Larcenous squirrel

Sampling the merchandise ...

And planning the heist ...

Will my chain and wire hold? I've bought a new cage, just in case.

Green, gold and warm red-brown

In the grey and beige wasteland of the wintering dunes inland from Boundary Bay, miniature gardens glow with jewel tones:

Moss and lichens on an ancient log.

Scales, honeydew, and a good bath.

The leaves were falling off my Schefflera houseplant. Just a few, at first; I picked them up and thought nothing of it. Then, last week, there were more every day. Saturday, I finally got around to really looking at the plant, and discovered that it was covered with scale insects and their excretions.

A plague on all their houses!

A closer view. Scales, sticky sap, bubbles of honeydew.

These are soft scale insects, Coccidae, feeding on the plant juices, gradually killing their host. They don't look like insects; all that's visible is a shell glued to the stem or veins of the plant, like a limpet to a rock. But the limpet wanders about; these do not.

They are probably all females; some species reproduce by parthenogenesis, without the need for a male. In other species, the males live for only a short time; they do not feed.

Female scale insects attach themselves to a handy location, and settle down to eat and lay eggs, 1000 or more in a season. They cover themselves and their eggs with a thin coat of wax and feces. As they feed, they excrete excess liquid through pores in various places; this is a sweet, sticky substance, called "honeydew". It covers the leaves and stems, attracting fungus spores and, on houseplants, dust.

Little bird from Chinatown apologizes for not eating the bugs.

I broke off the stems and leaves where the scale insects were thickest. Some of the scales fell off, so I collected them to get a better look at them.

Side view, showing the waxy cap, and the mass of eggs or young underneath.

When the female dies, her eggs remain protected underneath her dead body until they are ready to hatch.

The largest scale I found, just over 3 mm. (1/8 inch) long. She was dead, her babies long gone.

Several sizes and conditions. Upper left, on top of the pile, what looks like white wax emerges from a central rear pore. Extreme right, center, a dead, empty shell, upside-down.

Most of the scales that had fallen off seemed to be dead and empty, but as I examined them, one started to rock. Then a very tiny, almost transparent baby crawled out from underneath. As I watched, others joined her.

Medium -sized nymph, about 1.5 mm. long.

The tiniest crawler, half a millimeter long. If you look very closely you can see a hint of legs. She could move at a pretty good pace for her size.

I don't know if those two black spots in front are eyes. Someone asked about that on BugGuide, but got no answer.

Only the newly-hatched insects crawl about; once they've found a good feeding spot, they settle down. In some species, they lose their legs entirely.

And now it was time to rescue my poor plant. The leaves I had removed went into the garbage, sealed in a plastic bag. I put the Schefflera in the shower and hosed it down thoroughly with lukewarm water and lots of soap. I took off the top layer of soil and scrubbed the pot, too. When it dried, I checked it over and discovered a couple dozen more scales; these I squashed.

Tonight, the plant looked healthy, but I found another few small scales along the veins of leaves, and removed them. I will have to continue monitoring until I know all the nymphs are gone.

There's an excellent photo of one of these, by Scott Justis, on Flickr, here's Wikipedia on the scale insects, and the USDA Systematic Entomology Laboratory, has a good discussion of the Coccid family.

Winter sports, critter version.

Junco making a snowball ...

Or maybe he's planning a snowbird.

I've been working over the weekend, while it alternately snows and rains outside; perfect weather for sitting at a desk in front of the window. Out there, the juncos, chickadees, bushtits, towhees, and assorted sparrows dash and splash about, perfectly happy as long as there's seed and suet.

And a grey squirrel hangs by his toenails to yank at the suet cage. I hope the chain holds; he hopes it doesn't.

Runes and Rounds

Seen at Crescent Beach:

Lichen circle. 

Several of the rocks had these, from about the size of a loonie to a hand-width. If you look closely at the full-size photo, you'll find individual cups as well, just starting out. I'm always amazed at these seemingly fragile things that eat away hard rock.

The yellow spots are another cup lichen.

Beetle tunnels on the inside of a piece of bark. They remind me of Nordic runes.

What the wind brought in

For the second day in a row, the sun shone, although the wind was biting. In mid-afternoon, our planned activity for the day finished already, we  took a quick run down to Crescent Beach.

