Wild West Yorkshire nature diary, Saturday 10th July 1999
THERE'S MORE GOLD in the fields now, contrasting with the tunnel of green shade alongside the old stone walls of the Chevet Estate near Sandal, Wakefield. Tractors thunder through the village of Rhyhill as preparations for the harvest intensify.
Rhyhill seems as descriptive a name now as in Anglo-Saxon times. But today there is more more pasture, barley, oilseed rape, and wheat in the fields than rye.
At rest near a field of cabbages are several hundred gulls which, at a glance as we drive past, seem to be mainly Lesser Black-backs. This isn't a gull that nests nearby so these are probably this year's non-breeders which have gathered together.
Yesterday's summer evening idyll was rudely interrupted by a boisterous party of our most inland of gulls, the Black-headed. Four tattered-winged specimens were diving, chasing and arguing in their husky, streetwise, 'keehar' calls. When we worked on the cartoon film of Watership Down the character actor, singer and comedian Zero Mostel was chosen for the voice of the black-headed gull Kehaar. His New Yorker tones, husky from years of work in smokey nightclubs, were a close match for these gulls.
A Toad that could comfortably sit on my little fingernail toddles across the causey stone path and heads into the grasses. I've seen larger spiders.
THERE'S MORE GOLD in the fields now, contrasting with the tunnel of green shade alongside the old stone walls of the Chevet Estate near Sandal, Wakefield. Tractors thunder through the village of Rhyhill as preparations for the harvest intensify.
Rhyhill seems as descriptive a name now as in Anglo-Saxon times. But today there is more more pasture, barley, oilseed rape, and wheat in the fields than rye.
At rest near a field of cabbages are several hundred gulls which, at a glance as we drive past, seem to be mainly Lesser Black-backs. This isn't a gull that nests nearby so these are probably this year's non-breeders which have gathered together.
Yesterday's summer evening idyll was rudely interrupted by a boisterous party of our most inland of gulls, the Black-headed. Four tattered-winged specimens were diving, chasing and arguing in their husky, streetwise, 'keehar' calls. When we worked on the cartoon film of Watership Down the character actor, singer and comedian Zero Mostel was chosen for the voice of the black-headed gull Kehaar. His New Yorker tones, husky from years of work in smokey nightclubs, were a close match for these gulls.
A Toad that could comfortably sit on my little fingernail toddles across the causey stone path and heads into the grasses. I've seen larger spiders.