A day at the beach

It's Canada Day, the four-day weekend, and the sun came out! What more could one ask?

All togged up for sand and sun.


An island of their very own. (While the tide co-operates.)


Flying mountains.


Flying volleyballs.


Flying eagles. In tandem.


Flying sticks and smiling dogs.


Beach succulents soak up the sun.


Until the sun goes that-a-way.


Time for home and supper. Tomorrow's another beach day. Woo hoo!

.

Life on the edge

... water's edge, that is. Where the living is precarious, the environment sometimes cold, sometimes hot, now wet, now dry, now saline, now fresh. The highest intertidal zone and the splash zone.

We've been combing the rocks around the Kwomais Point headland, but recently even the afternoon low tide has been high. (Today's tide levels at White Rock: 5:12 PM - 3.7 m, 8:49 PM - 3.4 m, 1:38 AM - 4.1 m. Only the morning tide is low: 9:53 AM - 0.4.) And we've found several things I'd never seen before.

Laurie has been looking at seaweeds. I never knew there were so many types!

Rockweed. The old, familiar rockweed.

I've been comparing our photos to the ones I found on a great ID site, WSU Beach Watchers EZ-ID Guides. I've been able to identify some, but not all of the seaweeds we found. I'm still searching for the most intriguing of them all, which I'll post about in a day or two.

Green algae on the lower edge of a wet rock. And a limpet to feed on them.

And I, being in a mood for rockclimbing (of sorts), have kept more to the splash zone. And lookee here!


A tidepool, just below the highest tide line. Nothing much in it but barnacles and mussels. But while I watched, something moved.

Zooming in. See that red beastie? He was moving fast; in a couple of seconds he had scuttled out of site.

He's a Neomulgus littoralis, a red velvet mite. BeachWatchers says,

This little arachnid is only about 3 mm in diameter or about the size of a period at the end of a line of newsprint. It is found on driftwood or rocks high in the intertidal where it looks like a tiny bright red dot and may be stationary or scurrying along the surface. These little mites feed by sucking the fluids out of kelp flies.

The three I found were scurrying.

I found a great photo of these on BugGuide. "Racing", the photographer says. Except for these two. A lucky shot.

And just a bit higher on the rocks, on a bare, dry boulder, I saw what looked like a giant pillbug. Except that it was running far faster than any pillbug I had seen. I jumped up to another rock, how I don't know (Laurie had to help me down later), to get a photo. Too late; he had disappeared down a crevice. I watched that crack for about ten minutes, barely moving, in case he reappeared. Nothing doing, although I did get another distant shot at a red velvet mite on a dry rock.

I found the isopod on BeachWatchers, though. He's a Ligia pallasii, the sea slater, or rock louse.

RaceRocks has a video of these creatures, including a shot of a cute one trying to escape the weighing station.

Both these sites are copyrighted, so I can't borrow a photo; you'll have to go see for yourself.

Next: the seaweeds.
.

After two days on the beach ...

... I'm too tired to put one word in front of the other.

Here are some of the barnacles we saw:


And now I'm going to bed. G'night, all!
.

Afternoon in blues and greys with white lace

We finally made it around the headland at Kwomais Point. It was difficult walking, especially since the tide was high and we were confined to the rocks.

But, oh, the song of the waves!







Around the bend, the sea was calmer, the rocks smaller.



And we walked back via the railroad tracks.

Some of the life on that shore, next post.
.

Seeing spots

I've been wondering about ladybugs. Gardeners have been releasing buckets of non-native species to kill aphids for a few years; by now, are the bugs in our yards old-timers or immigrants?

So this spring I've been taking photos of every one I've seen. Yesterday I sorted through my file. Over half of them were the imported Multicoloured Asian Lady Beetle, Harmonia axyridis. And the rest; well, let's see...


I found this one in New Westminster. The Asian ladybug.

The identification depends on the pattern on the pronotum, the shield between the head and the wing covers (elytra). All Multicoloured Asians have a marking in the shape of a W (or an M, if you're looking from the tail end.) Apart from that, they're ... well, multicoloured. And variously spotted. BugGuide has 288 photos of this species alone, and almost all different in some way. Wikipedia shows 13 different patterns.

Here's another, this one from Steveston:


The pronotum is more or less like the previous one, but the head has more white, and there are fewer spots on the elytra, 14 as compared to 19 (counting that centre-front spot as 1.)

And here's another, from Crescent Beach:


Black face, 18 variable spots. And the W.

But these are different:


There's no W. Seven (two at back, where they did not show up in this photo) spots on the elytra, two angular white spots on the head, and two rectangular ones on the elytra.

It's another import: the Sevenspotted Lady Beetle, Coccinella septempunctata. I found this one in Strathcona, Vancouver.


Another Sevenspotted, from across the street here in Delta.

And how about this one, from New Westminster?


No W. No black spots on the elytra, but the two rectangular white ones at the front edge, like those of the Sevenspotted LB. An elaborate black and white pattern both on the pronotum and the head.

There are similar ladybugs on BugGuide, and some discussion as to which of the three Cycloneda species they belong to. I would guess it's theWestern Blood-red Lady Beetle, Cycloneda polita, which is native to this area.

This was the only one in my file. All the rest were introduced species. And the roses are still loaded with aphids.
.

Ambush!

Now that the weather is warming up a bit, every flower ...

Foxglove stalk.

... wears a spider.

Tiny American house spider, I think. And a very successful predator, judging by the leftovers.

Honeysuckle

And its spider.

