Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Catrina Mexicana

A first attempt at a papier-maché mask for Hallowe'en. A happy calaca, modelled somewhat after La Catrina.

Buen Dia de los Muertos!

Have a happy and safe Hallowe'en!

(I know she has too many teeth. She needs them for her wide jaw.) (I mention this because that's the first thing Laurie noticed.)

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

In his natural habitat

It's that time of the year again; the Western conifer seed bugs are moving indoors for the rest of the year, as they always (attempt to) do. I found one on the window a couple of mornings ago, captured him* and brought him in, safely contained in a pill bottle.

I've photographed them before, in plastic containers, on white paper, in a glass container. I thought this time, I'd try for a natural background, and brought in a fallen maple leaf as a backdrop. It's what's around, this season; it should have been a familiar resting spot.

But no. He up and left  the minute he was freed.

Western conifer seed bug, Leptoglossus occidentalis.

The photo I managed to take while he opened his wings and flew away caught the upper part of his abdomen  It shows an interesting pattern of black chess pieces on yellow, and two red tail lights, which I had never seen before.

I couldn't see where he'd gone, but didn't worry. He's harmless, at least until spring, when his nymphs will start work on my evergreens. For now, all he wants is a warm place to sleep.

Later, while I sat reading, I saw him on the baseboard behind a lamp. A good spot; clean background, bright light. And for him, that was, really, a natural habitat, at least in the winter. So I crawled up to him and took photos.

Kneeling on the  baseboard, leaning on the wall. He stayed in variations of that posture while he looked me over.

He's very much aware of me, but not bothered at all by my proximity. Even when I touched his antenna with the tip of a finger, he didn't mind.

These are very social insects. When I've kept them in containers, they went into a sulk until I added a companion; then they woke up and started grooming and waving antennae at each other. And the more, the merrier. Even when that "more" includes a big human with a camera. This time, as I took photos, the bug suddenly disappeared. I found him right on the camera lens, checking it out.

I brushed him off, back onto the baseboard. He was fine with that, too.

"Maybe I'll just mosey along down this road, and find a nice spot to sleep."

I was about an inch away from his face. He stretched up one antenna to me, as if to say goodnight, then walked slowly off behind a cabinet.

* Or her. I still can't find any information on differences between the sexes. Maybe they're identical, to our eyes. The bugs seem to know which is which.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Too funny! Raccoon fishing.

Last time I collected seaweed for my aquarium, I had too much for one fill, and it was in excellent condition. So I saved half in a bowl of clean seawater. I've been keeping it on a shelf outside, covered with cheesecloth to keep out bugs and maple leaves. Two days ago, I moved it down to a spot where it would get more light.

A few minutes ago, while I was working late (de-spider-webbing photos of a bug for the blog) I heard a suspicious "clunk" outside. I went to the door, and a raccoon was fishing in the bowl of seaweed. He ran away when he saw me, but couldn't resist the lure of possible sea creatures. Hermits! Clams! Snails! Even fishies, maybe! He hung around the end of the walk, waiting for me to leave. I hid behind the drapes. And back he came.

Tip-toeing in.

Fishing. That was clean water! Now it's mud.

He sloshed the water around several times, pulled out a piece of sea lettuce and nibbled on it, put a paw in again and searched some more. (I notice that he's right-handed. He used two hands sometimes, but never the left alone.)

Finally, having muddied the water thoroughly and torn up my seaweed without finding any critters, he gave up.

"Where's my food? Did you eat it? Please! Share, ok?"

And since I had nothing to offer, he slouched off dejectedly.

Friday, October 26, 2012

Spying on an underground community

So, I've been trying to take photos in the dark. Not dark dark, midnight dark, but in shadow, illuminated only by a weak, yellowish overhead light, and dimmed even more when I used an auxiliary lens. And I couldn't use flash*.

See, the floor of the aquarium is covered with 2 inches of sand (more or less, as the crabs dig out valleys and hills). I brought the sand from their home territory, in the upper intertidal zone of Boundary Bay, draining off the fine sediment and muck before I used it. It was "live" sand; I reserved a half-cupful and left it overnight in a white bowl. In the morning, tiny, pinpoint snails were climbing the walls, and a few worms had re-established their tubes. Their tentacles, fishing for food, were only visible with my hand microscope.

