Busy tonight, so here are a few photos from Steveston. A couple of great blue herons.
Fishing by the old pilings. Nice breast feathers. I hadn't seen that pattern before.
Browns and greens, and a silvery heron.
This one is not cooperating. You can barely see the first one over behind the bank.
Going in for supplies? (Good pose, but you might have to look closely. Click on the photo.)
I'm still hoping for a closer identification of the birdhouse slime mold from the other day. Googling "Slime Mold", I came up with 475,000 entries. That's a lot of sites!
Add to that the Technorati search; another 700. And 1850 Google images.
But I am nothing if not persistent. (Or an experienced procrastinator; after all, I am supposed to be paying bills, not looking at pretty pictures.) And I have found some beautiful sites and photos. Here are a selection of (some of) the best.
Photos: a 55-photo Flickr set, by Myrioama. I especially liked this one.
Stephen Sharnoff. Just a few, but beautiful.
An amazing pink jelly.
Mycoweb. Go back to the main page for more Slime photos.
Blog posts: Lynne discovers orange jelly slime for the first time.
And the other end of the spectrum: The Beauty of Slime from Science Musings. Chet writes, "...with Whitmanesque gush, I sing their praises." Well-written and a good over-all description of their life-cycle.
An article by Hugh Griffith from E-Flora BC: Electronic Atlas of the Plants of British Columbia, about "intelligent slime" ("More amazing, if chopped into pieces that are then returned to a previous maze, the plasmodial bits will reassemble and start to move, avoiding dead ends and heading directly back to the food again.") and its weather prognostication talents.
And more intelligent slime: a slime mold drives a robot. From New Scientist.
And, of course, Wikipedia. Basic info, photos, and this drawing from Ernst Haeckel.
And now, I really must go and pay those bills.
Just the photos.
Sparrows and pigeon.
Budding branches against a cement pier.
A mallard, also out for a stroll.
Promises.
... or, the birds will just have to wait a bit.
Three sunny days in a row! Time to start organizing the garden and patio. I had the afternoon free, so I got to it. Washed windows, wiped down patio table and chairs, scrubbed out the bird bath, admired my sprouting perennials. And took down the bird house that had been turned topsy-turvy when it snowed those 18 inches in one day. I brought it in to be repaired and re-hung.
That was as far as I got. On the edge of the birdhouse roof, I noticed a sprinking of tiny black dots raised above the surface on millimetre-tall stalks. Slime mold!
Out came the camera and magnifying glass. And here they are:
Click on this one to see them close-up. Aren't they beautiful?
These are cellular slimes, but I couldn't identify them confidently. They look more or less like Comatricha to me; what species, I can't tell. Or alternately, they could be Japanese lantern slime, Dictydium.
Slimes are among the strangest creatures I have seen. Neither animal nor vegetable; one moment acting like independent amoebae, then the next organizing themselves into one organism and growing like a mushroom. In recent years, scientists have moved them into a separate kingdom, Protista, which they share with other tiny nucleated organisms like amoeba and algae.
They start off life from a spore, and grow as separate amoeba-like animals, eating bacteria, etc. At some time, they start to clump, then "migrate" as a single organism to an appropriate location, where they grow like a plant, some becoming stem cells, other spore cases (sporangia) or spores. One type, at a certain stage, loses its individual cell walls and becomes a mass of flowing naked protoplasm, hence "slime".
Others become masses of jelly; I have come across blobs of transparent "orange marmalade" in the dry bush near Chase, in the BC interior. Around here, I find bright yellow blobs, somewhat smaller. Or what looks like brilliant orange, red or yellow insect egs stuck to rotting sticks under the evergreens, or masses of scrambled eggs. Once, in a hollow stump, we found a white mass about the size and consistency of boiled cauliflower. In the process of migrating, some look like a tangle of threads, or pretzels. You name it; slime mold will imitate it.
And then there's the "dog vomit" slime. Yes, that is its name. And you can guess what it looks like. That one, I haven't seen yet. Just as well.
Here are a few links with fascinating photographs: Photo Gallery of Mycometes, Fungal Biology, George Barron (U. of Guelph), Hidden Forest, and a blog entry from Sitka Nature.
The bird house? I eventually got back to it, and replaced its floor. But I'll have to hang it up tomorrow. If it's not raining again.
I liked this photo; the silhouettes of slime fruiting bodies in a misty, moody atmosphere.
Just passing the word along: Jeremy Bruno, at the Voltage Gate, issued an invitation to join the First Annual Blogger Bioblitz.
He writes;
"In honor of National Wildlife Week, April 21 - 29, I am inviting bloggers from all walks to participate in the First Annual Blogger Bioblitz, where bloggers from across the country will choose a wild or not-so-wild area and find how many of each different species - plant, animal, fungi and anything in between - live in a certain area within a certain time.I joined up, since he opens it to individuals with a backyard. Now, I just hope it doesn't pour rain all that week.
Pick a neat little area that you are relatively familiar with and is small enough that you or the group can handle - a small thicket, a pond, a section of stream, or even your backyard - and bring along some taxonomic keys or an Audubon guide, or if you're lucky enough, an expert in local flora and fauna. Set a time limit. Try to identify the different species of organisms that you find as well as the number of each species that you find. Take pictures if you have a digital camera, compile your numbers, make observations, set up your post however you wish as long as you include your numbers in a digestible fashion (I'll have more details on that later) - then submit it to me and I'll include it on the list. We will also be tallying total numbers of each species found, and then a grand total."
A couple of weeks ago, exploring, we discovered a tiny park behind an new (horrendous, pretentious and astoundingly ugly, so bad we've been staying out of that area) housing development just a few minutes away from home. At the time, it was cold and we were tired, but there was a pond and a trail, a flock of American wigeons and the inevitable mallards sleeping on the grass. Next sunny day, we promised ourselves.
And yesterday it stopped raining (finally!), so off we went. We walked all the way around the pond, leaving the far end of the creek for another day.
The park takes advantage of a widening in Cougar Creek, at the upper end of Cougar Canyon, which is a quite deep gorge with a creek and a trail of sorts at the bottom; here, it is tamed, fenced and bridged. There are signs up announcing a "Releafing Project" and salmon enhancement. Good stuff.
And the ducks were there, floating idly in the center. Mallards, buffleheads, wigeons, mostly. But at the far end, while Laurie was in the bushes photographing fungus on a decaying log, I saw, on the opposite shore, a pair of wood ducks.
Now, these guys are shy. I have only seen them close enough to identify once before, at Reifel Island Bird Sanctuary, and even then, it was just a glimpse between the branches. And here they were, in plain sight! Trouble was, they were swimming fast; by the time I'd got the camera ready, they were out of range. I got one small, very fuzzy photo of the male. Laurie came along just as they disappeared, so he didn't get a photo either.
Never mind; now I know they're there. And we'll be back.
As for the "releafing"; the plants are co-operating.
A wild rose, just getting started.
Sticky leaf buds.
Salmonberry leaves.
And a bud.
Osoberry, or Indian plum. Good bird food later this summer.
And flowering currant. I love these plants; I had one in a previous home. They are not especially edible, but they make such a cheerful showing in the spring undergrowth!
... Good Planets is up at Burning Silo. Theme: A Memory. Great photos, wonderful memories. Go see.
This is Part II of a three-part series, reproduced from my old blog. (Here) Part I, Part II. (On this blog)~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Continued from Muddy Buddies, Part I and Part II , in which I told of the finding of this tiny crustacean.
To go on with the nature of the beast:-
This particular nebalia (pugettensis) has no fixed English name. Some call it a "sea flea", although what it has in common with fleas, I fail to see. Some Canadian sources call it the Mud Flat Hooded Shrimp, and this at least points us in the general direction. But it is not a shrimp, nor exclusive to mud flats, nor is that "rostrum" a hood; it's more like a rhino's horn.
One thing, though; nebalia loves mud. It lives around the world in muddy bottoms, from tidal flats to "abyssal" depths, "abyssal" referring to 2000 to 5000 metres underwater. The pressure down there, at the 5000 metre level, is 500 atmospheres, or 750 lbs per square inch. Amazing versatility!
We found them in Boundary Bay, because the sand is half mud; the other end of the beach is all sticky, impassible, stinking mud, and just across the water is Mud Bay. I've half a mind to go over there and dig for live nebalia. Nebalia loves mud, shallow or deep.
Eugene Kozloff , in Seashore Life, says, "The situations where it is plentiful generally show signs of being quite foul when they are stirred up." (p.241) That would describe the area perfectly.
