Sand in his teeth

Found on Crescent Beach:

"That's not my spinach!"

Eelgrass washed up on the west shore of Boundary Bay and around the corner at White Rock piles itself up in great, knotty heaps of rotting black bands, smelly and usually covered with flies. On Crescent Beach, on the east shore, it blows up above the tide line onto the gravel, and dries into these short brown ribbons. No flies, no noticeable odor.

It is probably the effect of the wind, which is much stronger and more constant on Crescent Beach.

Observation

Gulls are weird.

"Hey! Look over there, to our right!"

"His beak is shrinking!"

"Or maybe not ..."

"Screeeeeech!"

"Just pretend we don't know him, ok?"

"What?"

Nicomekl River, Christmas Day.

Dreaming of a (Pale) Blue Christmas

Christmas Day, 2014, on the banks of the Nicomekl River, at Blackie Spit.

Looking north, at near high tide.

Palest blues, reflecting their light on the crow's belly.

Floats marking off the dog-free zone. All of it dog free, now at high tide.

Gull

'nother gull, matching the greys of the clouds.

Tree lace

And the sun was warm, the air cool and fresh, the gulls peaceful. The perfect afternoon, between bouts of Christmas pandemonium. Hope your day was as happy!

A Skywatch post.

Trapped in the rocks

Walking along the Crescent Beach shore at high tide last week, I stopped often to look at the rocks. They've been dumped here to support the railway that runs just above the beach; I don't know where they originated. Not all from the same place, it seems, because they can be anything from soft sandstones to hard granite. They may be grey, black, brown, or white; solid colours or broken up with veins in green or white, spotted or striped, round or sharp-edged. Like live things, there are no two alike.

And I tried, I really tried, to see them as rocks with their own story, without adding layers from my own silly imagination on top. And then I looked at the photos at home, and the trapped rock dwellers showed up. Here are two of them. (Laurie saw them, too, without me pointing them out. So they must be real, right?)

Conglomerate, with woman wearing lipstick. (That's the real colour of the rock; I didn't add it.)

Textured sandstone, with long-nosed critter just leaving his bed.

Ok. 'Nuff silliness. I'll be sensible tomorrrow.

Selfies

I thought I was taking photos of pretty rocks.

I didn't even notice the crab and limpet until I got home.

And not until I looked closely, did I see the many photos of my granddaughter and me. And the rampaging dinosaur.

(You probably need to click on this to see it full-size to find the selfies. Or an even larger photo is on Flickr. There, click on Download to see the "View full size" link, then arrow right until you find the bubbles.)

Lonely beetle

At our usual entry point to Crescent Beach, where the lane emerges from deep shade to the sunlight, we always have to pause to look at the flowers, wild and cultivated, that bloom there. This time, we found purple irises, a towering mass of small white flowers I can't quite identify, the brilliant evergreen roses, and beside them, the quieter wild Nootka rose.

On one of them a golden soldier beetle longhorn beetle caught my eye.

Golden back, black pronotum and head.

Pidonia scripta, a flower longhorn

This looks similar to the soldier beetle I usually see, the Common Red Soldier Beetle, Rhagonycha fulva, often in large groups, usually mating. It has the long golden body, but with black tips on the tail, and a red head. I only saw the one beetle here, although I looked at other flowers nearby.

Common Red Soldier Beetle, Rhagonycha fulva, on daisy, June 2010

When we came back to the shore an hour and a half later, this same beetle, as far as I could tell, was still on the same flower. And still alone.

UPDATE: BugGuide has identified it as Pidonia scripta, a flower longhorn beetle. Post corrected accordingly.

Miles of seaweed, sand and snails.

The tide was low, low, low this afternoon. From Crescent Beach, it almost seemed as though we could walk to the far side of Boundary Bay, at Centennial Beach. I tried.

Halfway to the tide line. That's Point Roberts and Centennial Beach at the far right.

Walking the dog, far away. I think this is directly south, near the edge of Semiahmoo Bay.

I walked to the west edge of the beach, but then there was a wide stretch of water before the sand started on the Centennial Beach side. Of course there was; there's a river running down through there, the combined Nicomekl and Serpentine Rivers flowing out of Mud Bay.

