Afternoon walk

Laurie was playing/experimenting with odd camera angles at White Rock, and this was one result; a couple walking along the railroad track, against the muted colours of late fall vegetation. To me, it looks like an impressionist painting.

Untitled

I did nothing to this, other than resizing it for the blog.

Tidewrack

A fall storm hit much of our coast over last Friday and Saturday; some ferries were cancelled, power lines down. Nothing major. The wind died down by Sunday morning, but not until it had driven most of our cloud cover away. We went down to White Rock to see what the storm had brought in.

Mostly logs.

The waves were still high, making a continual roaring sound, punctuated by rolling pebbles as each wave retreated. Diving ducks bob up and down in the distance.

Logs piled on the beach, more coming in with each wave.

Log-rolling competitors, waiting for the starting gun?

Big log coming straight in, advancing a few inches with each wave. (It's perfectly straight; if it looks bent to you, it's an optical illusion.)

Wood chewed up by repeated slamming against a stony beach.

Drying out, bashed and stained, draped with black eelgrass.

After the logs, and surpassing them for number and variety, were the plastics. With every step I took, I had to pick up another piece or two. In one small stretch, I collected a full grocery bag of bits and pieces, from broken toys to bags to bottles and containers. Plastic objects (a metre-long drainage pipe, for example) too large to carry along with my bags, I carted up to the blackberry bushes above the tide line; at least they won't slide back down to the beach to be broken up and become gull food. I wished I had more time. I wished I had an army of volunteers with me, all provided with big bags.

I was surprised to see no styrofoam. I wonder why.

As cold as it looks

Sunday afternoon near the mouth of the Nicomekl River; cold and clear, with just a hint of wind. A heron fluffs out his feathers, curls his neck close to his body, and stands on one leg, to preserve a bit of warmth.

Looking downstream. The posts anchor a muddy bank, covered at high tide.

Laurie's favourite photo. The heron has seen movement; a fish, a frog?  Whatever it was, it saw the danger and vanished.

My favourite. I love the bands of light and shadow on the feathers, sunlight reflected from the water. And that little patch of rust brown on his epaulettes. (Check it out full-size.)

A quick game of hide and seek

Laurie found an earwig for me. I chilled her* in the fridge, and photographed her on an ice pack. Not good enough.

First photo, while she was still sleepy.

A few seconds later, awake and cleaning her antennae, preparing to run.

A couple of stretches, and she took off running, out of sight in a second. I couldn't find her anywhere, so I put away the camera, the lights, and the ice pack. When that was done, she sauntered out from under the computer. Grrrrr!

I put her in a flat plastic container and tried again.

A brief pause to look at the camera. Then back to running, taking shelter under scratches on the plastic.

I gave up. She's been sent out to play in the rain.

*The forceps (cerci) are unequal in length in the males. Earwig female forceps are (more or less) straight-sided, whereas male forceps are strongly curved (caliper-like) and larger. (From here. My addition, in italics.)

Green, fading to black

One of the pleasures of summer along our shores is to wade at the low, low tides, knee-deep in the eelgrass beds, watching the swirl of the deep green blades reaching up to the surface and floating there. We watch our step carefully; among the stalks, good-sized, maybe toe-pinching crabs scuttle. On the long leaves, if we look closely, we can see large green isopods and small snails. Sculpins and other small fish dart away at our approach, no matter how stealthily we tiptoe.

Most of what lives in these green forests, though, we don't see. Kozloff, in his chapter on sandy beaches, lists, among the inhabitants:

• On the leaves: the tinies; diatoms and other microscopic plants, invisible alone, but in mass, forming a brownish "fur" or long threads; bacteria, protozoa, algae, microscopic worms, crustaceans, copepods.
• The small critters: amphipods, including skeleton shrimp, hydroids, flatworms, ribbon worms, jellyfish, anemones, chink snails, sea slugs, including Melibe leonina, two species of isopods.
• On the mud, sand, roots: bubble shell snail, clams, sea stars, sea cucumbers, five crabs; Dungeness, red, two spider crabs, and helmet crabs.

Another list adds sponges, bryozoans, spiral tube worms. I would add the limpets and their cargo. There are many more, and we must not forget the fish.

So important is Zostera's role in this food cycle that estimates reveal that more than 20 species of commercially valuable fish species feed in these eelgrass meadows at some point in their lives. (R.I. Sea Grant Fact Sheet)

 That's the summer.

Summer eelgrass, waiting for the return of the tide.

In the fall, the eelgrass begins to die back. Stormy seas rip up the plants by their roots, and propel them toward the shore. The waves, coming and going, roll them up in dense masses, metre-long tough leaves wound and knotted around each other, and push them onto the beaches. There, they gradually die and blacken, always pushed further up the beach by the next tide's eelgrass roll-up, until they form great mounds of black, sharp-smelling gunk.

