It’s now twenty years since I started writing this online version of my nature diaries and sketchbooks and I remember my first ever post on my Wild West Yorkshire website included a sketch of wasp visiting the flowers of the ivy.
Today wasps and flies were busy visiting the flowers on next door’s ivy. The clusters of male and female flowers might not be showy but there are plenty of them. The decadent fusty-ness of ivy is a scent that sums up autumn for me, as much as flowering privet does for late summer.
It seems like one last party for the assembled wasps and flies before the onset of winter.
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Insects on ivy from my first blog post (although the word blog hadn’t been invented then) for Sunday 8 October 1998.
The drawings were scanned from my A5 page-a-day diary and coloured in Photoshop, probably, at that time, using a mouse rather than a graphics pad.
I quickly moved on to drawing in an A4 sketchbook, which saved having to erase the ruled lines in the diary. I didn’t start using watercolour until three months later, which was far less fiddly than adding colour with a mouse.
View from Charlotte’s Ice Cream Parlour, Whitley, on Monday.
We’ve recently started feeding the birds again after taking a break over the summer. This was partly to reseed the bare patch in the lawn trampled by the pheasants that had spent so long pacing about in tight circles below the feeders, pecking at the spilt sunflower hearts but also because two or three small mounds of earth had appeared at the edge of the lawn.
We thought that this might be a sign that brown rats were moving in but a neighbour has since told me that at that time there was a lot of mole activity in his garden, which is the most likely explanation as there were only piles of soil but no sign of any entrance holes.
Today the feeders were visited by coal tits, blue tits, great tits, nuthatch and greenfinch but outnumbering all of them were goldfinches. At one stage all eight perches on the feeders were occupied by them, with another ten on the ground below and six or seven waiting their turn in the branches of the crab apple.
Pigeon Food Pyramid
At breakfast time, a loose flock of wood pigeons flew over the house, followed later by a grey heron, which appeared to be struggling to clear our roof.
Top Predator
Calder & Hebble Navigation at the Strands, Horbury Bridge.
This evening down by the canal, a sparrowhawk perched briefly in a tree then flew off on its rounds. I suspect that a sparrowhawk killed the pigeon that we found on our back lawn a few days ago. It’s not going to be short of prey with so many wood pigeons about.
This cladonia lichen was growing in the shelter of the roots of a stump amongst a lush growth of polytrichum moss, by the path that leads up onto the moor at Langsett.
The ‘golf-tee’ shape of the fruiting bodies, with their dusting of flour-like powder is typical of Cladonia fimbriata, which is found on rotting wood, disturbed ground and crevices in walls, particularly amongst mosses.
The powder, known as soredia, is a way of dispersing the lichen as it flakes off the fruiting body. An individual soredium contains a few cells of algae and a few strands of the fungus that together make up the lichen.
The gritstone alongside the track is mainly lichen-free but a few rocks near the edge of the plantation support some crustose lichen species.
‘Pores in a Ring’
This grey crustose lichen is dotted with black fruiting bodies. Where the gritstone has been chipped away, the fresher surface is stained red with iron. I’m guessing that the gritty crystals in the dark grey weathered surface around the lichens are quartz, so the surface would be acidic.
I think that this might be a species of Porpidia; the name means ‘pores in a ring’. The pores are the fruiting bodies – the apothecia – which have been described as ‘like wine gums with margins not the same colour as crust’, distinguishing them from other lichens which have fruiting bodies that resemble small ‘jam tarts with margins the same colour as crust’ (quoted from the FSC Guide to Lichens of Heaths and Moors).
Porpidia crustulata is very common on siliceous rocks, such as this millstone grit, but there are similar species, in fact I think that there might be two species in this photograph, as the larger lichen in the top left corner is different in colour and in the pattern of the pores.
Crottle
There’s a lush growth of what looks to me like a Parmelia lichen, and I think this is the one known as Crottle, Parmelia saxtalis, a species which has been used to produce a reddish-brown dye.
Grey Crusty Lichen
Finally, growing alongside the crottle but not as lushly is this plain grey crustose lichen. I can’t make out any apothecia on its surface, so no ‘wine gums’, ‘jam tarts’ or ‘golf tees’ to help me here.
I should have gone in closer with the macro setting.