All to the good; worms in the sand clean up tiny bits of food that the hermits and crabs scatter. (Messy eaters, the lot of them!) Along with the mud snails and Nassas that plow through the sand looking for food, they help to keep the sand oxygenated, so that it doesn't develop those stinky, black dead zones that we find on the beach where the sand is too compacted.

Within days, the sand in the aquarium was riddled with hair-thin worm burrows. Some are right up against the glass wall, and I have been watching them.

The problem is, they don't like light. Very emphatically, they do not like it. Move the lamp so that light falls on the glass, and they're gone, retracted back into the dark sand. They're fast. All I usually see is a hint of moving colour at the bottom of the burrow, then nothing.

The camera is better than my eyes, even here. I set the camera down an inch from the glass, focused, held the focus so that the worms that fled the red focusing light could return, then pressed the shutter. Click ... ... ... ... click. I didn't release the shutter until the second click, to avoid shaking the camera while it worked on the scene. (The little pocket Sony was better at this than the bigger Nikon.)

Here are the results.

What the camera saw in the dark. Burrows and red worms. Some light percolates down through the top half inch of the glass wall.

I get the camera ready, finger on the shutter button, and turn on the light. This is what I see:

Empty burrows. A hint of red at the bottom of the long burrow on the right; a slowpoke worm.

Clean, nicely rounded tunnels. The worm wobbles its body back and forth to shape the sides. 

The tunnels are now about as wide as a line written by a fine lead pencil. The worms are obviously eating well and growing fast. The longest burrows are about three inches long, taking their meandering into account. They each open at the top onto the surface of the sand, and I have seen a couple at the opening, fishing.

I cropped the clearest photos, lightened them 'way up, and saturated the colour in the worms to compensate. As far as I can tell, there are three species of worms.

A long, smooth, round worm, lightly marked on the red. Lugworm?

A couple more of the long ones, and a short, fat worm (or segment of worm), much redder. It has some projections at the sides, parapodia, probably. Another polychaete?

Another of the long, smooth worms, head and tail both in the sand.

In the top right corner of the first photo above, there is a stripy worm. Here it is, magnified.

There were also a few translucent, unmarked, very smooth-skinned worms, just slightly pinkish. The cameras absolutely refused to take notice of them. At this size, I can't identify any of them.

And no wonder I can't find any on the beach; they are too fast for human hands, mostly too small for human eyes even when I do dig them up.

* The flash would have bounced off the glass, and made everything inside invisible.


Thursday, October 25, 2012

Failed test shot

My camera wasn't responding to what I was asking of it. "Taking photos in the dark; what's that about?" it said. So I took another, in an even darker spot. It didn't turn out; the colours are crazy and it's not exactly focused.

But I liked the result, so here it is.

Hermit, anemone, snails, barnacle.

It reminds me of one of the old still life paintings by the Dutch masters of the 17th century. I can't quite remember which.

Why was I taking photos in the dark? I'll show you tomorrow.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

A round Tuit, backyard birds, and a talking whale

I spent another rainy afternoon watching my backyard birds, and trying to get a photo of the nuthatch with not much luck. But I did get a junco; a noisy photo, what with the poor light, but better than none.

Junco and finch and sunflower seeds

Elegant robin back, with creeping Jenny and dying maple leaves.

Finch again, watching me over her shoulder

Steller's Jay. Checked out the garden, took a drink, and left again. They never stay long.

I've been thinking. Rainy days are good for that. I remember that I used to do a weekly links post. I think I stopped when I could just retweet them instead, but it's not quite the same; I don't bother explaining why I'm passing them along, just lazily click, "Retweet", and forget about it. So I'll start up again here.

And for a long time, I've been wanting to do a post about the bloggers I find helpful or inspirational, but never get around to it.

Here's one. No more excuses.

I think I'll do it in bits and pieces, maybe one with every link post.

And while I'm on the topic, have you seen the talking whale video?



The study details the case of a white whale named NOC who began to mimic the human voice, presumably a result of vocal learning. ... "The whale's vocalizations often sounded as if two people were conversing in the distance," says Dr. Sam Ridgway, President of the National Marine Mammal Foundation. "These 'conversations' were heard several times before the whale was eventually identified as the source. In fact, we discovered it when a diver mistook the whale for a human voice giving him underwater directions." ... How this unique "mind" interacts with other animals and the ocean environment is a major challenge of our time.
And from the BBC:
"Our observations suggest that the whale had to modify its vocal mechanics in order to make the speech-like sounds," said Sam Ridgway, president of the National Marine Mammal Foundation and lead author on the paper.


Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Desktop bird watching

The winter birds are back. This afternoon, my feeders served juncos and towhees, (on the ground), bushtits at the suet in the maple, and chickadees, a white-crowned sparrow, a pair of finches, nuthatches, a tiny wren (who looked at the seed, decided it was too big, and flew away) and an unexpected newcomer, all at the table close to my window.

Black-capped chickadee. An old-timer.

Chickadee and my little stone angel.

Chestnut-backed chickadee! I haven't seen one for years.

Black-capped on left, blurry chestnut-backed on right. These are fast little birds, even compared to the larger black-capped chickadee.

The one in back is another black-capped. The bellies are often buffy, but I think this one also has reflected orange light from the birdbath.

House finch

Squirrel cleaning up the leftovers.

The nuthatches are too quick for me; they zip in, snatch a seed, zip away while my already-focused camera thinks about taking a photo. And the juncos -- ah, the juncos! Bounce, bounce, bounce, hoppity-hop; always in motion, always at a distance. They don't like the table with a camera pointing at them over the computer screen. I think I need some camouflage; a bird blind on my desk.


Monday, October 22, 2012

Birthday candle bryozoan

In my last load of seaweed from Boundary Bay, I brought home a rotting piece of green stuff, about 4 inches long. Just "stuff", because it was so well rotted that I couldn't identify it. It was a once-sturdy blade, of the texture of bull kelp, but a bright green, whereas bull kelp rots to a sickly yellow-brown colour.

And it was covered, both sides, edge to edge, with an encrusting bryozoan.

I put it in the aquarium while I was busy with other things, and the hermits picked at it, emptying out the bryozoan cases. The next day, I collected it, and examined it with a microscope. All that was left were the white walls of each animal.

All lined up in alternating rows, like a brick wall.

Zooming in.

The individual cases are not quite rectangular; they're often more the shape of a first birthday candle, with the fat base and the overhang at the top. (On the candle; I don't know which end is the lophophore or mouth end of the bryozoans.)

Compare them to the kelp bryozoans we usually find.

Kelp bryozoan colony, 2009. They form circles on the kelp, radiating out from a central point.

Zooming in. The cases are less regular, slightly rounded. The walls are thinner.

I looked at hundreds of photos of encrusting bryozoans.  Some of the Membranipora membranacea, the kelp-encrusting bryozoans, stretch out on giant kelp, not limited to the narrower blade of bull kelp. The outer edges of these colonies become more rectangular and orderly, much more similar to the "birthday candle bryozoan" (my name).

In the Wikipedia article on M. membranacea, I found this:
Zooids within a colony can communicate via pores in their interconnecting walls, through which coelomic fluid can be exchanged.
It may be that the discontinuities in the walls are the pores. Hard to tell. I really wish I had examined them before the hermits finished them off. I just might have found some still alive.

Living encrusting bryozoans. Feeding zooids in their individual boxes. Image from U of Washington

Basic description of bryozoan anatomy and "weird stuff".

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Looking back, looking ahead


Six and a half years is a long haul in blogging years. That's how long I've been doing this. It's time to pause and take stock.

I've seen too many blogs announce their end this way, so I'll clarify, right at the beginning: I'm not quitting. Not taking a break or a breather. Just checking my roadmap, that's all.

History: the Past.

I started the blog elsewhere, on Delphi, on May 1, 2006, and moved to Blogger in December, 8 months later. I've written 2176 blog posts here, 69 on Delphi, making 2245 in all, just under one a day. (I'm sort of amazed at these numbers, little by little, how they do add up!)

