Too Many Words

Tuesday, 26th April 2005
Wild West Yorkshire nature diary

A day without drawing! I don't like it but I've just got to get this book designed; even so I'm going to make sure that tomorrow I take half an hour off to draw.

I've been pouring my text into more of the spreads I laid out yesterday and there's just too much of it. My first thought was to draw more illustrations but the book is a finite size so, even if I do produce more artwork, the text is going to need serious revision. The story is driven by the pictures and it's important that the text stays in balance with it.

Seeing Green

There's rain, fairly heavy rain, all afternoon. The garden, meadow and wood are so green at this time of year and I can almost see our new lawn growing. It's just the first wiry blades sticking up at present (along with some of the existing coarser grass that I tried to weed out when I prepared the ground) but the impression of greenness increases every day.

It's three weeks since I filled up the feeders; it's taken a week since we got back from Mallorca to get around to the job. Within an hour the goldfinches and greenfinches have found the niger and sunflower seed again. The pheasants have yet to visit the ground feeder.

By 6 p.m. we've got six greenfinches and a couple of goldfinches on the feeders while a chaffinch hops around on the lawn.

Two of the male greenfinches have an angry dispute over the sunflower, flying up in beak to beak conflict. Greenfinches seem to be the most aggressive of the finches.

Home Turf

It's not until later that two male blackbirds face up to each other on the lawn, making a final evening check on the borders of their territories. They solve their border dispute by bluff and bluster, alternately puffing themselves up and nonchalantly pretending to be feeding on their home turf.

Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk