Stuffed ducks

We survived the trip to Reifel with the little ones. And they got to see birds bigger than themselves: a trio of young sandhill cranes.

Blurry photo of Sophia distributing her first bag of bird seed.

There were a couple or three elementary school groups on the trails; most were well provided with feed. One of the leaders was carrying it in buckets. The mallards' crops were bulging.

Photos tomorrow.
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Hawk on a pole

Isn't he beautiful?


And we're babysitting tomorrow; taking the girls (2 1/2 and 6 y.o.) to Reifel Island if it's not raining too hard. So this is it for tonight. I need all the sleep I can get.

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Wordless (almost) Skywatch post

Boundary Bay, last week:

Sandpipers.


Youngster


Tide flats, with lugworm mounds


Eelgrass




Dead purple starfish


Flying high


Mount Baker at sunset.

(A Skywatch post)
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In praise of dead trees

How do you recognize a healthy forest? Plenty of greenery, good colour? Birdsong? Variety of plants? That fresh, wet, "green" smell?

One clue will be a fair proportion of dead material, not only the fallen leaves of last summer's growth, but needles, branches, and entire trees. Without them, the forest becomes sterile, a pretty park needing the careful hand of the gardener, bearing seeds and new plants. Leave it alone, and it will start to die, and spring into new life.

Shelf in Watershed Park, with fallen tree making a "clothesline" far overhead.

Raw materials. Branches from last year's storms.

Bushwhacking through the Watershed this week, without the summer froth of salmonberry, huckleberry, trailing blackberry, deciduous saplings, and so on, we noticed the deadwood more than we normally would. And it's bursting with life.

Storm casualty.

There were many stumps like this one, twisted and torn by windstorms, then stripped of their bark. Assorted slimes, lichen, and fungi creep over the surface, and dig into the wood. Beetles and larvae burrow through them; birds hunt for the insects.

A few of the stumps have been burnt, whether by lightning strikes or human intervention, we can't tell. The burnt places host their own special vegetation.

The ghost of the stump; a knight in armor to my eyes.

This springboard slot on an old stump has been burnt over. Now it's turning green. So is the stump itself: see the roots hanging down the side? A sapling takes advantage of the extra height (more sunlight) and the nutrients in all that rotting wood, to get a head start.

A large tree, fallen and broken off, becomes a den for larger animals, a hiding place, a dry spot on a rainy day, or a passageway.

Tunnel.

And, of course, the various fungi are always there. Sometimes they bring about the death of the tree:

Infested, top to bottom.

By the time the first of these shelf mushrooms show up on the bark, they have already taken over the woody interior. The shelves are just the fruiting bodies. These trees will stand upright for a time, rotting faster in this position than if they were on the forest floor. Meanwhile, they provide food for insects and birds, until a good windstorm topples them.

And down she went. A new crop of fan mushrooms takes over.

Once downed, as well as nutrients, they provide shelter for small, tender things:


On the lower slopes, we came across this pair of snags:

Woodpecker trees.

The bark has been stripped away, right down to the heartwood. Chips are scattered on the ground, with a pile right at the foot of the snag.

Wikipedia says of the pileated woodpecker,

"They often chip out large and roughly rectangular holes in trees while searching out insects."

A government site calls the holes "diagnostic". And Canadian Biodiversity maps them here. I haven't seen one, but I have heard them. Holes low down on the snag will be searches for food; nest holes are built much higher, in the central cavity of the tree. Last year's nests will serve as homes for many other species of birds, in their turn.

An old cedar stump, flaky as the pastry my grandmother made, "iced" with green icing, has a series of dents on one side, possibly the work of a sapsucker:

Bird barcode?

Laurie was following a small woodpecker, who, as they always are, was invariably on the far side of the tree*. I wandered off in another direction, and came across these red things on the ground:


At first, I thought they were some kind of mushroom that I hadn't seen before. Then I realized that they were scattered all around an area about 30 feet across, an area devoid of all but a few bare twigs, and dead leaves. They were lying loose; no stems, no connection to the ground. I picked up a few of the chunks.


They had the texture of rotted wood, and a whitish skin on one side. Bark?