And down there in the muck, they stir up the water, streaming it through the carapace, filtering out edible bits of organic matter, plant or animal. They are scavengers, too; they have been caught in traps baited with dead crabs, several days old. Part of the clean-up crew, all those billions of tiny unsung heroes filtering our water, carting away our leavings.
And yet, they are so beautiful! So clean looking; that glistening, glassy carapace, that polished horn. So delicate; the flowing, feathery tail. And those ruby-red eyes!
What are they seeing, down there, deep, deep down in the mud and slime, with those brilliant eyes of theirs?
This is Part II of a three-part series, reproduced from my old blog. (Here) Part I, Part III.
A website mentioned feathery feet. Time to open up the microscope. The nice thing about the hand microscope is that I can look at things in situ. I'm glad I did, this time. On the piece of paper towel where my nebalia were drying, I could see, at full power (40x) long, ostrich-feather plumes at the end of the tail, almost transparent. But so delicate! When I moved the nebalia to a better viewing base (a white plastic lid), using the tip of the paintbrush at the thick of the thorax as a lift, and looked again, the delicate fronds were broken off, leaving ragged stumps.
Yesterday, reading Bev's blog entry on camera techniques (loved that spider portrait how-to!), I remembered a trick I had read about while I was still wishing for a digital. Something that just might possibly work with my economy model, with its 7-in limit on close-ups.
I dropped everything and dug out my fixings...
I have a good lens that I bought at Value Village for a buck. It seems that it is a part of a (missing) older slide projector. Solid, unscratched, and well-ground. I placed it in front of the lens on my camera (set for close-ups) and took a few trial shots. It seemed to work. So I dug out my four dried nebalia pugettensis from last June, and photographed them. Uploaded the photos to the computer, and looked at them. WoW! Better than I had ever hoped!
Here are the 4:
And here's one on his own:
OK: time to back-track to the story. I discovered these on the beach ...
No, not that way; I'll just post the three parts of the story as I wrote it on my old blog.
"This world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that, long ago. In my books, he has a point. But I doubt that he was referring to nebalia, which made me happy this weekend.
It was a bright, sunny day, and we were in Boundary Bay Park . So was half the population of Surrey, with their kites and kids, umbrellas and sunscreen. The tide was out; it looked like we could almost walk to Mud Bay, just beyond. And 'way out at the edge of the water there was a white line that, on examining it through the binoculars, looked like a seagull convention. We decided to walk out.
Mount Baker was ahead, seemingly floating on a haze of grey cloud; MN (Laurie) had to keep stopping to take photos. I was watching where I stepped. The sand was covered completely, carpeted so that it looked almost black, with small needle snails*. Looking closely, I could distinguish 4 different types; 3 smaller ones, up to about 1/2 inch long, one dark brown and two with spiralling bands of white and brown. And a larger snail, paler brown and over an inch long. I wished I could float, like Mount Baker, over the sand; I could hear the shells crunching under my sandals. Couldn't be helped.
It was a long walk. I picked up a crab shell or two, and discarded them when I found them broken. Other than that, there were just the snails for a while, then empty sand with an occasional open clam shell, seagull dinner. We reached the water's edge just in time for the seagulls to rise with a great clamour and move back, behind us. They knew something we didn't.
We turned back. I confess it was a bit of a letdown; there was nothing more to see at water's edge than there had been half-way back down the beach. MN found a seagull to photograph. I waited, walking slowly, looking at the sand.
Then I saw them. First, it was the dead crabs. Small crabs. Smaller than any I had seen, almost paper-thin and transparent. I bent and picked one up on a fingertip. And saw another, and another.
How do you collect delicate shells when you forgot to bring a container? MN was back from his photoshoot; he found me a medium-sized clamshell half full of sand. Perfect! I stored the crabs safely, went to look for another. And found something I had never seen before: a half-dozen or so of tiny golden animacules, half the size of the crabs, with a little tail the length of the body. Four of them went into the clamshell before we realized why the seagulls had left.
The tide was coming in. And the beach is so flat, it ran like a river. So did we.
Next: What are these beasties?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*The snails were probably some variety of bittium.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Playing with my new camera again.
Garlic, responding to our BC spring humidity.
And a muffin at Tim Hortons. Blueberry. Laurie's favourite.
