Slow blogging

This next post is taking longer than I thought it would. So much that absolutely must be included!

So, for tonight, I'll substitute with another photo.


More ducks. Early summer, breeding plumage. Taken at New Westminster Quay, off the deck. Grey muddy rocks, silty water. How the ducks stay so clean, dabbling all day in it is a mystery to me.

And it's back to work for me.

Interlude

I am awestruck, amazed, astounded, humbled.

Story tomorrow.

Meanwhile, watch the ducks.

"Pesky photographers! Gah!" says heron.

A couple of weeks ago, we walked around Cougar Creek Park again. A quiet, mostly uneventful stroll; a pleasant interlude in a hectic fortnight.

The ducks were back.

The first time we visited the park, in March, there must have been a hundred, at least, in the various ponds, sleeping on the grass, paddling in the creek. Mostly mallards, but we saw wood ducks, widgeons and buffleheads, as well.

By May, the mallard contingent had been reduced to a couple of families. And we heard a red-headed woodpecker. The crows were holding their regular debate session in the trees farther into the bush. No wood ducks. No widgeons. No sparrows, even.

Through the summer, the situation didn't change. Never more than a few mallards and a squabble of crows.

Days grow longer, then shorter. We're heading into wet weather and the birds are trickling back to their winter stomping grounds. At home, I've seen my first towhees since spring. In Cougar Creek, the early wave of mallards is putting dibs on perching spots.

Coming around a bend in the path, we saw a heron in a willow, almost overhead. We stopped short, not wanting to frighten him off, and tiptoed around to get a clear view.

First sighting.


I snuck up on him, crouching in the shelter of berry bushes until the last few inches. Now he's seen me.


And he's not happy about it. He's leaving.

Well, if he wanted to go, I would take advantage of my position to get a really good shot of him flying. I switched the camera to video, and was filming by the time he got to the end of the branch.

And the uncooperative bird dropped off the branch, straight down out of sight, before he spread his wings; I barely saw a flash of wingtip. And through the berry bushes, he gave one mocking "Squawk!"

I got a nice video of a bouncing willow branch and dense salmonberry bushes. And the squawk.

Fall colours

Seen in the neighbourhood:

Tree or bouquet?

Pride goeth before a fall

Bending low, heavy with seed

Detective turns up a blank

It all started when Laurie's favourite potted yew turned brown. We had already lost a couple of small evergreens to borer beetles, so I searched the plant for insect life. In the detritus on top of the soil, I found a small grub, no bigger than a rice grain.

It wasn't a borer beetle, but what was it? I stashed it in a plastic box, photographed it, and went browsing through BugGuide.

The closest thing I could find was the larva of a syrphid fly, an aphid eater. A good bug to have around. But I couldn't really be sure; there were no syrphid larvae with the markings of mine.

A foggy photo, but it shows the elegant markings on the top and sides. The end towards the tip of the leaf is the head.

To confirm that it was, indeed, an aphid eater, I collected a good handful of assorted leaves from my garden, making sure that I had included several aphids. These went in the box with the grub.

I kept checking, but never saw it eating. 5 days later, I found that it had pupated.


This confirmed, to me, that it was some sort of fly. The pupa has the same two "periscopes" towards the tail that a fruit fly pupa has. I waited and watched.

10 days later, after a day when I had been too busy to check, I opened the box. The fly had hatched, unfortunately at the wrong time. It was barely alive; I gave it air and a droplet of water, to no avail. Within the hour, it was dead.

It looked like a wasp. Skinny abdomen, black with yellow stripes. I labeled my photos "mini wasp". But it was still barely the size of a grain of rice.


I went on a long detour, searching through all BugGuide's wasps. Nothing like this guy.

I went back to look at their syrphid larvae, and there was a photo of an adult fly; big eyes, a black skinny abdomen with yellow, wasp-like stripes.

So there it is; a hover fly, a syrphid, Platycheirus. And I can tell Laurie that I don't know what's bothering his yew.

Great help I am!

Changing of the Guard

The cool weather has definitely settled in, and the bug population has changed. There is barely an aphid to be had on the maple tree, nor a mosquito in my bedroom, and I think I've seen the last of those little lemon-yellow lauxaniid flies. No moths on the window screen, no leaf-hoppers on the rhododendron.

The wood-bugs are still around, though; they will be here until it snows. And my assorted spiders are busy with their families.

Over in the vacant lot across the street, the weeds are suddenly jumping with grasshoppers.

I brought home a weed to identify (hedge mustard) and an armload of lamb's quarters* for supper. From one of those, a tiny crab spider (Xystius, I think) escaped onto my countertop:

Over in the church parking lot, the bees were busy at the mint and yarrow. Among them, on a mass of small pink flowers, was this monster, twice the size of the others.

And I have a visitor on my desk at the moment: a fat crane fly, with an unusual pen-nib tail. I've never seen one like this before.

And then there's the mini-wasp. But that's a longish story. I'll leave it for tomorrow.

*Lamb's quarters; some books call them pigweed, but that name seems to be attached to several different weeds. Laurie calls them "fat hen". In Mexico, we called them "corazoncitos" and we bought them in the market. Whatever the name, they are delicious, de-stemmed and cooked like spinach. I like them just quickly pan-fried with chopped onions.

I take one precaution; they are a waste-land and roadside weed, but I never cut them too close to the road, or to cultivated land, where they might have been polluted with insecticides. In the centre of an abandoned, block-long vacant lot, I think they are safe.

Weekly Linkfest

Lots of goodies today; where to start?

Spiders, of course! At The Other 95%, Ant? Spider? You Decide!.

And other creepy crawlies: how about underwater ones? On Ellipsis, What A Mermaid's Autumn Day Must Be Like. Stunning photos!

And more practical: Photos and data on zooplankton of the BC Coast. Probably covers Washington State, as well. From Fisheries and Oceans, Canada.

More photos and data: Mushroom Observer. A searchable database. Mushroom season is starting; I'll be using this page frequently.

Susan Gets Native does another Hawk ID post. Handy.

On another tack: I love this video. I think I have watched it at least a dozen times. The inner life of a cell, from Harvard Multimedia. It's worth watching, even if you aren't into microbiology; you will be awestruck at the activity going on in this simplest unit of living things. I know I was/am.

I found a narrated version on YouTube; not as good resolution, of course, but very helpful in terms of understanding what the pictures represent.

Junkfood Science is one of the blogs I read every day. Two recent posts are "A" for Business, and Yo-yo science and the dangers of coincidence.

Skeptico points out the difference between science and pseudo-science in When will CAM do this?

And this is odd: the official kilogram is losing weight. (Don't panic; this doesn't mean that we all now weigh five kilos more, or anything like that. More like 2500 micrograms, and we can lose that by getting a haircut.) :D

Partying Princesses Pummel a Piñata

Fifth birthday party:


With a home-made piñata, made by the kindergarten class (they had a bit of help). It is supposed to represent the sun. "Not a star," the birthday girl said; " a star is pointy." So the ragged crepe paper becomes leaping flames. The face was a joint effort; each child took a one-minute turn at every individual feature, switching to the next when a timer went off. Great fun and an alarmed expression, very appropriate.

Line-up of pastel princesses


Dále, Chelsea!


Good hit!


Now that looks like a ball of flames!

And the perfect ending.

And Grandma Weeta is tired, and going to bed.

Post-coital Bliss, sort of

... at least for half of the happy couple.

Part of a continuing series on the life and times of an Achearanea tepidariorum (American house spider) family. Parts I - Spider Watching, II - Fresh laid eggs!, III - Taking Candy from a Baby, IV - We Haz Babies!, and V - Baby Pictures.

Ever since I first saw a timid male hanging around the edge of Fat Momma's web, I have been trying to catch them in the act of mating. No luck yet, but this is as close as I've come.

After the first egg case was laid, the male had disappeared. Whether she ate him or he was off gallivanting, I couldn't tell.

I kept my eye on her, all through the guarding of that egg case, and eventually another male (or the same one) showed up on the wall near her web. He stayed for a few days and disappeared, coincidentally at the same time that she produced another egg case. (And the same day that the first batch hatched.)

In the month since, a third male appeared, hung around a day or two, and was gone. And Fat Momma had a third egg case, the first still hanging there although it was empty.

