Where the birds were

A couple of days ago, we were in Iona Beach park, looking for birds and finding few. Here's why:

Before we left, I photographed this sign. (Yes, that's me and my flash, reflected in the plastic cover.) I didn't get around to reading it until tonight. It explains the lonely ponds and beaches.

The second paragraph reads,

"... a rich assortment of clams, worms and other marine invertebrates attract thousands of shorebirds at low tide. ... At high tide, the shorebirds move to the nutrient-rich Iona Wastewater treatment lagoons to continue feasting."

And when we arrived, the tide was at its highest point.

Iona park and water treatment site, Google maps.

The Wastewater treatment lagoons are the four squarish ones on the right. We walked around the two lagoons on the west side. Unfortunately, the treatment ponds are surrounded by a high fence, with a weed-covered, treed dike inside it, hiding them, except for a tiny glimpse from the top of the pipeline.

The second half of the sign. Clams, worms, and ghost shrimp. What the birds eat at low tide.

Heads I lose. And win.

It was a toss-up; Terra Nova on the south of the airport, or Iona Beach, on its north. We were looking for waterfowl; Laurie mentioned snow geese. I picked Iona Beach, thinking of cormorants off the jetty. Wrong choice. Not only was there not a goose to be seen, the tide was high and except for a mixed flock of ducks and coots on the far side of one lagoon, a couple of lonely crows and one long-legged wader, the place was birdless.

But there's always something ...

Quiet lagoon

Mushroom that looks like a flower. Or a hat.

Flower that looks like a butterfly.

These grow wild all over the dunes.

Shy beauty

Tiny 'shroom and moss

Wooly bear

I think this is a whimbrel.

Just leaving.

Someone will tell me now that all the geese were down at Terra Nova.

Is this a pterodactyl?

Laurie says it must be, just the head and neck. It was trying to climb up the side of the pipeline from the Iona Island sewage pool. Perhaps it's just a nestling, not able to fly yet.

Pterodactyl?

Whatever it is, it was near this large Mudflat Gryphon, seen preparing its nest on the riverbank.

Mudflat Gryphon

Ok, Ok, I'll settle down and be sensible. Proper beastie photos coming up in a bit.

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Antennaria to Womb

I was half-lying, half-kneeling in a parking lot. A couple of kids sitting on the curb laughed, but stopped when I looked in their direction. When I passed them, a bit later, I held up the camera and said, "Tiny wildflowers!"

They were nice kids, really. They apologized profusely, and I laughed and told them I was used to looking ridiculous. Smiles all round.

Here's one of the photos:

Common draba, probably Draba verna, aka. whitlow grass.

We indulged in some undignified ground-crawling on Iona Island last week, too. What we saw:

Pussy-toes and Roadside Rock Moss, Racomitrium canescens. And a single Haircap moss stem.

Pussy-toes is a generic name for flowers of the Antennaria genus. Several of them grow in the Lower Mainland. I couldn't find any that matched this one, though. It has the tiny, spoon-shaped, hairy, basal leaves, the white wool on the single stem, the compact flower cluster, white flowers; it is growing in open, dry, well-drained land. But see those cute three-pronged stem leaves? I could find nothing to match them; most Pussy-toes stem leaves are lance-shaped (a long, pointed oval).

The Roadside Rock moss is one of the most common mosses in this region. It's even identifiable as you whiz past in the car; a yellow-green carpet on sunny rocks or meadows.

A forest of sporophytes on their stalks on unidentified moss.

Juniper Haircap moss, Polytrichum juniperinum. Like little starry flowers underfoot.

More Juniper Haircap.

Unidentified red moss, with Draba.

The Drabas are also called Whitlow grass, because

"they were formerly used for treating "whitlows" (inflammations of the finger-tip, especially next to the nail)." (Plants of Coastal British Columbia, Pojar & MacKinnon)

I looked to see if they were still in the herbal remedies for infected fingers, hang-nails and the like, but now the herbal remedies include neem, plantain seed, eggplant, or, in stubborn cases, onion. Whitlow grass has been found ineffective, evidently.

