Another “wildlife encounter” this morning. Following on from the baby-newt-in-a-dog-bowl, today’s communing with Mother Nature was the discovery of a dozen or more baby snails in the plastic box we have been using as a parcel store. A snail must’ve laid their eggs in there a few weeks ago and now they’ve hatched. The hatchlings were tiny, about the size of a grain of rice, so I collected them up carefully so as to not crack their gossamer-thin shells and gently deposited them in the border. Hopefully they’ll grow big and strong, ready to decimate the nasturtiums and sunflowers next year…
Where I used to live (about 3 miles away) I had lots of wildlife around me as I lived in a farm cottage, and we regularly had badgers and birds of prey in the garden, as well as foxes and rats–but that was probably more to do with my poultry! I now live on the edge of a small town but I hear owls every evening, and have started hearing the fallow bucks roaring (an aspirational term for the guttural bellowing the males use to establish their status) and I’m just as thrilled to interact with the spiders, frogs, bees and beetles we get in the garden where I am now as I was with the arguably more charismatic animals and insects I could enjoy at my last property.
I drew some of the little snails in my sketchbook, but then got rather engrossed in a livecam of brown bears catching salmon in Alaska. I wanted to try drawing them but they are difficult to get on paper as somehow they look much less bear-like than I imagined once I started studying them. They are more angular and dare I say it, unattractive, than popular opinion would suggest, and with their rough coats and rather lumpy features I found it tricky to do any sketches I was happy with.
I used my liquid earth and charcoal pigments from Schmincke as they are really handy to pop in my bag and take with me if I’m away from my stash of gouache tubes. And, fortuitously, the perfect tones for bears and snails.
