Welcome mat

Last week, I posted photos of the spider that built her tunnel web on our compost bin. Evidently, it was still under construction, with just the shape of the walls sketched in, so that she was visible inside.

That was then ...

This is now.

She has reinforced the walls and built a doorway, with an inviting, carpeted foyer inside. And she's hiding in the back, out of sight of curious visitors. (I know she's there; I saw movement inside when I got too close.)

The little black scrap on the doorstep looks like the remains of a small moth. No garbage pickup here!

Instant antiques

A couple or three years ago, the city planted a row of saplings along the street behind our house. I haven't been able to identify them, but they are covered with pale creamy greenish flowers in the early spring.

I went out to see if there are any buds yet, and discovered that all the trees, now about twice our height, are covered with lichens and moss; the bark and even the wood itself is cracking, as if from extreme age and weathering.

There are a few buds here and there, at the tips of branches.

I'm wondering what went wrong, or is premature aging a characteristic of these trees? Did our weather have something to do with it? The climate? Pollution from a busy street? Come to think of it, last year, the whole lot were warming with ants. Did they cause this, or were they attracted by the growing lichens?

Questions, questions. I'll be watching the trees closely over this spring and summer.

First barn swallow of the year

The afternoon was sunny and warm, the insects were buzzing happily about over the Delta farmlands, and flocks of swallows came out to chase them down. One stopped for a breather overhead.

... noticed me taking his photo ...

and leapt straight up, then flew away.

Love those skinny feet!

And we found a critter I'd never seen before on the beach. Story tomorrow.

Half a season in 25 kilometres

The spring flowers are coming on apace in Beach Grove; not so much up here on the hilltop. My birdbath was frozen over a couple of times last week. But we'll get there eventually. Almost all of my perennials have poked an inch or so of green through the top dressing on the soil - steer manure and bone meal, this time. The hostas and ferns are still in hiding. I've planted more seedlings; Sweet William, foxglove, columbine, Candytuft and Fairy's thimble. (I love these names. They roll so easily off the tongue!) Laurie's going to put in a purple gooseberry shrub -yum!

But those fruits and flowers are all in the future; at present we're glad of Beach Grove. These are from last week's showing:

Cherry blossoms against a blue, blue sky

Creamy white clematis

Looking down the throat of a strongly yellow daffodil

Narcissi and their shadows

A green-flowered hellebore

The waxy flowers of Pieris japonica

And some humble purple asters. Well, as humble as asters ever get, crouching down at toe level.

I'm heading up to Strathcona tomorrow. There'll be gardens to envy, to emulate, and probably to shake my head at, bemused.

Cherry root mushroom

At the base of an old cherry tree outside our building, these outlandish mushrooms have pushed their way through the landscaping gravel:

Group of three. They're up to about 8 inches across.

Another trio. These start out "normal", like the small round one at the far right.

Tough-skinned, shiny under all the dust, raggedly gilled.

I can't identify these. One of our neighbours says his mother used to cook them back in the "Old Country", in Eastern Europe. She boiled them with a silver spoon; if it tarnished, they were poisonous, he says. It's not a test I would trust.

I think I'll wait for an expert's opinion, a spore print, a DNA test, a test for pesticide contamination, and after all that, someone braver than I to play guinea pig.

Ice and flowers

November 22. One month to go to the winter solstice. Dawn to dusk, 9 1/2 hours. One more month of shortening days and unpredictable weather.

Yesterday, the temperature had dropped to minus 4° (Celsius) overnight. The bird bath froze solid, and it took four kettles of hot water to thaw it out. My begonias all died. (The stems leak beet-red juice as they thaw. I didn't know that before.)

Today, it rained and blew all day, clearing all the remaining leaves off the maples. The temperature now, in the middle of the night, is up to 8°C (46°F). The wind is howling down the kitchen stove vent.

They promise us occasional sunshine and warming temperatures for tomorrow.

Just a typical Lower Mainland November.

Last Saturday, three days ago, we went to the school a block away to vote in the morning. In the schoolyard, the grass was green where the sun shone. Children had rolled the snow off it, making large snowballs, several feet in diameter, hopeful snowmen or snowforts. On the gravel and pavement, ice made intriguing patterns in the puddles.