I have been busy this last week, and didn't monitor her as closely as I could have. I hadn't seen the fourth male, nor was I aware of the hatching of the next round of spiderlings until three days ago; by then, they were probably about 2 days old.

And Fat Momma has a fourth egg case. And the male was still around. She was busy eating him. (Photo above.)

That question answered. She eats her mates.

(I wanted to confirm that it was her latest mate, and not a random visitor of another species, so I waited until she had finished with him, and fished him out of her web. A long wooden back-scratcher was handy for this job. I looked at the tangled, glued-together mess under my little microscope; yes, it was a small Achearanea. Her poor mate, who had sacrificed his all for love.) (And I have a photo, but I'm sure you don't want to see it. It ain't pretty.)

Laurie wonders how that works out; the successful suitor passes on his genes only once. Worse, I think, is that he has provided food for the female after the fact, after the eggs are laid. So he is getting her in shape for the next batch; the eggs fertilized by his successor. Seems counter-productive to me.

Any thoughts on that, anyone?

And I had wondered about incubation periods. So far, I have a sample size of 3; FM's 2, and Chica's 1. The first batch took 25 days, from July 26 to August 19th. The second batch ran from August 19th to Sept. 17th or thereabouts; 28 days, maybe 27. Chica's batch, laid the same day, has not hatched yet; that's 32 days and counting.*

What has changed? The weather. It is definitely colder these nights, cool in the daytime. And FM's web is in a sheltered corner; Chica's is around the outside corner, exposed to the wind.

Are the incubation periods dependent on the temperature? It looks like I'll have to watch right into next summer to find out.

One more thing; Wren had wanted to see baby spiders, and I couldn't get a decent photo. A few days later, one showed up on my doorpost, so tiny that I don't know how it was that I noticed it, just a black dust speck that caught the light and seemed to have legs. I was in a rush, and only stopped to take one photo. When I came back later, though I searched with a lens up and down the door, I couldn't find any spiderlings at all.

So here is a fuzzy baby pic.



Now to see if I can catch another baby of this latest batch.

*Update; Saturday morning. Chica's eggs are hatching. That's 33 days.

Friday Morning, 2 AM

Work finished, babysitting finished, assorted appointments kept. Whew!

And now to sleep!

Spider blogging coming up anon.

Tiny! Barely visible to the naked eye.

Day Three

... and after that, I can start catching up on blogging and blog reading.

Bee on flowering coleus, Glenlyon Industrial Park, Burnaby.

Very busy; back soon

Yesterday was the first of three very busy days. Which means three days of single photo posts.

# 2:

A Platter of Pollen

Sunflower and fly. With a leaf-full of pollen.

Green and Brown, with a bit of Blue

Cougar Creek Park, Surrey:

The creek:


Water striders. I love the shadows that race over the bottom, even when the insects themselves are invisible.


It's as if they were wearing snowshoes.


Out in the sunshine, ducks while away the afternoon.


Or maybe take a nap.


These reflections make me go cross-eyed.

Semiahmoo: More than meets the eye

For years, going 'way back to when I was a kid walking down the hill with my brothers and my towel, I have been exploring the White Rock beach. It's a big beach, though; I have never been on the beach east of the end of the promenade, down the railway tracks towards the U.S. border.


We decided last week to end that oversight.

We parked as close to the Semiahmoo Reserve as we could, found a trail through the rosebushes and blackberries, and crossed the tracks to the beach. The tide was low, but still going out. The pier, our usual eastward ending spot, was a good distance away.


Not much in the way of scenery, is there? Low hills, houses, flat sandy beach. It is more or less the same looking east.


We walked along the beach, zigging and zagging from shoreline to waterline, until we came to the outfall of the Little Campbell River. The water level was low; I read later that it is extremely variable.

River outlet on the right. A straight channel, here.

This "road", for such it seemed to be, made of smoothed gravel and outlined with barnacled posts, goes from the railroad bridge to ... nothing. The edge of the water. It does not extend beyond the railway; I think it is probably a retaining wall for the river, below the high tide level. Why it was made, I have no idea.

It was colder than we had expected; we turned back.

Ah, but I am missing out the most interesting part of the walk!

