Five minute expedition

We've had a busy day, driving back and forth, hauling stuff around, unpacking, shopping ... barely time for a quick walk to the corner and back. But even in that nibble, Strathcona doesn't disappoint.

The colours are vivid:

Purple clematis and a greenish-white hydrangea.

Shining white miniatures along the sidewalk.

Cherries, not quite ripe.

Unidentified flower head, with ant.

And the decor surprising:

Front porch pets.

The people front door is just to the left. Wasps enter on the right. Good neighbours.

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A walk in the garden

Blue jeans, Crescent Beach.

And with that, we're off to Strathcona, where sights like this are commonplace, for our annual week of house-sitting. Let's hope the sun shines!

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Brownie cooks Christmas dinner

Brownie is a Steatoda bipunctata, a two-spotted cobweb spider. I've been housing her since last November in a big glass jar. (Previous posts: Mistaken identity, twice over, and To spin or not to spin, spider #4.)

Small sowbugs make up the bulk of her diet; fortunately, they're plentiful in this wet climate. But I try to introduce a bit of variety sometimes. I read somewhere that lab Steatodas raised on boring diets don't do too well.

Brownie and patterned sowbug.

Every so often, I empty Brownie's jar to get rid of the layer of dead carcasses at the bottom, then supply her with a few fresh sticks to tie the new web to. She doesn't appreciate this. She usually spends the next few days sulking in a corner, not moving, not eating.

So yesterday was cleaning day. This time, because she somehow manages to pull down the sticks and tie them together at the bottom, limiting her mobility, I gave her a framework of leftover pipe cleaners. I hope they will be more resilient. (That's to explain the "Christmas decorations" in the next photos.)

In the evening, I found a winged ant in the garden, and brought it in to Brownie as a peace offering. It was a big one, half Brownie's length again: interesting! She forgot her snit, and stalked the ant from a distance for a full day. Tonight she caught it. And it put up a fight.

The battle.

I saw them at it, the two of them hanging in the web, vibrating. The ant kept snapping at the air, trying to turn its head to get at the spider. But Brownie had sunk her fangs into the edge of the thorax, and hung on like a bulldog. Nothing would shake her off, and the ant couldn't twist far enough to reach her.

(Usually, she bites her prey, then backs off and starts to tie it up. Looks like she's smart enough to modify her procedure when the occasion calls for it.)

She held on, never leaving that position, for over 15 minutes, until the ant was just barely kicking. Then she wrapped it and hauled it up to her new dining room.

She's been busy eating ever since. And I think she's forgiven the impertinence of her housekeeping staff.

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As blue as the sky

Skies and flowers at Crescent Beach:

Teasels

Lobelia with fuschia

Delphinium

Love in a mist

A Skywatch post

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Of feathers and milk

A year ago last February, we happened to walk under this pier and look up. The pigeons were nesting already. I was wondering, last week, how many there would be now, as summer approaches.

Crescent Beach pier

The underside of the pier, with nests.

Just as before, each crossbeam held at least one nest, or at least a few pieces of weed and straw to simulate a nest. Do chicks never fall out of bed?

Two chicks, two adults.

This June, they're probably well into their second brood of the year, and the squabs (pigeon chicks) are quite large already, but still only partially feathered. (Most of these are probably about three weeks old; compare with the set of photographs at the bottom of the Wikipedia page.) I love the yellow "Mohawks" they are wearing.

Feeding baby.

I watched the parent feeding her chick for some time. (S)he doesn't come and go, each time with fresh food, as some other birds do (chickadees, for example). She sat there the whole time. Every minute or so, she would close her eyes and open her mouth, and the chick would reach in for a fresh mouthful of milk and mush. She must have been regurgitating a cropful, bit by bit.

Crop milk bears little resemblance to mammalian milk, being a semi-solid substance somewhat like pale yellow cottage cheese. It is extremely high in protein and fat and contains more of it than cow or human milk. Both male and female adult birds produce crop milk and share in the feeding and care of the young. ...

Pigeon's milk begins to be produced a couple of days before the eggs are due to hatch. The parents may cease to eat at this point in order to be able to provide the squabs (baby pigeons and doves) with milk uncontaminated by seeds, which the very young squabs would be unable to digest. The baby squabs are fed on pure crop milk for the first week or so of life. After this the parents begin to introduce a proportion of adult food, softened by spending time in the moist conditions of the adult crop, into the mix fed to the squabs, until by the end of the second week they are being fed entirely on softened adult food. (Wikipedia)

Almost grown up.

Curly yellow feathers.

This pair, one brown and one white, were smaller and fluffier than the adults, but seem to be completely feathered already.