I'm really supposed to be either working or sleeping, so as to get to work early tomorrow. Deadlines, again.
So I guess that's it for tonight.
Tomorrow: nebalia pugettensis, and an experiment with lenses.
I'm passing on a message from Bill of the Birds about another of those horrible "unintended consequences".
"... hole-punched sign posts could be inadvertently deadly to perching raptors.
... the owl was suspended by a single talon that had apparently gotten caught in the top hole of the post. Clearly the bird flew in and perched on top of the post. Then, when it tried to leave, found itself caught by a talon through the hole. It had struggled to free itself, and likely starved to death.
... And they asked us at BWD to help spread the word about the unintentional danger these sign posts may pose to any raptor with talons that perches on top. This style of sign post or fence post is commonly used, so how can the danger be reduced?"
And we got a clear photo of the invasion!!!
We were just lucky Laurie didn't get zapped by any of those death rays!!!
It's rare that the eagles we see ever take notice of us. And why would they? We're beneath them (literally), earth-crawlers, slow-pokes, bound to our little trails and roadways.
So this trio surprised us.
In our program of gradually moving north on the Boundary Bay - Mud Bay dike trail, we had driven as far as we could go on Tsawwassen streets and parked at Beach Grove Park, with the intent of taking one of the many little alley-ways to the beach. (See map.) Instead, we crossed the park and followed a narrow trail into the trees, hoping to hit the shore in that direction.
In this area, most of the trees are cottonwoods, and many of the largest had been sawed off, leaving tall snags. (They tend to fall over easily when they get too big, so cutting them is wise in populated areas.) A sign explained that the dead stumps had been left for food, perches and nesting for the local birds. Near the top of one of the tallest, I saw a large eagle's nest. No eagles, though.
Our trail petered out at a bit of a creek, too deep for our shoes. We back-tracked and found a way around the wood, at the edge of the farmland. A few birds called in the bush, but otherwise we were alone. Ahead of us, we saw the dike across a plowed field; it was fenced, so we had to turn south again, back towards the street.
We had worked our way about half-way down the sea-ward side of the wood, when we heard a loud, indignant-sounding "Squawk!" I looked up, and there was a young eagle directly overhead. On more distant branches two mature eagles sat silently, ignoring us, as they do.
Of course, we both started madly snapping photos, walking slowly towards the base of the trees. When we got too close, all three rose into the air and flew away. A couple more clicks of the shutter, and they were out of range.
Here are the closest two, one adult, one "kid":
Laurie got an excellent shot of the young one, flying directly overhead. If you look closely, you can see how he was turning his head to look down at these rude intruders. Click on the photo; enlarged, you can even see the pupil of his eye.
We walked on, and the eagles returned to the roosts where we had first seen them. But when we got back to the road (through a narrow gap in the fence), I looked back again. Not a sign of them, nor of the big nest. They had chosen their spots carefully, where they could not be seen from anywhere along the street. No wonder the young one was perturbed when we "snuck around" from the fields.
Continued from yesterday: a walk along Boundary Bay.
I am still learning the ropes with this digital camera. So my focus on this walk along the shore was on seeing what it would do outside, in bright sunlight. I snapped wildly as we went along, at anything and everything, from scenery to the little puddles left by the tide. Even this, which I think is a roller from an ancient wringer washer.
The beach was almost deserted, the tide well out. Not a seagull in sight. And this area was mostly bare of eelgrass. Nothing to see, really, but sand and sky. I turned over a stone with my toe, and tiny crabs scuttled away from the sudden light, buried themselves in the sand again. I investigated a few more puddles and saw movements, something tiny and pale, visible for only a moment. Bending down low, I could see pinkish shrimp-like creatures, almost transparent. I took photos, without much hope of getting anything through the reflecting surface of the water.
Farther on, I found a light-coloured snail and practiced on it.
At home, I blew up my photos and looked them over. I got the shrimp! Yay!
Pale and blurry they may be, but still; I can see their little eyes and the curve of the body. Encouraging.
And that snail? He had company. There is a crab beside him that I hadn't even noticed, looking straight at it on the beach, possibly because he's wearing camouflage colours. And barnacles, and limpets in several colours, another snail. Going back to the "shrimp" photo, I realized I was also seeing something that looks like a white tube with tentacles on the end; some kind of a worm. And something starfish-purple.
