Laurie is a WWII veteran, British army, stationed mostly in S.E. Asia. With this snowy weather, we've been staying inside, puttering around, and he's been cleaning out old files; he found a stack of currency he had brought home as souvenirs.
These ones had interesting artwork. Can you name these fruits?
Or this tree?
Front of the one rupee note:
These date from around 1940 to 1947, when Laurie came home. More, with a bit of history, tomorrow.
... As long as there are black oil sunflower seeds, life is good.*
*Translated from the Chickadee, Fraser Delta dialect.
And not exactly "Five", either. A bunch of links, anyhow. Mostly intriguing photos, ones that made me think, this time.
"Because the two sides of lobster develop independently of each other an error can occur on one side and not the other."
1. Plan to count birds for at least 15 minutes during February 15–18, 2008. Count birds at as many places and on as many days as you like—just keep a separate list of counts for each day and/or location.
2. Count the greatest number of individuals of each species that you see together at any one time, and write it down. (You can get regional bird checklists here.)
3. Enter your results through our web page.
That's it! We'll look forward to receiving your counts.
It snowed most of the day, starting with tiny, almost dust-size flakes, ending with a fast dump of 4 or 5 inches of heavy clumps.
Back in October, as some of you may remember, I photographed a Cabbage White butterfly caterpillar turning into a chrysalis, and blogged about it here.
The adult butterfly should hatch sometime in the spring. One site I found suggested it may be as early as February. So it is time I started monitoring more closely.
I have had it outside, in a semi-sheltered location, still in the big salad bowl where it anchored itself on the lid, and with a couple of layers of open-weave cloth over it to keep out predators, but allow air circulation.
Here it is, as I last photographed it, at the end of September. It is anchored at the tail end (where the discarded skin is) and with a thread around the middle, and hanging upside down (judging by the position of the caterpillar when the transformation started).
I brought it inside tonight. Fingers crossed: hoping I would find it still alive and growing. I photographed it quickly, not wanting to expose it to a warm lamp any more than was necessary, bundled it up again, and put it back outside.
Here's what I found.
There are a few changes. It is no longer attached by the tail, but is swinging free on the thread around the waist, right side up. The old skin is still there, but no longer tied to the chrysalis.
It seems to me that the markings along the wings are more pronounced, and the bulges that I still think may be eyes are rounder and have a rim on one side.
Floating free as it is, I got a first look at the belly.
Some kind of apparatus there. Legs? Antennae? Mouth parts? Time will tell. The belly was tight against the lid in the fall, so I don't know whether it has changed since then.
And back to waiting again. I hope I have done it no damage; I figure the disturbance was no more than what would have been normal on the underside of a leaf in a bit of a wind.
We'll see.
It's amazing, sometimes, to watch the unfolding of children's personalities, and especially to trace family resemblances there. It's more understandable that they have Mommy's eyes, an aunt's long fingers and Grandpa's curly hair, etcetera, even recognizable family temperaments; but likes and dislikes? Or ways of interacting with their world? How is that inherited? And yet it seems to be. It boggles the mind!
Today my five-year-old granddaughter was laughing at the way her sister had positioned a rubber grasshopper, and it occurred to me to show her a real (albeit dead and a bit dilapidated) grasshopper from my son's collection.
She was fascinated.
She looked at it from all angles, and moved on to the butterflies. She asked questions; "Where are the eyes?" "What's that?" She was so interested that I got out a lens and my bright desk lamp. And for the next half hour or more, she pored over my insect collection, with her head bent low over the lens. She moved the insects around to see them top and bottom, always very carefully; she didn't break even one of the tiniest or most delicate. And she insisted on double-checking to make sure she hadn't missed even one.
She even noticed a tiny broken bit of butterfly in the case; "What's that thing?" The coiled proboscis, or siphoning tube, barely 2 mm. across.
And I remembered my early years, how I spent hours watching flies and crabs, investigating the "innards" of fish and sea urchins, permitting mosquitoes to bite me so that I could see how they looked up close. And my delight at my first microscope (at about 11), when Dad had to tell me to calm down and stand with my hands behind my back to tell him about the fly wings I had spent the afternoon looking at.
I had to promise Snookums that I would have more beasties to show her next time she comes so that she would allow me to put these ones away at lunch time.
Astounding! All the more, to me, because most of my other grandkids would be saying, "Ewwww!"
