30 Days Wild in a grid

 30 Days Wild is an annual celebration of the natural world led in June by the UK Wildlife Trusts, and is full of wonderful ideas for getting in touch with nature for all the family. This year I thought I'd do a 30-day grid of mini-paintings, one for each day, inspired by something in the natural world that caught my eye that day. It was great fun!

A month of nature - June 2020

Summer is here, and the wild world is being celebrated in various ways this month! The Wildlife Trusts have their annual 30 Days Wild event throughout the month - though this year it's a much more constrained affair because of the pandemic restrictions.

And at the start of the month we had International Nature Journaling Week, with daily prompts and lots of links to resources and workshops, on top of a whole load of guest blogs which give a great insight into keeping a nature journal from many perspectives (including mine!). Take a few minutes to check it out.

To finish the month there's National Insect Week - celebrating the little things that pollinate our plants and keep our ecosystems healthy - followed by Swift Awareness Week, which takes us into July.

We started off with the same warm and sunny weather that we'd enjoyed in May. The flowerbed is looking rather lush...

I've continued watching the peregrine chicks via the webcams at Leamington Spa and Nottingham. As the chicks grew, they became quite mobile and often disappeared from view of the cameras completely.

One of the prompts for Nature Jounaling Week was 'Nature Finds' - definitely a strength of mine as I'm always filling my pockets with interesting bits and pieces to draw later.

Of course, you don't need flora and fauna to be able to make a nature journal entry - for June 6th I kept track of the weather, with four drawings of the same patch of sky across the afternoon.

With the promise of rain in the following few days, I made the most of the last of the dry weather with a walk round the fields. So many different grasses - made me realise how little I know about them, even their names. So I've bought a field guide, though of course it's not as easy as you might think to ID them all...

This was the sky before the weather finally broke...

The much-needed rain eventually arrived (we'd had the sunniest/driest May in a long time), and within a couple of days the log pile was sprouting some fabulous fungi - Jelly Ear :-)

When the weather turned warm and sunny once more I decided to repeat my Soundscape experiment of a couple of months ago (no great hardship there!). Sat myself in a sunny spot and listened to all that was going on around me. Not as many different birds as last time, and the wood pigeons weren't quite as constant - a very pleasant and peaceful way to spend a mindful hour or so.

Solstice weekend was warm and humid, and rather hot when the sun came out! I spent some time watching the comings and goings in the flowerbed. Amazing what you see when you take the time to watch a while.

And on some flowers at the front of the house, a not-very-camouflaged speckled bush cricket nymph! Once I'd spotted one of these, they seemed to be everywhere. We usually get one or two of the adults in the house at some point later in the summer, and I assume it's these that I can sometimes hear on my bat detector.

My final journal entry for the month concerned a favourite insect - the lacewing. What's not to love about these delicate little creatures, whose larvae are absolutely ferocious when it comes to dealing with aphids! This one caught my eye as it fluttered about in a shaft of sunlight. It then landed on my wine glass and made its way to the small drop of liquid remaining at the bottom, had a drink then flew off again :-)

And always a treat - a visit from a hedgehog! This one was out and about fairly early in the evening, but looked bright and healthy as it made its way around the edge of the garden, under the shrubs, before disappearing under the fence.

So a great June, despite still being in some kind of pandemic lockdown. Restrictions are easing somewhat (for now anyway) so perhaps it's time for me to visit some local nature reserves at last!

Nature Notes May 2020

Weather-wise, this month has definitely been a month of two halves - cool and windy to start with, but the last couple of weeks have been warm, dry and sunny, to the point that everywhere is now tinder dry and a fire risk. We've had no significant rain for a while, and there's not much forecast for the couple of weeks ahead either. We're filling up the water bowls in the garden every day, and in the evening to make sure the hedgehogs and other night-time visitors have access to water.

We're still in lockdown but the restrictions are due to ease from the start of June. Not sure this is entirely wise, but we will see. I'm pessimistically expecting that a second peak of infection is inevitable...

But as always, the natural world continues in its rhythms. As we reach the end of May fledgling birds are starting to appear - we have blue tits and starlings in the garden, and I watched (and listened to!) a great spotted woodpecker youngster following its parent around yesterday. But a real treat for me came at the start of the month - a mistle thrush with youngsters! I usually see these birds in the autumn and winter, feeding on the berries in the rowan tree, so this was a special sighting that went into the journal!

 By the middle of the month most of the summer migrants had arrived. Out running around the local lanes, I found that the hedgerows were suddenly filled with singing whitethroats, and swallows and housemartins were about too. I'd heard reports of local swift sightings from the start of May, but it was the 16th before I spotted any. I think they are my favourite summer visitor.

