Honey Fungus

THIS DENSE cluster of mushrooms on a stump by the lakeside track at Newmillerdam Country Park is Honey Fungus, Armillaria mellea, which will attack both dead a living trees and shrubs. It’s also called the Boot-lace Fungus because of the long black cords of its rootlike hypha.

I made this drawing with a 0.8 brown Pentel Drawing Pen and watercolours from a photograph taken on our walk today.

Rhododendron is in full bloom. This introduced shrub can be invasive but kept under control in a park setting like this it makes an impressive display at this time of year. The glossy evergreen foliage provides shelter for Pheasants and other birds in winter.

Grey Feather

I PICKED UP this feather by the stream in Coxley Valley. The most obvious bird to leave a 6 inch (16cm) wing feather (a secondary?) like this in the wood would be a Pheasant but this feather is greyish brown and whitish, rather than the brown and tan that I’d expect a feather from a female Pheasant to be. If I’d picked it up on the coast I would have assumed it was from a juvenile gull, and of course it could be; they do fly over the wood.

Another thought was that it might be a Tawny Owl. We do get them in the wood but there’s no sign of a downy fringe to this feather, even under a microscope at 60x. It’s this downy fringe to the feathers that makes owls so silent in flight, compared, for instance, with the clattery take off of a Wood Pigeon.

It’s just occurred to me, looking out of the window that the pylon wires cross the valley at that point. Any bird sitting on the top wire – or for that matter in a tree-top below – could have dropped this while preening and one bird that will occasionally sit and preen on a perch overlooking the wood is a Sparrowhawk. The colour and pattern would be about right for a large female.

The adult female is dull brown on the upper wing, barred on the lower wing, so if you imagine this as a right wing feather the right (plain) side of the feather would show on the upper wing while the barred (left) side would be overlapped by the adjacent feather of the upper wing, so the barring would be visible only from below.

Branched Oyster Fungus

IT LOOKS like a paler version of Oyster Fungus, which you find growing in clusters on stumps and fallen logs in the autumn but Branching Oyster Fungus, Pleurotus cornucopiae, appears earlier in the year, and can be seen growing on elm, oak and beech stumps and logs from spring  to autumn. These were growing on a fallen Silver Birch in Coxley Woods between the two dams.

In his field guide Marcel Bon warns that although edible it’s ‘not of high quality’ and says that the white flesh has ‘a strong smell, sometimes rather unpleasant’. Michael Jordan describes the odour as ‘slight, of aniseed’. A related species, the Pale Oyster, is grown commericially, as is the Oyster.

Horn  of Plenty

The species name of the Branching Oyster, cornucopiae, refers to the mythical horn of plenty. In specialist books on fungi this funnel shape is referred to as infundibuliform. In anatomy, a infundibulum is a funnel-shaped cavity or structure.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s 1959 novel The Sirens of Titan, one man (and his dog) gets trapped in a ‘chrono synclastic infundibulum‘. I’d worked out the first part of this; chrono is time, the prefix syn means united and clastic in geology means broken pieces. So these clumped up fragments of time had formed a funnel-shaped structure.

Bramble Sawfly

THIS SAWFLY was crawling up the side of our car when we called at my mum’s this morning. Her garden is well stocked with shrubs, herbs and mature trees and there’s a lot of blossom about at the moment, which must attract plenty of insects.

At first glance I thought that it was some kind of beetle, then when I took a closer look at the head and antennae I guessed at some kind of hunting wasp but Michael Chinery’s Collins Guide to the Insects of Britain and Western Europe includes a clear illustration of this species; Arge cyanocrocea, a sawfly whose larvae feed on bramble. It’s about 1 centimetre in length.

In Greek mythology Arge was a huntress. ‘Cyanocrocea‘ means ‘greenish blue/yellow’ which I guess refers to the blue sheen on the thorax and the yellow abdomen. I’d assumed that the blue was just a reflection so I’ve greyed it in my drawing but I have included a red spot on the front right leg which I now realise is the red of the car seen through a raindrop. Which demonstrates the perils of drawing from a photograph!

It was raining and we were in a hurry so I took a few photographs which I decided to draw from. That’s my way of really looking at new species before I reach for the book to try to identify it. Our bright red car didn’t make the best background and I couldn’t make out the shape of the abdomen because of the dark smudge that is part of the this sawfly’s wing pattern, so I’ve added a small sketch from the illustration in the field guide to show the hidden shape. Sawflies lack a ‘wasp-waist’.

