Stories Creek story

Making my way back from looking at the eagles' nest the other day, taking a different route than the one leading me to it, half-lost among curving and dead-end streets, I passed a sign, "Storie Creek Park".* I parked and started down the trail.

It turned out to be a narrow greenbelt, about 100 m. wide at the widest point, sheltering the creek, which runs down towards the ocean from the forests above. Campbell River occupies a long, narrow belt along the shore; the distance at this point from the shore to the last house is a bare 800 metres. So, though in a residential zone, it is still wild land. The sign warns visitors that "Bears and Cougars do live in the area and pass through the park." Bears are common enough here, even in my backyard a mere 2 minutes drive from downtown, but cougars? Stay out of this park alone after dark!

Google map superimposed on satellite view, to show the creek route. (A bit off; it has the creek running through a house.)

The sign also warns about seasonal high water flows and high winds. Stories Creek can be tumultous in the rainy seasons; the banks may move about, the trails may be treacherous at these times.

Looks tame enough now.

In some forests, the trees stand straight and tall, closely packed, reaching for the sunlight. Along the river, where water undercuts the banks, fallen trees make open spaces. Here, humans have modified this; where trees have come down, the logs have been cut into smaller lengths, and shoved to the side of the trail. The standing trees, Douglas-fir, alder, maple, and birch, are widely spaced (for BC's rainforests). Some show signs of stress; reasonable, with human fences and pollutants a stone's throw away.

Dust lichen and moss on a maple. The trunk is oddly-shaped; lumpy and swollen.

Intertwined roots. 6 trees, huddling together, as if for protection. This gives them strength to resist the turbulent waters and strong winds in the spring.

Tree in a tree.

This struck me as strange; a cave in the lower trunk of a tree (alder, I think) with what looks like a smaller trunk inside, with its own bark.

Scar where a branch broke off.

The black marking is a fungus, possibly Sorocybe spp. And the knobs around the edges? They look like burls in the making. Are they the result of the damage caused by the break, or did they weaken the branch, causing it to break off? The tree's not telling.

Burl formation is typically a result of some form of stress such as an injury or a viral or fungal infection. (Wikipedia) 

*(Also identified in the sign at the park entrance a few meters away as "Stories Creek", and spelled "Storey" on another sign nearby and "Storrie" as the name of the road. An apostrophe and the "s" come and go, sometimes on the same official brochure. There was a family by the name of Storey, north of here in Port Hardy in the 1940s, and their beach suffers the same confusion over spelling. I can't find Campbell River's excuse.)

Tomorrow: some of the lichens on these trees.

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

Camino de regreso de la visita al nido de águilas hace unos dias, camino vagabundo ya que buscaba una ruta diferente a la que me trajo, pasé un letrero anunciando el parque "Storie Creek" (Riachuelo Storie)*. Me estacioné y tomé el sendero que entraba al parque.

Resultó ser un espacio verde, más o menos hasta 100 m. en su punto más ancho, y protege el riachuelo, el cual baja hacia la costa desde los bosques en el interior. Campbell River ocupa un tramo largo y angosto apegado a la costa; en este sitio, la distancia desde la playa hasta la última casa es apenas 800 metros. Así que, aunque el parque está en una zona residencial, sigue siendo tierra "salvaje". El letrero a la entrada nos avisa que "Los osos y las pumas viven en esta zona y pasan por el parque." Los osos son comunes aquí, hasta atracito de mi casa, a unos 2 minutos del mero centro de la ciudad. Pero, ¿las pumas? ¡No te atrevas a entrar a este parque a solas después de anochecer!

Foto #1: Un mapa de Google, sobre la misma vista desde el satélite, para mostrar el curso del riachuelo. (Que, por cierto parece estar un poco desviado, ya que pasa por dentro de una casa.) 

El letrero también incluye una advertencia que hay que tener cuidado durante las épocas de lluvias; el agua puede subir, y hay vientos fuertes. El riachuelo Stories puede ser algo tumultuoso en estas temporadas; las riberas pueden cambiar de lugar y los senderos pueden ser peligrosos.

Foto #2: Por ahora, se ve pacífico.

En algunos bosques, los árboles se mantienen erguidos, derechitos, cerca el uno del otro. Al lado del rio, donde el agua desmorona la ribera, los árboles caídos forman espacios abiertos. Aquí, la gente ha hecho sus propios cambios: los árboles tumbados los han cortado en trozos y los han arrimado hacia los lados de los caminos. Los árboles todavía en pie, los abetos de Douglas, los alisos, los arces, los abedules están algo separados (en lo que se refiere a los bosques de aquí en la zona pluvial). Algunos muestran señales de estrés, lo que es de esperar, estando tan cerca de las casas y los contaminantes ambientales.

