Seals in the sunshine

Last week I spent a day with friends on a sailboat, tacking between Quadra and Cortes Islands, sort of looking for whales, mostly just watching the islands slide by. We saw no whales, except from the ferry landing before we got started, when two breached twice, then disappeared. We did see seals, from a distance.

Seals, basking in the sunshine.

We got no closer than this, so I couldn't tell if they were the little harbour seals or the big California seals. The kayakers behind the rocks on the left came much closer before we were out of sight, but the seals took no notice of them.

More photos once I've processed them.

Speedy green-eyes

On the same patch of tansy as yesterday's yellow-bellied bee, a large, green-eyed wasp was feeding.

"Green-eyed wasp", Tachytes distinctus.

The Latin name, "Tachytes" means "swiftness, speed". A good description. I chased this guy from flower to flower for a long time; he rarely slowed down.

Probably a male.

Males in particular have very large eyes, the better to detect passing females or rival males ... (BugEric)

BugGuide describes the abdomen as having "four pale abdominal bands and a bright silvery pygidial plate." (The pygidial plate is the tail end segment of the abdomen.) In the bright sunlight where this one was foraging, those pale and silver bands looked very pale blue.

Another of the bees on the tansy.

Yellow belly

Tansy flowers are loaded with pollen. So, therefore, are the bees that forage on them.

This little one is a male; he has no saddlebags for carrying pollen. But he manages, anyhow.

Yellow belly.

(The term usually refers to people from Lincolnshire, UK, and this critter is in Willow Point, Canada, but I think he merits the name.)

Rainbow under rocks

The Willow Point beach is rocky; hard, round rocks, mostly cemented into the substrate. In the lower intertidal zone, they are often covered with green sea lettuce and rockweed. Where there is sandstone, it is pitted with green anemone holes. And everywhere there are barnacles, scuttling crabs, and tiny black snails. At the water's edge while the tide was turning, I flipped rocks and combed my fingers through the rockweed. Slow going, but worth the effort.

Here are some of the beasties I saw, in no particular order.

A flatworm, flatworm eggs, and two amphipods. This flatworm kept flipping her edges up towards me, instead of slithering along, as they usually do. It almost seemed as though she were defending her eggs.

A small kelp crab. This one's not wearing the seaweed hat. There was another with it, wearing the hat, just one patch of green algae growing near the top of the head. It ran away before I could get down to their level.

Limpet, periwinkle snail (or hermit in a periwinkle shell), two flatworms, and a pretty orange-striped green anemone, without the green.

Three limpets. Limpets wander about, lifting the forward edge as if to see where they're going. As soon as I touch them, they clamp down and cement themselves to the rock. These ones are still on the move.

Limpets, a whelk, and 6 of the tiny yellow or orange hermit crabs in periwinkle shells.

I haven't been able to identify these hermits. They are always tiny, and brightly coloured. I had at first thought they were greenmark hermits, Pagurus caurinus, which are the right size, but they have unbanded antennae; these little guys have green and white bands on their antennae.

Catching a few rays: there's a starfish, or maybe several starfish under this rock.

A fat ribbon worm. At the upper right, there's a small polychaete that I didn't see until I blew up the photo.

A two-toned polychaete.

This was the highlight of my afternoon. This worm has a blue front end, but the rear half is a bright pink. If you look closely (click on the photo to enlarge it) you can see the four eyes on the head. It's about 18 inches long. (More or less, these worms shrink and stretch continuously.)

There's a wandering ribbon worm, Paranemertes peregrina, with its purple back and cream belly, at the lower left, and a tiny greenish worm at the lower right.

Colours under rocks

What a difference a few metres make! I've been on this beach (Willow Point), flipping rocks at low tide before, but this time, the tide was the lowest I've seen it. The last time, I saw crabs and small snails and hermit crabs and barnacles. Not much else. This time, every rock had a diverse community on the underside.