Drying eelgrass, caught on driftwood log. Boundary Bay.

But their useful life isn't over yet! First, while they are drifting ashore, Canada geese congregate to eat the green stems that they usually can't reach.

Geese and gulls, watching the eelgrass come in. White Rock.

I collect handfuls for my aquarium critters from the fresh rolls, disentangling the greenest, the ones with bits of root still attached. In the winter, the low tides usually fall well after dark; I can't wade out to what's left of the eel-grass beds. I'm glad it comes to me, instead.

In summer, any eelgrass I harvest is well checked over for other life. I always find limpets, usually quite a few snails, occasionally an eel-grass isopod or two. There may be amphipods along the leaves, often polychaete worms in the roots, and always the fuzzy diatom communities.

In the fall and winter, the eelgrass looks bare until I run a finger down a leaf; then I notice the hard, raspy bryozoan communities, the thickening where a cryptic limpet is attached, and maybe an isopod will transfer his clingy feet to my finger. All of these go into the aquarium where I plant the eelgrass.

I don't bring home the black stuff. Some people do; I have seen gardeners with wheelbarrows and big barrels on the shores of Crescent Beach and Boundary Bay, filling their containers (once a pickup truck bed!) with nutritious mulch for the winter garden.

But I do roll it over, to watch hundreds of beach-hoppers leap every which way. (I remember, back when Laurie didn't know me quite so well, I called him over to see. "Look!" I said, and turned over a heap of dead eelgrass. He wasn't prepared; the hoppers ended up on his legs, and he jumped back, annoyed. He got over it, and now is as enthusiastic as I am. Sometimes more.)

Inside that rotting mass, worms, fungi and bacteria work at reducing it to fine dust, which will sift slowly out to sea, returning the nutrients to their source for another round. In the meantime, tiny black flies swarm over the surface, feeding and breeding in the relative warmth from the decomposing grass. Nothing ever gets wasted.

Bryozoan colony on dying eelgrass.

In my aquarium, fall eelgrass only lasts a couple of weeks before it dies and turns black. I doesn't look good, and eventually will disintegrate and clog the filters, so I remove it. But first, I make sure I'm not removing live animals. Most of the limpets have moved on to greener pastures; so have the isopods and amphipods. But there are still patches of bryozoans and hydroids.

I wondered, the other day, whether the bryozoan colonies were still alive, so I brought them out to a tray of shallow water and examined them under a microscope. All the tiny, glassy barrel shells were empty; the makers were gone.

Each little tube was the home of one zooid.

If you were seeing these photos live, you would also see tiny specks of light moving between the shells, barely visible transparent threads weaving back and forth, white dots that seem to have legs scuttling across the green spaces. The bryozoans have died, but the colony is still very much alive. And the spiral tube worms are still busy catching the specks and threads for supper.

Bryozoan colony with feeding tubeworm.

I replaced the eelgrass in the aquarium. These industrious hunters and gatherers deserve their full life span.

Delectable rotten eelgrass

Laurie keeps taking photos of rotten eelgrass mounds and I keep deleting them, because the stuff is just not photogenic. I had to go back to 2007 to get these two:

October, 2007. Rotten eelgrass on the shore of Boundary Bay.

Driftwood "statue" tied up in old eelgrass.

Wonderful stuff! Really. I'll explain why, tomorrow.

Not a cherry root mushroom

Just around the corner from yesterday's big brown mushrooms, in Laurie's evergreen shrub garden, similar mushrooms grow. He brought a couple in for me.

Smooth, round cap, brown stalk. The biggest are about 4 inches across the cap. They're dense and heavy for their size.

White gills, separated from stalk.

As they age, the gills shrink and blend together, the cap broadens out.

These are growing where Laurie put down steer manure, and probably came from the pasture where the cattle fed. Even though this mushroom almost matches yesterday's at first, it never achieves the uninhibited twistiness of the cherry tree root 'shrooms.

Searching through my Guide, and on the web, I see many similar, none exactly like these. I won't try tasting these, either.

Cherry root mushroom

At the base of an old cherry tree outside our building, these outlandish mushrooms have pushed their way through the landscaping gravel:

Group of three. They're up to about 8 inches across.

Another trio. These start out "normal", like the small round one at the far right.

Tough-skinned, shiny under all the dust, raggedly gilled.

I can't identify these. One of our neighbours says his mother used to cook them back in the "Old Country", in Eastern Europe. She boiled them with a silver spoon; if it tarnished, they were poisonous, he says. It's not a test I would trust.

I think I'll wait for an expert's opinion, a spore print, a DNA test, a test for pesticide contamination, and after all that, someone braver than I to play guinea pig.