Foto #3:  Líquenes polvosos y musgos en un arce. El tronco está malformado, hinchado y con nudos.

#4: Raices entrelazadas. 6 árboles, como si se juntaran para su protección. Esto les da fuerzas para sostener el impacto de aguas y vientos turbulentos.

#5: Un árbol dentro de un árbol. Esto me pareció algo extraño; en una cueva en la parte baja de un aliso, crece lo que parece otro arbolito, con todo y su propia corteza.

#6: Una cicatriz donde se rompió una rama. La mancha negra es un hongo, posiblemente Sorobyce spp.. ¿Y los nuditos alrededor? ¿Resultaron a causa de la rotura de la rama, o es que la trauma originó los nudos? El árbol no me dice.

La formación de nudos típicamente es el resultado de alguna forma de estrés tales como un herida o un contagio de un hongo. (Wikipedia)

*También se nombra en el letrero a la entrada del parque, a apenas unos metros de distancia, como "Stories Creek", y se deletrea "Storey" en otro letrero cercano, y "Storrie" como el nombre de la calle. Se le añade a veces, o no, un apóstrofe o una "s", a veces las dos formas en un mismo folleto oficial. Hubo una familia llamados los Storey, en Port Hardy, en el norte, en los años 1940, y la playa que toma su nombre también sufre la misma confusión. No sé cual será la justificación que da la ciudad de CR.

Mañana, veré algunos de los líquenes que crecen en estos árboles.

Fishy

Growing up, I learned to call them fish: starfish, jellyfish, even sunfish. Why, I wonder? They're not fish; it makes no more sense than if I were to call the crabs, "crabfish" or "hermitfish". And I had also learned never to call a whale a fish; that would be silly.

Common names are sometimes really odd.

This is a purple sea star, Pisaster ochraceus, or, translating the Latin, ochre starfish. Yes, the "fish" part is there in the Latin, too; Pisaster is a combination of Piscis, fish, and Aster, star.

Scientific names are sometimes really odd, too.

I had automatically named the file, "Starfish". The habit is deeply ingrained.

And these are moon jellies, Aurelia labiata, not jellyfish. "Labiata" derives from the Latin, "Labiatus", lip. There is probably a good reason for that name, but I can't find it.

At the border between gentle waves and wet sand.

A second moon jelly, exposed on the sand at low tide.

The four lilac semi-circles are the animal's gonads. The female's are usually a paler pink, or even whitish.

Just a reminder:

... plastic bags that end up in the ocean often look like jellies to animals that depend on these drifting creatures for food. Thousands of turtles and birds die each year after swallowing indigestible wads of plastic mistaken for jellies. (From Monterey Bay Aquarium)

If you see a plastic bag on the beach, pick it up and trash it, please!

Squinty

This small cellar spider hangs from the ceiling near my window, day after day, waiting for an incautious mosquito or blundering crane fly. She eats them and cuts them loose from her skimpy web; when I dust the dresser beneath her, I find crane fly legs and wings longer than her entire body. (But not longer than her legs; never longer than her legs.)

Long-bodied cellar spider, Pholcus phalangoides*.

These spiders look so delicate, so fragile, that it is surprising sometimes to find one halfway through eating a huge, hairy, large-fanged house spider.

The remains of a Tegenaria with the cellar spider who caught it. Compare the relative sizes of the pedipalps (feelers/grabbers, centre front, just above the fangs).

At first glance, it looks like she has two eyes, instead of the usual eight; they're arranged in two clumps of three, with two tiny eyes in the centre.

Zooming in. She's got a fat belly; she may be pregnant.

*The meaning of the name, Pholcus phalangioides, is uncertain, but it probably means "Squinty-eyed critter that looks like a harvestman"; both of these and the crane flies share the nickname, "Daddy long-legs".

Powder blue tail

Aka Whitetail.

Names of living critters are funny things. The more specific they are, the less they seem to correspond to the actual individuals, maybe because life doesn't like being put in boxes.

The Common Whitetail skimmer has a brown or blue abdomen (not tail; that part of the name is wrong, too), depending on its age and sex. It is also known as the long-tailed skimmer, although its abdomen is relatively short, less than the wingspan.

