Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Still learning various techniques in the first two frames of my Bilberry Wood comic, drawn, designed and coloured in Clip Studio Paint on my iPad Pro. I like the slightly resistant surface of the Paperlike screen protector when I’m drawing with my Apple Pencil.
Bilberry Wood was planted in the mid-Victorian period, at about the same time as Nethergill was built as a lodge.
Heather, also known as ling, Calluna vulgaris, grows in the drier parts of the wood, including on tussocks raised about the boggy areas and, here, from a crevice on a fallen pine trunk. Heather is an indicator of dry acid soils. The abundant heather and bilberry here are a sign that the wood has been only lightly or moderately grazed.
Lightly-grazed pinewood with tall heather is classified as National Vegetation Classification community W18.
The hummocky ground layer of Bilberry Wood is carpeted, as its name suggests, with bilberry which is dripping with globular pink flowers, a few of which are beginning to set berries. It has flourished in the years since the wood was fenced off to prevent sheep grazing here.
Recently red squirrels have moved into the wood. They have been caught on camera attracted to feeding boxes (see link below).
Bumble bees are busy in the wood but on the strips of acid grassland around it small heath butterflies are the most conspicuous insects, flitting about over damp sedgey ground pockmarked with the hoof-prints of sheep and cattle. Two green-veined whites have paired up and come to rest among the grasses, giving us a chance to take some close-up macro shots.
In a calm section of Oughtershaw beck, large red damselflies, Pyrrhosoma nymphula, are laying their eggs, perching on a leaf of pondweed, Potamogeton.
Red squirrels at a nut feeder in Bilberry Wood, Nethergill.