This was the most diverse beach I have seen in some time, in terms of the types of sand and the life we found on it. There is clean, sand-box sand, muddy sand, black, slimy sand, piles of brown, dead eel-grass or unidentifiable furry fibers, surf-smoothed stones, sharp-edged, clean gravel and barnacly gravel. Shallow pools may be dark green with eel-grass or yellowish with sea lettuce. A few areas support the invasive battillaria snails, although sometimes, bending to look at them, I found their shells mostly housing tiny hermit crabs. Yay, hermits!

The sand was sometimes ridged, sometimes smoothed by retreating water. In places the fecal castings of lugworms dotted the surface. In one area, every tiny valley was filled with what looked like those chocolate sprinkles they decorate cookies with.

Wave patterns on clean sand, with a few sprinkles.

Turning over rocks, I found some of those spunky crabs waving threatening pinchers at me. Another rock exposed a fistful of tiny shrimp. They squirmed and twisted in the light, but didn't dig themselves down into the sand, as the shrimp-like creatures on Boundary Bay beach do. Instead, they milled around within their little hollow like dancers on a stage. I put the rock back carefully once we had taken a couple of photos.




And, of course, we found shells. I brought home a couple of oyster shells, a tiny pink clam, and this one, that looked, sitting there in the sunshine, more like a butterfly than a clam.


A week ago, I had been wanting, for what I no longer remember, a bit of sand. Real sand, beach sand. On our way back to the car, I remembered, and collected a pill bottle full.

At home, spreading it out to dry, it occurred to me to look at it under my hand microscope. And that sand was alive! Everywhere I looked, it was squirming and bubbling. I saw tiny, transparent worms, gliding gracefully or waving to and fro. Something that jittered across my field of vision and disappeared. Tiny, tiny, shrimp-like animals. And a creature more like a barrel with streamers out the back.

I have no photos. I tried, stacking lenses over my tray of wet sand; all I got were bright points of light that were in a different position in the second of every pair of photos. And many tiny circles of deep red. In one photo, I can see -- almost -- what looks like segmentation in a red tube.

In the morning, I checked the tray again; something had raised little hills in the wet sand. Busy little beasties.

We covered barely a third of the Semiahmoo beach area; Laurie says we'll have to come back soon and look at the Ahmoo beach. Sometimes I wonder about him.

Protest in Semiahmoo

Friday afternoon on Semiahmoo Park beach. (White Rock)

I take it he didn't appreciate the dry bread I threw him.

You woke me up from a nap for this?

(More on this beach tomorrow.)

Working Late

Nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel ... Work, work, work.

Meanwhile, they toil not, but they sure spin!

Nuthatch on my feeder.

Cold-blooded links

Lizards. We rarely see them in the wild up here in Canada, and I miss them. I remember them in Mexico, outlined like carvings on every sunny wall until we came too close, then convulsing once and disappearing into the bougainvillea. In Oklahoma for a year, we kept an old aquarium full of anole lizards; in the evenings we caught moths that came to the lights and slipped them, live and fluttering, under the screen top. The lizards would take only live prey. I loved to watch them snatch the moths out of the air with their tongues.

Here in BC, I once found a Western Skink in the Southern Interior. Once only. They are resident only in a small area, and blue-listed, partly due to the impact of invasive plant species.

Other than that, Canada hosts only 4 other species, according to Wikipedia.

So I was happy to find two blog posts this week on lizards. Tame, certainly, but still ... "Mike O'Risal" celebrates his bearded dragon's 11th birthday on Hyphoid Logic. And I learned something; I never thought of them as relating in any way to their humans. So much we don't know!

The next lizard story has kept me chuckling all week. From A Blog Around the Clock, why we should have paid attention in biology class.

Spiders: Mo starts off by saying, "Spiders make my skin crawl..." His loss, but he posts a fascinating look at their silk and other spidery matters, in Spider Silk & Spider Senses. Kevin says, "Spiders are just plain cool." And follows up with a report on two papers in Spider Double Whammy!

Bugs in general: Or, more explicitly, Insect Porn. A Flickr pool.

And off the topic, a very funny YouTube video. With an edge. Via PZ.

Flashlight photography ...

... and other nocturnal delights.

I've been watching a large cross spider (Araneus diadematus) for some time now. He sets up his web at night, and takes it down before dawn, rarely leaving more than a trace. (He recycles; he eats the web and spins it again the next night.) So I've been going out at night with the flashlight to see if I could get a decent photo.