I'm babysitting tomorrow, early till late. I've child-proofed the house, defrosted goodies for them, tidied the toy box, set the alarms. (Three of them; I'll never manage to get up at the first one, and maybe not even the second.)
And now, I'm off to bed. See you tomorrow!
I was left holding the bags while Laurie finished off his list. Sitting on the stairs, because all the seating was occupied. So I had to entertain myself somehow.
... but didn't. Because I was driving.
Anyhow, Hugh, over at Rock, Paper, Lizard, took them. And posted them on his blog. Here. (Down at the bottom, below his tales of woe. Ouch!)
These are the mountains that hedge the northern border of the Lower Mainland. The range continues on to the east; looking south, we have Mount Baker, and west, the ocean. Appropriate envy is permitted.
Can't be a real moth, says Laurie. Wyldthang calls it " pretty freaky". "Spooky", someone on another site called it.
That's this visitor, that I photographed on my garden wall, last August, and posted to the blog a few days ago:
Well, yes, it is strange.
I hadn't gotten around to IDing it, nor even finding where it fitted. I've been doing that all this evening (and early morning).
It is, as far as I can figure out, a Morning Glory Plume Moth, Emmelina monodactyla, and is fairly common across the US and Canada, and in the UK. It turns up on a database of species in the Lulu Island bog, just across the river from us. Some people have called it the "T" moth, which is the name I gave it for my own use. Logical, I guess.
I found eleventy-two photographs of Emmelina, but very little information. I read, over and over, that the Plume Moths have unusual wings. (As if I hadn't noticed.) They are like long "spars", or shafts, two in the front wings, three in the back. Long feathery "plumes" trail out from these shafts when they are open, but at rest, the moth rolls up the front wing and hides the back wings underneath. Wikipedia says,
"Often they resemble a piece of dried grass, and may pass unnoticed by potential predators even when resting in exposed situations in daylight."On BugGuide, I found a photo of this moth with the feathers exposed:
No photo today**; instead, I'll try to paint a picture with halting words.
Today we went across the river to shop in New Westminster. It was a clear, sunny day; even though everything froze hard overnight, by noon the ice had melted wherever the sun reached.
We were done shopping by 4:30 and headed home. The setting sun was mostly straight ahead, almost at road level. The sky, even through sunglasses, was a light orange, the sun a blinding orange-yellow circle, dimmed by haze just enough to let us see its shape. And big; as big as the harvest moon of last November.
I tried my best not to look directly at the sun, especially because I was driving. But it kept leaping out at us as we crested a small rise or as the road turned under us. Luckily, it was partially screened by trees, leafless but still providing some cover. Maybe that was why it looked so huge; the trees barely covered half its diameter.
The road home crosses three bridges. On the second one, the sun was to our right, haloing the trees of the bog*, touching up the bridge railings with orange highlighter, ricocheting off the river, off windows and tin roofs. I turned away, to the left, to rest my eyes.
And there was the moon. A full moon, fully as big, today, as the sun, but gleaming white, whiter even than the snowy mountains below.
Round white moon, round orange sun, and us in the centre in our little white car on the rounded slope of the bridge.
Beautiful!
At moments like these, I get an inkling -- a sensation, an intuition, maybe -- of our planet as part of a much larger world. Bodies, large and small, whirling in a rhythmic space dance, and ourselves as mere dots crawling on the surface of this blue-green ball. Insignificant, even in our cities, freckles on the skin of the world. Yet important, because we are part of that larger whole. And because what we do can affect the dance, even if only by changing the dress of our particular performer.
And, if the presence of an observer has an effect on reality, as some say, we are that observer.
I explain that very badly. I don't know if we have words to do justice to the feeling.
... at any time of the year. But the first time we were there, in March of last year, we saw buffleheads, wood ducks, and widgeons, as well. By April, they were gone. So when we went for a short walk there, yesterday, I was hoping they'd be back.
Yes and no.
At the bottom end of the pond, where the creek exits, we found new building going on; a fair start on a beaver dam, already raising the water level of the pond. It's an ambitious project. All around the lake, trees have been cut, most of them dropped into the water, a few on land; some of these have already been cut into manageable sections.
... is that I get a lot of computer housekeeping done. It's just enough effort to keep my mind off my troubles, but doesn't require any real thinking. And I'm not moving about; a big plus when every muscle aches.