And I found an ancient treatment plan in an extract from The Lady's Assistant: Family Physician. The relevant passage is here. Warning: rather gruesome. And it veers off-topic, into "Womb, Falling down of"; not for the squeamish, at all.

And now, I have veered off-topic, too. I'd better quit while I'm still in the general vicinity.

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A couple of non-singing residents of Iona Island

At first I thought it was a rock ...

Just a grey blob, not moving, far away on an island in the pond. But then, any rock there would be covered with reeds, I thought. So I took a photo.

Turtle, catching a few rays.

This one was moving, and fast. Laurie found it in the blackberry patch:

Garter snake. At least, part of a snake. Almost patternless.

The turtle could be B.C.’s only remaining native pond turtle, the Western Painted Turtle, or more probably, the imported Red-Ear Slider. They are distinguishable mainly by the red patch on the side of the red-ear's head. These are often released by bored pet owners; most turtles we see in the ponds are red-ears.

The snake is a native, probably the Northwestern Garter Snake.*

*Update: PSYL asks, in the comments, why the garter snake has no stripes. I really should have "shown my work" in the post, so here goes:

I am used to seeing very stripy garter snakes.

However, quoting from the BC Reptiles page on Northwestern garter snakes, "adults are black, brown, or olive in colour. This may be accented by a stripe down the back. However, the width of the stripe varies, and sometimes the stripe is missing entirely. ... The colours can appear muted because of the strongly keeled scutes (scales with a ridge running from front to back), a trait shared with all other Garter Snake species."

If you click on the photo to see it full size, you can see a very faint yellowish stripe down the side. And the ridge along the back is there.

Thanks, PSYL!

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Treasure in a failed photo

The drier areas of Iona Island were clothed in a variety of mosses. We took a bunch of photos, of which more later. This one didn't turn out:


Looking straight down at the moss, the camera balked at the contrast between sunlit "flowers" and shady ground, so that it washed out the colours, but left the background almost black. I was going to toss the photo, but zoomed in first to see if I had missed any clues to the identity of the moss. That's when I saw the lichen.

I have never seen lichen like this. It's a club lichen, standing upright like Cladonia, but is weirdly branched, and in spots, almost leaf-like. And on those branches, it has tiny fruiting bodies, like little balls. Little purple balls. (It helps to click on the photo to see it full size; the fruiting bodies are really small.)

I tried adjusting the colour balance of the photo, thinking the fruiting bodies should be grey, but the closer the moss came to its true colour, as we saw it, the bluer the fruiting bodies grew.

I finally gave up, and over-saturated the colours; even the grey body of the lichen turned out to have a purplish tinge.


I don't know what these are. They're not in my book. I am going to browse through the thousands of photos on the Sharnoff Lichen website to see if they're there. Wish me luck.

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Too much of a good thing. Far too much.

When I was a kid, half a century or so ago, we lived for a year in White Rock. I walked to school most days down Buena Vista, rather than the slightly shorter route straight along Thrift from our house. I liked Buena Vista; one of the houses* had a hedge made of Scotch broom, and in season, the yellow pea-flowers were heaped high over my head. In winter, the hedge was dense and green, while everything else was just bare sticks.

Mom said it was a bad weed, but I didn't care. It was beautiful.

So I find it understandable that Captain Grant, back in 1850, brought seeds from Hawaii to plant in his garden on Vancouver Island. Only three germinated. And from those three seeds, the "bad weed" jumped his property line, galloped south to Victoria, crossed the Strait to the mainland, and dug itself in, evacuating any of our native flora that stood in its way.

Scotch broom, Cystisus scoparius, is a stiff, dusty-green shrub that grows to about 3 metres tall. It was probably called "broom" because of the long, flexible, but tough new growth; a couple of branches bound together would make a quite acceptable broom.** The leaves are small and inconspicuous; off-season colour is provided by the new green branches. The flowers are a glorious, sunshiny yellow and cheddar cheese orange. In the fall, it produces thousands of seeds in black pea-pods.

Old branches, new branches, dead wood, of Scotch broom. Iona Beach Regional Park. No leaves or flowers yet; it's early spring.