For the second half of the month the weather has been warm (very warm on occasions!) and dry. Towards the end of the month I started seeing damselflies in the garden, and dragonflies when out for a walk, along the ditches at the edges of fields. Summer has arrived.

My original plan for this year, for drawing, was to get out and about and visit the Raptor Foundation, and maybe a local zoo too, to practise drawing birds and animals from life. Obviously this has been scuppered, so I've continued to follow a couple of peregrine falcon nest cams, drawing from the live feed. Three chicks are thriving in the Leamington nest, and one egg of three has hatched at Nottingham. The Leamington nestlings are now getting quite mobile!

Next month sees both International Nature Journaling Week and 30 Days Wild - it's going to be fabulous!

30 Days Wild 2019

It's that wild time of the year again! The Wildlife Trusts' 30 Days Wild happens in June; last year I did a nature journal entry every day, but this time round I thought I'd take a more relaxed approach and simply add things as and when, to complete a spread each week. So here are my pages for this year...

Highlights from week 1 included a wasp beetle rescued from the conservatory, and a woodpigeon with a missing patch of feathers that made it really easy to spot. The swifts are here, but yet again the house martins that have regularly nested in the village for some years have not appeared (second year running -  guess we've lost them, sadly).

Out for a run during week 2 I spotted a muntjac deer down the farm track ahead of me, emerging from a field of beans. It watched me getting closer before bounding off across the track and into the field on the other side. Very wet weather courtesy of Storm Miguel made for some rather soggy garden birds, and a large group of long-tailed tits have been passing through.

Week 3 saw an exciting find for me - a smooth newt, hiding under a plant pot in the greenhouse. It's the first newt I've found in the garden here, and it was an unusual golden-yellow colour. I've since found another one under a log in the log pile, this one the more usual brown colour. A hedgehog tackled a huge earthworm, images caught on the trailcam in the front garden. I also puzzled over the flower preference of bumblebees, and discovered that it's all to do with tongue length!

Another first for me in the final week - a white-letter hairstreak butterfly, that I spotted in a garden during our village Open Gardens afternoon. Then a few days later, one appeared in my own garden! The recent wet weather has resulted in some quite fabulous fungi in the log pile - oyster mushrooms, which I was very tempted to pick and eat (but didn't in the end and now they've been very nibbled by the slugs and snails). Out for a run I saw and heard a corn bunting, with it's jangling-set-of-keys song. Very nice to see this farmland bird, which is in general decline, like so many...

Wine ropes for moths

Moths are an unknown for me. So many, little ones, big ones, day-flying ones, pugs, carpets, thorns, hawks... just dipping my toe into the water makes me realise that this could be an all-consuming passion (in the warmer months anyway!). I thought I'd start gently, with some wine ropes (although I'd love to run a light trap sometime!).

The recipe was 500g of sugar dissolved into a bottle of cheap red wine, slowly heating in a pan. I tore up an old bedsheet for the 'ropes' and once the wine/sugar liquid had cooled enough, soaked the strips then hung them up around the garden and waited for dark...

I've had to get myself a moth field guide to save my eyes from too much onscreen time trying to ID these! I've added the ID that I've hazarded a guess at. These were from a couple of nights, the first in June (#30DaysWild) and the second in July, well into the heatwave/dry spell. These shenanigans also went into the nature journal of course (where you'll spot the hoggie that also visited!).

Reviving the slumbering blog...

After a gap of 12 months I'm waking up Cambridgeshire Nature Notes with the intention of posting my nature journalling efforts on as regular a basis as I can manage. I've just completed 30 days of nature journalling, inspired by The Wildlife Trusts' #30DaysWild. So, to start, here's a link to the flip-through of the journal...

Hoping this will kick-start some regular uploads of the natural world I see around me.

#30DaysWild, days 26-30, the final few days!

All too quickly it's the final few days for this year's #30DaysWild...

On day 26 I went off for a run along some as-yet unexplored bridleways. Startled a couple of pheasants into flight from right under my feet, and saw a fox too. I also discovered that my hi-vis running vest is a great lure for bugs of all kinds...

Day 27 was an afternoon down at Paxton Pits with the camera and sketchbook. I did get somewhat rained upon....

On day 28 I finished up my nature journal spread from the previous day's wanderings at Paxton Pits (bonus minibeast pics too)

Day 29 - here is our sparrow bush! I don't know what it is about this shrub that makes it so popular with our house sparrows, but it is definitely the place to hang out around here if you are of the Passer domesticus persuasion...

And finally day 30! Pretty much all my arty dabblings are inspired by the wild, so here's a linocut print I finished recently – the design is based on photos and sketches from an afternoon out at my local nature reserve, Paxton Pits.