Wildlife
Easter Sunday morning
Woke exceptionally early (too much chocolate the night before?!) and was met by a frost. Anxiously did my round of checks at the workshop, new seedlings, just planted out sweet-peas, my re-located Good-King-Henry plant, tender parsley, my tiny Oak – all okay! Collected the goose eggs, and hadn’t at all needed to decorate any, […]
Recumbent Rabbit
There are four favoured digging spots for the rabbits at my workshop, each showing regular fresh excavation and soil scattering. One is behind the greenhouse and leads under the hedgerow, another (shallow) is at my bonfire site, a third at the corner of, and into, my stone store shed, and the last out in […]
Ground Bird
I’ve been watching ground feeding birds, it astonishes me how acute their vision is and how quickly they peck up tasty morsels. There have been lots of blackbirds feeding in wet ground nearby, pulling worms – they sort of bird prance about, looking with focused intent, then dart forward head down, wings hunched, tugging […]
Elementum
It was an unexpected find – I’d followed a link from a beautiful Barn Owl illustration by Rebecca Clark and found myself introduced to Elementum. The name intrigued, Elementum – A journal of nature & story. At the time I was much too interested in Rebecca’s beautiful work, but later went back to look […]
Red Bird
These little treasures of red pebbles and my other thoughts on red stone recently, have inspired me to carve a piece of red sandstone that I had in the workshop. It was a slim slither of quite course grained stone, with areas of differing textures and it somehow became a bird – Red Bird. […]
Big Garden Birdwatch 2017
The sun came out for my birdwatch, after days of cold grey. The bird sound is spring-like. Spotting and recording the birds is the easy bit – I hope to sketch them as I see them during my count, which I find is quite a challenge. Particularly the Nuthatch as it sneaks off behind […]
Crow Country
Most days they are my background sound, and sometimes I stop, sit, and take time to watch their flapping rise, fall and curving in the sky above the line of trees which form the view from my workshop. Occasionally lone birds will caw and rattle at me from their perch at the top […]
What is it with Mice and the colour Red?
As the weather gets colder I find the little creatures start to come indoors – when I say indoors I mean the workshop. I can tell, as they leave little brown tell-tale signs, and also footprints in the stone dust. Once I came to put my gloves on and found the fingers chewn […]
Yorkshire Wildlife Trust – work day
Yesterday I spent a brilliant time with a group of volunteers at Appleton Mill Farm on one of the conservation work days with the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. The Farm is managed in partnership with the Trust and the day’s work involved clearing a steep, wooded, muddy bank of all the scrub and branches left […]
A Kestrel’s Chiding
Have you ever been scolded by a Kestrel? It is new to me – but there’s absolutely no doubt about it when it happens! This is the reason. A few days away from the workshop and wildlife has taken up residence – of course I’m delighted – but hadn’t expected it to be so […]