Everything is different in bug world after dark. The harvestmen are everywhere; so are tiny slugs. Chica and Fat Momma are on the prowl. The lauxaniid flies are sleeping.

And even with lights on them, the colours seem different. The flash is no good in this situation: it makes everything wash out. I tried my cheap-o flashlight.


The spider I came to see, by flashlight.

There are a couple of spotlights on all night; two spiders have intelligently spun webs right in front, where the moths congregate. Climbing on the table, I could get behind one of those webs; here it is, with the spider so close to the bulb that he glows.


I brought out my desk lamp again. It helped, but only when I could bring it in close to the subject. Here is the cross spider, with the lamp a couple of feet away.


Shadows become an integral part of the story:


One good shot of the cross spider, with the lamp a few inches away:


What else is out tonight? Imagine me, crouching over the ground and garden, IKEA desk lamp in one hand, camera in the other. Picture me down on all fours with my nose in the London Pride and the lamp propped on a sturdy leaf. Good thing no-one decided to go out for a midnight walk, or I'd be still explaining myself to the men in white coats.

This is what I found.


A boring, everyday woodbug, looking somehow silvery and sleek in the lamplight.


A harvestman with prey. When I got a smidgen closer, he took off in a great hurry, taking his booty with him.


And a pretty grub, unidentified as yet.

Seeing Eye to Eye

I had a couple of visitors yesterday afternoon:


A harvestman, probably Phalangium opilio. He spent the day lying in wait behind an orb spider's web. He was quite amenable to posing for his picture, and didn't move a muscle, even with the camera an inch away. Click on the photo to see his odd little turret eyes.


And a brown moth, Noctua pronuba, or large yellow underwing. I was surprised, getting face to face with him, how much he looked like a bird, a hawk, maybe, or an owl. That's if you ignore the extra legs, and the fact that the "beak" is a proboscis, adapted for a diet of nectar.

Hot Colours

... to liven things up a bit.

Big sister shows how it's done

Seen in the parking lot next door

Lychnis, Bear Creek Park, Surrey

Construction site: Keep Out!

Construction materials storage

Fiery poppy

Three flies on pink sedum

Rented crane left behind for the weekend. On my lawn. Grrrrrr!

Weird and weirder

An afternoon on Boundary Bay beach. But definitely not the usual.

It started out more or less normally. It was high tide, and we walked along the rough at water's edge. I stopped to take a photo of the mosaic patterns the shallow waves made on the rocks underneath.

Click on this to see the "grout" lines.

Laurie picked up a stone-and-barnacle encrusted piece of metal, solidly compacted and rusted into place. A heavy "souvenir", but it went into my bag, along with a 2-inch-tall snuff bottle look-alike I found, also "fossilized".

Not an antique snuff bottle.

On the way back, we walked along the front of the houses. And got to looking at reflections in their humongous windows.


A driftwood sea serpent and background mountains that just weren't there; the house faces the empty bay with a bare hint of Mount Baker in the far distance. Mystifying.


Laurie trying to shoot the sea behind him in the glass wall of a deck. He is on the empty sand dunes, not in the shrubbery. Reflections are deceptive.

And Laurie again, shooting me shooting him, with fiery grasses in between.

At the entrance to our street, a crowd had gathered; all adults, not going anywhere, just milling around. As we approached, a man with a tag on his shirt came over to introduce himself. I noticed that everybody facing me had the same sort of tag.

"This is the International Bocce Competition. We're training for the Olympics," he told us. I had never heard of the game, but I noticed that a man was aiming a small ball along the path we had just taken. "Are we on your pitch?" I asked. "Not any more," was the answer. Oops.

Not that I could see, even after I knew about it, that there was a "pitch". They were just throwing their balls down on the rough sand, debris an all.

Off to the side, a couple of women were tossing their balls down the slope, towards the water. The first thrower had a can of beer in her left hand. (Accepted procedure, I read later, boning up on the game.)

There was a rough chart of rounds taped up on the fence, a couple of scorekeepers in chairs, a couple of coolers. Very business-like, except for the seeming lack of any standardized playing field. "Free form", this blogger calls it.

