I've just watched the meltdown of a message board where I have been a regular for years. Now hundreds of us, me included, have resigned/boycotted/self-banned in protest at recent events.
No sense even naming the place anymore; it's closing down, section by section, forum by forum.
I am too disheartened right now to post anything here. Sorry, all.
... a couple of spooky pics.
Evening clouds.
Red-eye special.
... That's the block at the end of Kwomais Point, again.
And I'm limiting the photos to houses and trees, this time. All from a two-block length.
The first of Laurie's photos from the Kwomais Park area are in. Here are a few views from the lookout at the corner of the Park.
Great spot for dreaming!
We got Laurie's photos from the other day's jaunt yesterday. Three whole rolls of film. And they are good ones; too many really good ones; it was almost impossible to narrow them down for posting here.
Tomorrow they go to London Drugs for scanning to the web. Maybe as early as tomorrow night (depending on LD's schedules), they will be ready to post.
In the meantime, I will tell you what happened, and post a few samples from my digital.
We were trying to find the shorter steps down to the Kwomais Point area that the deli owner had told us about. Following her tentative, maybe-laden instructions, we drove as far south as the roads would take us, around the curve onto a residential street that soon ends in a cul-de-sac, watching the seaward side closely for a hint of a trail. Not here, not here, not here, not here...
We backtracked. At the extreme point, the map showed a green space, maybe a park. We checked out both ends, and finally stopped where there seemed to be a gate of some kind.
... Following along in our attempted peregrination around the Lower Mainland shoreline ...
A week ago, before the bad weather hit us, we went looking for the "1000 steps" that Cicero had told me about. Starting at the Ocean Park mall, we explored the streets to the west and south. Most end in a few blocks at big houses built right on the bluff, occasionally at wild bush hiding muddy cliff faces, unclimbable except on all fours.
But at the end of 15A Avenue, there it was; a place that looked like a parking area, with prominent No Parking signs, a trail head, and a notice; "1001 STEPS". We found parking a block up the hill, and walked back.
It was a steep climb, but didn't live up to their advertising; there were only 236 steps in all. Enough, though.
(The lighting was strange; bright, dazzling sunlight, shining straight in and reflected off the water, but deep shade under the brow of the hill. My camera couldn't handle it very well, and Laurie's seems a little off. Even my old eyes protested.)
On the slope, the trees, a mixed bag, respond to the lop-sided exposure by twisting and angling themselves into the light and out of the wind.
Almost at the bottom. Below us, just the railroad track, a short scramble over tumbled rocks, and the shore. Not a beach.
Difficult walking. But quiet, so very quiet. Just the rustling of falling leaves, and the lapping of a retreating tide.
There were only two other people on this segment of coast, a man and a small boy. They walked ahead of us, almost to Kwomais Point (marked by a heron silhouetted against the water), then crossed the track into the bush.
After they had gone, we moved away from water's edge, and tried to work our way up to the heron and a bit beyond, to be able to get a clear photograph. He sat, unmoving, until we were almost there, then squawked once and left. Oh, well.
Laurie, at the Point, wishing for a heron.
As for other live things, this shore bears a different mix than the sandy areas to the north, and around the Point into the White Rock beach. The rocks were bare, well-scrubbed. There were few crabs, no dead crab shells, no sign of seagull feeding. A few white clamshells, sun-bleached. Barnacles, small ones, at the water line. No mussels. And none of those invasive batillaria mud snails. (Yay!) The few snails among the barnacles were smooth and dark, fatter and shorter than the batillaria.
At the high tide line, dead kelp wound itself around the bigger rocks. I don't remember seeing eelgrass, and there was no sea lettuce, which shows up on every other stretch of beach in the area. But in the cracks between some of the bigger rocks at the water's edge, I found a few small clumps of these, that I had never seen before.
Deep purple seaweed. Growing only in the deep shade in cracks between the rocks. I had to put the camera right into the crack and rely on the flash to show it up; to my sun-dazed eyes, this looked almost black. When the flash was too close, edges of the weed flared orange.
Back over the rocks, we climbed to the railroad track, under a fence, and through a bit of bush, making a shortcut to the steps. Up, all 236 of them, up the hill to the car -- my legs were aching -- and back to the mall for a bite at the deli. Where the proprietess told us of another set of steps, a shorter one, that would take us to the south side of the Point.
More on how we tried to find them yesterday, in the next post.
Oh, and the loons? Here they are, doing what loons do; diving as soon as you get anywhere near, coming up 'way over in the distance.
... or seven. Links, that is.