Bonfire Moss
Also on the top of the wall, this moss has white, wiry outgrowths and its reddish-brown sporangia have screwed up, curly stems.
In mosses the stems of the spore capsules are called seta. The bonfire moss, Funaria hygrometrica, is distinctive, with its abundant, swan-neck seta. The British Bryological Society field guide says that this is a common plant that beginners will soon learn to recognise, so I’m pleased to have made a start by identifying it.
Although it is characteristic of old bonfire sites, it will colonise any patch of bare, disturbed nutrient-rich soil. Perhaps here it has colonised a bare patch of the wall top which had initially been colonised by the crottle.
Yellow Brain
This small orange fungus was growing from a conifer stump near the cladonia lichen. I think that this is Yellow Brain, Tremella mesenterica, a common jelly fungus, which appears as knobbly outgrowths before it grows into a brain-like mass. The field guide tells me that it’s commonly found on gorse, hazel, birch, ash,
Perching on the iron fence by the Lower Lake at Nostell, a carrion crow is struggling to extract the sweet chestnut nuts from their spiky green casings. Two of the spiny husks have become firmly Velcroed together.
Fungus by woodland path.
The experts at nut gathering are the grey squirrels. They are so intent on burying their cache that you can walk past within a few feet of them and they won’t even bother to look up.
They’ll poke their heads down amongst the leaf litter in several spots in succession. One suggestion is that they’ll dig several ‘fake’ holes which they’ll leave nothing in, to confuse any rival squirrel that might be watching them.
The Pleasure Grounds by the Lower Lake are the most popular with squirrels, not just because of the sweet chestnuts but also because no dogs are allowed. Up by the Obelisk Lodge we’d seen a dog walker we know chasing her dog along the cycles-only path.
“She’d seen a squirrel,” she explained, “They’ll stand there, deliberately teasing the dog!”
We think that we saw the squirrel that the dog had chased. It dashed at a frantic pace across the driveway beyond the Obelisk Lodge and shot into the bushes, which resulted in a startled cock pheasant bursting out, grockling in alarm.
Some squirrels do seem to egg on the dogs. In the park, one spaniel was barking in frustration and straining on its lead but the squirrel it had spotted was on the other side of the electric fence (and probably knew that it could scamper about with impunity).
There’s a windy swirl of low pressure, the remnants of ex-Hurricane Oscar, approaching across the Atlantic. Over to the west we can see a distant bank of cloud but here it’s sunny and still with wisps of cirrus and streaks of con trails against the blue sky.
When we arrived home yesterday afternoon, we found a wood pigeon casualty on the back lawn, with a scattering of small downy feathers around it. A few moments later, Barbara spotted a bird of prey, probably a sparrowhawk, flying over the houses on the other side of the road, so perhaps we had disturbed it as we returned.
In a sparrowhawk kill, there should be marks on the quills where the sparrowhawk has grasped the feather with its bill. Most of the feathers were too flimsy for this to show but on two of the larger feathers there were traces of marks.
It’s not conclusive but I think that sparrowhawk is most likely. We’ve had a cat visiting the garden that lurks in the flower border then pounces on the birds that have gathered around the feeding pole. We’ve yet to see it catch a bird but two days ago it chased a grey squirrel up the crab apple.
The squirrel had to escape by leaping from the top branches into next door’s garden.
Original size of drawing: 1.8 inches, 4.5 cm across.
So good to be back at Langsett, walking around the reservoir, across the more and back up through the woods where larch and beech are now in their autumn colours.
Photographed, then drawn (well, I admit it, traced!) and coloured in Clip Studio Paint, on my iPad Pro, using an Apple Pencil.
First visitor to our new sparrow nest box: a blue tit. It checks out hole number three first; no, that’s not quite right; then hole number two and it’s just about to investigate hole number one when a second blue tit appears, there’s a skirmish and off they fly.
It’s likely that, as this RSPB box was made specifically for sparrows, the blue tits will find the entrance hole a little too wide for their liking but the old box, single-holed variety, attracted blue tits one year, sparrows the next (and finally bumblebees), so we’ll have to wait until springtime to find out who finally takes possession.
Photograph by W P Worth.The stamp reads: ‘W P WORTH, OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHER, CASSA LA . . . ‘ (last word indecipherable).
