Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
This Ringlet butterfly was a roadside casualty that Barbara spotted when we were in Dalby Forest, North Yorks Moors, last month.
I put it under the microscope to focus on the eye-spots. Each has a bright fleck in the middle, even the smallest of them, which must help give the impression of a gleaming snakelike eye, distracting any attacker either by surprising it or fooling it into pecking the butterfly’s wing instead of its body.
Summer warmth and a few heavy showers have triggered the growth of some small fungi on our dewy back lawn this morning. They’re going to get trimmed off when I get around to cutting the lawn so I pick them to draw and to take some close-ups using my USB microscope.
The cap which is about a centimetre across is smooth with no trace of ridges. It has dark brown gills, which I’d describe as distant as opposed to close or crowded.
In this photograph the gills are emarginate, meaning that there is a notch where they attach to the stem. But the notch isn’t as clear in this cross section of the cap;
The circular stem is hollow and there’s no swelling at its base.
The pattern of growth, as far as I can judge by this little group, is trooping. I couldn’t see any trace of a fairy ring starting to form.
I’m taking spore prints which might help narrow down what kind of fungus it is.
My thanks to Steve Clements for this suggestion;
Most likely a Mottlegill (Panaeolus or Panaeolina) – the commonest one on mown grass round my part of Sheffield is Brown Hay Cap – Panaeolina foenesecii – which is supposed to be slightly hallucinogenic. The spores are blackish, and warted (under the microscope). The gills look mottled under a hand lens.
The Collins Guide calls this species Brown Mottlegill and adds that the ‘dark brown-black’ spores are ‘ellip to lemon-shaped’ which is how they look in 200x photograph that I took with my microscope.
The Garden Snail, Helix aspersa, has a thin, lightweight shell but that still looks cumbersome as it explores a fern-filled crevice in an old wall (see previous posts). As I drew it from a photograph that I’d taken this morning I noticed traces of damage to the shell with what appears to be a healed break in the rim and hairline fracture on the ‘back’ of its shell.
I imagine it being surprised, perhaps by a bird, retracting into its shell then falling from the wall onto the pavement below.
A second snail clung precariously to the base of the stems of Common Ragwort, growing from a crevice near the top of the six foot high wall amongst the fronds of Rusty-back Fern and Wall Rue.
Wall Rue, Asplenium ruta-muraria grows alongside the Rusty-back Fern in the crevices of an old wall in Ossett. It is a common fern of walls and limestone crevices.
Leathery leaves and long wiry roots are useful adaptations for conserving water.
Like the Rusty-back it is a member of the Spleenwort family, used as a herbal remedy for diseases of the spleen and also in the treatment of rickets.
The Rusty-back fern, Ceterach officinarum, has rusty scales on the backs of its leaves. These cover the spore-producing sori and probably help prevent the fern from drying out. During dry spells the fronds roll in at the edges.
Growing to just few inches, this fern is found in dry crevices in limestone and in old mortared walls. A small colony grows on a north-east facing sandstone wall on Station Road, Ossett.
It is best grown in a cold frame, potted rather high, among loam mixed with a large proportion of brick-rubbish, and not over-watered.
Thomas More, British Ferns, 1861
Rusty-back fern is a member of the spleenwort family and was used to treat diseases of the spleen. Legend has it that Cretan sheep with spleen disorders would greedily devour its rootstock.
It’s scientific name Ceterach is said to derive from the Arabic ‘Cheterak’ the name that Eastern physicians used for this plant.
When disturbed the Yellow-tail Moth, Euproctis similis, sticks the end of its abdomen up between its wings. Both male and female have the yellow tip although it is larger in the female.
Some female moths spread pheromones by raising their tails and the males use their feathery antennae to home in on them.
So why does this male raise his ‘tail’ when disturbed? Is it a way to surprise a predator?
It’s the first time that this species has turned up in the moth trap.
Yellow-tail moth caterpillars have been found on Japanese Knotweed, an invasive garden escape which very few native insects feed on, but they’re more likely to feed on sallow, blackthorn and hawthorn.
THERE WERE at least half a dozen Large Yellow Underwings in the moth trap this morning plus some of their smaller relatives but this is the first time that I’ve seen the Broad-bordered Yellow Underwing, Notcua fimbriata. This is a male; the female is paler.
It’s more typical of wooded areas than gardens but as the foodplants of its larvae include docks, nettles, brambles, sallows and willows it’s not surprising that it has turned up here.
Although it’s years since I last saw a Silver Y moth, Autographa gamma, I didn’t have any difficulty in putting a name to it, thanks to the conspicuous calligraphic Y on its wing. This is the first time that it has turned up in
the moth trap and that could be because, as an immigrant each year to Britain, it has taken until now to reach Yorkshire.
There are so many brownish, streaked little moths, both micro and macro, that I find drawing them gives me my best chance of picking out the pattern as I look through the field guide. Taking a close look at this, I noticed that the two bands and the inconspicuous dot made a pattern like a carnival mask, enabling me to identify it as the Dun-bar, Cosmia trapezina, a common moth from lowland Scotland southwards, wherever there are trees.
While I sketched these moths Barbara went through the book and came up with a name for this obscure-looking delta-winged little moth. It’s the Fan-foot, Zanclognatha tarsipennalis, a common moth of woods, hedges and gardens.
The the three lines on its wing are;
with a row of fine dashes along the edge of the wing.
Lets have an easier moth; the male of the Orange Swift, Hepialus sylvina, has a bright orange-brown forewing. It’s larvae feed on herbceous plants including dock, dandelion and bracken.
These two underwings are so regular in the moth trap that I tend to ignore them so that I thought it was about time that I made a quick sketch of them.
Rummaging through my file drawer for some photographs for an article I was surprised to find that I still have the negatives from a three week course that I took at the Royal College of Art in early spring, 1974 including this old shoe on the strandline taken on a day trip to the south coast.
Looking through them brings back vivid memories of that period, for instance, these contact prints from the still life session include long forgotten details of my everyday life; keyring, pens, bus ticket and anorak label.
Read more in my article Just handle a Pentax in the Retro Tech series in the Currys photography blog.
I’M PULLING together my year of research into our family tree into a series of mini-biographies of some of the key characters starting with John Jones, one of my maternal great-grandfathers (left). He was blacksmith from Connah’s Quay, north Wales, near the border with England.
Tracing a Jones family in Wales is tricky as it’s such a common surname and so far I’ve made only limited progress. Now is a good time to go over what I do know and consider the questions that I need to be ask next if I’m going to take things further.
I’m using Apple’s iBook Author to produce an illustrated PDF document that I can e-mail to other members of the family and print out for my mum.
As it’s not for general publication so I don’t have to think about the wider audience or the limitations of print. It’s an opportunity to experiment with the design.
I want to start with the basics and show John’s position on our family tree without all the subsidiary branches. I was considering a simple hand-lettered diagram but then I thought wouldn’t it be more inviting in a digital publication to have something in colour, something like the image that they use in the television series Who do you think you are?; an oak tree in a green meadow spreading its branches into a blue sky.
As I was thinking that I looked out of the studio window and saw a cloudscape that I thought would do just fine. I took a couple of pictures of it one with the exposure set for the sky, the other set for the wood, and I stitched them together in Photoshop.
So that’s my starting point; my mum, her parents and her grandad John. On average one eighth of my genes must come down from him.
The blue sky is a suitable metaphor for the blank canvas that you’re faced with when you start researching your family tree but when I think about times past I don’t think of a vertical axis, like so many in the west I’m in the habit of seeing action as starting on the left and running to the right and my image of the past 2000 years is of a band, like a film strip, curving back into the past.