And it's 7 miles, shore to shore. It just looks like a quick walk.

Interim birds

I am feeling seriously bird-deprived. Except for the sandpipers at Crescent Beach the other day and the mallards at Cougar Creek, all the birds we have seen recently have been far, far away, and mostly on their way to distant shores. We keep making plans to go to Reifel Island, but the weather and our schedules keep getting in the way. Maybe this week, as soon as the sun comes out again.

Meanwhile, I've culled a few shots from Laurie's camera, which does distances better than my prime lens. They'll serve as a temtempié* for now.

*(Temtempié, Mexican idiom for "appetizer, snack". A corruption of "tente en pie" = "keep you standing up".)

Eagle, Crescent Beach. In an unusual pose for this tribe; they tend to be just the other side of that trunk, or see, up at the top, that white spot? or soaring over the top of the hill, heading for White Rock.

The one, lonely wigeon at Cougar Creek park this month. His vibrant colours work as camouflage as long as he stays near the shore of the lake.

"After splashdown, an explorer leaves his still-glowing space capsule, unfolds his beak and legs, and takes stock: 'Let's see, there's a big, black, short-legged bird over there, a few white and grey squealers scattered around. Not much else. But it looks like I've landed in a colony of tunnellers; look at all those chimneys! Could be worth my time to stay here.'"

Okay, I'll be sensible.

Robin hiding on us in a maze of bare branches on a misty afternoon. Cougar Creek Park.

Who cares if it's freezing out there?

Not us, not when the peeps are feeding on the beach.

Looking southwest. Silvery sea and the beginnings of a sunset. The black lines on the water in the background are more birds.

Looking north; peeps not minding Laurie. He's just a step away, off camera to the right.

Ankle-deep water (to a dunlin's ankles, that is.)

Sand patterns, with a few dunlin tracks

Icy blue birds

In Crescent Beach the snowdrops are flowering already, the bush glows with yellow-green lights. And ice imprisons the sloughs and lines the creeks.

Ice shelf over a thin coat of ice on the running creek.

Captured feathers

Who cares if it's cold? This bushy tree doesn't!

It was low tide, and the wide, muddy beach was covered with sandpipers, flying, feeding, flying again, swooping and flashing their white undersides. They didn't seem to mind us, dropping in to feed almost at our feet, flitting away, swirling back, landing in front of us, just behind us, anywhere, as if we were just more innocuous rocks on the beach.

We took hundreds of photos, peeps flying, feeding, even bathing. But it was so cold - so cold! - that I had no feeling in my fingers, and early on, I brushed against the dial on the camera, turning it to my setting for tank photos. Never noticed, of course; there was no time to check the photos as I took them; just to wildly click, click, click, click, over and over for 200-odd photos. Which all turned out blue, deep, deep blue.

So did the ice, and a cute blue wren, and a deep blue sunset. Blue!

I may be able to rescue one or two.

Blue! Gah!

Survivor bee

In Crescent Beach, this week, the wildflowers are showing off. Not least, the bindweed; this year its flowers are bigger than I've seen them for a long time. And the winged hordes are stuffing themselves with pollen and nectar.

This bee was too busy to notice my camera a few inches away.

"Yummy!"

But wait! There's something odd about that bee. Something not quite right.

Missing something.

Her wings are half gone. One is a mere stump; the other a tattered shred, but longer. Besides, she's long gone bald. The thorax glistens as if it had been polished, and her furry, striped behind has been trimmed by a blind hairdresser.

The hair loss is probably due to age, but something, a bird probably, broke off those wings. I wonder how she managed to fly. Surely she didn't walk to the feeding grounds?

Finished with this flower.

Turning to go, she stood facing me, as if gathering strength for the next flight. The wing stubs are clearer here.

On the lip of the bindweed flower.

A brief rest, and then she flew away. Half a wing or none, she's got work to do! She's a survivor.

Here's one of her relatives, on a mallow, for comparison:

Lots of hair, complete wings.

The bees have four wings, but the pair on each side hook together, so that they look like one. On the first bee, I see no sign of those frilly underwings.