Wosnesenski's isopods, multi-coloured snails, limpets, a tiny, tiny clam, barnacles, spiral tube worms, unidentified eggs, and a possible red chiton.

I was chasing Wosnesenski's isopods; they're big and visible, but very fast, very motivated to get back underneath a stone. None of them stop to challenge me, like a shore crab will.

"I'm going to pinch you and crunch your shell! No matter how big you are!"

(Aside: what's that weird thing under the clamshell on the upper left?)

Wosnesenski's isopod (Pentidotea wosnesenskii) stubby isopod (Gnorinmosphaeroma oregonensis -the name is longer than the beastie), and red chiton.

This isopod ran away, as they do, but exposed a stubby isopod and a red blob, which the camera saw better than I did. Stubby isopods are small, at most 1 cm long, usually less.

Stubbies. I think there are two of them, stacked. Two flatworms and their eggs, a barnacle, and a small, red chiton.

Chitons are fairly common in the lower intertidal zone. So far, I've seen the giant Pacific chiton (up to 14 inches; the ones I've seen were between 5 and 6 inches long), the beautiful red-lined chiton, the woody (to 8 cm), the mossy (10 cm), and some hairy species, so buried under their overgrowth of algae that they were unidentifiable. But I hadn't seen one so small, and so red. I don't know the species; none of the 30 species in my encyclopedia seem to match.

A more usual find; a woody chiton, still very small.

Bubbles

Little green shore crab, bubbling at me.

In the shadows, assorted whelks, periwinkles, and hermit crabs in periwinkle shells. Also another tiny crab in a clamshell.

The tide was very low, and I've got a pile of photos of critters to process, including one that was a lifer for me. Coming up tomorrow.

Red, white, green, and kelp coloured

A few seaweeds, large and small, wet and dry.

Coming in with the tide; a floating salad of torn sea lettuce, nori, Turkish washcloth, snippets of rockweed, and this glorious red branched seaweed.

In the summer, I see a lot of sun-bleached seaweeds well up on the shore. Most are white; newer ones are pale pink or cream. I don't remember seeing one where the bottom half was pure white, while the top still retains its full red colouring.

Laid out to dry in the sun. Fresh bull kelp.

Kelp is edible, and the floats and long stipes make good pickles, "they" say. Kelp is also very tough; I've tried cutting out a segment, using sharp, broken clamshells; almost impossible. Even the thin end of the stipes are too srong to break until they're half rotted. I must bring a knife to the beach to harvest a piece of the next fresh kelp I find. I'd like to try out that kelp pickle recipe.

Big lunch

At the beach ...

"Look what I found!"

"Starfish! A whole starfish, all for me!"

"Of course I can swallow it whole!"

"See?"

"And no, you can't have it!" (Because I was coming too close. So he left, taking his half-swallowed starfish with him.)

Zeballos River Falls

A short way out of Zeballos, I stopped at the Zeballos River to look at a waterfall.

Waterfall in two steps. A small one, as BC falls go.

Look at those rocks.

The Zeballos river is a small stream by mid-summer. In the spring, with the snow melt, it probably comes up near the top of the light-coloured rocks. But look at those rocks again: the darker top section, where mosses and small plants grow, is rounded, smoothed down by centuries of weather, lichens, and burrowing roots. But the lower section is all sharp edges, looking as if it had been chipped off by a rock hammer. As if the river hasn't been working at it very long, in rock years.

(The small, sharp rocks at the bottom of the photo are leftovers from road work.)

I looked up the world database of waterfalls, under BC, Canada. It lists 2465 waterfalls for BC. Of course, it misses most: just along this 42 km. road, I saw dozens of tall waterfalls, pouring down the mountainsides. The database map shows only 3 of them, all unnamed, a distinction shared with 1159 other BC falls.

The database includes the height of some of the falls, going from 840 metres to 1 metre; one of these, the 15th down from the top, is also unnamed. And many named falls have no height registered.