Friday construction materials, gone by Monday.

Ehecatl, Aztec God of the Winds, as he is sometimes pictured.

Duck on ice.

What do you see here?

The ice man.

And then, since the sun had come out, we went down to White Rock, where flowers were blooming among the weeds.

Very small umbellifer.

Gumweed, still budding optimistically.

End of the season for this one.

Patterned sepals. (Click for full size.)

Ice and flowers; that's November in BC.

Just a reminder ...

... to myself.

Sometimes, with all the construction going on around us, the traffic and dust, I forget what a green city this is, really. Here's a view of a busy area of Vancouver, taken from near the top of Vancouver General Hospital: we used to live right in the middle of all that greenery.

Cambie Street, Queen E. Park, Mount Baker

Where we are now, in Delta, the plantings are newer, the open areas larger, but just down the hill we have Burns Bog and the Watershed Park, both under dense stands of trees. And then there is wide, flat farmland down on the true delta, where the winds blow fresh, where gulls and eagles play overhead. No wonder Vancouver (and area, the GVRD) scores high on the lists of the world's most livable cities!

I just needed to remember that; the air was dusty this afternoon from the construction projects next door and down the street, and I was grumbling.

All sewed up

Hay bales in their plastic wrappings, looking like oversized spools of thread:

Lower Delta, second haying.

Flatlands

The Fraser River splits into two arms as it enters the delta. Between them lies Richmond, with another split in the northern arm making a separate island for the airport and Iona Beach. It's flat, low-lying land, as befits a delta. Half of it, more or less, is residential and business; the other half is farmland, growing mostly blueberries and cranberries.

Across the river to the south, is the municipality of Delta, stretching from the Fraser to Boundary Bay to the south. It's the largest municipality in the Greater Vancouver Regional District, flat and boggy like Richmond, but sparsely populated. North Delta, where we live, is off the delta proper, up on the hillsides; most of the people live up here. Below are farmlands, Burns Bog, and a lot of empty space.

I measured the flats on Google; from Reifel Island at the northwest corner to Burns Bog to the Nicomekl River on the south, and back along Mud Bay to Tsawwassen, then up to Reifel again for the fifth side of a kid's drawing of a house; as the crow flies, about 40 miles. Following the roads, it's about 60.

We criss-cross this area on our way to most of our favourite shores. We don't usually stop; it's a long drive already. Often, we take photos from the car windows. Blurry photos, mostly. Not all.

Taken as I drove; soggy field in the rain.

I stopped for this one, along Colebrook Road, just off Mud Bay. The only fishing spot handy was the ditch.

There are fish in this water, see?

Farmhouse and fog. 104th Street, near Burns Bog. This area is prone to fogs and wet mists, even when the sun is shining on the beach.

Grazing goats with the hills of South Surrey in the background.

Sheep on a spit of land between the Nicomekl and the Serpentine rivers.

Why do they leave this coat on the sheep's back? There must be a reason; quite a few were wearing these.

Leeks. 104th Street again. The next field over grew brussel sprouts.

Reflections in a ditch. Tsawwassen.

Last bit of wasteland before the hills and residential area of Tsawwassen. Where we stop to watch hawks.

A flight of redwings

After too much rain, with more on the way, I needed to remember this, from a summery day, barely two weeks back:

In a field of tall grasses, redwing blackbirds were harvesting seeds. I parked and took photos through the windshield, while Laurie crept up to them, one cautious step at a time. From my vantage point, just about level with the tops of the grass, they reminded me of a boiling pot, with black bubbles constantly popping up and falling back into the stew.

Only a small part of the flock was visible at any one time; the rest were at the roots of the grass. And still, I counted over 150 in this "bubble".

An overflow in the road across the field.

Laurie got one step too close, and the entire boiling rose up ...

swarmed around his head ...

sped across the fields ...

and disappeared into the distant trees.

We weren't sure whether they were starlings or redwings until I blew up the photos. Most are in drab; females, or youngsters with a bit of patterning on the wings. Only a few are adult males; on these, the flash of red is barely visible against the sky.

A Skywatch post.

Drive-by

Patchwork barn:

Delta farmland. Taken from the car window.

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