Written in runes

Near the top of the hill over the Campbell River canyon, they've recently cut down a tree. I stopped to read its history. Written in tree runes.

Quite a varied life it has lived!

Okay, the basics: a cross-section of a tree trunk shows 5 main zones. 

1. The outer bark. Here seen as a black line, just under the moss. This is dead wood, serving as a protective layer.
2. The inner bark, the phloem. This is the narrow zone just beneath the bark; here water and nutrients (sugars, mostly) flow from the leaves to the rest of the tree, going both up and down, as needed.
3. The cambium. This is the growing part of the tree, renewing itself annually. The outer edge produces phloem cells, and the inner cambium produces xylem cells, which become ...
4. ... the sapwood. This is new wood; here water and nutrients move upwards from the roots to the leaves. Here is where the annual rings are formed; the wood is lighter, less dense in the summer, and darker, denser when growth slows in the winter.
5. And finally, the heartwood. This, again, is dead wood, and serves as the strong support holding the tree upright.

But this trunk has a bit more history to tell.

Rings and squiggles and painterly zones.

What's happening here? There's that bright, yellowish area; it doesn't go all the way around the trunk. There are several growth rings apparent, and beyond it, there's that dark line that looks like it should be bark.

Sometimes a tree's situation changes as it grows. Other trees grow up and shade it, where it used to receive sunlight. Or another tree will fall against it, causing it to lean over. Or it  may be subject to high winds, creating more resistance on the windward side. Sometimes, then, the tree forms new wood on one side, building up strength where it is needed for support. This may be what has happened here.

Then there are those black lines separating dark wood from lighter wood. These are the borders of individual fungal colonies. The lines themselves are caused by an accumulation of fungal and plant chemicals. We would normally see the fungi as those shelf fungus that sprout on the bark, but most of the fungal activity is hidden here, inside the trunk.

Detail, fungal zone lines.

Then there is a section near the centre of the stump, where the wood is darker and full of holes. It could be insect damage, or maybe a dry rot fungus.

View from the other side, the slow-growing side.

Detail of annual growth rings and fungal zone lines.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Cerca del puente que cruza el cañón del rio Campbell, recientemente han cortado un árbol al lado del sendero. Me detuve para leer su historia. Escrita en runas.

Foto #1: Ha vivido una vida llena de cambios.

Bueno, empezamos con lo básico: una sección transversal de un tronco de árbol muestra 5 zonas principales. 

1. La corteza exterior. Aquí se ve como una linea negra, cubierta de musgo. Esta es madera muerta, y sirve para proteger la madera viva.
2. La corteza interior, o sea, la floema. Esta es la zona angosta debajo de la corteza muerta. En esta zona, agua y nutrientes, por la mayor parte azúcares, fluyen desde las hojas hasta la madera del árbol, subiendo o bajando como lo exige la situación.
3. El cambium. Esta es la parte del árbol donde sigue creciendo, formando una nueva capa cada año. La zona exterior produce células de floema, y en el interior son producidas las células de xilema, que forman parte de ...
4. ... la albura. Esta es madera nueva; aquí agua y nutrientes suben desde las raices hasta las hojas. Aquí se forman los anillos anuales; la madera es más clara, menos densa en el verano, y oscura y densa cuando el crecimiento disminuye en el invierno.
5. Y finalmente, la madera dura. Esta es madera muerta, sirviendo como el soporte que mantiene el árbol en pie.

Pero este tocón de árbol nos cuenta algo más de su historia.

Foto #2: Anillos y curvas y zonas pintadas. ¿Qué pasa aquí? Hay esa zona amarilla, que no rodea por completo el tronco. Se ven algunos de los anillos anuales, y luego esa zona café oscuro que parece que debería ser corteza.

A veces el ambiente del árbol cambia durante su vida. Otros árboles crecen y le quitan la luz. O otro árbol le cae encima, haciendo que se incline hacia un lado. O le azotan vientos fuertes, creanod una resistencia en el lado expuesto. A veces, en estas situaciones, el árbol desarrolla más madera de un lado para sostenerse. Esto puede ser lo que pasó aquí.

Y luego se ven esas lineas negras que separan diferentes zonas de madera. Estas denotan los bordes de colonias individuales de hongos y son el resultado de una acumulación de sustancias químicas producidas por los hongos. Normalmente, vemos los hongos como esos políporos que brotan desde la corteza, pero de hecho, la mayor parte del hongo se esconde aquí dentro de la madera.

#3: Detalle, mostrando las lineas de las zonas de hongo.