Broom is well equipped for survival in our climate. It grows well on poor or disturbed soil, because it is able to fix nitrogen from the air. Photosynthesis goes on even in the winter in the green branches, giving it a head start on other deciduous plants. It is winter-hardy, tolerating temperatures as low as -25 Celsius. And it produces seed in abundance; up to 3500 seed pods per plant, with about 7 seeds per pod. That comes out to about 20 thousand seeds. Per plant. And it throws them as far as 5 metres from the parent. Then they can wait up to 10 years for conditions to be best for germinating.

Add to this, toxins that protect it from foraging animals, deep roots and a waxy coating that prevents water loss in periods of drought, and a tendency to acidify the soil, which prevents the growth of native meadow plants. No wonder three plants were enough for an invading force!

Mom was right. It is a"bad weed". If it were well-behaved, and stayed in the gardens where we planted it, things would be fine. But rampaging over the fields, it is a destroyer. It crowds out native forage plants, out-competes evergreen seedlings, grows too densely to serve as cover for small animals. It is highly flammable; even a healthy plant always contains dead wood, and the fresh branches are high in natural oils. It is mildly toxic to animals and humans, and unpalatable to foraging animals.

Eradicating a patch, digging it out, leaves a gaping hole where nothing will grow, until the dormant broom seeds take advantage of the empty space. Burning it off stimulates the seeds.

Clearing land, whether for infrastructure, construction projects, or even logging, opens new ground for broom. Once it has a foothold, it prevents the regrowth of forests, even dooming tree-planting operations.

Iona Beach, where I took the photo above, has the worst infestation of Scotch broom in all the Vancouver metropolitan area. In Surrey, we have found it on the cleared strip under the power lines; a great highway for rapid expansion. On the Island, it is moving north rapidly.

Mom's generation had a saying; "Beauty is as beauty does." I guess broom is not so beautiful, after all.

*The hedge on Buena Vista is gone now; I checked. So is the big old farmhouse I lived in, the sloping meadow behind it, the little maple wood we played in, the henhouse and the fox that haunted it. It's all close-packed housing now. We're invasive, too.

**Or, more likely, vice versa. See comment by Christopher Taylor

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Blue, white, silver

Skywatching at Iona Beach:

Over (and in) the pond.

Over the beach.

Over the jetty.

Over the river.

And sky with swallows.

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Brand-new old favourite

Beach and jetty, at Iona Beach.

Iona Beach Regional Park. Marsh, logjams, quiet ponds, sandy beach, muddy river banks, dune meadows, concrete jetties. And sewage lagoons; what more could anyone want?

We've been intending to visit for a long time. Yesterday, we finally made it. And I'm stuck for words to describe it; maybe just a hearty "Wow!" will have to do.

A few bird shots, for starters:

One of the ponds, with goose. We saw buffleheads, mergansers, shovellers, as well as the usual mallards and geese on the water.


Three ducks over the river. North Shore mountains in the background.


Canada goose.


Beside the sewage lagoon, a pair of sleepy geese.


Rufous hummingbird.


Same hummingbird. Because I couldn't decide which photo to use.

In this area, between the sewage lagoons and the park proper, a narrow trail leads through and around deciduous forest, blackberry thickets, patches of Scotch broom, banks of purple-pink flowers. The grass is studded with pinpricks of white; two different miniature white flowers. And everywhere, small birds were singing. Redwing blackbirds called in the dried grasses, robins provided rhythm with their repeated "Cheer-ups", birds I couldn't recognize trilled, chirped, whistled. Chickadees, of course, were dee-dee-deeing in the background. Laurie saw a bright yellow bird, unidentifiable. Overhead, tree swallows did acrobatics.

Something about it all seemed so familiar, so right, like a fleeting memory of paradise. I got shivers down my spine.

Tree swallows, by the river bank.


The pilings along the bank are outfitted with swallow nest boxes. One had a long line stretched to a post on the dunes.


Swallow, wings akimbo


Nesting mallards.

Back at the parking lot, there have to be crows.

More Iona photos (I've still got oodles to sort), tomorrow.

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