We-ird. I think my family would like it; I'll pass the word on.

We went for coffee and tea. Across the street, someone was drying/desanding his sandals:

I never thought I'd say this ...

... but I found an absolutely beautiful slug on my patio.

I was out in the middle of the night, looking for a maple leaf with aphids to feed to a syrphid fly larva (another story, for later) and almost stepped on this:

Of course, that's not exactly what I saw; there is a light on at night, but not that bright. I brought out a lamp to get photos.

This is a leopard slug, Limax maximus. I haven't seen one around here for a long time; mostly we get black or dark brown slugs. These are the slugs that perform those incredible mating displays. Which I haven't seen. Yet.

He was moving too fast to get in close up. I sacrificed one of my hosta leaves to slow him down. He stopped and munched at it.

Sorry, it's a blurry photo; the best I could do with an active slug and poor light.

I had never been up close to an eating slug before, and was surprised at how cat-like were his movements. And how his face changed. Normally, the slug just shows the tentacles (4 for these slugs), but when he stopped to eat, he stuck out a whitish jaw and bit or scraped away at the leaf, turning his head from side to side to nibble at different areas.

I was able to get a good look at his outfit, too:

A tidy spotted "waistcoat" with a V cut in the centre back, and striped brown and black sheath behind. Along the upper end of his tail, there was a clear keel, like a transparent fin. His lower parts were creamy white, with a delicate grey fleck. Very elegant.

If you look closely, you can see, halfway down the waistcoat, a whitish spot. That is the pneumostome, his breathing hole. It's a bit clearer in this next photo:

He'd had enough of the hosta; he had other business. He went on, traveling fast. I took away the invasive light and left him to the night.

End of a Long, Busy Day

... and I'm so tired, my mind's a blank.

I took this photo over afternoon coffee. A moment of quiet, with the mad scramble left outside.


Tim Horton's, Kin's Farm Market and a gas station (reflected).

Twisty

Dead tree, Boundary Bay, August.

Ain't that the Truth!

Truth.

#2 on Google. #1 in Canada.

Whatever that means.

Update links from RockFlippin'

Dave Bonta has posted a list of links to RockFlippers; I am reproducing it here. Good blogs to check out, some of them new to me.

UPDATE (Sept 2, 11:30 EDT): The Flickr photo pool continues to grow, along with Bev’ Pbase gallery. Blogger-participants so far include:

Windywillow (Ireland)
Heraclitean Fire (London, England)
Sheep Days (Illinois, USA)
Earth, Wind & Water (somewhere in the Caribbean)
Pocahontas County Fare (West Virginia, USA)
chatoyance (Austin, Texas)
Fragments from Floyd (Virginia, USA) - GRAND PRIZE WINNER
Watermark (Montana, USA)
pohanginapete (Aotearoa/New Zealand)
Fate, Felicity, or Fluke (Oregon, USA)
Thomasburg Walks (Ontario, Canada)
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Woman (Queensland, Australia)
The Transplantable Rose (Austin, Texas)
Nature Woman (New York state, USA)
Marja-Leena Rathje (British Columbia, Canada)
A Blog Around the Clock (North Carolina, USA)
Busy Dingbat’s Sphere (West Virginia, USA)
Hoarded Ordinaries (New Hampshire, USA)
Congo Days (Kinshasa, Congo)
this too (London, England)
Roundrock Journal (Missouri, USA)
Wanderin’ Weeta (British Columbia, Canada)
Blaugustine (London, England)
A Honey of an Anklet (Virginia, USA)
Looking Up (Ohio, USA)
Ontario Wanderer (Ontario, Canada)
Bug Safari (California, USA)
Riverside Rambles (Missouri, USA)
Pure Florida (Florida, USA)
Burning Silo (Ontario, Canada)
Musings from Myopia (Texas, USA)
Cicero Sings (British Columbia, Canada)
Joan (Missouri, USA)
Nature Remains (Kentucky, USA)
prairie point (north Texas)

I still (as of 11:30 Sept. 2) have another post or two to write on IRFD festivities here in Plummer’s Hollow, but I’ll continue to update this post with new links as they come in. If you don’t see your own blog post listed, please email me: bontasaurus (at) yahoo (dot) com. And feel free to reproduce this list on your own blog, or anywhere else.