Y hay un area cerca del centro del tocón, donde la madera es de color oscuro y tiene muchos hoyos. Puede ser trauma causada por insectos, o causado por el hongo podredumbre seca.

#4: Vista del tocón desde el otro lado.

#5: Detalle de anillos anuales y lineas de zona de hongos.

Things that made me happy in 2023, Part 2

The springs that come and the summers that go,
Autumn dew on bracken and heather,
The drip of the Forest beneath the snow....
All the things they have seen,
All the things they have heard:
An April sky swept clean and the song of a bird....

(From The Charcoal Burner, Now We are Six, by A.A. Milne.)

Sea and sky and forest floors ...

Again, in no particular order.

A beach, sky, beachgrass in the sunlight. Today, Black Creek estuary.

Silvery bark. February.

A sparrow taking a bath. December.

Poor photo, but still... Teeny-tiny white flowers. No, I don't know what they are. June, airport trail.

An old boat propeller on a friend's board fence. June, again.

A hard, dry fungus on a short stump, black and orange. November, at the museum.

Looking into an alternate universe.

There's a large glass vase on the shelf above my desk, just where it catches the earliest rays of the morning sun and splits them into rainbows up and down my wall. The rest of the time, it shows a reflection of a fictional room, certainly not mine. It gives me two extra doors and a view of the water. I don't know where it gets them from.

The tiniest fly visible with the naked eye. Just a speck on my wall. September.

A cormorant, heading up-river. December, Tyee Spit.

More anon.

A Skywatch post.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Cosas que me hicieron feliz en 2023, #2.

Las primaveras que vienen, los veranos que se van,

Rocío otoñal sobre los helechos y el brezo,

El goteo del bosque bajo la nieve ...

Todas las cosas que han visto,

Todas las cosas que han oído:

Un cielo limpio de abril, y el canto de un ave ...

(Fragmento del poema, "The Charcoal Burner" por A.A. Milne.)

Fotos:

1. Una playa, el cielo, hierbas halófilas bajo el sol. Hoy, Black Creek.
2. Una corteza de árbol color plata. Febrero.
3. Un gorrión bañándose. Diciembre.
4. Pobre foto, pero me gustó. Flores pequeñísimas, no sé de que especie. Junio, cerca del aeropuerto.
5. Un hélice de barco viejo colgado en la barda de una amiga. Junio.
6. Un hongo duro y seco que crece en un topón cortito en el césped del museo. Noviembre.
7. Una vista de un universo alternativo. Se trata de un vaso de vidrio que permanece en el estante arriba de mi escritorio, justo donde le llegan los primeros rayos del sol en la mañana, y que el vidrio transforma en arco iris y lo pinta en mis paredes. En otros momentos, me muestra lo que parece un reflejo, pero por cierto no es un reflejo de mi cuarto; me da unas dos puertas imaginarias, y una vista al mar.
8. La mosca más pequeña que se puede observar a simple vista. Un puntito en mi pared. Septiembre.
9. Un cormorán cruzando Tyee Spit, volando rio arriba. Diciembre.

Predatory fungus

An amazing fern-eating polypore:

Chomp.

Side view.

It's on a decaying stump, blanketed with dead leaves and moss, shaded by evergreen ferns. Which the polypore has latched onto. I tugged on it; it's as immovable as the fungus itself.

Top view. 

And the polypore, in turn, has become slug dinner. Chewed chunks, top centre, far left.

More white stuff

I've paged through my mushroom and slime mold books over and over, and can't identify these.

On the underside of a log

This was the largest of a series of patches of a white and cream growth, soft and moist, with pink spots in the thicker areas. Fungus? Slime mold? I don't know.

A closer look. 

And then there's this:

White and green powders

Many of the stumps and trees along the Canyonview Trail are covered with a fine white or green powder, spreading itself sometimes over the whole stump. In the photo above, it's even growing on the spider webs. Another one I can't identify.

On a small, broken twig lying on the ground, I found these white mushrooms growing:

Top view. Fanning out from a side stalk. The moss shows the size.

And the view from underneath. The curve at the left is my thumb.

Waste not

The challenge this week at DPS was to photograph food at the dinner table. I was thinking of this as I chopped veggies for my supper, (which turned out delicious, but not photogenic) when I found that one of my tomatoes had sprouted a fungus. So I ate the supper, and photographed the tomato.

Roma tomato, with pin mould, Mucor sp.

Transparent stalks, with round fruiting bodies (sporangia) at the top.

New sporangia are transparent, becoming dark grey as they ripen.