It's a jungle out there.
.

Frogs, snakes, cuckoos, or bugs?

I've been monitoring the sprig of rosebush from last Friday, looking for changes in the orange casing. There's not much to report so far; a slight thickening of the dusty spots is about it.

However, I've found something else of interest in those three leaves.

It's been a hectic week, so I propped the twig in an eggcup full of water, to be examined later. I was gathering my purse and keys to dash off, when I happened to glance back and see a green bug on one of the leaves. In a great rush, I took a photo:


Then I popped the twig, eggcup, critter, and all, into a lidded container, and dashed out the door, only a few minutes late.

Back home on Saturday afternoon, I examined my find more closely. By now, the bug had built himself a safe haven:


A mass of bubbles, home to a spit bug (or spittle bug). The froth is sometimes called "snake spit" or "cuckoo spit". (I've heard that snakes do spit, so do frogs, but do cuckoos?) I brushed some of the bubbles off, gently.


It was some kind of hopper, still in the nymph stage. The wings are mere yellow stubs. I like those cute antennae, too; so short they look more like whiskers.

I was gone most of the day Sunday, and didn't do more than glance at the container through the lid, see that the rust was still orange, and rush off again.

Yesterday morning (Monday), the hopper was on the inside of the lid. And he was no longer green.


In the spot where he had been resting, only the molted exoskeleton remained, with a few popped bubbles.



He's a hopper. Still wet behind the ears, and a bit sluggish. But while I was looking at him, he suddenly leapt into the air, out of the container, and onto a file folder about a foot away.

I photographed him, slapped a cup over him and maneuvered him back into the container. He's there now, with the lid firmly snapped on.

And I found his mates on BugGuide; froghoppers. Philaenus spumaria, the meadow spittlebug. They're from the superfamily Cicadoidea, the cicadas and their kin. The meadow spittlebug is one of the few greenish nymphs found in BC. Their adult colouring is variable, anything from brown to black to patterned to plain to striped. And National Geographic calls them the "World's Greatest Leaper": an adult froghopper can jump up to 70 cm. high. That's over 2 feet, for a tiny bug, around 1 cm long.

I checked him out again tonight. He's dried out, and is quite active. His two "whiskers" have turned black, and have a little knob at the bottom. Charming.


.

I've been on the highway a good part of the time for the last couple of days. At a rest stop near Abbotsford, I found this tiny spider.

Scuttling out of sight.

In a leafy cave, in defensive mode.

.

Very pretty, but what is it?

Except in the section of the WhiteRock beach nearest the pier, access is problematic. If the obstacle is not a high cliff face or a muddy slough, the way is blocked by thickets of thorny shrubs, the invasive blackberry or native wild roses. Friday, we followed a narrow path hacked through the roses.

On the beach side, many of the twigs wore a bright orange wrap.


Orange-peel bright, about the size of a small caterpillar, crusty and peeling back where the twigs exit. Here's another:


I cut a twig and turned it over. The bottom was dusted with orange specks and threads. The specks fell off easily; you can see some already on the log where I laid the twig to take a photo.


And do you see those little round bumps on the stem? Here they are, close up:


So is this a slime mold? It looks like it to me. But I can't find anything quite like it in my books, nor on the web. Google failed me, for once.

I have my little twig in an egg-cup full of water now. I'll be watching it for signs of growth, or colour changes as it ages.

And I'm hoping someone can help me with an ID. I'm stumped.
.

Yes(s)ir!

Seen in an abandoned business site in Burns Bog:


Fraser and Yaya. Immortalized. (Sort of.)
.

Daddy is a show-off

The redwinged blackbird is an easy bird to identify. At least the adult male is. Most of the time.


He's black, and he displays brilliant red patches on the wings. And he perches on the tallest cattails, singing at the top of his voice. "Konkeree! Konkeree!"

Of course, he's not always flashing those red patches. Then he's a plain black bird, smaller than a crow, usually bigger than a starling.

Waiting his turn at the feeder. At Reifel Island Migratory Bird Sanctuary.

And sometimes only the yellow edge of the patch is visible.


But still, pretty distinctive.

The rest of the family is not quite so easy.

First, the male arrives in the marsh alone, and sets up shop. About a month later, when the air is swarming with LBBs (Little Brown Birds), the female arrives, looking like all the others in a sensible drab outfit. She busies herself with nesting duties, somewhere hidden in the shelter of the cattails.

Just another LBB.


She is smaller than the male, not much bigger than a Fox sparrow. She wears a tidy brown coat, a cap with a whitish streak over the top (like the white-crowned sparrow's) and another over the eye (again, like many other LBBs'). Her underparts are whitish, heavily streaked with black or brown. If she's in the right position, you can see that the tail is notched in the centre.


But hey, she hangs out around the cattails. Near where her flashy mate is loudly proclaiming ownership. That's a give-away.

And then there are the kidlets.


I think this is a juvenile redwing. I could (easily) be wrong. Basically, they look like a paler version of the female.


And this is a young male, in his first spring. The red patch is still orange, with black spots. But when he grows up, he'll be the spitting image of his Daddy.
.

Green and brown, too

Reflections in Cougar Creek:




In the course of babysitting, I agitated about a dozen large bottles of semi-congealed poster paint until they re-liquified, pulled half a dozen boxes out of storage looking for said paints, repacked and replaced them, squished and massaged another dozen or more paint tubes. I may recover the use of my arms in the next few days. Posting will probably be light until it no longer hurts to type.
.