Staring into trees

When the birds in the trees see my camera and fly away, there's always still a tree to look at. In Mazatlan, the coconut and date palms, the banana trees, the mangos and mameys were old friends, but there were so many more, new to me, out in plain sight lining and sometimes invading the streets.

Coconut palm, with coconuts ready for the picking.

Green dates on a baby date palm, barely 6 feet tall.

Sidewalk tree.

Another coconut palm, in a vacant lot.

I stopped at many vacant lots, hoping to see birds, occasionally chasing a butterfly, but I had to limit myself to skirting around the streetside edges; usually the vegetation was too dense to penetrate. And usually towering overhead. This one was typical. The vine, I think, is a Monstera variety, and the tree at lower right is probably a banana tree.

Mimosa?

I have Googled and browsed for hours; I can't identify these long seed pods.

The trees I found that almost, but not quite, matched these had similar pods and different leaves and leaf growth patterns. Others had knobby or ridged pods; these were smooth on all the trees I examined. The leaves are individual, oval-shaped, opposite, at the end of a forked terminal branch.

Small citrus, probably kumquats.

I haven't been able to identify yesterday's tree, where the boat-billed flycatcher has her nest, either. Dense leaf cover, pale yellow, upright flowers.

Any help with identification of any of these is greatly appreciated.

In the green spaces, open grass and trees, not quite parks but more wide walkways between streets, fruit lies on the ground, split open, a fresh buffet for birds and small animals. I was surprised not to see many insects, apart from the butterflies. Maybe they're all nocturnal, or at least hiding from the heat of midday.

The mangos are still small and green in April; once they ripen and fall, they will add their perfume to the entire area.

Green bananas

In Mazatlan, I was staying in a hostel about 15 minutes walk from the main hotel zone, where my daughter and her friends were staying. I walked out several times a day, varying my route so as to see as much as possible, sometimes stretching the 15 minutes into an hour while I kept stopping to take photos.

This banana tree was growing out of the sidewalk; a small tree, no taller than I am, but already busy producing fruit.

Wayside fruit stand?

I'm still processing street photos: trees, flowers, painted walls, and more birds.

Bird supermarket

Good bird habitat needs a generous variety of growing things, and Reifel Island Migratory Bird Sanctuary fills the bill. (And the beaks. Sorry.) And some, harvested elsewhere, would do for human food, too.

Here's a sampler of what we found this week.

Just flowers, as yet:

Mullein. We only saw a couple of plants. Rather unexpected; they are more common on roadsides in dry country.

These are tall plants.

Nightshade. It produces red berries which the birds eat, even though they are toxic to humans.

Lathyrus, beach pea. Produces edible peas later on.

Silverweed. In the rose family, and edible.

Thistles. The seeds are a bird favourite. Also, these are hosting many juicy bugs, of all sizes and shapes. (Check it out full size.)

Fruit ready to be eaten:

Wild cherries. A bit on the sour side. They get eaten quickly by small birds, leaving the seeds hanging by a bit of skin.

Crabapples. These are delicious. I ate one, frozen on the tree last winter. Nothing better!

Hawthorn. They will turn red as they ripen.

Salal. The tiny, inconspicuous flowers are sticky from stem to petals. 

Salal berries, not ripe yet. They are sticky and furry now; they'll get more so as they ripen. Ripe, they are a deep purple, with a super-grape flavour. They make great jam, but are difficult to harvest; the berries are mushy and everything sticks to your hands. Birds love them.

Hiding down in the grasses, a vine of ripening native blackberries.

Red elderberries. Dad used to add the flowers to pancake batter to make elderberry fritters. The berries are better left to the birds.

Black twinberry. They told us, when I was a kid, that they were poisonous. They're definitely unpalatable, but some birds eat them Hummingbirds and bees are attracted to the flowers.

More twinberries, because I like the bright red of the bracts in the sunlight.

The seeds:

Lupins gone to seed, surrounded by daisies. Some lupins are edible, some are poisonous, to humans and birds. I don't know about these.

Dock. A bird feast.

One of the carrot family plants.

 Others:

These were growing along the edge of the gravel path. I'd never seen them before, but they're some variety of bindweed.

The invasive purple loosestrife. Pretty, but bad news.

Another invasive plant; the evergreen blackberry. A nasty vine, armed to the teeth with needle-sharp thorns. There is this to say in its favour; the berries are tastier than even the Himalayan blackberry. Too bad the birds poop the seeds all over the place, though.

I love daisies like this, in great masses. It's another introduced weed, and a bee magnet.

Daisies, grasses, and one of the lagoons.

And we missed the salmonberries, thinbleberry, Himalayan blackberry, vetches, most of the grasses, cattails, etc. Bird heaven!

Old familiar mystery

This small tree was growing beside one of the ponds in the Dr. Sun Yat Sen Gardens. The fruits, about the size of cherries, attracted our attention:

Branches over our heads.

Oddly-shaped clumps.

A single fruit, splitting its spotted husk, and the pink growth cone.

I couldn't recognize this, and I've been Googling "Chinese tree fruits", plugging in names of fruit as they occurred to me. I've looked at kumquats, loquats, goji berry, quince, longans, pomegranates, persimmon, strawberry tree, litchi, and so on; anything smallish that I couldn't remember the growth pattern of.

Now I'm hungry.

I found nothing like this, until I examined the twigs and those fuzzy knobs on the tips of some branches. Aha! Magnolia! Google that!