Ice and flowers

November 22. One month to go to the winter solstice. Dawn to dusk, 9 1/2 hours. One more month of shortening days and unpredictable weather.

Yesterday, the temperature had dropped to minus 4° (Celsius) overnight. The bird bath froze solid, and it took four kettles of hot water to thaw it out. My begonias all died. (The stems leak beet-red juice as they thaw. I didn't know that before.)

Today, it rained and blew all day, clearing all the remaining leaves off the maples. The temperature now, in the middle of the night, is up to 8°C (46°F). The wind is howling down the kitchen stove vent.

They promise us occasional sunshine and warming temperatures for tomorrow.

Just a typical Lower Mainland November.

Last Saturday, three days ago, we went to the school a block away to vote in the morning. In the schoolyard, the grass was green where the sun shone. Children had rolled the snow off it, making large snowballs, several feet in diameter, hopeful snowmen or snowforts. On the gravel and pavement, ice made intriguing patterns in the puddles.

Friday construction materials, gone by Monday.

Ehecatl, Aztec God of the Winds, as he is sometimes pictured.

Duck on ice.

What do you see here?

The ice man.

And then, since the sun had come out, we went down to White Rock, where flowers were blooming among the weeds.

Very small umbellifer.

Gumweed, still budding optimistically.

End of the season for this one.

Patterned sepals. (Click for full size.)

Ice and flowers; that's November in BC.

Guessing game

This was an experiment that didn't quite work out, but it gave us a laugh.

Now I'll settle down and do some real work.

Silhouettes on blue

After a dark, wet, windy, and sometimes snowy week, a sunny Saturday was a treat. For us, the ducks, the gulls, and a couple of kayaking crabbers.

Bringing home the catch.

And I have two videos to put together, so I'll be busy for a couple of days.

A Skywatch post.

Pink jellies

On the felled trunks beside the new beaver pond at Cougar Creek Park, we found this pink jelly fungus:

Popping through cracks in rotting alder.

They come in all shapes, from cups to tongues to buttons to blobs.

The tiny red dots in the wood at the top are more of the same.

This one is more fan-shaped; behind it is a tongue and a button.

I stepped over this rotting stick and missed the tiny candlesnuff fungus.  Good thing Laurie saw it.

Housing project

I've got a lot of catching up to do. This post goes back to November 3, two weeks ago.


For the past three years, I have been watching as a family of beavers fight the city of Surrey. In the spring of 2009, I wrote:

"The Canadian Beaver is Canada’s national symbol. ... (It) is symbolic of independence, creativity, and determination ..." (From ArticleClick.com)

The beavers have plans for this small lake (Cougar Creek Park); they've been building dams and enlarging the waterways since before people decided to turn it into a park. Their ideas conflict with the city's pretty schemes, and the two parties are feuding. The beavers build dams; someone clears away the piles and removes felled trees. The beavers build again. 

The city (Surrey) trapped and killed a male about this time last year; in family-raising time. The female raised her brood, and during the winter, they dammed the creek leading into the pond, widening the creek and gathering enough water to wash away the trash that littered its bed. The dam, and much of the topsoil was stripped away. The beavers felled more trees, and started over. Wire fences went up around the biggest tree trunks. The beavers chopped down a row of new alders and dammed the outlet.

 And here's a photo from January of 2008:

Extending the present lagoon.

They are at it again. They have more or less succeeded at enlarging the lagoon; the mouth of the creek that feeds into it is now a pond. But that wasn't enough for them; there are two families now, and they need more territory, so they have annexed the bush on the far side of the bridge. What was up until now a narrow, sluggish, muddy stream, meandering through the bush and alongside another stretch of lawn, is now a wide, calm pool.

The blue shape shows the area now underwater.

This time, they have a larger construction crew; they have built dams higher than any of their previous attempts, and two at once, each raising the water level behind it about three feet.

One of the dams. A trickle below, going on to fill the next pool, a still pond above.

As the beaver families have gained workers, they have also become more ambitious; the trees they fell these days are much larger than any of the previous year's material.

Mallards rest on a small remaining patch of grass.

Lumberjacks at work. The trees they're cutting now are around 8 to 10 inches at the base.

Smaller alders with their feet and reflections in the new pool

Reflections and fallen leaves on the banks of the creek going under the bridge, swollen as it enters the second new pool.

We talked to a neighbour; he was quite incensed by the "depredations" of the beavers, and hopes that the city will get rid of them. I must admit, my sympathies are with the beavers. After all, our human housing developments are spreading into all the vacant land around the creek, with ever bigger houses, more fences, more streets. Turn about's fair play.

In the last bit of third-growth timber, a stone's throw from the edge of the park, we saw a coyote. A sign at the street, "KEEP OUT", claims this piece for some new housing scheme.

The coyote can't read, so he's not worrying. Yet.