Our local (Campbell River) waterfall, Elk Falls, appears 98th on the list, sorted by height, at 145 metres.

Windblown

It doesn't take much of a breeze to make these dance.

Philadelphia fleabane, Erigeron philadelphicus, road to Zeballos. With thimbleberry and salmonberry leaves.

Nor these:

White sweet clover, Melilotus alba. Beside the bridge crossing the Nimpkish River.

The guide book says that white sweet clover is sweet-smelling. I had never noticed it before, but this patch was highly perfumed; just walking across the bridge, the scent overpowered the combined scents of raw wood, road dust, and evergreens.

View from the Zeballos dock

Vancouver Island's small coastal communities grow, boom, shrink, rally, dwindle, grow, and dwindle again; the terrain is challenging, access limited, the weather mostly wet, and the hazards (fire, flood, earthquakes, landslides) unpredictable. Zeballos is a good example.

I drove in to Zeballos last Sunday. The last time I was there was about 45 years ago; we drove in on a logging road from Woss, also on a Sunday; Dad had to get permission from the logging company. It was slow going. At one point the road was so steep that the car's motor boiled over, and we all had to get out and walk to the top of the hill, and the next steep hill after that, picking and eating huckleberries as we went. There were 9 of us in that car, mostly kids. In those days, there were no seat belts, and kids sat on adults' laps.

Before that, it was 1955 when I was a regular visitor. Every Sunday; Dad was preaching in a store-front church there.

Zeballos dock, as I saw it last Sunday, on a rainy afternoon.

To take this photo, I went to the spot where my brothers and I would go down on Sunday afternoons to the log dump; the end of the wharf where logging trucks would dump their loads into the ocean to be boomed and hauled away. It was a bit different back then. The road was gravel, but mostly covered several inches deep with chips of bark and shredded wood. There were no railings on the dock; it was not meant for people. Here and there rusty old pieces of machinery waited until they were wanted. We climbed on some of them. There was a small float dock on the far side, where we tied up our boat.

Zeballos was a small settlement until gold was discovered, in the 1930's. The mine was extremely productive, and the town grew to around 1500 people. Then WWII came, and the men went away to war. When they came back, the price of gold had dropped, and the mines never recovered.

In the beginning, the miners carried the sacks of ore out on their backs down the narrow, slippery trails, through the mud and windfalls to the Zeballos River. From there the ore was transported downstream in a flat bottom boat to the mouth of the river where it was again backpacked over land to the beach. (Zeballos: Golden Gate to the West Coast)

The hotel, thriving in the gold rush days, closed in 1948. The population shrunk to 35. That's how I remember it, in 1955; I rarely saw any people on the street; there were only a few inhabited houses. I remember setting up chairs for Sunday service; a dozen or fifteen chairs were enough, even including our family of 5. We would have a morning service, then lunch (Spam, canned peas, instant potatoes, canned fruit, tea) heated on the wood stove, then go back to our boat and home, an hour's ride away. There was no other way, except by float plane, to reach the town. Food and mail were brought in on the Princess Maquinna weekly, to this town and to us, back on Nootka Island.

By then, logging was providing an income. The town grew again. There was a school. The hotel re-opened. And closed again. In 1964, the Alaska earthquake shook the town, and the ensuing tsunami flooded it. (There are still signs along the road near the docks warning visitors of tsunami hazards.)

In 1970, Tahsis Company (logging) built the road we drove in on a few years later, "... eliminating Zeballos' outport status ..." (Vanishing BC)

The hotel burned down in 2008. Last year, an out of control forest fire on the mountain overlooking the town forced an evacuation order. Wikipedia gives the 2016 population as 107 people. But there is a school, a clinic, a museum, a library, well cared for nature trails, one (1) store, a few B&Bs, fishing and ecotourism guides: the town is far from dead.

I"ll go back someday, on a sunny day; I'd like to explore the estuary nature trail.

No name lake

On the road to Zeballos.