So I've been cleaning out my photo files, getting rid of a lot that had been waiting on a decision until I had forgotten they were there. (It's easy to decide to chuck something when your head aches.) And I found quite a few interesting ones, also forgotten. I am going to have to devise a new way of sorting and tagging them so that doesn't happen again.
And I've thrown away old log files and leftover downloads, cookies for places I will never go again, etc. And defragmented the hard drive. All boring, routine chores.
Now I can start fresh. New year, freshened computer, and, I think, returning energy. Yay!
And, in a last bit of tidying up, here are two photos from the Strathcona Culture Crawl that I had somehow missed.
A sculpture by Mary Kathleen Barrett: more of her work at her website.
And, just after dusk, we passed this garbage bin with a warning sign:
"Lunatic cat", in French. Yowl!
I'm feeling a bit better; thank you for your get-well wishes.
Thinking, perhaps, that if this continues, and the weather co-operates, I'll be ready to be on the go again tomorrow.
Just a wee nap before we go, ok?
I'm down with some sort of a bug. I've been sleeping most of yesterday and today.
So, no post yesterday, just a couple of photos today.
... moths.
I've been cleaning out my hard drive. Tonight, I ran across these photos of a few moths that visited me last summer; good memories.
None of them have been identified, as yet. I'll get that 
one of these days.
This first one was on my window: I took the photo against the light, and got his silhouette and feather markings. From outside, he was a pale grey, and the markings were almost invisible.
He looks wary; he should!
Several chickadees were lined up on this table, hopping back and forth, looking through the window at my desk. Unusual behaviour; usually they go from the maple to the feeder to the evergreens, with an occasional side trip to the birdbath. I went to check the feeder. It was empty.
Sorry, guys; I got distracted somehow. I know my job description doesn't include distractions. Really, really sorry.
I filled the feeder, and put an extra handful of sunflower seeds in the dish where I put out small bird seed for the juncos. Atonement.
And five minutes later, Scruffy here was at the dish, stuffing his cheeks. He watched me, at the window, closely, but kept at it. Here he is, with an empty dish.
What's the problem? You spoil those juncos, anyhow. And you don't let me at the chickadee feeder at all. It's not fair. So these are mine. All mine!
... or is it peanutbagging?
They've had trouble with flooding along the beach area in Boundary Bay a couple of times in recent past, and many of the houses are new, and expensive. So they're building a dike along the property line.
At the core of the new dike are these bags. Farther along, they have already been covered with loose sand, up to about 2 metres high.
I checked; they're full of sand. Not peanuts.
More on this outing, later.
I've been wasting time, just playing around with the camera, trying out various settings, backgrounds, and lighting arrangements for indoor photography.
So here's a chair that my granddaughter uses to reach the washbasin with.
Two chairs.
Two chairs and a parrot.
I decided not to try your patience with two chairs and two parrots.
I know, I'm a bit bonkers. It's been that kind of a day.
So, to cheer myself (and you, I hope) up, I'm looking at photos from last March; the early signs of spring.
Born Again Bird Watcher hosts this month's IatB with a presentation of the
"justifiably little known and uncollected Edwardian playwright ... Oscar Wildlife’s “The Importance of Being an Ornithologist,” the middle portion of the fifth of fourteen and a half acts."The dramatic setting is the drawing-room of an intriguing English country house, and the imagination is stimulated by inspired costuming,
... are the small beasties, the spiders and snails, the wasps and dragonflies.
Apart from a rare fruit fly, the barest hint of a spider web or two in a dusty corner behind the desk, and a couple of woodbugs in the garden, I have seen no bugs around home for several months. Even "Fat Momma", who stayed in her corner with the egg cases until the temperature dropped below freezing, has disappeared.
I must have my fix!
So I looked over my old photos, and discovered this tiny spider, unidentified, and never commented on. I've spent much of tonight looking through Bug Guide, trying to find one like him, with no luck.
I found him in a park across the street last May. He was tiny, but moving fast; I only got one chance before he had dropped off the edge of the fence, out of sight.
An interesting black-and-white striped pattern; I don't remember ever seeing one like this before, nor those white feet; most similar spiders seem to have striped legs to go with the pattern on the back.
Zooming in on that yellow cup lichen:
This was one of my first outings with the new digital camera. I still hadn't figured out how to zoom in without shaking, nor to adjust for the lighting. I'll be back in that park this spring, to look for this lichen again. And maybe, just maybe, I'll find another stripy spider.