When I started to blog, I was recently retired, weary from long battles in public life, and a lifetime of caring for family, from children to grandchildren to parents. It was good to just sit quietly and -- but no: impossible! I got a bike and started cycling with Laurie; we went on long hikes; we visited the dry BC interior; we devised the Shoreline Project, a plan to, in easy stages, walk around the shore of the whole Lower Mainland. We didn't make it, but we've covered most of Delta and Surrey, anyhow.

Blogging about it all was almost inevitable; so many delights just had to be shared.

I had no camera. Laurie was using an old, crochety film camera. We had to get the photos developed, select some to have transferred to a CD, then copy them again to my computer. It took weeks, sometimes. The first site, Delphi, didn't handle photos well. I switched to Blogger, bought myself a cheap point and shoot and began to teach myself how to use it. And hack it; I made my own lens for macro shots. Not good, but an improvement on nothing. (I'm still using it, rebuilt for the current camera. It needs an overhaul.)

The cameras opened a new world to me. What my eyes couldn't distinguish, the camera did, and I could blow up the photos and discover completely unsuspected lives and relationships. I knew very little about what I was seeing; we'd spend hours poring over guide books and my Invertebrates textbook. I mis-identified things on the blog, and was corrected by amazing, generous people around the world.

Thank you!

Gold dust!

I discovered BugGuide, and Google Search, Wikipedia, and G. Maps. I met (online) a busy community of people as enthusiastic about the creepy crawlies as I am; we joined in Carnivals like I and the Bird, Carnival of the Blue, Circus of the Spineless, and so on. What fun!

I brought home a broken intertidal worm and tried to keep it alive in sea water. It died, but by then I was half set up with a marine invertebrates aquarium. I blogged about that. And about our trips, and the housesitting, and the spiders and chickadees at home. Everything became blog fodder.

Somehow everything seems more meaningful when it is shared.

So no, I'm not quitting blogging until they pry my computer from my clammy hands. I'm having far too much fun to give it up.

And we come to The Present.

Why the need to stop and take stock at this point?

Our situation has changed. We aren't as mobile as we once were. We no longer hike up steep hills, or scramble over boulders. We're not as flexible; we don't often change our route on the spur of the moment. We tend to follow old, established patterns.

It's simple; we're getting older. I turned 70 this July. Laurie is in his 80s. He has always been much more active than I, but the last year has been hard on him, and now we seek out easy walking sites and short paths. We stay on manicured trails more, come home earlier.

We were in a car accident two years ago. (Hit and run driver, not my fault, no obvious severe damage.) Laurie's balance hasn't been right since then, and he has suffered several falls, mostly on the beach. He fell off a ladder in the garden a couple of weeks ago, onto his back, and now can barely get around. He will; he's improving slowly, but every setback leaves its mark afterwards.

It was age (retirement) that set me free to explore, now it's age that starts to cross choices off our lists.

I come from a long-lived family. Dad was still putting in a full day at the computer, every day, at 92. My grandmother, Mom's mom, was playing the piano at 99. I don't plan on closing up shop for a long time yet. But yes, I will be slowing down.

I get yellow line fever. Driving home, I feel the urge to just keep going, take the highway north, see where it leads me today. Or I pass a local road and think, “We've never been down that way; should I detour?” And sometimes we do just that. (See Woodhus Creek). But not as often as we used to.

So our circle has shrunk. No matter. Nature is infinite. There is as much to see at the end of our noses as on the horizon. We won't be bored.

The road runs north. Laurie, Thunder Bay viewpoint, Sunshine Coast.

While our space contracts, I'm also aware that time has, too. I have a few projects I want to do, and have been putting them off until later; I can't do that. Time's a-wasting. I've got a website to clean up and revise. My grandkids are asking for more of my stories. There's a book (fiction) that I got halfway through writing, hit a dry spell, and never picked up again. It natters at me in the back of my mind; it wants to be written. It's about time I blocked off the daily hours it will take and get it done.

