Red grass

I never knew there were so many kinds of grass. I've been browsing grass photos for over an hour, fruitlessly looking for a match for this red-topped, spiky beauty:

The grass grows about a foot deep, and covers a meadow beside Little River. The whole meadow looks red from a distance.

The meadow is dry and sandy, but floods when the river is high.

The closest match I found on E-Flora BC is cheatgrass, with a photo of a red field. The grass is common in BC, and E-Flora has two records in the Comox area. I'm not quite convinced that this is it, though.

Promised glory

Lupins, Little River

It's still early: the patch is mostly leaves.

I'll have to go back in a couple of weeks; can't afford to miss a field of blooming lupins!

7 year old pond

At the Little River restoration project in Comox, two small ponds have been dug out in what 7 years ago used to be an old gravel pit. Volunteers from the Naturalist Society cleared out invasive Scotch broom and replaced it with native species, including the trees. Now the new park includes a small wetland, a dry meadow, bits of forest, a stretch of river, and a path to the beach.

I passed the wetland on my way to the beach, looking for Claytonia, but returned to inspect the ponds more closely later.

Coho salmon and cutthroat trout fry spend a year or more in these ponds before moving on to the ocean, eating and sometimes being eaten by assorted insects. Signs around the pond remind us to look predacious diving beetles, back swimmers, water scorpions, and more. An "extraordinary diversity of dragonfly species" (TideChange) makes their home here.

I didn't see any of these on my first visit; there were a few bees prospecting for pollen in the Indian plum bushes, no dragonflies. It's early in the season. I'll go back later. For now, there are waterlilies.

Variegated yellow pond lilies, according to the sign.

One lily, standing proud.