Even from our sheltered parking spot, I could hear the wind howling in the treetops. The gulls, dressed as they are from head to tail in feathers lined with down, were playing high overhead, shouting gleefully. Not us; on the shore, the wind went right through our heavy jackets, and after a quick foray out onto the flat sand, we returned, to hug the relative shelter of the bush and cliff face.

Here, we were surprised to find fresh, still damp, piles of eelgrass and bull kelp, several meters inland from the normal high tide mark, tossed there by recent storms. The eelgrass was twined around the roots of rose bushes and trees; the wind had even picked up clam shells and tossed them into the bush.

This clam shell was still rocking on the broken branch of an old stump, where the storm had snagged it. It has an eelgrass tail, barely visible as it whipped back and forth.  And yes, that's a piece of plastic candy wrapper on the stones.

Alder sprig, broken off, caught on a dead blackberry cane.

The eelgrass hadn't arrived alone. It was wrapped and tied around pieces of wood, branches, plastic, a lost glove, broken glass, many clam shells. Here and there, we found unexpected casualties.

Several dead starfish, far from their usual haunts.

I saw five kelp crabs. Someone had placed these two on a rock.

Kelp crabs live in areas which are continually under water. They congregate on pilings under wharves, or in the kelp and eelgrass of the intertidal zone, moving down as the tide recedes. On the wide, flat expanses of Crescent Beach, their habitat is far out into the bay; the tide races out too rapidly for them to survive closer to shore. These unfortunates had been swept up, past the sand flats, past the bare rocks, past the upper beach trail, to the roots of the hill, where they died.

This large crab was freshly dead, still wet and with all his limbs intact.

I'd never seen the underside; it turned out to be a brilliant red. Around the open abdominal plate, a few flies are beginning to feed.

And then the wind blew us back to the car and down the road to a toasty coffee shop.

Hopeful beginnings

The sun came out! And out shopping, we saw a flower bed covered with new shoots. We went to Home Depot and looked at mini-greenhouses, and bought more paving stones for the garden walk. It felt so good!

And then I came home and glued myself to the computer, trying out all the buttons and boxes in Element. I worked on 3 photos, one with a hard colour adjustment, one noisy squirrel, and one easy crop-and-sharpen job. The squirrel photo proved hopeless, but here are the other two.

Miniature harvestman. This had a distinct orange cast; Element took it out nicely. The background colour now matches the original piece of wood.

An older photo; the sky reflected in a corner beside the Ladner docks.

I used auto-adjust on the reflections photo. This almost never works in Picasa or Picnik, but with Element it did, at least on this photo. I don't like their sharpening tool, though; it's too small to control properly.

A Skywatch post.

Good software, buggy photos.

I've spent the day, since it's still raining, stumbling through the learning process on Photoshop Element 10, mostly by trial and error. So far, the help menu has been less than useful.

This unidentified bug has served as my first serious test subject.

Found in wet, cold mud in a flowerpot. 6 mm. long, very active.

Face view of a dead companion. Much more tranquil. I like his "eyelashes".

I have the feeling that I should recognize this critter, but the memory is elusive, and I don't see it in my books or on BugGuide. I have submitted photos there. (Update: Ken W., at BugGuide says it's a rove beetle of some sort. Update #2: In the genus Tachyporus.)

And I'm happy with the results of the editing process. It took about 4 times as long as it does in Picnik, but that will improve with practice.

Red Queen's Race

Since the photo editing program I have been using, Picnik, is going down soon, I've been looking into and trying out alternates. I finally bought Elements 10, and have spent all night tonight downloading, installing, and learning the basics. I like it, so far, although some things don't seem logical at the moment.

I need to figure out how to get the best quality in a tiny size for BugGuide; I've got several new critters to send in.

Meanwhile, here's a vintage photo I scanned and cleaned up in Picnik. It was scratched, wrinkled, and faded; I'm pleased with the job Picnik did. I've got a whole album of these to fix, so I hope Element isn't too terribly slow.

1950s photo; the weekly mail, Esperanza inlet, Vancouver Island.

Baby blue eyes

It doesn't make sense to grumble about the weather, does it? Instead, I'm keeping busy discovering what creepy crawlies are still active in my garden. A great crowd, I discovered, mostly very small. I've found some critters I'd never seen before, and solved an old mystery, to boot. So now there's a ton of work to do, identifying them, taking and sorting photos.

For now, isn't this the cutest baby spiderling?

She's about 2 mm. long.

A chubby-cheeked, fat, and furry infant.

Let it rain!

