Spook

It's Hallowe'en and the night is alive.

Walk carefully down those dark halls! She's waiting!

Happy Hallowe'en!

'Shroom heaven

The sun shines through dripping curtains of hanging moss, warming layers of black bark and orange maple leaves. Slugs feast on white mushroom meat. In the dark crevices between the fallen trees, polypore fungi gleam. It's fall in the rainforest.

Sunlight and hanging moss

Blending in. Big-leaf maple leaves and five big mushrooms to match.

This creamy-capped mushroom has slightly purplish grey gills.

Red-belted polypores with a pinkish cast.

Spore-laden firs and glistening mushrooms

These gilled mushrooms are common in the Grove. They all have freckles in the centre of a slightly pinkish cap.

Down in the mud under a log, we found these large, muddy boletes, identifiable as boletes by the dense pores instead of gills. I had to "see" them with my fingertips, as there was no way I was going to put my cheek in that cold mud.

More to come, tomorrow. This was a mushroom-rich forest!

Mushroom country

And more mushrooms from Cathedral Grove. The forest was dotted with them everywhere; every few steps we saw another clump.

A rotting, moss-covered stump, with its sprinkling of mushrooms.

Most of the trees on this side of the highway are Douglas firs. About 300 years ago, a forest fire downed many of them, and their enormous trunks lie on the ground, covered in a thick mossy blanket. In the space the fire opened up, big-leaf maples reach for the sunlight.

Ideal mushroom habitat; green, dim, and wet.

Mushrooms, burnt bark, and a mulch of big-leaf maple leaves.

Weeping shelf fungus, looking like a sticky bun, on the cut end of a log.

Gilled brown and beige mushroom. There's a scrap of hairy lichen here; these elastic threads hang from all the upper branches.

A similar mushroom, with a paler stalk.

More mushrooms tomorrow.

Under the firs

We went to Cathedral Grove on the Port Alberni highhway to look at the big trees and found mushrooms, small and large. It had been raining; the paths were muddy and puddly, the fallen leaves quickly turning to mush. Perfect mushroom conditions.

Mushroom and wet moss. And a strand of spider web.

The rest of the photos are still waiting to be processed. More tomorrow.

Billy

I met my son for lunch yesterday in Coombs, near Nanaimo. The restaurant is called, "Goats on a Roof". And yes, there are goats on the roof.

"Hello, down there!"

No fences!

Dressed in brown and gold

Hanging spiders. #Arachtober 24

Dinner with folding wings

I got a smidgen too close, and she turned on her side and ran away, carrying her dinner in her pedipalps.

Little chubby, hanging by two threads.

Leggy

Two spiders for #Arachtober 23, slightly mis-named:

Cellar spider, not in a cellar.

And a cross spider, never in a cross mood.

Not quite silhouettes

Fog isolates, showing up shapes I've passed dozens of times without ever seeing them.

Weeds on the rocks

At the boat launch, Stories Beach

Foggy afternoon

Gulls at the boat launch

Making their own brand of graffiti 

Using all three eyes

The camera sees more - and less - than my eyes do. Flipping rocks along the shore, left-handed, with the camera in the right hand, finger on the shutter button, I disturb crabs, who scuttle quickly under the next-door stone. Flip another; crabs. Another; more crabs. One stops to threaten me, pincers raised. "Come on, see if you dare!" I turn the camera in her direction, and she changes her mind and joins her friends under shelter.

Another stone. More racing crabs. Once they're gone, I see slow movement; flatworms. The camera sees them, unless the light is just exactly right, as brown smears. My eyes see the movement, the merest hint of it, going in a different direction than the slither next to it, the next flatworm.

Whelk egg cases, spiral tube-worms, and flatworms on the underside of a stone.

Wosnesenski's isopods, one lying upside-down for some reason, showing off his 14 legs. And a pair of crabs.

Sometimes, there's a nano-second of flurry, a miniscule splash; a baby sculpin, an inch long, gone to ground, now invisible. Maybe the camera will see him; I won't. But I saw the splash.

Some animals are only recognized, in these surroundings, by their movement. I learn to see them; the merest rise and fall of a limpet under the seaweed gluing herself down to the rock while the light threatens her; the split-second flip-flip-flip of a gunnel, the shrinking of an anemone, the characteristic sideways scuttle of a miniature hermit - snail shells don't move like that without a hermit resident; the writhing of a polychaete worm becoming one with the mud underneath, the squirting of a clam retreating deeper into the mud. The camera never sees those.

Spiral tubeworms, flatworms (the light was right- look for the eyes!) and a limpet, still on the move. I don't know what that tiny thing with the striped back"bone" on the stony patch in the centre is.

My eyes miss the very tiny critters. My reading glasses are in my pocket; they get in the way when I look through the viewfinder, and the light is too bright to see the screen. So I point and shoot, looking for the green square that says the auto-focus has found something interesting. Or find a safe, non-painful (broken barnacles are sharp!) place to kneel so that I can get my head down a few inches from the stones and look through the viewfinder.