Click on the photos to see them full size. For comparison, the snail is about a centimetre ( almost half an inch) long, the "shrimp" about half that.
I brought home a handful of dead eel-grass from the high-tide line, and a bit of plain sand. Looking at it through my hand microscope (40x), I discovered that it was full of worms, some large enough to see segments, the intestines and a whip-like tail, some so small that they seemed barely more than a lively thread.
Nothing to see but sand? I will never say that again.
"Sea Dragons are arguably the most spectacular and mysterious of all ocean fish. Though close relatives of sea horses, sea dragons have larger bodies and leaf-like appendages which enable them to hide among floating seaweed or kelp beds. ...He has many more photos; beautiful, all of them. Go over and browse.
...Leafy Sea Dragons are very interesting to watch-- the leafy appendages are not used for movement. The body of a sea dragon scarcely appears to move at all. Steering and turning is through movement of tiny, translucent fins along the sides of the head (pectoral fins, visible above) and propulsion derives from the dorsal fins (along the spine). Their movement is as though an invisible hand were helping, causing them to glide and tumble in peculiar but graceful patterns in slow-motion. This movement appears to mimic the swaying movements of the seaweed and kelp. Only close observation reveals movement of an eye or tiny fins."
A couple of days ago we returned to Boundary Bay beach, where we walk (and I poke at the sand/mud/stones under our feet) fairly often.
This is one side of a shallow bay, blending gradually into Mud Bay on the opposite shore. (See satelite photo. Google, edited.) There is a walk along the dike most of the way around. On repeated visits, we are gradually working our way north from Boundary Bay.
The beach at Boundary Bay Park, at the south end, is mostly sandy, with muddy patches. It is a favourite place for picnics, wading, and occasional swimming. (It is a long, long way out to deeper water.) As we walk north, we run into muddy patches and lots of eelgrass. At the Mud Bay end, it is all -- you guessed it! -- mud.
On our first visit, I was astounded at the quantities of snails on the beach; millions upon millions of them. (I wrote about these on my former blog.) The sand, where it was clear of snails, was covered with the castings of lugworms.
That first day, I also discovered a Nebalia pugettensis, the first I had ever seen. On future visits, we found sand dollars and jellyfish umpteen crabs, and tiny clamshells.
I have taken to collecting samples of mud and kelp to bring home and examine with my hand microscope. Each time I discover new wonders.
So far, I have seen:
Eyes on a stalk; now, that would be so useful! Even better than eyes in the back of my head. (Which I have; just ask my kids.)
See Pharyngula, the "lovely stalk-eyed fly".
One of my favourite carnivals is the Skeptic's Circle. This time, they've included my posts on pareidolia. A little something to nibble at between the heavy-duty courses; Orac on alternative medicine and Tara Smith at Aetiology. Plus a nice line-up of bloggers I don't know, yet.
Head on over and see!
... how this stays afloat.
Discovered at the Steveston Docks, still lined up with the working boats. If I were on it, I'd be afraid to cast off.
But the owners do keep their venetian blinds dusted and the windows clean. I'll say that for them.
Before we left the Buddhist temple (see previous post), we walked around the parking lot to a road leading to tall trees, gleaming in the sunlight. At an open gate, a sign read, "No entry to gardens," but we rationalized that this was for cars trying to drive through to find an exit, and walked on. A couple of workers saw us and smiled, so it must have been ok.
The trees were covered in large pussy-willows; Laurie got out the camera again.
Afterwards, we got back on the road and drove down to the old fishing village of Steveston. We ate lunch in a sandwich place, then meandered through gift shops on our way down to the pier.
The boardwalks were deserted; it's early in the season, and the crowds mostly show up on weekends, even in summer. A pair of Greater Scaups* in their best breeding finery were fishing in the quiet water.
It's not often we get to see these; their habitat is tundra and boreal forests, but sometimes they winter this far south. And they are divers, eating clams and crabs and the like, so are less interested in humans than the hand-out loving mallards. It was a real treat to see them paddling back and forth in the sunlight or diving for crabs, which are plentiful in Steveston. The female came up once with something that glinted like a fish, but could have been vegetation.
* I identify them as Greater Scaup, because the head of the male had the green sheen. The Lesser is almost identical, but his head shines purple.
