Morning stroll

 Some random shots at Oyster Bay.

Morning stroll

Dungeness crab molt. It always amazes me how they back out of their old skin, legs and all, leaving behind even the eyes.

Large clamshell.Nutall's cockle, Clinocardium nuttalli, I think.

Grass gone to seed.

Gumweed flowers still half closed.

Happy dance.

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Algunas cosas que vi caminando en Oyster Bay.

1. Paseo matutino.
2. Cangrejo Dungeness, Metacarcinus magister. Siempre me asombra como es que los cangrejos se retiran de su carpacho viejo, con todo y patas, dejando atrás lo que parece un cuerpo entero, incluyendo hasta los ojos.
3. Almeja de Nuttall, Clinocardium nuttalli
4. Pasto alto, produciendo semilla
5. Grindelia integrifolia. Las flores se abrirán cuando calienta el sol.
6. Baile alegre.

All the colours of the rainbow

Bright colours, wild and tame, from flowers to critters: I'm tidying up the "to be posted later" folder, making space for May's findings.

New grass just leaping up from under the moss.

Bleeding heart in a pot at home.

Big-leaf maple flowers

I don't know what this is, or how it got into my garden. But I love the colours.

This year's new evergreen fern fronds, unrolling.

Coiled pre-fronds.

And now, the critters:

Green shore crab, with dried shrimp treat.

Close-up of the underside of a sea urchin; tube feet with cog-wheel tips, mouth, spines, and the red seaweed the urchin has decorated itself with.

Pale blues, and yellow legs. A greater yellow-legs, Tringa melanoleuca.

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Una variedad de colores brillantes, domésticos y salvajes, desde plantas a bichos: estoy organizando mi folder del mes de abril, haciendo espacio para lo que encuentro en este mes de mayo.

Fotos:

1. Un brote nuevecito de pasto, recién surgido de debajo del musgo.
2. Corazón sangrante, en mi jardín.
3. Las flores del arce de hoja grande.
4. Esta flor apareció en mi jardín, no sé de donde, ni que es.
5. Los helechos de hoja perenne se empiezan a desdoblar.
6. Y debajo, unas hojas todavía están enrollados.
7. Y ahora, los animales: aquí un cangrejo verde, Hemigrapsus oregonensis.
8. Viendo muy de cerca un erizo de mar verde; se ven aquí sus espinas, sus pies ambulacrales, con sus extremos en forma de ruedita dentada, la boca, y el alga roja con que se adorna.
9. Azul claro del agua, y patas amarillas: un chorlo mayor, Tringa melanoleuca.

Just because

I went for a walk in the hills above Echo Lake. In the open, the sun was warm and dragonflies looped from sun to shade over a small creek. The moss on the rocks was dry and crisp, but thick enough to make a comfortable cushion. I sat to watch the dragonflies. And took a photo of the grass right in front of my nose.

Unidentified grass.(Update: sweet vernal grass)

The dragonflies never stopped zipping back and forth.

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Caminaba en el cerro arriba del lago Echo. En campo abierto, el sol calentaba, y las libélulas daban vueltas de sol a sombra sobre un riachuelo. En las rocas, el musgo estaba seco y crujiente, pero con suficiente profundidad como para formar un cojín cómodo. Me senté para observar las libélulas, y saqué una foto del pasto justo en frente de mi cara.

Las libélulas no se detuvieron ni por un segundo.

Dune walk

Along the dunes at Oyster Bay. Mostly sandy, with logs piled higgledy-piggledy from the high tide line to the forest; grassy, prickly with the seed heads of big-headed carex, dusted with lichens, anchored with tall grasses and assorted salt-tolerant shrubbery; home to garter snakes, grasshoppers, butterflies, and little twittering birds.

Photos in no particular order.

Typical mix. I'm not sure what the shrub is. There are orange fungi on the end of the farthest log out on the left and on the front log on the far right.

Silver burweed, Ambrosia chamissonis, just starting out. By mid-summer they will cover most of the bay end of the dunes.

Trails in the sand.

These trails were everywhere on the bay end of the dunes, well above the high tide line, in dry sand. There were no snail trails below the high tide line; these aren't made by sea snails, nor crabs, nor hermits. They're too irregular to be garter snake trails. If they're made by land snails, it's odd; the trails end abruptly, as if the snail picked up her skirts and tiptoed away. I've seen no live snails in this end of the dunes.

Any ideas?

One of the many grasses. A brome, I think.

Baked tree root.

Pink and green grass

At the foot of an old hawthorn tree beside the path at Oyster Bay, I found a patch of a grass I hadn't seen (or maybe noticed) before. An unusual grass; for a while I wasn't even sure that it was grass, but the flowering heads were grass-like. The clump was about 6 inches tall, and dense.

It almost looks like an evergreen tree, sort of. Except for those seed heads.

A single stalk, picked and hand-held. Background colour: the mud flats of Oyster Bay.

It wasn't in my books. Nor in the grass photos Google chose for me. I turned to E-Flora BC. They have 289 species in the local Poaceae, the grass family, most with small thumbnails. Down near the bottom of the list, I found it: Bulbous bluegrass, Poa bulbosa ssp vivipara.