Then there's this: it's not only we that are changing; so is the world around us. In the past couple of years, I have noticed a depopulation of our community of bugs and birds. Cross spiders no longer festoon all the hedges in July; this year I saw fewer than a dozen, not for want of looking. Moths are a rare treat. So are crane flies and cabbage whites. The bushtits showed up this week at my suet feeder; not enough of them to cover one side. I haven't seen a varied thrush in ages. Where have they gone? And why?

I think I know. All the “waste” spaces, the green lands, the remnants of old forests and farms in our area are turning into construction sites, noisy with machinery, silent when they shut down for the afternoon or weekend. No sleepy bird bedtime songs, no crow arguments; the trees have gone.

On our road to Boundary Bay beach, the new highway towers over the delta, great mountains of sand and gravel, access roads, bridges and cloverleafs, huge cement blocks lined up across prime farm land, well above it, as if preparing for the coming sea level rise. The farms may be swamped, but that causeway will go to the loading docks willy-nilly.

I have been trying not to rant. Focus on the positive, I tell myself. Celebrate the beauties we have before they're gone for good! Create an oasis where at least some can ride out the storms.

But it gets to me. And maybe I should be ranting, at least sometimes.

Sometimes I feel like giving up. Blogging, gardening, feeding birds, studying, crab watching -- what's the point? It will all be gone, and too soon. I shake off the feeling and go do something useful. But there remains a residual malaise, an ache I don't know where.

Rainy day, Mud Bay

Writing this out has changed how I see it. It may be that the difficulties in our life right now have made me more prone to discouragement.

And Ma Nature has tricks up her sleeve. I've been looking at Julie Zickefoose's photos of abandoned barns. Beautiful they were in their prime, bustling with activity, gleaming with red barn paint. More beautiful now, as the wood has aged and taken on depth, the grass and vines softening the contours, birds and other small creatures finding a hospitable corner there. Do what we will, the world will continue to be glorious.

Bull kelp, Miracle Beach

So: the Future.

We don't beachcomb under two meters of water. When the tide comes in, we come in with it. And when our energy wanes, well, we cope with that, too. Fretting's useless.

And I have things I want to do, things within my reach. That writing, for one. And if we're not spending as much time on the road, I think I can work it into my days. Better, I'll note here that I will do it, and I'll count on you to crack the whip occasionally.

I think it's time to upgrade my camera from a point and shoot to a camera body and a macro lens and an off-camera flash, at least. It's a big expense, and entails a steep learning curve. And just deciding which camera scares me; what if I choose the wrong one for me? But -- spider eyes! Bees' knees! Those tiny, so very beautiful white flies! Oh, joy and wonder!

About my intertidal beasties, the hermits and crabs, the anemones and worms; I will continue to feed and care for them, talk to them, and try to learn their habits and choices.

The world's critters, big and small, are our cousins, some distant, some close. I am more aware of this with every hour I spend watching them. They might not look anything like us (but they do; they have eyes and legs and mouths, or at least an intake and an outlet; and a way of sensing the world; their bodies are made up of the same materials as ours)  but they act with purpose, as we do, and they have similar needs and impulses.

We learn to communicate with cats and dogs , chimps and dolphins, horses and goats, and they respond in ways we can understand. Something in our mental workings is like theirs. Some call it consciousness. Or intelligence. As good a word as any for such a nebulous concept.

How far down* does this intelligence go? My hermit crabs exhibit curiosity; so, unmistakably, does a jumping spider. The shore crabs see me coming and wave, whether as a threat or just acknowledgement of my presence, I don't know. But it is communication.

I can't determine this. I can't even comprehend it. But I want to continue to explore the question, especially with the animals I have close by. So I'll be spending more hours staring into the aquarium and watching the bird bath and feeder. And, of course, blogging about it.

And,I think I will give myself permission to rant, occasionally.

Some things never change. I still have a spider in a glass house on my desk. (Laurie's latest gift; even leaning on his cane, in pain, he chased it around the bathroom with his pill bottle. And he doesn't really like spiders. I do love that guy!) I still drop everything to clamber on a table to see a moth above the door. I still talk to the chickadees; I'm sure they understand the friendliness, if not the words. And I still want to share what brings me joy. I'll keep on blogging.

