Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Sloe and hawthorn and a Vildpersilja cushion at Ikea, Birstall Retail Park this morning.
The car park is adjacent to one of the busiest stretches of the M62, which may be the reason for the lush lichen growth on the twigs. The yellow lichen Xanthoria polycarpa can tolerate high levels of nitrogen while the grey-green lichen, Hypogymnia physodes, tolerates acidic conditions.
Birstall Retail Park: Beyond the stores you glimpse belts of trees interspersed by hillside meadows. The nearby M62 is out of the sight, if not quite out of earshot. This is such a contrast to when we first came here (see link below), when old colliery spoil heaps to the east were being used as a municipal rubbish dump prior to landscaping the whole area.
Even the car park itself holds some attractions for the local birds. A magpie scouts around beneath a shrub, a sparrow closely inspects the links of a chain, a crow surveys the scene from a lamp-post, a wood pigeon flies over.
Daisy, sowthistle, willowherb, creeping buttercup and black medick are in flower on the verges. Leafy backwaters aren’t far away beyond the stores.
With a hour to spare before the film, we take a walk around the Showcase cinema car park. Beyond the steep grass verge at the bottom end of the car park there’s a steep valley where alders, willows and giant hogweed grow beside a storm channel which is currently running dry.
A chiff chaff is singing and we hear another warbler – a bubbly song – which we identify as garden warbler. This deciduous woodland with dense undergrowth is the right habitat for it.
Link: Lapwings over Ikea, my Wild West Yorkshire nature diary for Tuesday 1 December 1998.
Veils of grey cloud in ripple-mark patterns scud along from the south-west against a pearly glare which is all we can see of the midday sun. The wind up here at Birstall retail park flattens the spring loaded signs, bends the trees and grabs at the doors of the Pizza Express so that the waitress has to reset the door-opening mechanism.