When he sent this photograph back home to Sheffield, my father, Robert Douglas Bell, then a sergeant in a light anti-aircraft unit, stationed in the Western Desert, North Africa, wrote on the back:
‘The Egg Market (remember) taken in Feb. 1941’
Years later he told me about setting up this pop-up trading post. He’d been an accountant before his call-up and a keen sprinter and footballer, so he, and his unit, realised that the best way to barter with the locals was to be organised and scrupulously fair. Other units preferred to haggle and to try to get the better of the locals, so they soon found themselves sidelined and a queue formed at the packing-case desk that my father’s team operated.
My father is manning the desk and it looks as if he’s hung his shirt on the end of the bargeboard before getting down to business.
It’s amazing to have this photograph of ‘The Egg Market’, which my late mother thoughtfully added to a family history album.
Peter and Parts were puppies adopted by the unit. ‘PETER. when 3 mos old. Taken Dec. 1941. One of the best photos I have had taken of myself.
On a Balcony in Cairo
The following year, in Cairo, my dad was transferred to the Military Police.
‘The moustache is not really as untidy as it may appear,’ he wrote, ‘It’s slightly bigger now.’
Thank you, father, that’s just the sort of nugget of information which will be so useful to future historians. He rose to be colour sergeant major in the Special Investigations Branch of the Corps of Military Police, Cairo. His beat included the Pyramids and the Sweet Water Canal (which was anything but, he told me) and he had some input into security for the November 1943 Cairo Conference, attended by Franklin D Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek. Roosevelt and Churchill went on to meet up with Josef Stalin in Tehran two days later.
The Spoils of War
In my childhood years, we had a battered light-tan leather case which had been confiscated from hashish smugglers and I still have father’s sergeant’s baton. My mother used to keep it handy by the back door on top of the three coat-hooks in the porch, in case she ever had to beat off a doorstep attacker. Fortunately she never had cause to use it in anger. She could easily control us with a well-aimed tap with the back of the Hush Puppies brush.
My father was born one hundred years ago today on 29 October, 1918, just a couple of weeks before the end of World War I.
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Corps of Military Police, Cairo, 1939 Sept.- 1940 Dec., The National Archives, Kew. Do records for 1942 – 1945 still exist? Please let me know if you’ve been researching the subject and you can point me in the right direction. I’d love to read some of my father’s case-notes, if they still exist.
A cold front came in from the north during the night and today it’s noticeably cooler but mostly sunny.
Armed with secateurs, long-handled loppers, a step-ladder and a pruning saw, I trim back the golden hornet crab apple to a more manageable shape. It’s mainly a case of cutting back the whip-like vertical shoots that have grown since I last cut it back a year ago but I put in a bit of extra effort and use a pruning saw on one branch that’s managed to get its twiggy offshoots beyond my reach during the past few years.
Yes, it was a favourite look-out post for the resident blackbird, but it will soon find another perch. As I work at in the crown of a the tree, a long-tailed tit flits past my head and perches on a branch three feet in front of me. I don’t think it quite knows what to make of me.
Common Earthball, Scleroderma citrinum, has ‘a characteristic smell of old rubber’ according to Wildlife of Britain, the Definitive Visual Guide or strong odour ‘of gas or acetylene’ (Encyclopedia of Fungi, Michael Jordan). As I’ve mentioned before, this didn’t stop me from slicing the young ones, with firm white flesh, and frying them in a bit of butter when I was trying to survive on a very slender travelling scholarship on a student field trip to Iceland. To me, they tasted of mushroom, but I don’t recommend that you try them, as they’re variously described as inedible or even poisonous.
These were growing by the path in deciduous woodland at the top end of the Pleasure Grounds at Nostell Priory Park.
It’s now twenty years since I started writing this online version of my nature diaries and sketchbooks and I remember my first ever post on my Wild West Yorkshire website included a sketch of wasp visiting the flowers of the ivy.
Today wasps and flies were busy visiting the flowers on next door’s ivy. The clusters of male and female flowers might not be showy but there are plenty of them. The decadent fusty-ness of ivy is a scent that sums up autumn for me, as much as flowering privet does for late summer.
Insects on ivy from my first blog post (although the word blog hadn’t been invented then) for Sunday 8 October 1998.