Big Blue, 2010. Pagurus granosimanus.

*Down: only in terms of size. Not value, or complexity; we don't know enough to measure those. If they even can be.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

'Way back post II; Chickadee talk.



I am at work on a longer post, and meanwhile am re-posting some early posts from my starter blog, on Delphi. This is from August of 2006.

And a dee-dee-dee to you, too!


My little garden plot, closed in as it is, surrounded by low hedges, overshadowed by high cedars, with its handkerchief of lawn and a bit of bare cultivated soil, rich in worms, seems to be a bird magnet. I help it along with the homemade feeder, always full of black sunflower seeds, and a bowl of water for bathing.

So I've seen house finches, robins, sparrows, twohees and juncos, more or less on a regular basis. Off and on, a varied thrush will drop in, or a nuthatch on his way through town. Sometimes a flock of starlings will stop by to check out the lawn. A pair of Steller's jays visited several times this spring.

But always, always, there are the chickadees, winter, summer and in-between. This year, a pair nested in the cedars right in front, and raised a brood of four rackety youngsters, who have more or less declared the bird bath and rhododendron their private territory, and chase away the house finches with great chatterings and shoutings of "Dee-dee-dee" any time they come near.

Sitting outside at the end of the summer days, or watching through the bedroom window, I have been able to see these youngsters grow up, from the moment the first one huddled in the rain on a maple branch while a parent painstakingly showed him how to husk a sunflower seed, then stuffed it into his gaping mouth and went back for another. Within a couple of days, the four of them were on the maple, and both parents working full time at the husking and feeding. Then they were trying their own landing skills on the perches of the feeder, falling off with great flappings and dee-deeings as often as not.

Now, at the end of the summer, the "kids" are teen-agers, completely independent of their parents, noisy, curious and always hungry. They have pulled the coconut fiber from a hanging flower basket; they peck at my screens and the rubber handles on the bicycle. And they have learned the trick of banging on the feeder when it is empty, so that I am wakened early in the morning by their tap-tap-tapping and eventually have to get up and feed them.

And they talk; all the time, as youngsters do. Dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee-dee. Quietly, almost to themselves at times; shouting over differences of opinion as to whose turn it is at the feeder at others. When I step outside, they set up an excited chorus; "Chickadee dee dee dee!"

We were sitting outside after supper last week, enjoying the cool of the evening. We two, and the whole family of chickadees. One of the kids, under the shrubbery said, "Wiki". "Wiki". Not "Dee-dee-dee". He repeated it, at intervals, trying it out. "Wiki... wiki... wiki..." Odd, I thought; I didn't know chickadees said that.

The next evening,  a kid in the maple tree made a curious call, a repeated tone, "Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep." Once, then again. I listened carefully, and heard it again, a half-note lower. But it was now behind me, across the fence. It took a few seconds before I realized that this time I was hearing the neighbour's phone ringing. The chickadee had been copying it.

Again, I didn't know chickadees imitated other sounds. Oh, I know birds learn their language just as we do, even to the extent of having regional dialects. But -- chickadees? -- copying phones? That was for mocking birds and parrots and starlings.

This week, one of the youngsters -- the same one? I don't know -- said, "Cheer up!" Like the robin, only a bit reedier. "Cheer up!"

I wonder; who said "Wiki" first?

From here:
Chickadees are fascinating birds. In addition to a large behavioral repertoire (including the use of a bewildering variety of sounds) they are permanent residents over their entire range, form long-lasting pair bonds, have an interesting family life, and thrive in close proximity to human development. All you need is a few sunflower seeds and you can have your own flock of chickadees to observe.
I never knew...

Update: Today I heard the gargle mentioned by the author of the quote above. And one of the young ones was saying, "Too -whit". Like a towhee, only faster and chirpier.

Friday, October 19, 2012

'Way back post


I am at work on a longer post, and meanwhile am re-posting some early posts from my starter blog, on Delphi. This is one of the earliest, written in Strathcona, June, 2006. The photo is from Laurie's old film camera.

