In the starfish zone

It's raining again, and it looks determined to keep at it. I'm glad I still have photos from last week's beach walk.

Purple starfish cuddled up to a rock

Burrowing anemone. The body stays under the sand. Once I dug one up, by mistake. It wasn't attached to anything solid, and rolled away in the waves, a fist-sized ball of jelly.

Iridescent seaweed. It drapes over rocks like tossed clothes. It dries in the sun quickly, and becomes brittle and dull.

On the iridescent seaweed, many small, busy kelp flies swarmed. I took flash photos almost at random, hoping to catch one. In the sunshine, they look black, but all the ones the flash caught came out this ghostly grey, with red eyes.

More seaweed or algae. A small handful, attached to a stone.

Bird tracks.

And what the Encyclopedia calls, "Homo sapiens 'intertidalus'." 

And now, to go back to my Unrain dance, singing, "Rain, rain, go away." It always works - eventually.

You're the one!

Lulu Island, just northwest of us in the delta, is a watery place, a flat, wet land where blueberries grow wild, where fields are red with floating cranberries in season. Much of the island is, or once was, acidic peat bog, similar to our own Burns Bog. The Richmond Nature Park even has a quaking trail, a section of the bog made of a thick layer of decaying vegetation, floating on the soaking wet peat so that it bounces as you walk. Kids love it.

When it rains, the deep ditches (I think you could lose a small car in a few of them) are full of brown water; bog runoff. And the drainage pipes under roads vibrate from the urgency of the water racing to the sloughs and the Fraser river.

Laurie found this rubber ducky tossed to one side by the current.

Valiant little traveler

Roaring rapids

Will he brave the current again?

The duck, like the lumber, the pipes, and the bricks, has been stained by the tannins leached out of the peat, although the duck has lost some of it to scrapes along the way. These bottles we found lying on the bank are "tanned" to a nice leathery colour.

Tannins provide the red or brown colour of many of our foods, too. Nuts, some fruit, and even chocolate, for example.

We left the duck deciding whether to dive or not. I'm sure he did, eventually; he was vibrating with impatience. (Or with the motion of the pipe.) If you ever see, floating somewhere in the ocean, a brown and yellow rubber ducky, say hello!

Rock dwellers

Crunch, crunch, crunch ... That's us, walking across the rocky beach near Kwomais Point at low tide. Us, and innocent barnacles, patiently waiting for the return of the waves, instead cruelly ground underfoot. Crab food. It bothers me, sometimes; if only we could fly over them!

My Marine Life encyclopedia lists four species of acorn barnacles in our area. The tiny ones, barely a third of an inch across, coat the rocks at the high tide level. Below them are the Common Acorn Barnacles, not much bigger, living on larger rocks that are underwater most of the time. These are the ones we have to step on if we want to get to the lower levels.

And down where the rocks stand tall, we find the black-cirried* Thatched Acorn, up to 2 1/2 inches across. The Giant Acorn (6 inches diameter), the one with the pink cirri, is still farther out; we rarely see them here, except on floats. We explored Thatched Acorn territory last week.

Barnacled pyramid.

The outer shell of the large barnacles is covered with smaller ones, both the Common and Thatched. Mussels outline the base.

On the tops of large, flattish rocks, the mix of small and large barnacles, viewed at eye level, looks like a Calvinesque landscape, all sharp rocks and recently-erupted volcanoes. Imagine yourself in a plane, coming in for a landing somewhere in that "river valley" on the upper right.

All it needs is Spaceman Spiff

Sometimes the mussels and small barnacles completely engulf the larger ones. Do you see the mouth of the big guy here?

I noticed that quite a few of the mussels in this zone had "beards".  Or maybe I should say, "stubble".

Barnacles growing away from the crowd sometimes had a pinwheel base, formed from the ends of the downward ridges. There's a bearded mussel on the far right, and below it, a common acorn barnacle.

*Is that a word? Adjective, meaning, "having cirri". The barnacle's cirri are the fan-shaped feeding parts that the barnacle sweeps through the water.

Colour wheel, plus pink.

The sun was playing hide-and-seek yesterday, and I had work to do, anyhow, so I stayed in and got to it. Laurie took his camera out for a walk around our neighbourhood, and came back greatly cheered. Sure, it's smoky and dusty here; sure, construction goes on apace in the wasteland that was a mini-evergreen forest last year. The roads are congested, with more trucks, more hurrying shoppers; it's hard to cross, even at the lights. But, look! The spring flowers are blooming! Smile!

Purple crocuses, with last year's leaf

Yellow. Forsythia. First shrub to bloom every spring.

Pink and grey. Magnolia bud and opening flower

I love these furry coats on the magnolia buds.

More pink. Cherry or plum? Coming right along.

Orangey-red. Not a flower, but might as well be. Spring growth on Pieris.

Green. A mossy bouquet on rock.

Blue (ish). Snail out enjoying the sunshine.

I hope the sun shines again tomorrow. We'll go to Beach Grove or Crescent Beach (the town) and see what's blooming there. Work can wait!

There's always something new.

I always thought oysters were white. Or maybe greyish. But after I've looked at every other possibility, I think this is an oyster.

Beautiful colours; burgundy, cream, and whitest white.

The black, stripy thing is a small mussel, attached. The large shell is attached to the rock.

This was on a low rock about halfway down the intertidal zone. It's small, for an oyster; about 2 to 2.5 inches long. We only saw the one. I've seen a few, very few, oysters in the sand on White Rock beach before, but they were all white.

