Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
As I weeded the path behind the raised bed, one of the garden snail shells I spotted this morning was smashed, probably by a thrush; another was occupied, so I popped it into a crevice and a third was empty, a good subject to try out some Procreate illustration techniques on as I get back into my course.
6th May: I picked up a dried up sycamore leaf from a shady corner of John’s garden and found this brown-lipped snail, Cepaea nemoralis, hidden beneath attached to the leaf. We had a dry April so the snail might have settled down to a period of inactivity known a aestivation.
I always slip my Olympus Tough camera into my pocket when I set out to work in the garden and, even before I’d started repotting plants in the greenhouse, I noticed these zig-zag patterns on the seed tray I was using.
They look like the marks left by a snail scraping away a film of algae from the surface of the tray.
Probably one of the garden snails that I’ve evicted from the greenhouse on several occasions.
Note: Slimer & Shelley have now been relocated to the other side of the hedge, following their night raid on the climbing French beans.
FLIES, INCLUDING one bluebottle and three glossily metallic greenbottles, are attracted to the slimy stain on this fragment of sandstone in the bottom corner of the garden. The Song Thrush has been using it as an anvil, leaving fragments of the shells of at least three Brown-lipped Snails and one Garden Snail. I think that the plain ochre yellow snail in the middle is a colour variation of the Brown-lipped Snail.
You might think that the colour would provide suitable camouflage in this corner of the garden but it evidently wasn’t enough for it to escape the attentions of the Song Thrush.
Soon after I’d started drawing this stump, a Bank Vole appeared, pausing under the stump before disappearing beneath it. Later I had a glimpse of its white front paws (do voles have ‘paws’?) beneath the adjoining log pile. Bank Voles have chestnut fur and a longer tail than that of the greyer Field Vole, which is also known as the Short-tailed Vole.
I’ve stacked the stump and sawn-up branches here as a habitat pile, so I’m pleased to see the vole using it.
But I have removed another habitat that it had been using; voles (or perhaps Wood Mice) had excavated a small network of tunnels beneath a clump of the Flag Iris that we removed from the pond. That has now gone on the compost heap.
There’s more than usual ant activity on the patio by the kitchen window this afternoon. It’s a still, warm settled day and it’s been chosen as the time for ant colonies in the area to release their winged queens and smaller winged males on a nuptial flight. 
Barbara said that on her walk home from work at 5 p.m. there were lots of them about, some of them landing on her as she walked down Quarry Hill.
AFTER CLEARING the pond last week and leaving the water to clear we’re now adding ten weighted bunches of oxygenating Curled Pondweed, Potamogeton crispus. I’m thinking carefully before I choose the floating and emergent plants that we’re going to add next as I don’t want to introduce anything which will completely take over the pond as the Yellow Flag Iris did.
The evening after we’d cleared the pond and cut down some of the surrounding vegetation, we watched a Hedgehog snuffling around the pond edge. It waddled over to the garden shed to search amongst the grasses before disappearing under the hawthorn hedge into next door’s garden.
Snails are a regular part of a hedgehog’s diet but the empty and broken shells that we find on concrete paths in our garden are the result of another snail-eater which we’ve been seeing quite often recently; the Song Thrush. A week or two ago it came up to 
the patio with two youngsters. It may have nested in the ivy in the far corner beyond the greenhouse or in one of our next door neighbour’s dense evergreen shrubs.
Sadly another young Greenfinch collided with the patio windows on Sunday afternoon. We heard the bang. Sometimes the bird is dazed but it survives but this one was unlucky and apparently broke its neck on impact. The windows were open at the time but unfortunately it flew into the glass instead of flying into the house.
