Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Hemlock water-dropwort grows amongst curled dock and nettle alongside the car park at Newmillerdam. A holly blue butterfly rests on the hemlock while hoverflies visit the flowers of creeping buttercup, occasionally chasing each other around. A micro moth resting on a buttercup looks, at first glance, like a tiny fragment of plant debris.
Sawfly, bee-fly and hoverfly, dame’s violet, orchid, crosswort, briar rose and goutweed, orange rust and King Alfred’s Cakes fungus, on a Wakefield Naturalists’ Society field meeting at High Batts nature reserve this morning.
High Batts isn’t far from Lightwater Valley, north of Ripon. Visiting this reserve adjacent to a working quarry is normally by arrangement only but next month they’re holding an open day.
I wonder if this spider, photographed on our bedroom window yesterday, is one of the spiderlings, now grown up, that we spotted in a cluster by the front door recently.
Apologies to our Yorkshire Party candidate, David Herdson, in the upcoming Wakefield by-election, as I’ve made him look a bit like me, however Barbara thinks he does look a bit like me anyway. Sorry about that David!
Nadeem Ahmed and Simon Lightwood are our Conservative and Labour candidates for the Wakefield by-election, coming up a week next Thursday on the 23rd. I’ve got my work cut out if I’m going to draw all the candidates as there are 15 of them in total (and there are some great faces to draw amongst them).
There are plenty of smiling photographs of the Labour and Conservative hopefuls but these are from the only two photographs that I could find of them looking serious on Google. Perhaps a bit too serious: Nadeem’s expression reminds me of Peter Jones on Dragons Den when he’s grilling a would-be entrepreneur about shortcomings in a business plan and Simon reminds me of a headmaster telling the assembled pupils that they’ve not only let themselves down, they’ve let the school down too (yes, I’m afraid this did occasionally happen during my school days, but usually only once a term, I’m glad to say).
My first drawing using Clip Studio Paint in companion mode on my iPad. The linked iPhone acts as a remote control and you can toggle to the palette or to tool properties.
8.35 a.m.: Two male blackbirds have decided that the border between their territories runs along the narrow gap between a yellow grit hopper and a red recycling bin at the top end of the Health Centre car park.
First one hops forward, head held high, breast puffed out in ritualised belligerence, then it crosses the invisible line and its rival retaliates, driving it back.
This continues for a minute with the cut-and-thrust rhythm of a closely fought tennis tournament until they meet head-to-head at the half-way point and the contest erupts vertically into the air, the blackbirds lashing out with their feet like a pair of heraldic beasts.
This morning, in the short time I had available, I decided to write rather than draw, so my drawing of the rival blackbirds is from a sketchbook from March 1999, which I wrote up, using pretty much the same phrases as I did today, in my Wild West Yorkshire nature diary, www.wildyorkshire.co.uk
The rival blackbirds sketch appeared in my published sketchbook/nature journal Rough Patch, a sketchbook from the wilder side of the garden, published in 2005 (and still available, see link below!).
Neighbours, Wild West Yorkshire nature diary, Thursday, 4th March, 1999
Rough Patch, a sketchbook from the wilder side of the garden
The woodland walk at RHS Harlow Carr this afternoon.
Hogweed is now in full flower alongside the car park at Newmillerdam.
When I first got into botany, hogweed and cow parsley were in the Umbelliferae along with their garden relatives, carrot, celery and parsley. The preferred family name today is Apiaceae, after Apium, the name that Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder used for celery-like plants.
WordPress tells me that today I’ve posted 365 days in a row, and suggests that I should keep up the good work.
John Haller (1909-1983) once told me that humorist Patrick Campbell (1913-1980) had produced a play The Vigil for our local drama group, the Horbury Pageant Players.
Patrick Campbell is probably best remembered today as Frank Muir’s opponent on BBC’s Call my Bluff but he was also well known as a journalist and drama producer.
In October 1955 John Haller succeeded Campbell, former head of B.B.C. northern drama programmes, as Chairman of the West Riding branch of the British Drama League, when Campbell accepted a post with the I.T.A., the Independent Television Authority, which had been created in the previous year.
The Vigil is a courtroom drama by Ladislas Fodor in which the gardener from the Garden of Gethsemane is accused by the Romans of stealing the body of Jesus.
It seems that the Pageants were disappointed that they hadn’t had more support from Horbury’s churches and chapels.