A young seagull, tipping his head to see what Laurie was up to. Notice the barring on the underside of his tail. I hadn't been in a position to see that before.
Reflections on the water along the docks.
And flotsam. Frayed rope, bits of wood, you-name-it. It made an interesting pattern, I thought.
The sun was setting; we headed home for supper, tired, but exhiliarated.
For some time now, I have been telling Laurie I wanted to show him a beautiful jade sculpture of the Guan-Yin (Kwan Yin) Bodhisattva, housed in the Buddhist Temple in Richmond (about 20 minutes drive for us). Last week, on a sunny spring-like day, he said, "Well, let's go."
So we did.
And I have a stack of photos to share.
A little bit about the temple, first: their website tells us ,
"To date, the Temple is the most exquisite example of traditional Chinese architecture in Canada. In many ways, it is like a piece of art straight out of the Chinese past, as it resembles any authentic temple that can be found along the banks of the Yangtze River in China, where one of the world's oldest civilizations originated.
The main focus of the exterior of the Temple is its palatial roof, which is similar in structure to that of any royal edifice within the Forbidden City of Beijing, China. The roof is covered entirely with red-orange porcelain tiles imported from China. As strikingly intriguing as the facade of the Temple is its artistic interior, which houses artifacts with superlative Chinese workmanship in sculpture, painting, carpentry and embroidery. Traditional Chinese art and culture are evident in the majestic Buddha/Bodhisattva statues, exquisite shrines, enormous silk paintings of the sixteen Arahats, and the spectacular ceramic murals."
They're not exaggerating. It was impressive the first time I saw it, some 20 years ago, and they have been constantly adding to it since then. And they haven't even mentioned the landscaping. Think Zen, think centuries of wind and water, think colour.
A rock. I have been told the symbolism or meaning of some of the rocks here, so I am fairly confident that this one means something, too. I have no idea what.
In a small open shelter, the 16 disciples of the Buddha (arahats), each displaying his trademark characteristic. I've forgotten which 2 these are.
Another rock, just outside the shelter.
A few steps further down, protected by a slatted roof that will support flowering vines in the summer, a Guan-Yin, larger than life-sized. She often is portrayed carrying this upside-down vase, as a sign that she is sprinkling blessings on all beings.
A closer look at her.
Past the first gate now; this is one corner of the pool outside the main courtyard.
And the outside of the courtyard gate.
Here's their photo of the "thousand-arm Guan-Yin". To get an idea of the size, the base is about chest-height to me, if I remember correctly. Camphor wood, covered with gold leaf. A thousand hands, so she can help all those who come to her, I have been told. And a thousand eyes, one in each palm. Many faces, looking in every direction; she sees, she knows. So they say, qualifying that with, "... if you believe."
Arctic spiders. I didn't even know there were such things.
On Stolen Moments: A Green Digest, today's post was about these spiders and the changes coming to them with the thawing Arctic.
Source story from Reuters.
"In the winter they hide under the snow where the climate is quite mild,"
"(the Glacier Bay wolf spider only lives in southeast Alaska, and its habitat is at risk from glacier recession),"This is in a 1992 Discussion paper. 1992! How slow we are to pay attention!
... so I guess I'm not too late to wish PZ (Myers) a happy birthday.
His was one of the first blogs on my list, before I even knew what a blogroll was. And I still check it at least a couple of times daily.
But there's no way I'm going to be able to write him a poem, after reading the entries posted already. Unless a couple of lines of doggerel count.
Americans say P.
Zee.
The rest of us, we
Say P. Zed.
But we
All said
Have a happy, P.Z!*
(*However you want to pronounce it.)
New digital camera. Fairly cheap, since I'm a newbie.
And a couple of dull days and a sick day, so I'm inside, playing with it. I pulled out a few boxes of bugs and bones to practice with close-ups and the software that came with the camera. (Lousy, by the way.)
Here's a sample. Not too great, as yet, but I see possibilities. Let it rain!
The first is a bald-faced wasp. A big guy.
A skull of a bird, sunbleached. Found beside Boundary Bay beach. Probably a seagull.
A wasp's nest, abandoned early in the building. You can see the one cell where a larva was developing. The little bump at the bottom was a kind of stem and anchor.
A chickadee feather, for size comparison.
And a small mushroom.