A rainy season grumble

Weather! A BC winter, at it's nastiest. Rain on Friday washed away most of our snow, left the lawn full of slush. Saturday was windy and far too cold for poking around the beach. Sunday, it poured rain. They're promising us more rain for the next week, and there's a wind warning for the Vancouver area for today.

We're getting cabin fever already.

And to think; just a week ago, these were our skies:

An eagle basking in the sunshine. White Rock beach.

Crows, rocks, paddleboarders under fluffy clouds. White Rock.

There's ice on the water, but the sun warms us. Cougar Creek.

Reflections of bare alders, blue and white sky. Cougar Creek.

I'm hoping the weather people got it wrong again. Another week of rain, and I'll start to mildew.

A Skywatch post.

Beavers never give up.

Two months ago, I wrote about the ongoing feud between a beaver family and the city of Surrey (three years and more!), over the optimum use of the creek and lagoon. The beavers were winning at the moment; they'd enlarged the upper creek area, turning a muddy trickle into a duck pond. I commented, later, "The strange thing is that in all this time, I have never seen a beaver here. Just the dams and the felled trees."

The battle continues. The human residents have been trying new tactics. Where the beavers cut fresh trees, men went in with chain saws and cleared the banks, opening more land up to the sunlight. And they've removed a couple of dams; the new pond is gone again.

Not that the beavers seem to mind this; they're taking advantage of the newly felled timber to feed on fresh, green inner bark.

Alders are weed trees; they grow quickly in wet land, and the bark of the young tree is tender and juicy.

Beaver-felled alder.

They had cut some of the new timber into shorter lengths, which they can haul away to make new lodges. Quite a few of the branches are already piled in the quieter end of the lagoon, a start on the next community lodge.

And we saw beavers, finally: (Looks like we didn't; that's an otter. I didn't expect that!)

Resting between patches of ice, against reflections of still-standing trees.

There were at least two, probably three, adults, swimming back and forth across the lagoon, ducking under the ice, occasionally coming close to the edge to rest.

The beavers will have to hurry with the building program; it is breeding season now, and a warm nest area will soon be needed. Although their kits from last year will still be with them for another year or so, the next litter will be born around April. The yearlings will help with babysitting, and probably with dam construction.

*Update: Annie, in the comments says he looks more like an otter. He does. This is entirely confusing to me. Can a tiny lagoon in a muddy creek support both otters and beaver? What do you think?

Update #2: Others agree; it's an otter. Post corrected.

Wakey-wakey, little ones!

While I was looking for springtails, I rousted a bunch of other animals out of their cold-weather naps. There were slugs, of course; dozens of them. Sleepy sowbugs by the handful. And a few unexpected critters:

On the dry back of an old, crumbling planter box, this small spider was out hunting, still awake in spite of the below-zero weather.

She's another to identify. Ozyptila, a crab spider. Notice the interesting dotted lines on the sides of her thorax.

It was hard to imagine this delicate creature wandering around in the cold.

A lizard bark louse nymph, about 2mm. long, with undeveloped wings. The adult's will be longer than the body. I love the glassy legs.

Here's one on the rotten wood of the bottom of the box.

Blaniulus millipedes. Update: I forgot to add this: look for the tiny white critter at center left. I didn't see that until I was cropping the photo.

These were sound asleep, but as soon as they warmed up a bit, they uncoiled themselves and started to explore.

Every deep crack sheltered a few of these beetle mites.

I have to add at least one sowbug. Check out the antennae; they look as if they're made of metal pipes!

The cold snap has ended. It is now raining hard on top of the snow. The slugs will be waking up, hungry enough to eat the remains of my garden, in the morning.

Bushtits vs. squirrels; who will win?

The squirrels stole my suet cage. I had it tied on a branch with good steel wire; it didn't deter them. They were welcome to snack on the suet, but not to take it away, cage and all.

I got another cage, and more suet, and double-wired it. They stole that one.

I found a third torn off the tree, abandoned half-way down the lawn. Empty, of course. They managed to steal that one for good, with its suet refill, a bit later.

I've been looking for a new cage since the weather turned cold. Everywhere, they've been sold out; I think all the local squirrels have been busy.

Finally, two days ago, I found one in the supermarket. This one came with a heavier chain than the previous three; I've hung it from the chain, and added new wire.

A flock of bushtits found the suet by the next morning. I love to watch how they all swoop in, as if blown by the wind, swarm over the cage, hanging from all sides and the bottom for a couple of minutes, and then blow down and away, like little grey leaves.

