Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
These sketches from the hospital and the one of the wood were drawn with one of my regular fountain pens, the TWSBI Eco T.
But I’ve gone back to a fibre tip for these wood pigeons and sparrows in the back garden.
These were drawn with a Mitsubishi uni pin 0.3 fine line, which has water and fade proof pigment ink.
Thanks to Browning, I’m back in business with a replacement Strike Force Pro XD trail cam, so I’ve been catching up with the soap opera that is the wild side of our back garden.
As you can see, a male house sparrow has laid claim to the sparrow terrace nestbox, ousting the blue tits, who nested in hole 1 on the left last year. I love the puzzled expression on the blue tit’s face.
A persistent pigeon is waddling past the daffodils in pursuit of – he hopes – a mate.
Night visitors have included a cat and a vixen. I wonder if I’ll succeed in catching the cubs on camera this year?
A wood pigeon perches on the shed roof then swoops down to the lawn to chase off another pigeon that has just landed, chasing it around beneath the bird feeders with a menacing waddle punctuated with short jumps. The second pigeon soon realises that it isn’t going to get any peace and flies off.
I like drawing pigeons and that’s just as well because when they fly up from the wood the flock fills our field of vision as they wheel around, well over a hundred of them, probably 200. But we are going to have to net any seedling we plant in the veg beds.
We haven’t recorded a fox at the end of the garden on the trail cam for weeks now so, as we’ve recently trimmed back around the pond and scooped out the duckweed, I’ve set up my Browning Strike Force Pro XD trail cam there. This morning at 10 it recorded a dunnock (above) followed a few minutes later by a house sparrow.
Ten minutes earlier this greenfinch had been down at the pond’s edge.
It looks as if it’s drying itself off after bathing but, if it had been, the camera didn’t catch it. I need to clear out the last of the duckweed to give the birds better access.
At eleven o’clock yesterday the inevitable wood pigeon waddled by and a squirrel bounded along, slightly blurred on the photograph.
With a closer camera angle and a bit of stage management of duckweed and pebbles, this could be the perfect spot for a back garden stake-out.
This morning at Newmillerdam I drew the fishing platform for the opening frame of my Ode to a Duck cartoon and photographed a beech tree for this background for the squirrel/wood pigeon duo. You can already sense the natural chemistry between them.
For his waddle-on cameo in my Ode to a Duck cartoon, the wood pigeon is supposed to be empathic and concerned rather than ranting and irate, but, if you’re familiar with wood pigeons you’ll know that they have a limited repertoire.
The line work was drawn in Lamy fountain pen in my sketchbook. I’ve combined two of my sketches and coloured them in Photoshop. I kept testing the Photoshop PSD file in Adobe Character Animator, to make sure things were turning out more or less as intended.
I haven’t added the blink yet, as I did for the squirrel this morning, but this character is evidently the unblinking sort.
Next up, a foraging moorhen . . .
Time to test my new trail cam by positioning it below the bird feeders and sprinkling a few crumbs and mealworms on the lawn.
The wood pigeon took 36 selfies and even photobombed the dunnock’s brief appearance.
Also captured on camera, a blackbird, house sparrow and what we think was a song thrush.
Next test is on the video setting through the night . . .
Take a 90-second break with elegant gulls, dabbling coots, preening ducks and a hesitant pigeon on a quiet backwater near the Boathouse at Newmillerdam Country Park, Wakefield, West Yorkshire.
This mixed oak wood at the top end of Coxley Valley is typical of woods on Coal Measures. In the background there are planted conifers: crops of larch and Corsican pine have been planted here, adjacent to Earnshaw’s Saw Mill, although some of them have been badly damaged by grey squirrels.
Even on our short walk around the wood, there’s always something to see. We got a chance to squeeze in a quick visit a couple of days ago and I was determined not to stop to take photographs, but when I saw these frost-rimmed oak leaves, I couldn’t resist getting out my iPhone.
There are so many acorns this year that in places you crunch over them and they look like pea gravel strewn along the edges of the path. The resident greys haven’t been able to squirrel them away and the flock of wood pigeons, hanging around at the corner of the wood this morning, has come nowhere near making serious inroads into the enormous quantities on offer.
Wood pigeons are great acorn eaters but jays are the real specialists. We’ve often seen a pair of them flying from a large oak, crops bulging with acorns. On this morning’s walk we hear them screeching somewhere in the background but we’ve yet to spot them here, collecting and caching.
Berries are few and far between on the hollies, which provide some winter cover in the shrub layer of the wood.
There isn’t a lot of fungus around at the moment but I spotted these common earthballs, Scleroderma citrinum, growing amongst the leaf litter at the top corner of the wood.
What made this scrape amongst the roots of a larch tree?
Borrowing scenery is a theme in Japanese gardens, Monty Don explained in the second of two films on BBC2 yesterday. Because of the topography of the country, space is usually limited, so skilful planting and pruning can give the impression that a garden extends to the trees on the slope beyond. Presenting gardens as a work of art, the experience of strolling along paths through cloud-pruned shrubs or crossing stepping-stones might feel like browsing through a scroll painting of mountain, river and forest. Alternatively, a particular, carefully constructed view might be framed by the open wall of teahouse – a picture window on a grand scale – as if it were a single painting.
My niece Sarah and husband Will have managed something similar in their orangery extension on the back of the house. It’s been almost like summer today so we had the windows wide open with a view of three wood pigeons relaxing in the trees beyond the garden fence. Drawing them, with a pot of tea and a bacon sandwich to keep me going, thank you for that Sarah, as we caught up with my brother and his wife, made for a suitably English take on the Japanese zen garden ideal of contemplating nature from the calm surroundings of a teahouse. Calm because of I refused my great nephew Zach’s offer to act as goalie for him.
The three wood pigeons didn’t seem to have any pressing business to attend to. I’d noticed a wood pigeon this morning twisting a twig from the top branches of a silver birch but these three weren’t in nest-building mode. One of them indulged in a relaxed preening routine the other two just sat hunched up close to each other, watching the world go by.