And now, looking at all the photos on E-Flora, I realize that I probably have seen it before. Many times. Photos taken in early May are pink and green; photos taken in June show taller plants, brown and dark brown. I've seen those, but wasn't paying enough attention.

E-Flora's info says that the flowers are yellow. They aren't visible; grass flowers grow inside an inner bract, inside an outer bract, protected by two more outer bracts. The red colour here is of all those bracts.

It's an imported grass, from Eurasia, common now in BC.

Winter grass

Just grass. Beside the estuary.

Just because.

Light along the shore

It's been a while since I've been to Tyee Spit, mostly because there's no shade, and this summer has been hot. But suddenly, it's wet and cold; time to go looking for mushrooms. Tyee Spit is a good place for them.

And for watching the light over the water. I walked the shore a couple of hours before sundown, facing the dying light.

Stumps along the shore

Distant loon. The shore plants are broom (grrrr!), Oregon grape, and blackberry.

Just grass

More shore "weeds"

Turning to face away from the light. The tail end of the Spit from a new viewing platform. Grey weather, but it's not raining, for now.

Today's spider for Arachtober is a pensive jumper.

Green fangs!

#Arachtober

Just grass?

I walk through fields of spring flowers, and usually don't see them; it's just grass, something to pass by, push aside, look beyond.

Until I stop to look at what I've been ignoring.

Dune grass, Leymus mollis, in flower. The dangling yellow ribbons are the anthers, hanging from a thin filament, the whole making up the stamen, the male part of the flower.

These, a Bromus sp., possibly, are heavy with seeds. (And a bug.)

These are growing in Oyster Bay Shoreline Park, around the outside of the meadow, and on the dunes lining the beach.

Grasses, take two.

More of the grasses of Oyster Bay:
 

Tall grass with a drooping head, with long awns. Unidentified.

Another large grass. One of the Bromes? Or a foxtail, maybe?

Unidentified.

Shorter, fatter inflorescences.

I need a grass expert! The more I paw through my guide, the more confused I get!

At least I know these. Not grasses, but sedge. Carex macrocephala, Large-headed sedge. Also known (by me) as "Watch your ankles sedge".

It's just there

Bread. Candy canes. Hats. Tacos and birds' nests. Beer and baskets.  Paper, sometimes; also some roofs. Rum and bamboo bicycles. Breakfast cereal. Sushi. Place mats. And so on, and so on. They're all made from grass.

Dune grass, Oyster Bay Shoreline Park

We're grass eaters. The bulk of our food is either grass, or relies on grass in the form of animal feed.

"Grasses now provide us with 3 times more food than do peas and beans, tubers, fruit, meat, milk and eggs put together." (Plants of Coastal BC)

And yet, we - I - mostly ignore the grasses. It's "just grass". A mistake.

Dune grass and unidentified grass, Oyster Bay.

The checklist for plants of Oyster Bay Shoreline Park includes 24 different species of grass, of over 200 species in coastal BC. That's a lot of missed beauty. I've started to pay attention, finally.

One of the Bromes. Cheatgrass, maybe.

The grasses are flowering plants, but the miniature flowers are hidden under an arrangement of bracts and awns. To understand what the guide tells us, we need a new vocabulary: the bract that covers the flower is called a "lemma": two more bracts, beneath the floret, are called "glumes". The whole contraption: glumes, lemma, flower, inner bract, and awn: makes up a spikelet. A bunch of spikelets makes an inflorescence.

Each type of grass has a different arrangement of these parts. It's complicated.

I think this is one of the vernal grasses.

I am going to try to photograph and identify as many of the grasses of the park as possible. Any help with identifications (and all corrections) will be vastly appreciated.

I couldn't identify this one. It's a small grass. (That's my finger at the bottom left.)

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.

York Road beaver pond

I've never seen any beavers in the bit of pond that borders the road; I've never seen a hint of the dam. But every time I pass by, I stop, just in case.

This visit, there were misty reflections and wet grasses to reward me.

Something down below is bubbling, making circles on the water.

Common rush seed head, soaking wet.

Tule and grasses and their angled reflections.

Just wet grass, dry on the inside, wet outside.

Wet winter grasses, in ditches, crispy and cold; so tempting! Oh, to be a kid again, in rubber boots and a wool jacket that Mom would hang over the wood stove to drip dry when I came home!

I've been remembering a cold winter afternoon, years and years ago, when I was a kid in school in White Rock. My brother and I took a "shortcut" home from school. (These shortcuts usually took much longer than the usual roads, of course.) Our route involved walking down the ditch, and through a culvert under the road. The ditch was full of dead grass, pale yellow-brown, glittering with frost in the shadows, dripping wet where the winter sun had reached it; it rustled icily as we passed through. There was a smell of soggy mud, with overtones of rotting hay. So much more inspiring than the boring sidewalks and picket fences of the street!

Zooming in on those dead grasses.

York Road. I do love these country roads!