I count 17 here.

"Wait for me!"

I wonder how long this one will last.

Dressed in scarlet, for the cold

For this house finch, a snack of black oil sunflower seeds goes down nicely on a chilly afternoon.

"And now, I must be off. Thanks!"

Christmas stocking animal

"In the blink of an eye..." The phrase is used to suggest speed, and with reason; the human eye can complete a blink in 0.15 seconds, or 150 milliseconds.  Fast enough; anything that happens faster than that, we fail to notice.

A springtail's response time is about one tenth of that. In 18 milliseconds, less than 0.02 seconds, he has disappeared from here and landed over there, up to 100 times his body length away. And he arrives in the new location primed and ready to leap again, should the situation not be to his liking; he has no steering mechanism and has to take potluck. His continued survival depends on being able to move on instantly.

He has no wings. His legs are slender and used for walking. For those high jumps, he uses a spring and lock system on the underside of his abdomen. The furca, visible as he jumps, is a pronged, clawed fork, hinged near the tail. Usually, this is carried folded up, ending just under his chin, and secured by a locking mechanism, the retinaculum. When the lock is released, the fork snaps back like the drawn string of a bow and arrow, flinging the owner into the air with great force.

Globular springtail, caught mid-leap.

Quite simple, really. Easily understood. Except that it takes considerable energy either to leap, or to re-set the spring. So I looked closely at the underbelly of the springtail walking up the glass wall of the spider box.

View from the tail end.

Yesterday's photo, again.

The spring is that long V up the center. Between the two prongs, about mid-way up, there is a small button; this is the lock. But what are all those other contraptions?

I found a couple of very helpful photos on Flickr, here and here, annotated by Frans Janssens, the go-to Collembola expert. The large round organs on either side of the base of the furca are torsion bars, the spring mechanism. (I had to look this up; it's been a while since I studied these.

A spring can be defined to be an elastic member which exerts a resisting force when its shape is changed due to an applied force and returns to its original shape when the force is let off. ... when one side is fixed to an immovable object and the other is twisted, torque is applied. The torsion bar resists this torque and like any other spring it returns to its original position when the torque is let off. From a GM truck site.) 

The bars are powered by large muscles in this abdominal segment.

Slender springtail, showing the furca and torsion bars.

Now, look at the photo of the leaping springtail again. (Re-inserted below, to save scrolling.) See that thick, protruding bar just below the second set of legs? That's the collophore, or ventral tube, another unique springtail piece of equipment. This is what gives the springtails their scientific name, Collembola, from colla, glue, and embolon, a plug.

Globular springtail, caught mid-leap.

All Collembola have a ventral tube. From this tube they can everse two 'sacs'. In Symphypleona, (the globular springtails) these sacs are evolved into long tubes. These eversible tubes are multifunctional organs. They are used to regulate the internal osmotic pressure by taking up water with the tips of the eversed sacs/tubes. They are also used as an aid to adhere themselves on a smooth substrate surface .... In Symphypleona the long eversible tubes are also used for grooming. (Frans Janssens)

The BugGuide page where I found this shows another use for the tubes; a springtail turned belly-up is trying to use the tubes to right himself. Frans comments, "This is a trick only Collembola can perform."

And how about this one? Here's a photo of a springtail using an eversible tube to drink the dew off his own back! (Collembolas, Jan van Duinen)

We're not done yet! Springtails are full of surprises; Christmas stockings, all lumpy and bumpy with mysterious packages.

Beautiful patterns, no two alike. I love this "Southwestern blanket" one.

Look at the shape of the eyes. Well, not exactly eyes; they're irregluarly shaped eye patches. Each one is dotted with up to 8 "ocelli", simple eye, not joined to each other, and of different sizes. (Image) These are not like the compound eyes of insects and instead, are called "composed eyes". The internal workings are not the same, and the individual eyes never touch each other.

One last photo; Smiley!

Cheerful little jumper, isn't he?

Update: in the comments, "Don't Bug Me" added a pair of links to YouTube clips from a David Attenborough series, "Life in the Undergrowth", showing some great footage of springtails. In the first, as the animals leap, if you watch carefully, you'll see the furca folding back into place while the animal somersaults through the air. The second shows a head-butting mating dance. Thanks, DBM!

Update #2: I just found this video; a BBC team catching and photographing a jumping springtail. Check it out!