Common whitetail male, mature. Plathemis lydia

The young males and the females have brown bodies, with white or yellow side stripes. The mature males are a chalky blue, getting chalkier as they age. In full sunlight, some of them do look almost white, which explains the name.

They catch their food, mosquitoes and other flying insects, by hovering or skimming over the surface of calm water. At least that part of their name fits.

The marital status of moths

I found this moth on the washroom eaves at Reifel Island Migratory Bird Sanctuary.

Solitary underwing. Catocala sp.

Before I sent it in to BugGuide, I spent a while scanning their photos to see if it was there already. And I found a match; the Betrothed Underwing, Catocala innubens. Except that its range is 'way over on the East coast.

I gave up and submitted my photo. A few minutes later, I had an answer; it was possibly either the Once-married, unijuga, or the semirelicta, which translates as "Half-widowed", both very similar, but found on this coast.

Researching these, I found mentions of other look-alike underwings: the Old-wife, palaeogama, the Little Wife, the Connubial, the Mother, the Sweetheart (amatrix), the Bride (neogama), the Widow, the Divorced (repudiata), the Cheater (adultera), and even the Girlfriend.

Some are named after interesting women from history and legend: Delilah, Magdalen, Sappho, Scarlett, Aholibah, Helen (of Troy?), Andromache, Desdemona.

Or they are named after their mood: Dejected, Tearful, Sad, Mourning, Penitent, Inconsolable. I didn't see any happy underwings, although one is called Serene.

The common names given to species of Catocala are often fanciful and arbitrary. (BugGuide, Unijuga page)

I noticed.

For a more complete list, look at this Moth Photographers' Group page, or the Wikipedia list of Palearctic species.

Possum, Oh Possum!

The possum has been back. And this time, I've got a better picture.

Sort of a big rat with bad hair. And long toes.

I've been confused about the name; is it possum, or opossum?  And is that the same as the Mexican tlacuache?

I Googled it, and now the confusion has doubled.

The American possums are actually called opossums, scientific name, Didelphimorphia. But for some reason, they are more commonly referred to as possums. ... Australian possums are (scientific name) Phalangeridae. Both are marsupials, but that’s about it. Other than that, they are not really related at all.(From BobInOz)

Here's Wikipedia on the American possums:

The opossums, also known by their scientific name Didelphimorphia ..., make up the largest order of marsupials in the Western Hemisphere, including 103 or more species in 19 genera. Of South American ancestry, they entered North America following the connection of the two continents.
...
The word "opossum" is borrowed from the Virginia Algonquian (Powhatan) language ... from the Proto-Algonquian word meaning "white dog" or "white beast/animal".
They are also commonly called possums, particularly in the Southern United States and Midwest. However, the term "possum" was borrowed into use to describe distantly related Australian marsupials (specifically those of the suborder Phalangeriformes) when Australia became known to Europeans.

They originated in South America, from where one species spread into the American Southeast, and then west and north to here. And in each country in Latin America, they go by a different name: "tlacuache" (from an Azetc word) in Mexico, which is the name I knew, and ...

en El Salvador como tacuazines ... en Ecuador como guanchacas, en Honduras como guasalos, en el Perú como mucas o canchalucos, en Bolivia como carachupas, en Colombia como faras, chuchas, runchos o raposas, en Venezuela como rabipelados ... (From Wikipedia in Spanish)

And the Latin name, Didelphimorphia, means "double womb", referring to the split reproductive system; baby possums are born very early in their development, and crawl up the mother's belly to a pouch where they attach themselves to a teat and grow until they're ready to face the world. They are marsupials, like the better-known kangaroo.

Looking up names, I learned that some of the things I "knew" about possums were wrong.

• "Possum" has been used in the phrase, "playing possum," referring to the habit of a threatened oppossum of keeling over and pretending to be dead. Except that they don't, really, all that often; only about 10% of possums play dead.


• They are also supposed to have prehensile tails, but this only shows up in the young; an adult is too heavy for his own tail.

UPDATE: Christopher Taylor adds, in the comments,

The "double womb" is actually a bit more literal than that. Unlike the situation in humans, where the Fallopian tubes lead from the ovaries on each side to a common central uterus, marsupials have an entirely separate uterus for each ovary, with a separate vagina for each (though only a single cervix, so I think there would still be only a single visible opening externally). I believe many male marsupials have a divided head to the penis, so that they are able to fertilise both sides of the female's reproductive system at once. Even though this feature is (I think) common to all marsupials, I suspect that Didelphis was the animal that got tagged with it because, of course, the American opossum was discovered by Europeans long before the Australian forms.

