Making progress

I've gotten distracted by a birthday party, for a while, but I'm back on track. Like my busy caterpillar, here climbing a nasturtium stalk.

"It's a long hike between meals, but the menu is great!"

If YouTube behaves, I'll have the story for you tomorrow.

Sunflower in the rain

Bowed with the weight of fattening seeds. And a day's worth of drizzle.

Still working on the caterpillar post(s).

Yodelling cat . . .

. . . erpillar.

Ay-Ee-Oooo!

This caterpillar is pretty amazing! No, not for the yodelling; it's what else he's been up to. I'm working on a post, with video, to be ready in a day or two.

Been through the wash

I took a blouse out of the washer and hung it to dry. This daddy-long-legs came running out of a fold. Good thing I used cold water and the gentle cycle.

Not a speck of dust on him, shining colours.

He's missing a leg and two half legs, at least.

I saw him last night, roaming placidly around the bathroom; he looked duller then. Today, the first thing I saw was the flash of brick red. And he was panicking; I don't think I've ever seen a harvestman run as fast as he was before.

I caught up with him when he paused for breath on the bathtub surround.

With the one remaining long leg stretched out.

I wonder: does he run faster with shorter legs? Do those long, wobbly legs slow down his brothers?

Sublime to ridiculous

More White Rock beach photos from last week, in no particular order:

Mount Baker, behind the Semiahmoo hill

Disappearing seaweedy rocks, with gull.

Setting out nets for smelt.

Vicious sea monster?

Rock "garden"

Hawkweed by the railroad tracks.

More hawkweed.  With aphids.

Green-gold hover fly

Many of these were busy over flowers at the edge of White Rock beach last week.

Look at that green spotted eye!

Top view

I looked through 5,000 of BugGuide's photos of Syrphids last night, without finding them. There are only another 5, 215 to go.

Good news!

Two years ago, in November of 2011, polluted water from the White Rock beach killed my aquarium. A month later, we found a zone of the beach that was basically dead, too.

There were no crabs under any of the rocks I flipped. No hermit crabs. No snails. No limpets. No worms. A few of the higher intertidal amphipods that always swarm on the bottom of these rocks. Just a few.
I walked west, flipping a few more rocks after every couple of steps. Nothing was alive but the amphipods.

We've been back, off and on. The view is always beautiful, but so often, I flip stones and find nothing. With time, even the barnacles were all dead. The rocky west end stunk of a cannery in summer; a long-dead fishy odour. I was beginning to dread walking that direction.

Last week, we headed that way again. It had been a while. And the beach is back! It smells fresh and salty, as it should. I flipped rocks and disturbed whole communities of hermit crabs, hairies, grainy hands, and those little orange ones I can't identify. Shore crabs scuttled away to hide, or stood their ground, menacing me with their mighty half-inch pincers, according to their various personalities. Big eelgrass isopods slept on the bottoms of stones; polychaete worms burrowed into the sand away from the light. The stones were dotted with pinhead snails, probably periwinkles.

I collected a bit of eelgrass for my critters in the tank. Washing them off at home, I found tiny limpets. One blade held at least 10, plus a raft of spiral tubeworms.

And the barnacles and mussels are growing back.

Detail of a stone top.

And flatworms! I'd never seen so many at one time before. Every stone held a few; on some stones, every barnacle seemed to have a flatworm oozing around it.

I count 7 flatworms on this corner of a rock. I don't know if they're the same species or not. Since their bodies are semi-transparent, whatever they've been eating changes their colour and pattern.

Not all the ooze on that stone is flatworm. The more shapeless and patternless blobs seem to be some sort of sponge.

And I've never seen these anemones anywhere but near the American border on the Tsawwassen beach. I didn't see them when I took the photos, but at home, counting flatworms, I noticed quite a few. And two came home on three barnacly stones I brought to feed my one predatory snail.

Orange-striped anemones. Five here, plus one flatworm that I can see. This corner of the photo was blurry, and I've sharpened the anemones to make them stand out.

We walked quite a distance west from the end of the park. I flipped stones at intervals all the way. Every stone harboured a thriving community.

I am so relieved! Life on the edge is tougher than it looks.

Pink barn

I love old barns. We had one up north, a ramshackle, disintegrating, greying, roomy old building that housed our rabbits, goats, chickens, geese, and horse. Cosily enough, even though the old boards had shrunk over the years, leaving gaps we could see light through. But the fragrant bales of hay in the loft, the trampled hay on the floor provided warmth and comfort all winter.

Sometimes, in the summer, I would just stand there in the cool, listening to the interspecies chatter around me, revelling in the colours and shapes; the silvery grey of old wood, the ripe yellow-brown of the tail end of last year's hay, rich browns of horse and old leather saddle, pitchforks and pails, bags of feed smelling of grain and molasses, a smooth, round goose egg . . .

25 years later, the sight of a decaying barn brings it all back.

Small barn in afternoon sunlight, Fraser Valley.

September fields

Driving home from Chilliwack, I usually dodge the freeway and zigzag back to Delta, jogging south and west on almost empty farm roads. It's harvest time; yesterday afternoon, I passed field after field of bare soil or stubble, acres of vines dying back to expose the pumpkins underneath, barns surrounded by machinery and those huge silage "marshmallows". Farm markets and roadside stands feature tables and wagons of squash; I stopped at one and bought some end of the season black- and blueberries.