Zooming in

"Young" threads, with tiny growing sporangia

And then the tomato, mould and all, went into the compost bin. Nothing goes to waste around here.

Fur, lace, horses' hooves, and toasted cheese

The best time to visit the forested side hill of the Watershed Park, is after a week or so of solid rain. (Typical BC spring weather, in other words.) Then every downed tree, every stump, every mossy branch shelters mushrooms and slimes. They come in all sizes and shapes, from twisted threads to wide, flat, "cowpie" shrooms, in all colours; purple, blue-green, white, orange and yellow, brown, even black. We scramble over logs and through blackberry patches, getting wet and scratched and muddy, unheeding, following the glimmer of yet another beauty just beside that next stump.

And this year, we missed our window. The weather has been almost summery; we had started the daily watering of the gardens after several days without rain. And the Watershed is dry. The rainy-day mushrooms are gone, disappeared back into the ground until the rains return.

So yesterday's little pearly shrooms were all we could find. Or so it seemed, until we turned our attention to the "boring", as in "always there" polypores, the hard, woody, dull shelf fungi. And there they were; everywhere we looked, and as beautiful, if not as fragile, as the delicate mycenas and glowing orange slimes.

On the standing trees:

Tall birch, still growing, but already home to dozens of polypores.

On fallen logs:

Birch on the ground. And a couple of polypores. The large one is a tinder polypore, aka horse's hoof fungus.

Another two on a birch log. They grow on dead and dying hardwood trees.

A different hardwood. Young maple, maybe? And a broken polypore, showing the brick-red interior.

Back of a shelf polypore, showing it's pen-and-ink scribbles.

Probably a red-belted polypore. These are extremely variable. The fruiting body, usually the bottom while the tree is standing, is white on a young polypore, turning to brown as it ages.

Front view of the same fungus.

Dye polypore. This one is soft and spongy. It grows on dead wood, and on the ground near evergreens.

Young 'uns. Probably red-belted polypore. They look good enough to eat, like toasted cheese bagels with cream cheese. They're not.

Fuzzy brown and white. Unidentified shelf fungus.

Zooming in to show the fur cloaks and lacy petticoats of these fashion-conscious belles.

And some strange trees, tomorrow.

Pink jellies

On the felled trunks beside the new beaver pond at Cougar Creek Park, we found this pink jelly fungus:

Popping through cracks in rotting alder.

They come in all shapes, from cups to tongues to buttons to blobs.

The tiny red dots in the wood at the top are more of the same.

This one is more fan-shaped; behind it is a tongue and a button.

I stepped over this rotting stick and missed the tiny candlesnuff fungus.  Good thing Laurie saw it.

Mystery green thing. What is it?

This is the time of year to look for lichens and tree fungi; when it's not too cold to stand still, admiring, and the leaves still haven't hidden them from view.

These are a few from that "spooky wood"*.

Staghorn lichen? Two different species? The one on the left is slender and spiky. And a flattened leaf lichen. On bark of a creek-side shrub.

More staghorn.

A leaf lichen on a twig. It looks like Parmelia (sulcata?).

And I don't know what to think of this next one. Is it a lichen or a shelf fungus? Or a lichen colonizing a shelf? (Click on the photo to see it full-size. What do you think?)

Mystery green thing.

And a common shelf fungus:

Iffy photo of the whole shelf. Too much white on top for the long-suffering camera.

Underside of a similar one on the same log.

Googling along, looking for holly-leaf lichen colonizing bracket fungi, a question caught my eye; "Why do lichens ..." And I had clicked away from it before I realized that it was the perfect question. Why do lichen take on so many disguises? Why do they eat rock? Why do they live on so many different suraces? Why do they change shape and colour from one week to the next?

1. To drive us amateurs crazy? or ...
2. To drive the professionals crazy, too? or ...
3. Because they can?

*The wood is not all that spooky in real life. It's a mini-bird sanctuary; the snags have been left purposefully. Eagles perch here, flickers, woodpeckers, assorted songbirds, and even a horned owl nest in the cavities in the broken and dying trees. Unfortunately, from the shade of the understory, the birds are black shapes against the sky. When they're visible at all, that is.

The lichens, at least, are at eye level.

Can you put a name to this?

What is it?

The skin of a _____?

We found it on the Boundary Bay beach, just below the high tide line. Does that help?

How about if I step back a bit?

That should be pretty obvious.

It's art by Ol' Ma Nature, working in mixed media: black rot fungus, some of that green slime that grows on any wet wood around here in the winter, sun and salt bleached wood, in collaboration with a crew of chomping critters.

Here's the context:

Old driftwood, root end.