I am far too easily distracted...

... or, the birds will just have to wait a bit.

Three sunny days in a row! Time to start organizing the garden and patio. I had the afternoon free, so I got to it. Washed windows, wiped down patio table and chairs, scrubbed out the bird bath, admired my sprouting perennials. And took down the bird house that had been turned topsy-turvy when it snowed those 18 inches in one day. I brought it in to be repaired and re-hung.

That was as far as I got. On the edge of the birdhouse roof, I noticed a sprinking of tiny black dots raised above the surface on millimetre-tall stalks. Slime mold!

Out came the camera and magnifying glass. And here they are:
Click on this one to see them close-up. Aren't they beautiful?

These are cellular slimes, but I couldn't identify them confidently. They look more or less like Comatricha to me; what species, I can't tell. Or alternately, they could be Japanese lantern slime, Dictydium.

Slimes are among the strangest creatures I have seen. Neither animal nor vegetable; one moment acting like independent amoebae, then the next organizing themselves into one organism and growing like a mushroom. In recent years, scientists have moved them into a separate kingdom, Protista, which they share with other tiny nucleated organisms like amoeba and algae.

They start off life from a spore, and grow as separate amoeba-like animals, eating bacteria, etc. At some time, they start to clump, then "migrate" as a single organism to an appropriate location, where they grow like a plant, some becoming stem cells, other spore cases (sporangia) or spores. One type, at a certain stage, loses its individual cell walls and becomes a mass of flowing naked protoplasm, hence "slime".

Others become masses of jelly; I have come across blobs of transparent "orange marmalade" in the dry bush near Chase, in the BC interior. Around here, I find bright yellow blobs, somewhat smaller. Or what looks like brilliant orange, red or yellow insect egs stuck to rotting sticks under the evergreens, or masses of scrambled eggs. Once, in a hollow stump, we found a white mass about the size and consistency of boiled cauliflower. In the process of migrating, some look like a tangle of threads, or pretzels. You name it; slime mold will imitate it.

And then there's the "dog vomit" slime. Yes, that is its name. And you can guess what it looks like. That one, I haven't seen yet. Just as well.

Here are a few links with fascinating photographs: Photo Gallery of Mycometes, Fungal Biology, George Barron (U. of Guelph), Hidden Forest, and a blog entry from Sitka Nature.

The bird house? I eventually got back to it, and replaced its floor. But I'll have to hang it up tomorrow. If it's not raining again.

I liked this photo; the silhouettes of slime fruiting bodies in a misty, moody atmosphere.

Experimenting with lenses, and nebalia

Yesterday, reading Bev's blog entry on camera techniques (loved that spider portrait how-to!), I remembered a trick I had read about while I was still wishing for a digital. Something that just might possibly work with my economy model, with its 7-in limit on close-ups.

I dropped everything and dug out my fixings...

I have a good lens that I bought at Value Village for a buck. It seems that it is a part of a (missing) older slide projector. Solid, unscratched, and well-ground. I placed it in front of the lens on my camera (set for close-ups) and took a few trial shots. It seemed to work. So I dug out my four dried nebalia pugettensis from last June, and photographed them. Uploaded the photos to the computer, and looked at them. WoW! Better than I had ever hoped!

Here are the 4:


And here's one on his own:

OK: time to back-track to the story. I discovered these on the beach ...

No, not that way; I'll just post the three parts of the story as I wrote it on my old blog.

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Part I: "Muddy Buddies"

"This world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that, long ago. In my books, he has a point. But I doubt that he was referring to nebalia, which made me happy this weekend.

It was a bright, sunny day, and we were in Boundary Bay Park . So was half the population of Surrey, with their kites and kids, umbrellas and sunscreen. The tide was out; it looked like we could almost walk to Mud Bay, just beyond. And 'way out at the edge of the water there was a white line that, on examining it through the binoculars, looked like a seagull convention. We decided to walk out.

Mount Baker was ahead, seemingly floating on a haze of grey cloud; MN (Laurie) had to keep stopping to take photos. I was watching where I stepped. The sand was covered completely, carpeted so that it looked almost black, with small needle snails*. Looking closely, I could distinguish 4 different types; 3 smaller ones, up to about 1/2 inch long, one dark brown and two with spiralling bands of white and brown. And a larger snail, paler brown and over an inch long. I wished I could float, like Mount Baker, over the sand; I could hear the shells crunching under my sandals. Couldn't be helped.

It was a long walk. I picked up a crab shell or two, and discarded them when I found them broken. Other than that, there were just the snails for a while, then empty sand with an occasional open clam shell, seagull dinner. We reached the water's edge just in time for the seagulls to rise with a great clamour and move back, behind us. They knew something we didn't.

We turned back. I confess it was a bit of a letdown; there was nothing more to see at water's edge than there had been half-way back down the beach. MN found a seagull to photograph. I waited, walking slowly, looking at the sand.

Then I saw them. First, it was the dead crabs. Small crabs. Smaller than any I had seen, almost paper-thin and transparent. I bent and picked one up on a fingertip. And saw another, and another.

How do you collect delicate shells when you forgot to bring a container? MN was back from his photoshoot; he found me a medium-sized clamshell half full of sand. Perfect! I stored the crabs safely, went to look for another. And found something I had never seen before: a half-dozen or so of tiny golden animacules, half the size of the crabs, with a little tail the length of the body. Four of them went into the clamshell before we realized why the seagulls had left.

The tide was coming in. And the beach is so flat, it ran like a river. So did we.

Next: What are these beasties?

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*The snails were probably some variety of bittium.

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Part II in next post.

Wasps. And am I ever having fun!

New digital camera. Fairly cheap, since I'm a newbie.

And a couple of dull days and a sick day, so I'm inside, playing with it. I pulled out a few boxes of bugs and bones to practice with close-ups and the software that came with the camera. (Lousy, by the way.)

Here's a sample. Not too great, as yet, but I see possibilities. Let it rain!

The first is a bald-faced wasp. A big guy.

A skull of a bird, sunbleached. Found beside Boundary Bay beach. Probably a seagull.














A wasp's nest, abandoned early in the building. You can see the one cell where a larva was developing. The little bump at the bottom was a kind of stem and anchor.

A chickadee feather, for size comparison.

And a small mushroom.








A small wasp.










An unidentified bug.

















A conifer borer, that, with the aid of his family, destroyed Laurie's favourite spruce tree. Bottom view.














The small wasp, a couple of seeds from a weed found near Chase, in the BC interior, a mushroom from the same area, that unidentified bug, belly up, and a dime for comparison.