I've been babysitting, antiquing, plowing the car through rivers (where they shouldn't be; it's been raining hard and long), fighting off a flu, and now I'm falling asleep almost as soon as I sit down. So we'll see how far I get with this before my head hits the keyboard. Again.
Detail of dying maple leaf
I was sorting out some 10-year-old photos for my youngest son, and I came across these, from the couple of summers that he went tree-planting in BC's north country.
I said I would upload them to Flickr, and his reply was, "Cool". So, given that they're now public, I must share them with you.
These are copies of copies: photos taken with my camera of old hard-copy photos from a cheap film camera. I don't know exactly where they were taken, just "up North".
... Strathcona fall colours and Strathcona art, that is.
Here is the south end of that studio window on Hawks Street:
My ISP has been off and on all night.
So I'm posting a photo and closing down before they do it to me again.
Pigeons watching the dawn, a couple of mornings ago.
... I did.
Strathcona, the old community on the edge of Vancouver's Chinatown, is home to a goodly number of them; some in cheap rental digs, some in heritage houses, some in brightly painted modernistic structures, some in an old church; some working in the garage, on the front porch, in a shed in the yard, and some having studio space, alone or with others.
Every year, my daughter invites us to the East Side Culture Crawl, a three-day festival, when all these artists open their homes and studios to the curious and -- they hope -- customers. I promise to go, and then we find ourselves tied up that weekend. I'll try again for this year, November 16 to 18.
Whether we make it to the crawl or not, we conduct our own mini-crawl every time we visit the area, although we are limited to rubber-necking and staring in studio windows.
We had about 15 minutes for this activity last Saturday: here are a few of my photos. (Laurie's are in the film camera; they'll come later.)
Where to start? Down the street, of course.
Across the street from MacLean park, there is an oddly-shaped studio, with several doors, all interesting. In front, an enormous fig tree, and almost randomly-arranged plantings. On the curb, under another tree, sit two old washing machines, used as planters.
This is a working studio, not a display point. But the residents can't help themselves: the long glassed-in porch or hallway under the fig tree is an ever-changing visual feast. Plants, work in progress, clay pots, and you-name-its vie with the reflections from the park.
I don't know for sure which artists are responsible for this part of the building; I know that one here, David Pirrie, a painter, will open his studio for the Crawl.
Here's a photo from the summer before last, one of my favourites, in the same window.
(And Laurie will have a few photos from the other side of the tree, later.)
Heading back towards Hastings, we pass an old bakery converted into a studio; the Paneficio Studios. (Of course.)
I'm sure the paint job is not what the original owners intended. It suits the area, though. The little round sign above the corner post reads, "Paneficio".
Six artists at this address are registered for the Crawl. Valerie Arntzen has her work in the window this week. Very symbolic, although of what, is anyone's guess. I'll ask her if I manage to get to the Crawl.
I like this photo, taken through the window at an angle; the fuzziness adds to the mystery of the old box itself. What do you think it symbolizes? What does it say to you?
Down the street and around the corner; not much time left. A mailbox speaks of early-morning coffee on the stoop, watching the sun make long shadows on the pavement.
On the other side of the hydrangeas, the window intrigues:
Ancient paint, an Indian sari as a curtain, and the reflections of sky, trees, and peaked roofs above.
Time's up; back to the party. Where my granddaughter gets into the spirit of things. Dancing shoes and a lampshade that swings in the breeze.
That's all for now: more later, when I get Laurie's photos uploaded.
This is a photo from the Bella Coola trip that I posted on Flickr.
A glacier, unnamed, somewhere along the ferry route, melting into the valley below.
Two days ago, Nod 432 left a comment: "Take a good look 'cause these things are melting fast!"
So true. So sad.
I have noticed, in the years since I left, that every year's crop of photos of my beloved Nusatsum mountain shows more rock, less ice.
As it was, once.Snootli Peak, also in the Bella Coola Valley. Barely a hint of ice on top now.
Today, browsing mountains in the area, I came across this ex-glacier.
(Image by Dru.)This lake was a glacier until about 1985, when it started to break up as melt water accumulated. Now it's full of giant icebergs that you can see the layering from the original glacier in. It will probably take another 30 years to fully melt. Located off the Satsalla River valley on BC's central coast at an elevation of around 1800m.What can I say? Will we get around to turning down the heat before our mountains are bare rock?
Strathcona, on the edge of downtown Vancouver, never fails to charm. It has a ragged, unpretentious beauty no matter what the weather.
So when my daughter hosts a party, we come early, to take a stroll down the street and see what we might see. Here is her street, in its October outfit.