A small wasp.
An unidentified bug.
A conifer borer, that, with the aid of his family, destroyed Laurie's favourite spruce tree. Bottom view.
The small wasp, a couple of seeds from a weed found near Chase, in the BC interior, a mushroom from the same area, that unidentified bug, belly up, and a dime for comparison.
(Part IV of 4: Part I, Part II, Part III.)
This just showed up in my blogroll: a woman whose house burned down two weeks ago, now has found a picture of Jesus in her burnt wallpaper. Here.
Phil Plait, over at Bad Astronomy, has several good posts on the phenomenon. See More Pareidolia for links to stories about Lenin in a shower curtain, Jesus in the Eagle Nebula, a Google Maps image of Jesus in Peru and much more. Or see the search results. (Warning; the September 6, 2006 entry may not be to your taste.)
And then there is Jon Voisey, the Angry Astronomer; he has quite a series of posts on the topic, including a Virgin in a cookie sheet from last month.
And that's the last about this for a while. Laurie is now seeing faces and figures in everything, even in the inside of my socks!
Enough.
... Actually, a stone.
The story is, I tend to bring home odds and ends from my wanderings. Sticks, leaves, bugs, mushrooms, seeds, feathers, bones. And often, stones, usually because of their unusual patterns or good colours. (I have a small collection of almost perfectly round stones, too.)
Usually, they end up in a corner of the living room, where I have a couple of plants and a large "Mother Earth" carving that Laurie did some years ago. Things collect around her feet and up the wall around her, her "earthy children", making a sort of improvised altar or meditation centre. Not that I associate it with any ritual, mind you; it's just my little celebration of the wonders "out there".
Another odd quirk of mine: I shuffle my collections around, so that I always have something new to look at. About once a month, I change the grouping on my kitchen table. One month, porcelain, next a bowl of yellow leaves, then assorted Tonala pottery... This month, I piled a handful of favourite stones on an antique, well-worn, tattered crocheted tablecloth inherited from my grandmother (1888 - 1965). A clay pot full of pussy-willows and a salt-shaker in the form of a cairn that I dug out from the garden of my son's 1930's house finished the arrangement.
Nothing new there: I had lived with all those items, except, of course, the pussy-willows, for years. But Laurie had not really had a chance to look at them. Now, they were staring him in the face for weeks.
And in one of those stones, he saw, plain as the sunburned nose on my face, a crucifix with the figure of Jesus hanging on it. And while I looked with him at this apparition, I turned over the stone and saw a face I knew well from history books; the face of one of the penitents at the time of the Black Death.
It took me a while, but I found the picture. And here is the procession. (Lousy photos, sorry.) Note that one man is carrying a crucifix. It is the same pose as the "Jesus" on my stone! And his is the face on the back!
Alas, and alack! I am bound for destruction! I have no faith, no faith at all! I think this is just a quirk of our minds, of the patterns made by ages of sedimentation and pressure; a coincidence, nothing more.
(And I wonder; did all their piety save these people from the plague? I doubt it. Ah, me!)
Here is the stone: do you see the figures?
(Part III of 4: Part I, Part II, Part IV)
Part II of 4: Part I, Part III, Part IV .
A few weeks ago, the Mungers at Cognitive Daily explored the question, "Why is it that people seem to see faces so many places that there aren't actually faces?" They discussed the work of Pawan Sinha on developing computer models for face recognition.
It seems that we need very few clues to identify a face. (I would even extend that to a body part; a foot extending beyond a parked car in the lot, for example. Often, on the basis of that alone, we deduce age bracket, sex, direction, and decide whether or not to brake.) Dr. Sinha was experimenting with photos of 12 by 15 pixels only; Cognitive Daily went on to do an online survey with photos down to 6 by 7 pixels.
Go look them over and test yourself on their photos, here, here and here: you will be amazed!
Hint: many of these photos are nothing but a blur from close up. But walk across the room, and look. Even though they are much tinier at that distance, they usually resolve perfectly into clear images.
Does this have a bearing on why we see faces in random patterns?
And here are another couple of photos where we see faces. A puddle on the roadway and a rotting stump in Watershed Park.
(Laurie sees different faces than the ones I see. What do you see? Walk across the room; do the faces appear or change?)
More tomorrow.
