPENS BOX

. . . this sandwich was developed by survival expert Ray Mears, who says he always takes one with him whenever he heads for the hills.

GETS OUT INGREDIENTS

And it’s simple to make:

The bread, I’m going for wholemeal and actually this is homemade and in this case the flour was ground at a centuries-old watermill at Worsborough.

Butter? To give us a protein boost we’re going for peanut butter, organic of course, and – controversially – I’m a chunky man.

Instant energy? This is pure Peak District heather honey from last August, which was exceptional for heather, hope you managed to get out there, it was a sea of purple over The Strines. One teaspoon, so that’s 1,500 bee miles across the moors . . . but it’s going to be a tough hike so let’s make it two: that’s 3,000 miles!

Finally the main event: a superfood developed in the greenhouses at Chatsworth by Joseph Paxton: the Cavendish banana!

Link

Become a Better Presenter : Improve Your Public Speaking Skills, a free FutureLearn course. Learn how to improve your presentation skills and add personality into your presentation style on this three-week course. Learn from The Presenter Network at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.

Heron King

heron

You can see that I’ve struggled to draw one of my Dalesman nature diary illustrations in the same grungy style as my first Adobe Fresco drawing on my iPhone, but really that’s the point of it. This heron, which touched down on the greenhouse last January, was probably checking out our garden pond for the first frogs. It looks suitably regal and, for our frogs, dangerous, so I thought of the Aesop’s fable of the frogs who ask Zeus for a king but soon tire of log that he throws down for them and request a more impressive leader. They soon come regret their request.

Fresco for iPhone

man in hat

My first drawing using Adobe Fresco for iPhone, drawn with a Wacom Bamboo stylus.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Common Puffball

puffball

Common Puffball, Lycoperdon perlatum, is edible when young, as in the one above, growing on grassland near trees on the south bank of Skelton Lake. The pyramidal warts fall away as the puffball changes colour from white to ochre brown, leaving a faint net-like pattern.

These two were growing within a few feet of each other with a third nearby.

Woodland Mushroom

woodland mushroom

The fibrous scales on this small mushroom resemble those of the Blushing Wood Mushroom, Agaricus silvaticus, a common species that some writers say is good to eat, but there are similar-looking species that aren’t, so I won’t be giving it a try.

Alder

alder cones

The alder is the nearest that we get to mangroves as it produces adventitious roots above ground which enable it to grow in very wet ground, even at the water’s edge. These female woody ‘cones’ are ripening and will attract seed-eating birds such as redpolls and siskins.

Polypore Bracket

bracket fungus

I’m struggling to identify this polypore bracket fungus but I’m going for Smoky Bracket, Bjerkandera adusta, a common fungus on the dead wood of deciduous trees. Having said that, this sawn-off poplar hasn’t quite given up the ghost: it’s putting out new green shoots from epicormic buds beneath the bark.

With bracket fungi, it’s important to know what species of tree they are growing on. This is poplar, which has distinctive diamond-shaped lenticels (right), so another  possibility is that this is the Poplar Bracket, Oxyporus populinus.