Orange hearts, yellow nipples, and treacherous mud

The beach at White Rock is wide and flat and the sand goes out on the inner end of the bay almost to the American border. To the east, towards Kwomais Point, the sand quickly dwindles and the shore is first stony, then rocky, then rugged. At low tide, there are patches of sand at first, and we can make our way quickly to where large rocks, some taller than us, all covered with barnacles and mussels, stand dripping into pools at their bases. At the lowest tides, we can even walk around them on dry sand.

And here we can expect to find starfish and anemones, giant barnacles and bright whelks. There may be a large Dungeness crab in the pools, or stranded fish. And there are always surprises.

On many of these large rocks, this Thursday, we found bright orange patches of a compound ascidian, probably Violet Tunicate.

I think this is the same as the one I had in my aquarium last year.

A young colony (right), showing the arrangement of siphons and "hearts".

These tunicates come in various colours, from peach to a deep, winy red. There are other encrusting growths in the same colouring; this one can be distinguished by the more or less orderly rows of siphons, and the ends of blood vessels radiating around the edge. (The blood flows outward, then reverses direction; the outer tips have been called little individual hearts. A post from last year, Chordate for a day, has more details.)

A red colony.

I am uncertain about this one. I can't see the "hearts". It may be a sponge.

On the last pair  of rocks we reached, while Laurie was discovering his batch of whelk eggs, I was checking the landward side of the largest rock yet. The lower half of the rock was home to large black barnacles, and around them yellow nipples, an inch or more long, hung from a jelly and slime base.

Sponge. Unidentified.

The yellow tubes were surrounded by a transparent slime; tubes and slime covered all but the mouths of the barnacles. The tubes felt rubbery to the touch.

I came out from behind the rock to call Laurie over to see these; he was bent over looking at something on his rock (the whelk egg cases, I found out later), but left them and hurried over to see what I wanted. He was in too much of a hurry, I guess, and took a direct path through some shallow water, where the deep mud sucked at his boots, his feet slipped, and he fell face down into the mud.

In the excitement of dragging him out of the mud while the mud fought back, getting him cleaned up, and patching a bleeding knee from a rock hidden under the muck, we forgot our finds. A pity; I should have gotten a sample of the sponge and a few macro photos. Another day, maybe.

My Encyclopedia has 20 pages of sponges. None of them look quite like this one, except possibly the Breadcrumb sponge, Halichondria panicea, which comes in a variety of shapes and colours. And names, too:

Halichondria panicea, popularly called "Breadcrumb Sponge," is the marine world's reigning champion of Latin aliases, with 56 synonyms appearing in taxonomic literature since its first description in 1766. Of no fixed address, it's known to frequent floats, pilings, and the underside of rocks, smells like exploded gunpowder and takes on many guises.
CREDIT: Bernard Picton and World Register of Marine Species (Live Science)

I didn't smell the gunpowder.

I was getting confused and frustrated, comparing all the different sponges in the book and on the web, so I was cheered up by the last 5 pages of the sponge section; 25 "Undetermined Sponges," and that's only "A Selection". Thank you, Andy and Bernard!

And in case you're wondering, Laurie's fine. He's limping a bit, but the cut on the knee wasn't deep. At least most of the mud gave him a soft landing.

Baby whelks, dressed in pink and cream.

Spring and small critters go together. So, on a warm spring day, so warm I regretted bringing a jacket, and with a low, low tide providing access to the barnacled rocks southeast of Kwomais Point, we spent a couple of hours peering into cracks and crouching to examine anemones and starfish.

Laurie and I made our finds at the same time, on separate rocks. These are Laurie's:

Whelk egg cases.

Zooming in. Each case has several to many eggs inside.

One of the whelks, a wrinkled dogwinkle. We found many of these, all along this stretch of shore, all beautiful, all different, from solid white to solid orange, or striped in many colours.

I'm still trying to identify the animals I found. I'll post them tomorrow.

Birding FAIL!

I've been sorting photos all evening. It's amazing how many get put aside to review later, and then buried under the newest arrivals. Some, I may never get to.

These are from our visit to Reifel Island Bird Sanctuary three weeks ago.

Sandhill crane. Last year's chick.

Dry grasses, with grumpy heron.

Redwing blackbird male, vocalizing.

I picked up this feather on the trail. Possibly from a wigeon.

And this last photo is so frustrating! On our way back to the gate, Laurie took a photo of a little brown bird in an evergreeen. The bird flew away, leaving only a blur. Reviewing the photos at home, I almost tossed this one before I saw, 'way up at the top, a large, suspiciously bird-like, dark shape behind the branches. I cropped and brightened the photo, and found this:

Two big owls (or eagles?), right over our heads, that we never even saw.

Reminder to self; go SLOW! Look behind things! Stop thinking about home and supper!

Self-portrait in a spider's eyes.

I found this unfortunate spider curled up and dead in the middle of the hall yesterday morning.

The obligatory ID shot. Another hunter, but very tiny.

With the macro lens, I noticed how brilliant his eyes were. So I tried for a face shot...

And found my lens and camera body reflected in his eyes.

He has a sort of cute kitten face, if you ignore the fact that all the features, "mouth", eyes, and "ears", are really eyes. Some kind of crud is hiding the first eye on the bottom row.

Afternoon dip

They take turns ...

Next!