These little guys are so smart!



Ok, you'll have to click on the photo to see them properly. And even then, they're blurry; they were just too tiny and too active for our camera. But it's the general impression that counts here.

These are baby spiders, just hatched. I had seen some the day before, on the back porch railing. A yellow clump about 1/2 an inch across, vibrating gently. Up close, I could just see the tiny legs moving as they clambered over and under each other.

Half an hour later, when I came back with my glasses, they were gone.

We stopped to talk to a neighbour over her garden gate the next day. In a clump of sedges, Laurie saw what he thought was a yellow flower, and pointed it out to me. "It's more baby spiders," I said, and he bent to look at them more closely. Instantly, the clump disbanded, spreading out over a small web that we hadn't noticed before; efficient predators, commanding as much territory as they were able.

Laurie took his photo quickly, before they spread too far, but once he had moved away, the spiders again froze into position, still looking vaguely like tiny yellow flowers.

So here they are, newborns, out in a big new world for the first time, planning strategy; make a web, clump together to look like a flower so as to lure tiny bugs, and at the first sign of action, prepare to leap!

Co-operation and aggression hand in hand. I am sure many of them, not finding enough noseeums nor tiny crawlies, ate their brothers and sisters.  But still ... they started out with that splendid group effort.

I wish them well.

~~~~~~~~~

Looking back from 2012, I think these are infant Cross spiders, Araneus diadematus. They are plentiful in Strathcona, and those were good years for them.




Thursday, October 18, 2012

While I was on the beach

... taking photos of floating maple leaves, Laurie looked at our maples at home.



Blogging may be light for a couple of days, while I work on a long-planned, and always postponed post.

(There! Now I've committed myself to finishing, I'll actually get it done.)

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Shopping in ankle-deep water

My hermit crabs love seaweed. The bushier, the taller, the more tangled, the better. They eat it, climb it to rest clinging precariously to a waving tip, socialize on it, survey their territory from high points in it (they're always so interested in everything!) and hide under it.

When the rain started, I had been planning an expedition to replenish their supply, but I didn't want to venture out in the weather. By yesterday, they were down to a couple of blades of rotting eelgrass. I had given them a piece of lettuce, which my aquarium books said they would like. The crabs nibbled at it some, but the hermits ignored it and climbed the eelgrass, taking turns for lack of space.

This morning, I finally dug out my rain jacket and warm pants and dressed for rain. And the sun came out! I hurried down to Boundary Bay while my good fortune lasted.

A perfect summer day. I discarded my jacket on a log. Looking south to Point Roberts.

The sea was empty; even the birds stayed on board parked boats. Two gulls here.

And a half dozen on this yellow cataraman.

It was a good afternoon for seaweeds. Perhaps the recent weather has ripped up more of the tide flats than usual. In the first few minutes, I'd collected all the sea lettuce I could handle, and several handfuls of excellent, fresh eelgrass, one plant with roots and all.

I was looking for a tiny piece of kelp; the crabs love it, but it rots quickly, so it becomes a treat for a day and then gets tossed. I found some, and brought home a chunk with bryozoans for added protein. And along the way, I found several varieties of branched red weed, green rockweed, three kinds of hairy red seaweed, a ribbon sea lettuce, Turkish towel, and a rubbery sheet of red algae. From a boat a man and a boy were trailering, I harvested a handful of fine green algae; good to freeze for the next rainy day. And there were umpteen oak leaves, maple leaves, and one geranium stalk, blown out to sea by the wind, brought back in on the tide. (I didn't bring any of these last items home; good for the garden, but coals to Newcastle and all that.)

Small leaf of big-leaf maple, tied neatly with brown eelgrass.

Faded Turkish towel, red algae, eelgrass live and dead,  and brilliant green sea lettuce.

A blade of well-aged kelp. Interesting patterns; I see in there an old flyer or postcard, much yellowed with age, with part of a face visible on the front.

Another view. The "postcard" has disappeared.

The fog settling down again, all the colours blue-shifted.

Back in the car, as I turned the first corner towards Tsawwassen, the rain started again.

Oh, and the critters approved of my "purchases".

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