Dem dry stones

Cougar Creek drains from the clay soils near our house, seeps under a couple of malls, meanders over to Cougar Creek Park with its lagoons and beaver dams, and plunges into a steep canyon. At the bottom end, it tunnels under the road into Sunshine Hills, and out into the Burns Bog flats.

We started our rock flipping excursion from that road, heading upstream, at first, into the canyon.

Reflections of the trees at the top of the Canyon. This year, the creek is shallow and slow.

Dying alder leaves and shadows of horsetails on the stones along the river bank.

We turned over many stones, both on the banks, and in the dry areas of the creek bed. Under a few, we found pillbugs, and one earthworm. Nothing more; the ground was dry, the creek bed scoured clean, and barely damp.

Where the creek was slightly deeper, held back by sticks and leaves caught on a few rocks, I turned over a rock, saw something flashing in the current, and caught it. I spread it out on the next rock to examine it.

A gruesome find. A red dragonfly, minus most of the head and abdomen, probably eaten by fish. The wings are intact. Nothing there to interest a hungry trout.

We crossed the road into Burns Bog. This part of the bog was once extensively mined for peat, and is criss-crossed by walls and railway tracks. A large part of it was paved over, but the pavement is cracked and mossy, buckling as the ground has heaved under it. Alders and maples grow in the gaps.

Moss breaking pavement, making soil for larger plants.

Cracked pavement. I looked in the cracks; nothing was moving.

It's been a dry summer; even in the shade, the moss was dry and scratchy. The ground underneath was no damper. We turned over many rocks and chunks of broken concrete, finding mostly dry soil, baked hard.

Under one slab of concrete, a few reddish ants had dug tunnels. They have something damp and bluish in the upper centre here; some sort of dead critter.

The underside of a paving stone. Ant trails, hot and crispy. No ants in sight.

Pillbugs

And a small, sleeping slug. I have never seen one before with a spotted white face; I didn't know there were such critters.

And this I will never understand: Burns Bog is supposed to be an ecological preserve, even this once-mined area. Access is mostly on foot, and the trails are long. Why, then, do people haul garbage deep into the woods here? On foot, carrying heavy trash, when we have door-to-door pickup or easily available bins?

Every time, we find something. Bottles and buckets, bicycle parts, grocery store trolleys, old cabinet TVs, rotting mattresses, shoes . . . This time, it was electronics. Underneath the chunks of concrete.

TV? Or what?

And what is this? It's plastic, backed with cardboard.

This I do understand. There's a graffiti'd wall just beyond.

Neon waters

A good place to hunt rocks:

Cougar Creek, in September colours.

Spots, patches, circles along Cougar Creek

At the entrance to the Cougar Creek canyon, the creek flows over a sandy patch; there we could see small fishes swimming.

Fry, about 3 inches long in a gentle current.

These are probably first-year fish, aka fry. Cougar Creek is home to cutthroat trout, Coho and Chum salmon; I'm not sure which these little ones are. The spots along their sides may be a clue to those who know their fish. I don't.

Some trout, such as the rainbow trout, are salmon species; cutthroat trout is a salmonid, but not a salmon.

A bit further up the creek, where the shade is deeper and the current more variable, water striders chase each other over the surface.

This may be a male trying to capture a female.

Water strider females need to mate only once, whereas males mate as frequently as they can; the last male to mate is the one who passes on his DNA. The females, once they've mated, flee or fight other hopeful suitors. (More detail in The Case of the Reluctant Brides.)

I love the way their feet always make circular spots on the water, and when the water is clear, a half-dozen circular shadows some distance away.

And I just liked the pattern on this log:

Moss, bleeding heart leaves, spots of lichen, and peeling bark.

Textures and shapes: Green on green

Tall ferns cast their shadows on the skunk cabbage leaves in Cougar Canyon:

The ferns themselves are those blurry pale shapes on the left. The dark fern shapes are all shadows.

Slugs or snails have been at work here.

Busy day tomorrow; we'll be going to Deer Lake, weather permitting. Goodnight for now!

As promised: Green, green, green

And where the sunshine filters through, a bit of yellow. That makes Cougar Canyon a good place to visit on a hot day.

Reflections on the creek, with water striders and their circles.

More reflections

Ferns and a couple of skunk cabbage leaves

Lichen and mosses

Miners' lettuce

The creek rushing over a small drop

A skunk cabbage spadix, not ripe. We smelled ripe ones, but never saw them. 

Moss, bleeding heart leaves, and a brown shelf fungus, for a bit of variety.

Where the shade is deep

It's been sunny and warm this last week. Too warm for us, coming out of a cool, rainy May. We've been seeking out green places, where the trees screen out the light and heat.

We took the trail down Cougar Canyon again, after several years away. A dim, quiet trail over newly-laid pallet boards squishing into the mud under our footsteps, with the creek murmuring to itself in its stony bed, and the mosquitoes humming over our heads. I'd forgotten those mosquitoes; I'm still itchy.

In a hollow stump, blackened maybe by rot, maybe by long-forgotten fire, we found these:

A sweating shelf fungus.

The stump was dry, or barely moist back in the very centre, but the bottom of the fungus was dripping. I'm not sure if the green colour of the droplets was a reflection of all the green around us, or the colour of the fungal sap.

A large yellow slime mold, directly beneath the fungus.

This seems to be the "many-headed slime", Physarum polycephalum. The saturated yellow colour was startling in that dark hole; it almost looked like something plastic, left behind by careless visitors; but it was real, soft and damp, and living.

These slime molds crawl along, sort of like a flatworm, oozing over their food source, surrounding it, secreting enzymes to digest it before they absorb it. They're not in any hurry, but they can manage a speed of about 1 mm. per hour, or about an inch a day. When they dry out, they go dormant and wait for the next rainy day.

They don't like too much light; the spot chosen by this slime was in a hole on the northern side of a stump in an already deeply shady ravine. The sun never shines directly here.

Another slime mold, on the dark side of a mossy log under an evergreen.

Tomorrow: green, green, green.