Two uteri, and a pouch, to boot! And then the mother carries her babies on her back for weeks after they're out of the pouch. The burden of motherhood is a heavy one for an opossum!

A mouthful of centipedes

Rows of spores on a hart's-tongue fern in Laurie's shade garden.

Asplenium scolopendrium, I think.

A cluster of spores makes up a sorus, from the ancient Greek for "pile, heap". In the hart's-tongue, the sori are long rows; in our common native ferns, they're round dots. These long sori reminded somebody of a centipede, so the fern was named, in Latin, for a centipede: "scolopendrium".

(They look more like caterpillars to me, but according to the naming conventions, the first person to describe a plant or critter gets to name it.)

Here's the whole fern. And the fronds are supposed to look like deer's tongues. With centipedes on the underside.

The imagination boggles.

Erigone, ancient and modern

I don't know how Laurie does it. It's been a poor season for bugs; I rarely see spiders or ants or even wood bugs. An occasional midge turns up floating in the aquarium tank sometimes, and that's about it.

But every couple of days, Laurie catches me another miniscule beastie in a pill bottle. I think he must be creating them in some secret laboratory when I'm out shopping.

Today, he brought me this spider, only 2 millimetres long. He tells me that it escaped, and he caught it the second time; he hopes he didn't damage it.

And then he complains about his eyes not being what they should be!

Spider with the lid of the pill bottle. One front leg is broken off. Did Laurie do that, or is it an old injury? Spidey's not telling.

He's a male, as shown by the fat pedipalps.

This looks to be the same species as one I submitted to BugGuide last January. It was identified as a Dwarf Spider, genus Erigone. A distinctive characteristic of this genus, they told me, is the toothed edge of the carapace. I got a very blurred photo of them last time, enlarged here.Today's specimen must be a bit smaller; though I confined him under a piece of plastic and got right in close with the microscope, I couldn't be sure if I was seeing teeth or not. The teeth are smaller than the eyes, which are just visible in the photo above.

Side view. I like the long spikes on his legs.

About the name: Erigone was a mythological Greek maiden, the daughter of Icarius of Athens.

Her father, who had been taught by the god Dionysus to make wine, gave some to several shepherds, who became intoxicated. Their companions, thinking they had been poisoned, killed Icarius and buried him under a tree. Erigone, guided by her dog Maera, found his grave and hanged herself on the tree. Maera jumped into a well and drowned. Dionysus sent a plague on the land, and all the maidens of Athens, in a fit of madness, hanged themselves. Icarius, Erigone, and Maera were set among the stars as Boötes (or Arcturus), Virgo, and Procyon (Canis Minor, the Lesser Dog); to propitiate Icarius and Erigone, the festival called Aiora (the Swing) was instituted. During this festival various small images (Latin oscilla) were swung from trees, and offerings of fruit were made. (Encyclopædia Britannica Online.)

Wikipedia adds that "according to Ovid, Dionysus "deceived Erigone with false grapes", that is, assumed the shape of a grape cluster to approach and seduce her."

How the name got selected for this genus of spiders, I have no idea.

Yellow somethings

I'm always glad to see these; little lights in dark places.

Bisporella citrina

But I didn't know what to call them. I have called them "Yellow blobs", which they are, and "Yellow jelly", which they sort of look like. (Except when they're orange or grey.)

This time, I decided to find them and get the name right.

Trouble is, I found names, plenty of them. They're "Yellow Fairy Cups". Good, because they are usually yellow or orange, and they are a cup fungus, although the cup is shallow enough to be a disc most of the time.

Or we could call them "Lemon Drops". Not the candy type, though; they're inedible. And not a useful name for web searches.

"Lemon Disc" or "Lemon Disco"? Like disco lights? And what do you call them when they grow up and turn orange? "Orange Wood Cups"? That would do.

Maybe the Latin name is the best. And it's still descriptive enough. "Bisporella citrina".  "Citrina" refers to the citrus colour; could be orange or lemon. Some websites refer to them by that name alone, "Citrina".

Of course, there are older Latin names, which are handy if you're Googling. There's Helotium citrinum; that's how I found the Orange Wood Cups name, and Calycella citrina, which just takes you back to Bisporella.

Whatever you call them, (I think I'll stick to Bisporella c.) they grow on rotting or dead wood, mostly in the shade. The ones above were on a dead snag in Watershed Park, where it is always dark.