Feral (city) pigeons breed several times a year, at any season, although they prefer the warmer months. They incubate a clutch of two eggs from 15 to 19 days, on a swing shift:

Parents continuously incubate eggs for about 18 days, females from late afternoon to mid-morning, males from mid-morning to late afternoon. (The Kansas School Naturalist)

The squabs, once hatched, are ready to leave the nest in a month, But the female may have already laid the next clutch of eggs over a week before; the half-grown squabs share the nest with them. The male takes over most of the feeding during this time.

Conscientious, hard-working parents. And they don't even look frazzled!

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Where the Nicomekl meets the sea

It's been a while since we visited the inner corner of Crescent Beach, adjacent to Blackie Spit. I wanted to see what was happening around the pier. Around, on, and under, really.

We found plenty to look at (in no particular order):

View from the end of the pier, looking out to sea.

"This is heavy water!"

Off in the distance, an eagle on a post.

Seaweed on rock at low tide.

Pigeon on protruding pier plank.

Gull. On post.

The pier, looking inland

Rusted out stair railing.

Light fixture.

Barnacles and mussels coat the pier supports.

Conference.

Rock, with barnacles.

A couple of boys were jumping off the end of the pier. A couple more didn't dare.

"Water for my crab!"

Sailing upriver.

Bag A Clypse. That's what it says. What it means, I don't know.

What I was hoping to find (and did find), next post.

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Fringed emerald

This green moth showed up on my wall this afternoon.

Beautifully fringed and pleated wings; click to see them full size.

It's the Common Emerald moth, Hemithea aestivaria. Its larva is an inchworm; a caterpillar that alternately folds up, then stretches out to grab the next foothold, "measuring" its path. This one will be a green caterpillar with black markings, about an inch long.

It is originally from Europe, but has come to this area. BugGuide says,

"First North American report in 1979, centered in Vancouver, B.C. and expected to spread outwards from there."

It's probably the same as the one my granddaughter is saving in a jar for me.

Front view.

They usually hold their antennae this way, turned back under the wing; the part that shows sort of looks machine-made, like bicycle handlebars.

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Underwater menu

I found a dead mussel in my dishpan aquarium yesterday morning. Dead, empty, cleaned out; not a morsel of mussel flesh left. One of the whelks is probably still digesting it.

The assorted other animals in the water get along nicely with each other. The isopods, limpets and periwinkles graze on the algae; the barnacles, anenomes and clams strain plankton out of the water; the crabs clean up the trash. But the whelks eat mussels and barnacles.

So white, so angelic, so bloodthirsty.

Whelk, showing white flesh and orange operculum.

I've been watching them; they settle on a mussel or a clump of barnacles and stay put, boring through the shell. The largest mussels are most at risk; a couple of little ones wander through the tops of the seaweed, where the snails can't reach them. The barnacles, stuck on the rocks, aren't so fortunate. A couple of days ago, three snails were working together on the largest barnacle, which now stays closed up, whether dead, anethesized, or trying to protect itself, I don't know.

A Nature Coast Marine Group (Australia) page gives a general timetable:

When feeding the whelk crawls onto the barnacle, tubeworm or shellfish and drills a hole in the calcium carbonate covering of its prey. In the case of barnacles, whelks usually attack the doors that open to allow the animal to feed. The whelk releases an acid from a gland in the front part of its foot. This softens the calcium carbonate which is then licked away by the rasp-like tongue (radula) of the whelk. When a hole has been made in the prey the whelk inserts its tube-like mouthpart into the victim and, with its radula, tears off and eats the soft tissues.

... It takes 30-40 minutes for each application of the acid then about a minute of rasping before the process is repeated. The whelk takes about 8 hours to penetrate a shell 2mm thick and can take up to 4 days to get into a larger barnacle.

My poor barnacles!

These miniature snails don't bother even the tiny barnacles: they are algae eaters.

Sitka periwinkles.

This one may have been a young Amphissa. It's just over 4mm. long. It would have been eating dead algae and other detritus.

I saw this next snail first crawling upside down on the undersurface of the water, suctioned on just as a larger snail would attach itself to a rock. It crossed the whole dishpan this way. Here it has moved to a leaf of sea lettuce.

Another algae eater.

These are a couple more residents of the mini-ecosystem: I'm not sure what they are, but I would guess some type of sponge. Alive or dead, I don't know, but they seem to provide housing for some of the smaller shrimpy things.

A yellowish, branched spongy substance, with random tunnels.

And a more rounded, purply sponge, with one hole in each "branch".

This long worm was travelling through the eelgrass and seaweed. It's a polychaete, with bristles on each foot, and a carnivore, like the whelks. It's probably eating the tiny, hair-like red worms that live in the sand.

Click on the photo to see the head structure.

And, since I don't have any starfish (nor gulls), nothing eats the clams.

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