You can see from the photograph that I’ve started my drawing with the head then gone out of proportion, going a little too large, when I came to the wings. Those round blobs on its thorax are droplets of rain.

Most female sawflies have saw-like ovipositors which they use to lay their eggs in plants and most sawfly larvae resemble the caterpillars of moths and butterflies. The field guide says that Arge cyoncrocea is often seen on umbellifers and the adults are about from May to July. In 1986 it was described by Chinery as ‘fairly common but confined to the southern half of Britain’.

Horntail at Braemar

The most spectacular sawfly I ever encountered was a ‘Wood Wasp’, also known as the Horntail, Urocerus gigas, which landed on our Standard Vanguard Estate windscreen as we stopped in a layby in the pine forest near Braemar in August 1960, when I was nine years old. I was so impressed by this insect that I sketched it in my Eagle diary. Later my dad got one of the secretaries in the typing pool at the Coal Board to type a letter I’d written for me send to the magazine Young Naturalist which I’d started reading that summer.

My dad suggested that we head the letter ‘HORNET?’ but the editor of the magazine was able to identify it from our description as a ‘Wood Wasp’ (which unlike the Hornet, has no wasp-waist).

The First Wildlife Talkie?

By coincidence, it was in 1960 that Gerald Thompson of the University of Oxford Forestry Department was working out how he could set about making a film of the Alder wood wasp and its parasites. This lead to him setting up the influential Oxford Scientific Films unit.

He was inspired by the work of F. Percy Smith who in 1931 made a film in the Secrets of Nature for British Gaumont Instructional Films called War in Woods, about the life of the Horntail or Conifer Wood Wasp. According to Thompson, in interviews filmed in 1998/99, this wood wasp film, narrated by Dr R. Neil Chrystal, ‘was the first science film with a soundtrack shown in the cinema’. Dr Neil was Thompson’s predecessor at what was then the Imperial Forestry Institute at the University of Oxford,

Thompson specifically refers to a special showing at the Super Cinema in Oxford so it’s not 100% clear that he considered this the first wildlife talkie ever, but that appears to be what he believed.

Royal Deeside

Also that year, near Balmoral, we saw a family riding horses across a heathy slope beside the road. Our immediate reaction was that this was the royal family, the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles and Princess Anne, but my parents decided that it probably wasn’t them on the grounds that it’s so unlikely that you’d ever get to see the royal family out riding. But of course in the summer of 1960 if you were driving past the Balmoral Estate at the right time, you would have seen them.

Links: Gerald Thompson interview at WildFilmHistory.org includes link to a PDF transcription of the interview.
Secrets of Nature; War in the Woods, 1931, at British Pathé

Catching up

Burton Agnes Hall, near Bridlington, drawn when my friend Helen Thomas spent a week as an artist in residence there.

I’VE BEEN catching up with my holiday diary for Corfu today. I wanted to write about the experience while it was still fresh in my mind but I don’t think that I’ve done anything like justice to impressions that the island made on me.

After catching up with book orders, accounts, the garden, jobs around the house and doing a refresher course on Dreamweaver since I got back, not to mention attending a wedding and a funeral within four days of each other, I’m looking forward to getting back to work on my next book.

To draw a line under a rather disrupted month, here are the meagre contents of my recent sketchbooks, the drawings that didn’t make it into my online journal.

Langsett Moor, drawn from a photograph taken on a recent walk.

On the radio today there was an article on the increase in sales of fountain pens. Some specialist shops report a doubling of sales. I can see the attraction, they often give you a more fluid feel as you write or draw, so it’s very suitable for quick sketches like this Blackbird preening, which I drew when we took my mum for lunch at the Bella Italia at Birstall. I like restaurants where you can bird watch as you eat.

The bar at the Bella Italia, Birstall, drawn with my new Safari fountain pen.
Sowthistle

I went back to ArtPen, the one filled with Noodlers waterproof black ink, for these last two drawings, again drawn while we were out and about with my mum. These were drawn in my new 8 inch square format sketchbook but I’d forgotten to put a spare set of watercolours in the bag that fits it, so they’ll have to stay in black and white.

Meadow Update

Chicory in flower later in the year.