Hydrangea, the flowers fading, but the leaves picking up the lost colours.
An oak. Speckled leaves, spotty trunk.
The spiders pick up the same colour scheme, browns and yellows. These beauties were all over, on every bush, it seemed. I missed seeing a web and walked right through it; the first I knew, here was this big guy hiking up my blouse. I must confess I yelped as I flicked him off.
I'm not sure what they are: they and their webs look like the cross spiders of Delta, but the markings seem slightly different. And they are quite a bit bigger than most of ours.
Another kind of web, holding tall Roma tomato plants.
Dahlia. And fly.
McLean Park; fallen leaves and long shadows.
A small aster at curbside.
Back in my daughter's house: a last look at the street, reflected in her front door.
A corner of the upstairs balcony.
Drying hydrangeas, on a side table.
Strathcona is an artist's colony: every front door and window is an adventure, nothing "behaves itself". Not even the wiring:
Tomorrow, I'll post photos of some of those doors and windows.
We're still continuing with our project of walking the whole shoreline of the lower Mainland. Yesterday, we went down the 1001 steps* off Ocean Park, and walked to Kwomais Point.
And I'm tired, it's late, and we have a big day planned for tomorrow. So here are a handful of random photos from the Point. I'll have more to say later on.
6 weeks ago -- 6 weeks! Where did they go? -- Christopher Taylor over at the Catalogue of Organisms favoured me with the Thinking Blogger award. Which I greatly appreciate, even as I modestly refrain from blowing it up and framing it for my wall.
I am supposed to pass it on to 5 other bloggers, bloggers who think, or who make me think. Which set me thinking. (Maybe I can pass this award back to Christopher?)
Who makes me think? Well, most of the bloggers on my blogroll. Not specific enough.
Why and how do they make me think? Better question. I find that I can divide the ways into categories. And choose a representative of each. So here goes, in no particular order.
From the first time I ran across Julie Zickefoose's blog, with her tale of skipping out of a kid's baseball practice to wander in the woods looking for wildflowers, I have been a regular reader. She reminds me, time and time again, of the romping delights of just plain daily life. Thank you, Julie!
A more sobering blog, one I discovered recently, A Mountain Too High, chronicles the life of a courageous woman dealing with the Alzheimer's disease of her husband. Jean's posts are heart-wrenching and -warming at the same time, and give me an anchor for my memories of my family's struggles with the disease, and for strategies for dealing with it in the probable future.
I just realized that I have 117 feeds on my Bloglines list. And it is almost impossible to say which are the "thinkingest".
On with # 3. One of the specialist "looking at nature" blogs. Which? Which? Which? So many useful ones ... How about Hyphoid Logic? "Mentations of a Mad Mycologist". Mushrooms, commentary on "whatever I'm pondering at the moment that I write in it. That may include anything at all." And a cute, punny name; Mike O'Risal.
Theological musings. A topic I used to spend a fair amount of time on. Debunking Christianity, with its stable of thoughtful writers and commenters (pro and con) gives me plenty to mull over.
And back to the simple life. Cicero Sings. (She says, "Every spring there is a little bird that visits our yard and his never ending song is: "tse tse tsicero". Voila! A name to use.") A normal, sane, cheerful life in BC's Chilcotin; a human diary, filled with cooking, family, plants and weather. Something to keep me grounded.
And that's 5. Whew!
Now to wander off and notify everyone that they've been tagged. :)
This leggy character was planning to move indoors for the winter. Laurie found him on the curtains this morning.
He's handsome enough, but...
He and his family have been feasting on our trees all summer. Which was not appreciated. So, no, we are not extending our hospitality to cover the winter, as well. Sorry, guy.
From Cornell U., I learn that,
The leaf-footed bugs use piercing sucking mouthparts to pierce the scales of conifer seeds and suck out the seed pulp. The list of host plants includes white pine, red pine, Scotch pine, Austrian pine, mugo pine, white spruce, Douglas fir and hemlock. Often these trees are planted or are growing near homes, and if that is the case, the bugs may seek the nearby buildings as an overwintering site.
...
In spring these bugs move out of doors to coniferous trees nearby. The bugs feed on the developing seeds and early flowers of different species of conifers. Females are reported to lay rows of eggs on needles of the host trees, which hatch in about 10 days. Young nymphs then begin to feed on tender cone scales and sometimes the needles. The nymphs are orange and brown, becoming reddish-brown to brown as they develop. Nymphs pass through five stages and reach adulthood by late August. Adults feed on ripening seed until they seek overwintering quarters.