Blue

Crescent Beach, Friday afternoon:

At the south end, almost at Kwomais Point

A half-dozen juvenile eagles were soaring over the point. This young couple were especially playful. The one in the rear repeatedly flipped upside-down to fly underneath the other, almost belly to belly.

Wet rocks and waves.

Blue and white and deep, dark grey.

Not blue:

Someone had tied this kelp stipe around and around a leaning alder.

A Skywatch post

Catching a few rays

On Crescent Beach, facing the afternoon sun, spring is well on its way.

Red alder catkins, male and female.

The male flowers appear before the leaves, hanging in long yellow and red catkins. The female catkins are small, upright and green; they mature to small, brown, woody cones that stay on the tree until the next spring. Pine siskins like to eat the seeds out of the cones.

More male catkins, and a few pink leaf buds.

There's always lichen

With the rain, come the rain lovers. The fungi, the slimes, the lichen.

At Crescent Beach, yesterday, I examined one lichen-encrusted tree.

The common flat-leafed grey-green lichen: flat, loosely attached lobes, tiny fruiting bodies, shiny black lower surface. Above it on the trunk is an acid-green leaf lichen, and a grey crust covered with round, saucer-like apothecia.

Another branch, more leaf lichens, more crust, and a spiky, thin-leafed cluster. And this is a confused tree; look at the base of the branch on the left. See the new pink bud? Thinks it must be spring, given the constant warm(ish) rain.

The same branch, zooming in. And there's a white dusty heart, for Clytie.

I didn't even notice until I was trying to identify that green stuff, that this section of branch has 4 or maybe 5 red mites on it. Do you see them?

While I looked at lichen, Laurie clambered through the bush, dodging blackberry canes, to get close to this big clump of shelf polypore.

On a well-rotted log, pierced by dead blackberry canes, and tinted with bright slime.

Patterns in wood and stone

Between the water and the hill, between one raincloud and the next ...

It was raining as usual, and the tides are high all day these days, but we've been too long shut in. We went to Crescent Beach anyhow. And the rain stopped, just for us!

The sea was empty; no boats, no people, only one lone Bufflehead. But there's always something to look at. Like wet logs and stones, for example.

Empty sea around Kwomais Point, grey-green branches overhead.

Water rushing over stones in a creeklet.

The White Rock - Kwomais Point - Crescent Beach shore is home to an amazing variety of stones and rocks. I never get tired of looking at them.

Some have washed down from the cliffs above over many millennia; others have broken off the rock piles that support the railway, or the rough gravel on the rail bed itself, and have been barged down from the upper Fraser Valley, or possibly from the Sechelt area on the Sunshine Coast. Some are volcanic; most are granites or conglomerates. I find agates, many but of poor quality, green jade-like stones, fossils, a bit of sandstone, white marbling. There's pink, green, grey, blue-black, brown, creamy yellow, translucent white, solid white . . . Beach glass, too, mostly green or brown. A few stones even seem to be worn-out bricks. How they got there is anyone's guess.

I don't know my rocks and stones. So, in the absence of proper vocabulary, I give them my own names. Like so:

Pink, peach, and rust "Easter Egg" stones.

"Knitted" rock. It looks like a mass of thick threads.

Laurie says this one looks like a frog.

"Iced potato" stone. Some softer, coarse brick-like stone, covered top and bottom with drizzled marble.

Another beach face.

The stone is uniformly grey; all the pattern is in the etching or molding. And I see dozens of shapes in it. A couple of horses, a sculpin, an axe-head, an old grump, a Roman statue, a dinosaur head.

Grey-green stone, with narrow veins of harder rock. Many of the rocks are veined like this, or split apart along a vein, leaving a white, flat side.

Most of the logs come and go, hauled away by the winter storms, or by the clean-up crews that try to keep a path open along the shoreline.

This old stump has been here for several summers.

Cute "chick" sheltered under the stump's wing.

Head-height into an old shrubby tree, something (high tides, high winds) had tossed a peeled, red stick.

Neither a stone nor a branch. Kelp float, sporting a side-ways Mohawk haircut.

I'll save the lichens and fungi for the next post.