White shells, a sea of white shells; must be barnacles. The camera knows better. Waving seaweeds; no, the camera discovers tentacles or antennae. Or a mass of worms.

The camera saw these. I didn't.

This photo includes two masses of ribbon worms; the upper one is a knot of Paranemertes peregrina (p. means wandering), the purple ribbon worm, with a very purple body and a creamy belly; the orange ribbon worm, Tubulanus polymorphus; and the green ribbon worm, Emplecotnema gracile, with its green top and yellow belly.

The lower knot appears to be all green ribbon worms.

And there are three flatworms and a trio of crabs.

Sometimes things are easier; I find an underwater species tossed up to die on the shore. These I can pick up and move to a better background.

Unidentified species of hydrocoral. Notice the yellow "bud" at the tip of the branches.

Habitat for the critters found above. The stripes parallel to the shore are probably old glacier tracks on sandstone.

On the rocks

Rain one day, sun the next. One sunny afternoon coincided with a very low tide.

Rocks, ducks, coastal communities. Looking north.

The ducks are Harlequins. This one's a male; the females are a drab brown with white spots on their heads.

I found it curious that each duck sits separately on his or her own rock. I only saw two sharing a rock.

Harlequins are shy ducks. I approached carefully, pausing often. When the closest one slipped off his rock and swam away, I turned and left them alone. I was still quite a way from water's edge.

Arachtober 15

We're halfway through the month of Arachtober. Todays entries (two per day for the rest of the month) are photos of one who lived for a week in my hallway.

Araneus diadematus male. With spiky legs.

Sleeping "hidden" in a gap behind a shelf.

And now he's gone, probably to sleep in a warm crack for the winter.

#Arachtober

Ungainly

A great blue heron is such an elegant bird. When he's standing still, posing, or stalking his prey.

Standing tall.

But when he decides it's time to leave, well ...

He starts off with a jump, toes splayed out.

Stretches out his neck, snake-like, dangles his skinny legs and messes up his wings. (Blurry photo, but I'd never noticed the black and white pattern on the exposed belly before.)

If you're close enough, you can hear those wings creaking. Needs oil.

All neck and wings.

Late early mushrooms

I've been looking for mushrooms since the rains started, but with little luck. So I looked at the last two years' posts; in 2016, I was finding many mushrooms around here since the last week of September, earlier on visits north and west. But in 2017, they started to show up near the end of October, and in greatly reduced numbers.

This year, it looks like we're following last year's schedule. I found a very few last week; half a dozen puffballs in a patch that is usually thick with them, three small brownish ones on Tyee Spit.

And finally, this Wednesday, a short walk near Woodhus Creek turned up a crop of varied 'shrooms.

Down in the moss, a brown mushroom with purplish stripes. With an unidentified critter poking his head out from behind.

One puffball, already gone to spores. There were two others in the vicinity.

Mushrooms often grow in the shadiest, dimmest parts of the woods, and even there, they hide under logs or in the shelter of deep moss. The camera doesn't like this; there's not enough light to get a clean photo. But you can't use flash; most of the light-coloured mushrooms concentrate and reflect all the light, so that everything but the mushroom comes out nicely, but the mushrooms are a featureless glare. Puffballs are the worst. I was lucky to find one in a ray of filtered sunlight.

Tiny, delicate, pinkish mushrooms on a log. With a young sowbug. There were many of these.

A foot-long piece of burnt branch with a topping of moss, nurtured these tiny tongues, most under 1/2 cm. long.

Getting down close. The bases are a greyish blue, the tops pure white.

No mushrooms here. Leaf lichen with fruiting bodies on a dead twig, and Oregon grape leaves.

I met another mushroom hunter along this trail. He was looking for chanterelles, that he has found in large quantities here in previous years. Not this year; he hadn't seen one.

A walk in the autumn woods

Along the trail under the trees, it's dim and brown...

The path to Woodhus Creek

... outside, it's all saturated colour; yellow,orange, blue.

Last turn before the exit.

Sleeping it off

Walking in the woods this afternoon, I passed a garter snake basking in the sunlight. Usually, all I see of them is the tail end disappearing into the undergrowth, but this one was more asleep than awake.

He's watching me. Once he stuck out a tongue. Once.

I passed him before I saw him, a few inches off the trail I was on. I turned back and took a bunch of photos, getting right down in his face, then went on down to the end of the trail. Not until I came back up the trail did he think it wise to move on, slowly.

He's about two feet long.

Looking at the photos, I notice a suspicious bulge in that first U bend. A frog, half digested? A big slug, maybe? No wonder he's lethargic!

Life is tough.

Chia, in a mournful mood.

"This bed is too small! Why don't you fix it?"

She has slept in this basket ever since she was a kitten. She has a new, larger basket, with a wool cushion and a catnip toy, and she does consent to curl up there at times. But this little one is her old favourite; wherever I move it, there she goes to sleep. Even if she hangs over the edges all around.

Maybe if I put the little basket inside the large one?

Arachtober 10: Today's entry is a spider meal, appropriate for the Canadian Thanksgiving season.

Ready to eat

#Arachtober