See that long tube down his belly, 3/4 of his entire length? That's the business end of his "piercing sucking mouthparts". Eep.This sap feeding is of no consequence to otherwise healthy trees.Well, maybe. But we have a couple of new conifers that have been struggling this summer. Dropping needles, failing to thrive. So, Leptoglossus occidentalis, you are being relocated. Elsewhere.
In the Safeway parking lot: maples changing colour, dancing in the wind.
Down the block and around the corner: more like a bouquet than a tree.
Tim Horton's parking lot: some variety of maple? The trunk peels like an arbutus.
Down a bicycle passageway or two: Big Cone pine. Laurie brought me two cones that had fallen to the ground. They are around 10 inches long, 6+ inches wide.
A bit farther afield: Tsawwassen front yard, and a droopy short tree.
... here's a link to the cutest octopus ever!
Baby Octopus, on flickr, at Tiny Animals on Fingers.
This has been going the rounds for a couple of weeks; Bora, at Blog around the Clock, started it off.
We are supposed to blog about interesting animals in our lives, under 5 headings. I already filled in one of them in the comments on Creek Running North; I'll cut and paste that here, under the appropriate heading.
The year I lived in Oklahoma, I kept noticing box turtles on the roads. I would carefully steer around them, but not everybody did. I found a fair number damaged or killed by traffic, and started rescuing those that could survive, releasing them when they seemed healthy again.
At one time, we had around a dozen wandering around the rec. room.
One turtle had been hit on the head and had a large wound over one eye. After a few days, checking him over, I noticed a maggot crawling out of it. I sat down with him and tweezers and pulled out, one by one, a wiggling mass of maggots. The hole left behind must have been a half-inch deep into the flesh, and beyond the broken bone into the brain.
The turtle survived. In mid-summer, I was able to release him.
5. An interesting animal in its natural habitat. Grizzly bear. And that is another post all on its own. Sometime this week.
... You asked for it: here it is. The chrysalis, as it hangs today.
Compare to a week ago:
Paint drying, it is.
I have moved it, plastic container and all, to a safe spot outside; he wasn't intended to spend the winter indoors.
... they're all interesting. As you will see in this linkie line-up.
The carnivals:
I and the Bird # 59. At Naturalist Notebook. If you checked this one out early on, you probably missed one: there is a late addition: Who likes Wood Storks?.
Circus of the Spineless # 25. At The annotated budak. A very carefully crafted post, loaded with felicitous phrasings; for one, he calls my American house spider a "webmistress". That she is.
The bad and the ugly: (But these sites are definitely good. Useful and informative.)
The top 5 nastiest creatures getting stronger. Brain eating amoeba and the like. Yikes! At Groovy Green.
Plant Pathology; can these plant diseases make you sick? The verdict; usually, no. And reassuring info about evergreens that look sick and aren't. From Iowa State University.
'nuff ickiness; the fun stuff next:
From 10,000 Birds, a non-bird post. And local (for me) to boot: Bandits in the Park. That's our Stanley Park, and the bandits are raccoons. Charlie's photos are fabulous!
Best Sex Video on the Web; that's how Sheril Kirshenbaum bills this one. Barnacles. One that Brian missed in his ongoing series, "Sexiest Animal on the Planet".
The coolest animal on the planet. In my estimation. Water bears. Tardigrades. Now starting a new career as astronauts; see Tardigrade Space Program, at Deep Sea News.
How-to: insect photography 101, by Bev at Burning Silo. Basic gear. A keeper.
Changing the topic: this one is ... disorienting? Frustrating? Militant Platypus has a silhouette spinning either clockwise or counter-clockwise. You decide. If you can.
I saved the best for last. I discovered this by accident; a short biographical sketch of the career of Mary Anning (1799 - 1847).
An amazing woman, an equally amazing life. A poor, uneducated (at least formally) orphan, she scoured the seashore for fossils to sell, to earn a meager living. For 35 years, she collected and studied, borrowing books, consulting with scholars, even dissecting modern creatures. Among her finds was the first plesiosaur known to science. With time and patience, she became an internationally recognized authority on fossils.
I had never before heard her name (another inexcusable gap in my schooling!), but a tiny scrap of her fame had filtered through to me: she is the original subject of that old tongue-twister, "She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore."
A must-read, from Discovering Fossils.
The best thing about October here in the Lower Mainland is the sudden spate of mushrooms, popping out of their hiding places (like condominiums, says A Local Naturalist), and staying from the first rains until the first hard frosts. (Last October's findings here.)