It's the Star magnolia, Magnolia stellata, a familiar tree in Vancouver parks, named for its white flowers. Not all trees produce fruit exactly like this, but the general pattern is the same. At the end of the season, the husks dry out, and the fruit splits open to reveal hard orange seeds. I've seen those before.

There's a good photo on Flickr, here.

.

No, oranges do not grow on pear trees.

Sunday, taking a breather during a very animated birthday party at my son's house, I wandered among the fruit trees behind the garden to see what was on offer. A large pear tree caught my attention; from a distance, it looked as if it were bearing small oranges.

No such luck. Not even orangey pears. This is what I found:

Gymnosporangium, the pear-juniper rust.

These mounds grew on the underside of the leaves. Out of each, one or more nipple-like, slightly hairy, pale growths sprouted. Where the sun shone through the leaves, the whole mound glowed a brilliant orange.

Closer view of a couple of mounds.

Topside of a leaf

Some kind of gall, I thought; some insect growing inside. I Googled "pear gall" and got nowhere. "Pear disease" turned up Gymnosporangium sabinae, the European pear rust. This one is probably Gymnosporangium fuscum, the pear trellis rust, introduced to BC around the 1960s.

It's not an insect, after all: it's a fungus. And it has a surprising life cycle. The fungus overwinters in junipers, in the form of orange, jelly-like swellings along the twigs. When the warm spring rains arrive, it produces spores, which float in the air to the nearest pear tree. (All varieties of pear seem to be susceptible.) The pear develops, first, orange spots on the leaves, then the mounds. At the end of the summer, the "nipples" appear, and produce new spores, different than the ones that attached themselves to the pear trees. These are carried back to the junipers on the wind, re-infect them, and wait for the spring.

The recommended remedy is to remove any junipers from the vicinity of the pear trees, up to 100 feet away. (This site suggests 100 metres.) Fairly simple, if the junipers are on the same property. In this case, the pear tree is near a wall that borders an apartment complex. The landscaping (we can't see it) is probably mostly junipers.

The other solution is to remove the pear tree. Or put up with the spots and the occasional damaged fruit.

Wikimedia has a clear photo of the sporulating heads.

.

Another hidden treasure

As you go into Reifel Island Migratory Bird Sanctuary, at the last right-angled turn before you enter the lane alongside the slough, you come to a gate and a road leading straight ahead. Mostly, the gate is closed and locked.

There's a sign; a bird and a name. Canadian Wildlife Research Centre, as far as I remember. Nothing to hint that it is open to the public. We went in, once, finding the gate open. The road went over a bridge, around a corner to parking lots. A sign here said, "Visitors Report to Office." It was raining hard, and the place looked dark and uninviting; we made a U-turn and drove on out of there.

Some time later, I ran across a web page that mentioned walking trails at Alaksen, which turned out to be this site.

Wildlife conservation is the primary purpose of Environment Canada’s protected areas, but most sites permit public access and some offer visitor facilities, and limited activities and services: Alaksen NWA in British Columbia ... provide special facilities to view wildlife. In these protected areas, there may be exhibits, trails, brochures, and viewing stands to help visitors understand their surroundings. Locally published notices inform people about the activities that are generally permitted in protected areas... (Hinterland Who's Who)

So we had to go back. I found out that they're open weekdays, 9 to 5, whereas most visitors to the Bird Sanctuary go on the weekend; no wonder we'd found them closed.

The old Reifel residence now houses the research centre.

We had time for a quick visit a couple of weeks ago, an hour before closing time. We registered at the office; the woman on duty was friendly and helpful. She loaded me down with info and a map. Somehow, winding down the stairs from the office, and along the hallway, I got turned around, and we headed in the wrong direction, out into the fields, on a path that dead-ended at a fence. Back around the other side of the building, I stuck my head in an open window and asked for directions. Unorthodox, but the man at the desk by the window cheerfully explained how to find the trailhead.

We chose the shortest trail, a circle to the river and back along Ewen Slough. It was quiet; a few sparrows chattered in the bushes and swallows hunted over the water, but otherwise, we heard only the wind (threatening rain) in the trees and our own footsteps. A few sleepy cows watched us from a field belonging to the farm next door.

I liked the sculpturing of this salt block, shaped by cows' tongues.

It's the end of summer; past time for most flowers. Now, the trees and shrubs are all bearing fruit. I sampled several handfuls of blackberries, tart and sweet at the same time. Red elderberries hung over the trail. So did wild cherries, but most were fallen and dried up:

Fallen cherries, caught on a hawthorn branch.

Hawthorn laden with bird goodies.

I think this is some variety of native honeysuckle. A scruffy, tangled, climbing vine.

Evergreen blackberry. My favourite of all the blackberries. (Compare to the Himalayan berry.) But those thorns are really nasty. Look how they curve backwards, like snake fangs.

Trailing blackberry. Our only native blackberry, sweet and flavourful, but hard to find. The long, trailing vines wind in and out underneath other plants.

Red osier dogwood.

A huge mountain ash, (about 1/8 of the tree here) heavy with fruit.

Alder, a bit more discreet.

Maple.

Staghorn sumac. The red fuzzy spike is not the flower; it's seeds in a furry coating.

And the fruiting body of a shelf fungus. The rest of it is hidden inside the tree.

A mix of weeds and grasses on the banks of the river. Purple loosestrife and a mint, a few spikes of sedge.

We got back to the office after 5. The gate was closed. Not to worry, another staffperson told us; just drive slowly up to it, and it would open for us. And the rainclouds had moved on. So we had time to dawdle around the building and discover the wasps' nests and the baby swallows.

We'll be back.

.