Ahhh! That feels better!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Later: The Bug Guide people are fast! Thanks to John Maxwell, I have an ID; the spider is Salticus scenicus, a Zebra spider, one of the jumping spiders.
Combine dim lighting, a beginner's camera, and candid shots: sometimes you get strange effects.
Like these eyes.
Or these.
Around here, most people stop celebrating the season the 2nd of January, and get back to work. Not us. We've still got three more traditional feasts to go.
Yesterday was Twelfth Night (remember the "12 days of Christmas"?), the date of the traditional "Dia de los Reyes", day of the Kings, or Wise Men. We celebrated Mexican style, with the obligatory bread ring ("Rosca de Reyes") and hot chocolate.
My son, again, did the honours. His bread this year was better than ever; moist and not too sweet. He usually uses a recipe from a 1974 Sunset Books Cook Book, which is good enough, but just a little too elaborate. I just counted: 17 ingredients, plus toppings!
This year, he used the recipe from "Like Water for Chocolate". Much simpler, and more as I remember it.
I got sidetracked, looking up the recipe to share it here; the recipes in the book are integral to the story, and I ended up reading all afternoon. That is one entertaining (and strange) story! I had seen the movie, but never read the book.
And here's the recipe, for a crowd:
Mexican recipes use weights, not volume; I did convert from kilos and grams to pounds to make it a bit easier.
- 1 oz yeast
- 5 lbs. flour
- 8 eggs
- 1 Tbsp salt
- 2 Tbsp Orange blossom water (I have no idea what this is; substitute with a bit of orange rind.)
- 1 1/2 c. milk
- 2/3 lb. sugar
- 2/3 lb butter
- 1/2 lb candied fruit
Soak yeast in 1/2 cup of warm milk; add 1/2 lb. of the flour, set aside in warm place to rise.
On a floured board, make a pile with the rest of the flour; hollow it out to make a well for all the other ingredients. Mix in gradually by hand, kneading until completely blended. Add raised yeast and flour mix, knead until smooth.
Set in a greased bowl, covered by a napkin, to rise until double in size. Turn out on floured board, and stretch into a long strip. Roll up, move to a large greased baking sheet and form a ring, with the seam side down. Set in the warm place to rise again, until double.
Decorate surface with candied fruit, glaze it with a beaten egg, and sprinkle with sugar. Bake at 400 degrees for about 20 - 30 minutes. Cool. Serve with hot chocolate or coffee brewed with a cinnamon stick.
I have been lax these last two weeks. (Well, Christmas and New Years' might have something to do with that.) So, whatever the excuse, I haven't built up a listing of science links for the regular link fest.
But here's what I've been browsing today, in no particular order:
From Rock, Paper, Lizard, "Arthropod Art". Right down my alley.
From Science Daily, "Insect attack may have finished off the dinosaurs". Not an asteroid impact after all? An interesting idea.
From the New York Times, "The Invisible Ingredient in Every Kitchen." Can you guess?
One of my favourite blogs: Janet Stemwedel's "Adventures in Ethics and Science". Her weekly "Friday Sprog Blogging" is well worth watching for. This week, the sprogs discuss bears.
From Aardvarchaeology, "Mars Rover still working after Four Years". And the warranty was for 3 months! Someone was doing something right.
Tetrapod Zoology: Surreal caecilians, Part II: "Pass mom's skin, hold the mayo." I know, I know; don't click on this if you're squeamish, or if you object to ten-dollar words. But it has some very interesting tidbits; skim on down to the 8th paragraph for the title story.
And Shelley Batts has the beginning of a series, with her article, "Coffee as Treatment for the Plague". She says,
"Pretty much I'm just going to dig back into the forgotten and moldering annuls (sic) of scientific publications to find weird and interesting studies that very likely would never be published or done today (and perhaps never should have.)"Have fun browsing!
The weather for the last few weeks has been predictable only in that it was cold and usually wet. Snow, slush, rain, wind, ice, snow, rain... We weren't getting out much. But last Saturday, the sun came out from behind the clouds and looked like it was planning to stay out.
We bundled up, just in case, and went down to Boundary Bay.
We stopped at the first parking lot, at the head of the shortest path to the beach, a wide, straight stretch between the mud flats on the left and the grassy, scrubby dunes on the right. A flock of sparrows hidden in the dry blackberry canes at the entrance chattered as enthusiastically as if it were mid-summer. A good sign.