I called Laurie, and he came over, looked straight up, and found the source:

Far above our heads.

Bleeding tree.

As far as we can tell, in the winter when there are no leaves, it's a red alder.

From BCAdventure.com;

"The name red alder comes from the fact that the inner bark turns orange-red when exposed to air."

What kind of woodpecker makes these holes, I have been unable to figure out. Do you know?

*Laurie never did get a clear view of that elusive woodpecker.

And what kind of creature left behind this piece of dead tree, I can easily guess.


It was less that two dozen steps from a litter barrel. I counted. And I filled the bag with the rest of the scattered lunch wrappings (some were foil, some plastic) before I dumped it.

Dead branches fit here in these woods; not dead painted paper. Nor foil, nor plastic. For shame!
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Whatever the weather, there are always 'shrooms

We went mushrooming at Watershed Park, Sunday afternoon. The ground was frozen, and some of the logs had a sheen of ice on top. We had to watch our footing, but at least, when we needed to kneel (or crawl) on the ground, we didn't get wet.

And we found mushrooms:

Assorted sizes and colours of the turkey-tail type.

These were rotting peacefully in the soggy soil by a creek at the bottom of the hill.

All across the upper reaches of the Park, these white cones were scattered.

More layered fans. These ones were tied together with the fine fibers of another fungus.

And attached to the log with more of the same.

A Douglas fir cone. I was hoping for Douglas fir collybia, Strobilurus trullisatus,* but it looks like I got bird poop.

*It's probably 'way too late for them. The last time I saw them was in November.

What else we found, tomorrow.
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Seen in passing ...

Moss and lichen on a burnt stump, Beach Grove, last Friday.


Look closely, and you can see the beginnings of red tips on the taller lichen stalks. It's one of the Cladonia, maybe C. bellidiflora, or lipstick cladonia, C. macilenta.
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On a grey day, all the colours

It was a good thing we'd started on our way to Reifel Island early; with a stop for lunch, and all the stops in between to look at birds, it was well past 2:00 when we arrived at the parking lot, barely 2 hours before sunset.

The mallards were out in force, some in the parking lot, more along the first part of the pathway, where new visitors would have fresh bags of grain. I dispersed a mere handful, though; I had other customers in mind.

Kid contemplating mallards.

Mallard with orange belly.

Between the office and the first crossroads, the LBBs (no-name brand: Little Brown Birds) set up shop. In the summer, the feeders are kept full; this week, they were all completely empty. But the scrubby bush there is full of food; dried blackberries in abundance, full heads of weed seeds, dried grasses, holly berries, and more. The birds chirp and sing happily in the tangle of stalks.

I tried to entice them out with my bag of grain, without much luck. We managed to get blurry photos of brown -- somethings -- before they hopped back into hiding. Oh, well; the ducks would get the bait instead.

A few LBBs, however, sat on the fence, and even stayed put as we took photos.

All puffed out against the cold.

House sparrow.

Golden-crowned sparrow in the blackberry canes.

We turned into the paths bordering the waterways. Now, the predominant birds were ...


... mallards, of course.

But there were a fair number of pintails:


... wigeons:


... coots, mergansers, and a few shovellers. We saw no geese, which surprised me.

Laurie got this photo of a male bufflehead, in all his female-luring glory:


I've always thought of buffleheads as black-and-whites, but when I looked at the photo, I noticed the sheen of blue on the head, and saturated the colours a bit more, just to see what they were. Here's what I came out with: (Click on it for a large copy, to get the full impact.)

Black and white. And blue, green, and burgundy.

I wondered; what do the females see? Do their eyes pick up all this display of colour? How much are we missing of the scenery here at Reifel?

Back to Google. I found this page: Causes of Color - Color Vision in Birds.

Only recently have we begun to grasp that vertebrates such as birds and fish possess more sophisticated color visual systems than we do. While we are trichromats, having photo-pigments with sensitivities at three peak wavelengths, birds have photo-pigments with sensitivities at four or five peak wavelengths, making them true tetrachromats, or perhaps even pentachromats. In some species, the visual spectrum extends into the ultraviolet range, once thought to be visible only to insects.