A QUICK update on the patch of wildflower meadow that I replanted on the 6 April; it looks even smaller now that the hedge is in full leaf and the surrounding Cow Parsley, nettle and Chicory have grown but you can see how effective our weeding out of Chicory and docks in the central area has been. At this time of year this would normally be wall to wall Chicory and dock.

The strip of turf at the back has established itself successfully and the grass seed in the meadow mix has greened the bare soil but I can see that there are also a lot of seedlings of Opium Poppy coming up, a species that wasn’t in the meadow mix but whose seeds are scattered all over our garden. It’s a plant that I like to see and to draw but I’ll have to weed them out to prevent their lush foliage shading out the wild flower seeds that I’ve sown.

Buttercups and Red Clover are already in flower on the strip of turf so I’ve got some idea of the final effect.

Next job; to mow down the Chicory to create a path around the edges. I don’t want it to spread into the central area again so it’s going to mean some more weeding and then I’ll sow the edges with suitable grass seed.

Bella Coffee

I’M STILL getting used to my new pen, the Lamy Safari fountain pen. It’s great for writing because it flows so smoothly and the slightly italic nib gives a consistent broad downstroke and fine sidestroke but this presents a bit of a problem when drawing because it keeps wanting to go with its natural flow. For drawing I’m used to a pen which will happily go off in any direction, like the ArtPen with its sketch nib or a fibre tipped drawing pen. But I think that the Safari has possibilities either for a simpler and bolder approach, aiming at the sort of ‘clear line’ Hergé used in the Tintin comic strips (yes, wouldn’t it be great if a pen could help me draw like that! I guess you have to apply a certain amount of intellectual rigour as well as change your pen) or alternatively go the other way and try for a lighter, more diffident line.
For the moment I’ll have to make do with plain awkward.

Whitley Reservoir

Charlotte’s Ice Cream Parlour, Whitley, 11.30 a.m. THE PENNINES are fading into the mist and the mist grades into the low cloud above. A Skylark rises high over a pasture in which donkeys and cattle are grazing.

Besides the small stocky  black cattle, which I think are Dexters, there are two young Jersey cows. One takes a break from grazing to rub her chin on the fence.

Scarifying

I GIVE the lawn a rake with the springbok rake at this time of year to get some of the moss out of it but my new Scarifier, one of this week’s bargains at Lidl supermarket, does a much better job. The lawn is no more than 25 square metres, but I raked up this pile which is almost entirely moss. It amounted to 7 or 8 trug-loads to take to the compost bins.

I’ve got nothing against moss but it has obliterated the grass in places so I’ll need to put some seed down. It should soon germinate and grow at this time of year. Meanwhile the Blackbird is making the most of the newly exposed bare ground, picking up worms or insects.

This scarifier is basically a long-handled rake on wheels with 11 stainless steel blades. The eccentrically attached wheels give an up and down motion to the blades which makes the action a lot easier than it was with springbok. The instructions recommend that you scarify your lawn at this time of year, after you’ve cut it short and in dry weather.

I don’t think that I’ll bother adding any fertiliser but I might sieve some garden compost over the lawn when I scatter the grass seed.

Spring Greens

I DREW this with my 08 nib Pilot Drawing Pen and made a start adding the colour as I waited in the queue for advice from a government helpline. After all the waiting, it turned out it was a problem of my own making but at least the hands free phone gave me an interval to sketch. I keep thinking that all the work that I put into mundane tasks like accounts and tax returns will eventually give me some freedom but at this rate by the time I get all the loose ends tied up it will be time to start all over again.

In this view of the woods there’s a Sycamore in full leaf on the far right with an oak just coming into leaf behind it. There’s dark green ivy on the boughs of the big Ash tree on the left, the branches of which are dotted with the Ash flowers, now going to seed, and its fresh green leaves. At the bottom left by the little store house there’s a Blackthorn bush, which was in blossom a few weeks ago.

In my efforts to catch the subtlety of the greens which are actually made up of a stipple of different colours I’ve ended up with an autumnal cast to my watercolour. When I compare the finished result with the actual view from my studio window the real foliage is a fresh light green. I’ve added too much ochre and the odd touch of crimson. There might be traces of both those colours in the barely perceptible flowers, twigs and buds but the foliage is the predominant colour.

You’d have to go for a pointillist technique of lots of tiny dots of pure colour to reproduce the experience of all the colour that you can see but in washes of watercolour you’ve got to average it out and any attempt to introduce those flecks of red and brown will simply dull down the dominant pure greens of the spring foliage.