Corn stubble and boiling clouds.

Pumpkins, orange, green and white. At the back of the field, a crew was loading them into pickup trucks.

Old barn and trees turning colour under the shadow of more rain clouds.

If only they could talk

Beach rocks, no two alike, all colours, assorted textures. I wonder what histories they could tell.

White Rock beach, east end.

Big day tomorrow; birthday party out in Chilliwack, a drive through farm country, maybe in the rain.

When I've recovered, I've got a bunch of flatworm photos for you.

Illusions

"Never point your camera at the sun," they say. But rules are made to be broken.

Mid-afternoon, over the White Rock beach.

Why does the horizon sometimes curve upwards? All the explanations I can find say it's an optical illusion, but the camera sees it, and drawing a straight line, edge to edge, leaves a gap in the centre. There must be a better theory!

A Skywatch post.

Reifel Island: it's not all about the birds.

I'm still processing photos from a couple of hours on Reifel Island. We were shutter happy.

Near the gate, after we run the gauntlet of absolutely starving (to hear them tell it) mallards, we come to a clearing overlooking the lagoons to the east. Just below the fence, a school of carp are usually milling about, waiting for seeds, just like the mallards. I love to feed them, watching them slide over and under each other, in a slithery, complicated dance.

Most of these carp are about 2 feet long.

4 fish here, and swirling water.

Most of the birds were lazing about, waiting for Saturday, but the insects don't have that luxury. They were all busy, busy, busy.

Cross spider, Araneus diadematus, in the center of her web. Every bush and clump of tall grass had several of these, all fat, quite a few with their latest catch.

Big blue-eyed darner, pausing to catch his breath. Not for long.

Syrphid (hover) fly on asters.

Goldenrod and brown water. With a spider's anchor line.

The same goldenrod with a pair of yellow and black look-alikes; a small, long-legged wasp, with a yellow face and yellow striped abdomen,and a hover fly, with its striped vest.

Luckily, this huge wasp nest (10 to 12 inches high) has been abandoned; it is only a couple of feet off the path, and at head height. Usually, they are built higher up in the trees.

We had ostensibly come to see birds.

Sky, branch and mallard reflected in a still pond.

Semicircle of one-legged peeps.

Just a late-summer path.

Blue polka-dot leggings

I removed a couple of stones from the aquarium, looking for a tiny anemone that has taken to wandering about, and one of the hermit crabs came along for the ride. So he got his photo taken nose to nose.

As curious as a kitten

He enjoyed the photo session so much, he didn't want to let go of the stone to go back in the tank.

And I didn't find the anemone until today; it's moved to a clump of rockweed instead.

What was I thinking?

Remember Rock Flipping Day? I didn't. I completely forgot about it until I saw Bill's post on Fertanish Chatter; he remembered, and found frogs, worms, and a beautiful green beetle. Go look!

I've been calling myself all sorts of names all afternoon. Doesn't fix anything, does it?  If you were planning to join us this year, I've let you down. I'm so sorry.

Did anyone else go out all on their lonesome and flip rocks? I know one museum had scheduled an event, but I can't find any mention of having done anything.

Beetle with a better memory than mine. He came inside to remind us, but I didn't twig.

Faded glories

Male mallards are always scruffy this time of year. They're molting. They will be losing their brilliant breeding plumage, even dropping the wing feathers, which will leave them unable to fly for a couple of weeks.

Splotchy male. He will retain some green on the head all winter, and the yellow bill.

This one still has his sleek summer wings and a blue-purple head, but it's starting to fade.

Ma mallard can afford to look smug; she maintains her tidy coat year-round.

A few more Reifel Island birds

On a Friday afternoon at Reifel Island Bird Sanctuary in September, the lagoons are quiet, the paths empty. The parenting tasks are done for the year, many of the summer residents have flown south, and the winter visitors are still on their way. And it's Friday. The remaining ducks know the score; Saturday morning, the parking lot will be full of kids and kids at heart carrying bags of seed; then they will be busy begging, demanding, hounding, jostling, squabbling, peck-peck-pecking, diving, honking and quacking until dusk, with a repeat the next day. They'll be rested and ready for it.

Friday is a good day for a quiet walk.

House sparrow on a fence

This mallard was eating low-hanging blackberries. She didn't seem to mind them not being ripe.

The splotchiest pigeon I ever did see.

And an uncharacteristically placid coot, ignoring my tossed seeds.

More tomorrow.

Wood duck at Reifel Island

It's been a while since we visited Reifel Island Migratory Bird Sanctuary. We remedied that this afternoon, and took, as usual, far too many photos.

Male duck, showing off his colour range.

More photos tomorrow.

Somebody's got the right idea

Cool reading on a hot afternoon

Copycat flies

A clump of Michaelmas daisies in Beach Grove attracted a swarm of yellow and black insects this afternoon, honeybees and wasps, mostly. And a pair of lookalikes.

Syrphid fly. Eristalis tenax, a bee mimic.

Flies have only two functional wings. Bees have four.

Another syrphid. A bee mimic's mimic. Smaller, and with a striped vest instead of the furry one.