With fireweed, Epilobum angustifolium, and hardhack,Spiraea douglasii.

The pale pink spikes all along the closer shore are hardhack. This shrub loves wet feet. The fireweed grows a bit farther from the shore, higher up. It doesn't mind being a bit dry.

A closer look at the fireweed.

Closer still. With a long-winged fly.

From my guidebook:

"This plant was sometimes called asperge (asparagus) by the French Canadian voyageurs, and it was used by them as a green potherb. The leaves are rich in vitamin C and can also be used to make a tea. ... The flowers produce ample nectar, which makes an excellent honey."

And "the seed fluff ..". we'll leave that until it shows up.

Hardhack isn't used these days, by people, that is: insects love it. The Nuu-chah-nulth used to use the twigs to make brooms for harvesting shells. The wood is hard, and even the twigs are "hard to hack".

Blue mountains

Seen from the highway from Zeballos, heading east on a rainy evening.

Trees on the brown mountain on the left look like they're beetle kill. In the foreground: fireweed, daisies, and red elderberry, ripe.

The road in from the main highway (#19) is gravel. 42 kilometres of potholes, washboard, and fish-tailing on loose stones. Earlier in the afternoon, everything near the road was covered with grey dust, but now, after a heavy rain, it's green again.

More about this Sunday afternoon drive tomorrow.

A Skywatch post

Giant's laundry

Every now and then I find a log on the ground that's twisted in a spiral, as if some giant had hand-washed it, wrung it out, and forgotten to hang it to dry. I have wondered what caused that; could it have been because of the way it fell?

But today, I found one still standing, and already wrung out.

Tall, twisted snag. On the highway to Zeballos.

Mid-section showing the spiral twist. The snags next to it are perfectly straight.

With a little twisty baby on the top.

Zeballos highlighted in pink. Snag halfway there from Hwy 19.

What's for dinner?

She's not even my cat; just comes in to visit. But she likes my Mexican rice pot.

Thanks! Just my size! she says.

Twilight at Black Creek

It had been a cool, grey day; not raining, but likely to at any moment. I was busy, and not able to get out until after 7:30. But sunset doesn't come until after 9 these days, so I grabbed the camera and went out. Towards the south, a gap in the clouds allowed a few rays of sunlight to warm the trees; I headed that way. But as I went, the light moved south and south again, and then went out.

I found myself near Miracle Beach, passing a trailhead on Black Creek. I parked and went into the bush.

If the light was blue-grey out in the open, here under the trees it was twilight already. A green twilight.

Greens and browns. Present and visible here: evergreen trees (Douglas-fir, cedar), Big-leaf maple, red elderberry, thimbleberry, salmonberry, Vanilla leaf, evergreen ferns, huckleberry, mosses, Ocean spray (white patches in the distance, behind the trees). Not visible, but present; foam flower, salal, polypores.

The trails wind through the bush down Black Creek, connecting with Miracle Beach, the campsite, and two parking lots. When I came to the first parking lot, I turned back; it was already getting dark.

Red-belted polypore. I had to use flash for this; in the dark, it was a greyish blob.

Salal flowers.

At one point, the trail led underneath a canopy of Ocean spray. I'm short, and I had to dodge this one, at face height. Flash used.

In a dark corner on top of a stump, a brown and black mushroom, looking a bit the worse for wear. Flash, of course.

And on a future nurse stump, two baby evergreens in a blanket of moss.

Mossy snag. Out in the open, as I crossed the road to the second section of the trails. I still needed the flash.

8:49 PM. More moss. I call this a "zoo tree". I see mossy critters everywhere: a rabbit, a gopher, a frog, a sleeping sloth, a bird face, a big snake winding itself around the trunk.

A tree ladder, the lowest rung too high to reach. Why?

Black Creek. A wide spot; at other places, it's a trickle under a bed of ferns and fallen trees. From the road in, not the trails.

The rain started as I returned to the car. Just in time.