Scariest find of the day: a copperhead, within striking distance, at Roundrock Journal.
Most amusing: Ontario Wanderer flips rocks on her desk.
Farthest afield: Congo Days, in Kinshasha.
Most ... off-topic? Weird? ... Most saintly! That's it! Sheep Days.
The best excuse for not flipping rocks: at Hoarded Ordinaries.
The most disgruntled post: Flipping the Grindstone at Sans God.

Any more votes for "Most YouNameIt"?

Updates, added as I find them:
Sans God (Northumberland, UK) checks in late, but with a good excuse.
Bill, at Prairie Point, finds a cockroach.
More pillbugs: Flipping Out at microecos.
And, in the comments, Dave reminds me of the video at Cephalopodcast. Here's the link.

Shelob in her lair (Rock Flipping Day)

It was an iffy day today, threatening rain. I decided not to go far afield to flip rocks; instead, I investigated the vacant lot across the street that I Bioblitzed last April. Plenty of rocks there. One end is being used as a construction materials dump.


The older piles are overrun with weeds. I went searching for a nice-sized rock there.

At first I found very little, except for the centipedes that twisted once and disappeared, before my camera could focus. I got quite a few shots of mud with rootlets and nothing else. Down in the old creek bed, now dry (even under most of the rocks), a few small critters hid out, waiting for the fall rains.


A larva of some kind, perhaps a Rove Beetle.

I tried to photograph this blond slug, but the focus was off. I hadn't even seen the other resident until just before I hit my Delete key.

It looks like a harvestman of some sort, although the body looks very woodbugish. More BugGuide browsing ahead.***

That looked to be it. A white butterfly just escaped my camera and a bee waited until I had climbed the hillock to his clump of vetch, then left the area completely. Contrary beasts they are. I gave up and headed home.

Passing the pile of raw debris, I kicked over one last stone in my path, and a big spider scrambled out of the way. And waited politely on a leaf until the camera clicked.


Thanks, buddy. Now you can go home.


Hidey-hole, with remains of dinners past. (I think the glossy pieces are from ants.)

Look closely; see the legs on either side of the tunnel? The rear end of the abdomen is just visible.

Again, checking out the photos, I discovered another spider in the same web. A different colour, a different shape; just a hanger-on, looking for scraps from Shelob's dinners? Or venturing into dangerous territory unaware?

See it there, at the base of the leaf? Click on the image for a better view. **

Hey, this was fun! Thanks, Dave, Bev and Fred for the idea!

*Update: these photos, and more, posted to Flickr group, International Rock-Flipping Day. Check out everybody's photos here.

**The large spider is an Agelenopsis, a funnel-web spider. The tiny one may be a dwarf spider.

***Christopher Taylor of Catalogue of Organisms says it definitely is a harvestman. (See comments.)

Odds and Ends and a Trial Run

Links, first;

Can't keep your lawn watered? Paint it! From A Blog around the Clock. (Sheesh!)

More on those Texan social spiders, and an excellent photo, from Zooillogix.

And from the same blog, good news: that extinct white dolphin is not quite gone yet. One has turned up, alive.

A third from Zooillogix: too good to miss. The fish with a metal detector chin.

And more strange beasts: on MilkRiverBlog, a fascinating National Geographic article about cave-dwelling animals, or troglodytes.

Not so strange, but fun: a Flickr group dedicated to Insect Porn.

The Friday Ark, #154; animal stories galore!

And the Circus of the Spineless for the last week in August is on Naturalist Notebook; great stuff, and a beautiful newly-designed blog.

And today is International Rock Flipping Day. Get out there and start flipping!


These rocks look interesting enough. As long as we're wearing good mud-proof boots.

And the Trial Run. Blogger has stuck in an icon for loading videos, so I thought I'd try it out. Here's a short clip from yesterday's picnic at Second Beach in Stanley Park; a few of my grandkids and a swing.

I am still trying to make sense of the instructions for taking videos on my camera; I can't seem to tell whether it is on or off. So this is a trial run in more ways than one. However, I thought it might bring a smile.

Fingers crossed ...

Evening in Stanley Park

Taken from Second Beach.





More later.