Out on the mud flats, Canada geese lined the waterways, mostly asleep.
Closer to the path, a sole yellowlegs (greater or lesser; I can't tell the difference) waded in the shallows. A pair of teal, the first I've seen in some time, splashed around just beyond.
And in a ditch through the dunes, a heron was fishing.
It was enough. I was content.
But -- wait! What do we see next?
On a dead tree, against the light, a small bird perched. An odd shape; that is all I could distinguish at that distance. I took a photo, anyhow, to see if I could blow it up at home and get a better look. And before I could get a second shot, he dropped off the branch and flew into the blackberry canes right at our feet.
A kingfisher. I had never been so close to one.
While we watched, she (I think, because of the hint of rust on the breast) dove into the water, fishing, several times, each time moving to a different cane with her catch.
Easier to see than to photograph; the cameras kept wanting to focus on blackberries and grasses, and she kept moving on. And here, Laurie's camera began to give problems. While he wrestled with it, I scrambled down the bank ahead of the bird, and tried to get into a position where I had a clear view.
Not quite. But here she is, diving. A bullet-shaped bird going down; wings spread coming up. (Do click on that second shot, to see her clearly.)
And then she'd had her fill; she flew off into the bushes, out of sight.
And that was only the opening act. Down at the beach, we had another treat coming.
Great flocks of dunlins were feeding in the shallow bay. They would stand, all together, at ankle depth (to them) poking at the sand for a few minutes, then lift off suddenly, all together, and stream quickly a few dozen meters down the shoreline, land and feed again. (Click on these photos to get the full picture.)
Feeding. One yellowlegs in front. Looking like a conductor with his orchestra, all of them in tidy brown and white. Note the seagull, just a bit beyond, on the right; it gives an idea of the relative size of these little birds.
Farther out, we could see great grey rafts, mostly resting; the more successful hunter-gatherers, perhaps, sleeping it off.
When the dunlins flew, they looked either black against the light, or as they turned, exposing the underside of the wings and bellies, flashing bright white. All at once; the flock was either white or black in its entirety. And the change was instantaneous, like an electric light switching on and off.
Black. One flock flying, another feeding. Beyond, in the deeper water, a group of Canada geese.
White. Flying just a few feet up, so that their brown upper parts are reflected in the water as they turn.
We followed them down the shore, almost until sunset, never getting close; they took it in easy stages down to the point, then turned and flew back again, always just ahead of us. Laurie was berating his camera; it kept sticking, refusing to zoom, refusing to focus. But no matter; it was glorious just to watch the show; the flocks moving as a unit, a flying raft, stretching out into a line, then bunching into a speeding grey cloud just over the water, flashing white again. And then alighting in a great flapping frenzy, to stand quietly in the mirrored bay, as if intending to fall asleep like the geese. Until, as if blown away by a sudden gust of wind, they were off again...
At one point, another viewer came up to us to ask if we'd seen them in the morning. No. He explained that every morning they are there early, in flocks of thousands, wheeling and flashing over the water. One of these days we must go see.
A photographer loaded with equipment, including a large tripod, and wearing big boots for the mud, made his way down to the water's edge; like us, following the flocks. But by the time he had set up, the dunlins were far away. I felt sorry for him; all that persistent work. But as we reached the straight stretch back to the parking lot, I turned for a last glimpse of the birds.
Payoff! The flock was landing at his feet. I watched him for a while, turning his long lens this way and that, surrounded by feeding dunlin.
On the way back to the car, we noticed a bald-headed eagle standing in the water near the geese. Just standing there. Odd.
We drove home in blissful silence, too full for words.
"Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual."
--Mark Twain
Next week?
Oh, dang it all; I've already started.
Got the worm, anyhow.
Boundary Bay beach, December 30th.
The sand, on the dunes above the water level, is always changing, moving, re-shaping itself. All that anchors it are the scruffy plants, barely a few straggling branches and tiny leaves, even in summer. Now in midwinter, they have become mere place-holders, waiting for spring and warmth.
Dead blades of dune grasses hug the ground, pulled to one side by wind and rain, but holding fast, roots still gripping their handful of sand, slowing its flow.
A hint of green, last gasp of fall blending into first growth of spring. The earth itself, like the dunes, moves on, turning now towards the sun.