It is as hard for us to imagine how birds perceive color as it is for a colorblind person to imagine full color vision; it is outside of our experience. This impacts the study of bird behavior, and our grasp of how birds navigate during migration, classify objects, and interact socially and sexually. For example, some species we see as having identical male and female plumage differ when seen in the ultraviolet range - a difference apparent to the birds themselves.

Wandering through discussion groups and GoogleImages, I learned that some birds glow under ultra-violet lights. The males only, at least in some species. And the females pay no attention to them if they are somehow prevented from seeing the UV. (Sunglasses?)

From Wikipedia:

Some animals can distinguish colors in the ultraviolet spectrum. The UV spectrum falls below the human visible range. Birds, turtles, lizards, and fish have UV receptors in their retinas. These animals can see the UV patterns found on flowers and other wildlife that are otherwise invisible to the human eye. ...

UV and multi-dimensional vision is an especially important adaptation in birds. It allows birds to spot small prey from a distance, navigate, avoid predators, and forage while flying at high speeds. Birds also utilize their broad spectrum vision to recognize other birds, and in sexual selection.

Something to mull over. Something to think about in these grey days; maybe we are surrounded by unseen, unimagined rainbows.

Maybe not so dull, after all.

And here's a rainbow, even for our limited eyes: the male wood duck.

Handsome pair.

On our way back to the car, I stopped off at the washrooms. And while I was there, I checked out the swallow's nest at the side of the building.


Still there, still in good repair. I'll look for violet-green swallows there this spring.

I wonder how many colours they really wear.
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Such a beautiful day!

The sun burned away the fog! The sky was blue! It was warm (sort of)!

We got carried away; walked for hours along the beach, the dike, and through the town, watching eagles and feeling the warmth on our backs.




And now I am so tired I can't stay awake. I keep finding that I've been "reading" with my eyes closed. I'm off to bed.

'night!
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Mute swans and a not-so-mute heron

I love mallards. They're beautiful birds, and funny, too. Even when there are hundreds of them, all quacking at once. Even when they mob me for a few seeds, and I have to push them aside with my feet to walk. Even when I have to inch my car through the parking lot, and they don't see the need to move until the front fender almost touches them. (They remind me of range cattle in the Chilcotin, that way.)

But after you've taken a couple dozen photos of mallards, the cameras get clogged with green head feathers; they crave variety. And on this last visit to Reifel Island, that's what they got. We saw so many different birds that I haven't been able to even sort through all the photos until tonight. And there are too many for one blog post.

May as well get going:

Eagle's nest in the mist.

The fun started even before we got to the bird sanctuary. At the bridge to Westham Island, we parked and walked over (and back). The fog limited our vision to the near at hand:

River's mouth

On the Ladner side, Laurie checked out the eagles' nest we saw last year; one eagle was standing guard. At the river's edge there is a marshy area, enclosed by a log breakwater. A white goose dabbled in the mud there.

It always amazes me how they stay so bright and shiny, digging through all that goop.

Nice clean goose.

Double-crested Cormorants lined up on the breakwater.

Western Grebes, downstream.

One of a pair of Mute Swans. More unspottable white.

We drove on. Passing the last farm before the entrance to Reifel, we stopped again, to watch a heron in the ditch, and startled a hawk. I managed to get a photo, very tiny, very misty:

I think it's a Harrier.

We had interrupted its dinner.

More white feathers, still bright in spite of the situation.

Another hawk was in the trees nearby. I don't know what this is. The more I search through my books, the more confused I get. They don't even look the same from one book to the next, let alone from one time of year, age, or sex to the next. Help!

Sitting raptor. At least that much I know.

On to the heron:

Through the branches.

He wasn't in the mood for photos. Laurie got a bit too close, and the heron took off with the loudest, angriest, harshest, longest "Graaaaaaak!" I had ever heard. Sorry this next photo is blurred; I was laughing too hard to hold steady. If you look closely, you can see his open beak.

"Graaaaak!"

Another heron, standing one-legged, looking like an old woman in a shawl.

Next: we finally get to the starting point.
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