The first ones, around here at least, are tiny. The corals and the big boletes and the cowpie (my name for big, flat, brown polypores) mushrooms take their time.
So here, mostly unidentified, are the little ones we found in the Watershed a couple of days ago.
Very attractive gilled mushrooms, purple-topped, with dark purple stems.
A mix; brick-red, white, and a pale mycena (I think). The white ones are everywhere; they are mostly tiny, ranging from a pin-head to an inch across.
A clump of black-stemmed "umbrellas". Very delicate things, these are; they break off if you so much as brush against them.
The slugs got the few larger white mushrooms, and the purple-red topped ones. And a man was out looking for supper goodies; he said he'd found only three. I don't know what he was looking for. I really wouldn't eat anything but a puffball or maybe a boletus from here. (If I could find one without worms or slug slime, that is.)
But there were other fungi, as well:
Some pretty lichen on a tree.
More lichens, inside a burned-out stump. These ones look poisonous enough. A shapeless, multi-coloured coating on the dead wood.
And these tiny cup mushrooms: I had never seen any aqua-coloured ones here before. It was raining too hard at this point to spend much time kneeling in the wet leaves, trying to keep the rain off my lens while I took photos. I broke a tip off the rotting stick, and brought it home.
The largest of these is about a sixteenth of an inch across. And these tip ones seem pretty battered, compared to the ones farther up on the branch.
One seemed undamaged. It looks like a golf tee or a hollowed-out white chocolate kiss, gone greenish. The closest I can come to an ID is the green stain, but all the characteristics don't line up. My guide says that, "Other greenish cup fungi can only be differentiated microscopically." Beyond my capabilities. Let it rest at this; a blue-green cup mushroom.
Of course, there were polypores. There are always polypores, of all descriptions. Laurie found a beautiful hoof-shaped shelf, possibly a young red-belted, so white around the rolled rim that my camera balked at it.
And by then, so did we. We were cold and wet; time for Tim Horton's, tea and coffee.
Watershed Park, Delta.
The fall rains have come. It is mushroom season.
So the first semi-dry day, we went to the Watershed to find some.
Semi-dry, did I say? In the Watershed, nothing was dry. And it was starting to rain again.
Well, that was quick! I didn't even get around to posting my photos on BugGuide, but we have an ID for yesterday's caterpillar. A local naturalist left a comment on that post, with a link. Thanks!
What I have is a Cabbage White butterfly, Pieris rapae. The link answers a few of my questions:
Cultivated brassicas are the primary foodplants including cabbages, and Nasturtium (Tropaeoleum majus). Wild crucifers such as Wild Cabbage (Brassica oleracea), Charlock (Sinapis arvensis), Hedge Mustard (Sisymbrium officinale), Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata), Hoary Cress (Lepidium draba), and Wild Mignonette (Reseda lutea) are also used to a lesser degree.)
What to say? To think I have lived all these years, never suspecting that this was going on just under my nose!
Just look:
It began last week when we wandered over to the vacant lot and brought home a few branches of hedge mustard for identification. It was an oddly attractive plant, and I left them in a bottle on the kitchen table afterwards. The next day, I noticed a green caterpillar nibbling on the tiny yellow flowers at the tip.
I stashed it in a plastic box for observation and identification. Here it is, as I found it:
A bit fuzzy, about an inch and a half long, green all over with yellow dotted lines along the sides.
I had more time to look the next day; I snapped on an extra lens.
Look closely; this is important. See the 4 little black dots around the eye area. Note the hairiness, and the tiny bluish dots overall.
I fed him (or her) assorted leaves; he ignored all but the hedge mustard. Of this, he relished the miniature yellow flowers the best.
Later that evening, he was no longer eating, but wandering, going to the tips of branches and waving around, as if looking for the next. I brought him new, fresh samples, thinking that maybe the old stuff was too dry. It made no difference. He kept searching.
The next day, he knew where he wanted to go: up. Whatever I gave him, he climbed to the top of, and reached for the sky until he dropped off. Then it was on to the next stem, and up, where he repeated the performance. I put him into a large, lidded container for his own protection; my desk is not the appropriate environment for caterpillars.
Climbing
Almost off. Look at that molted skin; there are the four black dots at the eye level, the hairs, the pimply bumps where the blue dots were.
All this activity took place in about 15 minutes. I could see the old shapes, the rounded segments, the neck line, dissolve, turn to jelly, reform themselves differently. Big round lumps grew at the head; I thought they would be eyes, but then they reabsorbed themselves. The snout lengthened. The tail shortened and formed a point. A bulge grew over the forehead.