Pareidolia, according to Wikipedia, is
"a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being mistakenly perceived as recognizable. Common examples include images of animals or faces in clouds, seeing the man in the moon, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse. "We've all read about the Virgin on a wet glass window or in disintegrating cement under a bridge, but pareidolia happens much more frequently than those few instances. In cloud formations, or plywood markings, or book foxing, or -- you name it -- we've all seen it.
Here's one, for starters. A cloud formation, on a dark day. But look at it again. Click on it, to see it full-size, and walk across the room to look at it. (There's a reason for that; I'll write about it in a future post.)
Same day, next roll of film:
These were taken at the end of the afternoon, at Crescent Beach. Still raining.
Out for a pleasant walk, BC style.
And a great blue heron with the beach to himself.
Three rolls of film are back from the shop, and I have a stack clamouring to be the first to be posted. Eeny-meeny-miney-mo ... these ones!
This was our rainy-day jaunt to Mud Bay last Sunday.
Early morning; looks like it might just be a nice day for a walk.
Rule # 1: Never trust BC weather in the spring time. It was raining hard by the time we got to the dike, so we never even got out of the car. Laurie took the rest of these through the window.
First, setting the scene. This is agricultural land, mostly deserted at this time of year. There are three or four farmhouses, no through roads, no dearth of potholes. Up ahead is the dike, then Mud Bay. Behind us, empty fields, plenty of mud, a tree with two eagles at the top. Off to the sides, mallards and some black and white ducks, dabbling in the temporary lagoons in the fields. And starlings everywhere.
About a half-mile back, the road skirts a field beside the Nicomekl River, where a small herd of sheep stood dripping miserably. Most were "normal" (to me) sheep. One, I had never seen the like of; yes, that one.
He looks to me more like a big grey caterpillar than a sheep, with that round, creased body, stubby legs, eyes that aren't eyes at all, but shadows only, no visible face. He even moved like a caterpillar, swinging his body slowly from side to side, nose to the grass, constantly nibbling. I don't know what breed he is; he was the only long-wooled one in the field, the biggest by far, and the only one whose face (I think, for all I could see of it) is white.
I looked at sheep on the web, and the closest I could find was a Lincoln, from this site (Oklahoma State University, Breeds of Livestock). Not quite the same, but maybe the rain and the mud served as a disguise. Or maybe it's a related variety.
From OSU, I learn:
The Lincoln is usually referred to as the world's largest breed of sheep. ... Lincolns are rather rectangular in form, are deep bodied, and show great width. They are straight and strong in the back and cover thickly as mature sheep. ...The fleece of the Lincoln is carried in heavy locks that are often twisted into a spiral near the end. Lincolns should be very well wooled to the knees and hocks, and occasionally some individuals carry wool below these points. ... Lincolns produce the heaviest and coarsest fleeces of the long-wooled sheep with ewe fleeces weighing from 12 to 20 pounds (5.4-9kg).
And:
The breed has been more generally popular in Canada than in the United States.Well, that ties in; this is Canada. But still, I had never seen one before.
After our coffee and tea in Crescent Beach, we drove down to check out the shore. The rain slowed down to a sprinkle for a few moments, and Laurie managed a couple more shots.
... 2 hours of reading source code. Then a couple of minutes of cut-and-paste, and -- problem solved! Yay!
But I'm tired, and I'm going to bed.
Some good photos just in, but they can wait until the morning.
Meanwhile, a stump that defies classification.
The truth is now # 7 on Google.
Aiming for the #1 spot, in a web experiment.
Just doing my bit to help, again.
(We are going through envelopes of Laurie's old photos, in the pre-blogging days, having good ones loaded onto my hard drive. Periodically, I will be posting some of these. Today, for example:)
These are from Victoria's Beacon Hill Park, around the year 2000.
I recognize the site, but it still looks to me like something out of a fantasy novel; no real place could look that stylized! Even the pigeons look posed.
That large, greyish bird across the stream is a white peacock. Here, I'll have him turn around for you:
I don't know if this is a breed, or if he's albino. (With a tint of pink. Some hanky-panky with flamingos back in his ancestry?)
It's hard work, keeping our enthusiastic B.C. vegetation cropped and shaven and orderly.
And everybody needs a nap sometime.
Tomorrow: back to the real world. Rainy days, mud and weeds. And hopefully, a duck or two.
