A couple of hunters.

Crows are scavengers, eating almost anything they find, usually anything left out in the open, easy pickings. On the shore, that may be anything from a hermit crab too slow to get undercover at low tide, to taco chips left by human beachgoers. This was the first time I've seen one actually work for his supper.

Here he is, looking over a snail. But no, he had other ideas.

It's in this clump of rockweed.

He dug at this rockweed for a while, ripping out plants and tossing them aside. The one in the photo is the third I saw him tear out. He dug out an oyster shell and threw that away, too. His target was hiding deep underneath; a rockweed isopod, a 3 cm. long, squirmy, leggy morsel. 

Got it!

Rockweed isopod. They hide at low tide, and cling tightly to the seaweed; it's not easy to pull them off.

Herons are always hard workers, intense stalkers. The little fish found in tidepools are elusive; as I walk towards a pool, I see movement; a ripple and no more. The fish have seen my shadow and are now hiding. And though I stand perfectly still, they don't show themselves again until I've lost patience and moved on. The herons are more patient than I. And faster than the fishes. This one caught two fish while I watched.

Standing perfectly still, pretending to be another rock.

Mouthful

A heron eats about 1/2 kilo of fish every day, twice that in breeding season. That's a lot of little fishies!

And I came too close. On to the next pool!

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

Los cuervos son carroñeros; comen casi cualquier cosa que descubren, generalmente alguna cosa  abandonada; hallazgos fáciles. En la playa, recogen desde un cangrejo ermitaño que no se escondió a tiempo hasta tostadas dejadas por humanos haciendo picnic. Esta fue la primera vez que he visto que un cuervo haga algún trabajo para ganarse la cena.

1. Aquí está, mirando un caracolito. Pero no, no se le antojaba.
2. Lo que quería estaba escondido bajo este grupo de fuco, algas marinas pardas. Se ocupó por un tiempo arrancando plantas y tirándolas a un lado. La que tiene en la foto es la tercera que vi. Luego encontró un ostión; eso también sacó y desechó. Por fin capturó lo que buscaba; un isópodo de alga parda, un bocado patudo de unos 3 cm. de largo.
3. Aquí lo tiene.
4. Isópodo de Wosnesenski. Se esconden bajo las algas y se agarran fuertemente; es difícil arrancarlos.
5. Las garzas, en cambio, son trabajadores muy dedicados. Los pescaditos que se encuentran durante la marea baja son tímidos; caminando hacia una poza intermareal, veo algo que se mueve; una ondulación repentina, y nada más. Los pescados vieron mi sombra, y ahora están escondidos. Y aunque me detengo largo rato sin moverme, no vuelven a salir hasta que me haya ido, habiendo perdido la paciencia. La garza es mucho más paciente. Y ataca rapidamente; es más veloz que los pescaditos.  Capturó dos en unos minutos mientras yo observaba.
6. Un bocadito. Las garzas comen medio kilo de pescados a diario; ¡un buen número de pescaditos!
7. Y me acerqué demasiado.

Bullies, devourers, thieves, and pacifists.

Continuing with the July assortment, these are animals in my aquarium and on local shores.

The bullies first.

Crabby. All blue-eyed innocence, except for those menacing pincers.

Crabs are fun to watch; always busy, always on the move. I had three in the aquarium, and they were thriving, molting and growing, scrambling everywhere, re-arranging rocks three times their size, rolling snails and tearing the sea lettuce. All well and good, until they grew big and fast enough to attack their tank mates.

There were three big rockweed isopods, inoffensive seaweed grazers, bigger than the crabs. They'd come in with seaweed long ago. The crabs grabbed and ate two; I caught ol' blue-eyes in the act.

They ate one of the big hermits. And my old red shrimp. There was no need for that: I've always fed them well.

So I fished them out of the tank and hauled them down to the beach, where they strutted into the waves, waving pincers, ready for action. They didn't know about fish and gulls yet.

The remaining residents of my tank breathed a sigh of relief. Or would have, if they were breathers.

Signal crayfish, Pacifasticus leniusculus. Identified by the white markings at the wrists.

We found this crayfish, dead, floating in the shallows of the Campbell River mouth. Another aggressive predator: they will eat anything, from rotting vegetation to live fish and their own relatives. My son had one that got in among his goldfish, ate them all, and grew very big.

They're a freshwater crustacean, but tolerate brackish water, freshwater mingled with tidal surges.

A bright orange starfish. (Blood star, maybe?) Stories beach. A notorious predator.

The Monterey sea lemon. Trundles around slowly, eating sponges and other sessile animals (fixed in place, like barnacles.) On Stories beach, at the south end of Campbell River.

Pale pink and green anemone in my tank. It arrived as a mere speck on a shell, and now has grown to half an inch across. I rarely feed these; they thrive on copepods and other plankton. Including, possibly, all those baby hermits.

Orange-striped green anemone, Duodumene lineata.

This one was on Stories beach, but a few tinier ones came home with me on a stone full of barnacles for my Leafy Hornmouth snails. I counted seven tonight after I cleaned the tank.

The tiniest of the fishermen; a two-tentacled worm (a Spionid) in a hole in an old shell. They catch detritus, which slides down the tentacles into the mouth.

Another, with leftover sand grains around the mouth. The worm cleans off the edibles, and spits out the sand.

One of my hermits, a Hairy.

These guys eat leftovers, dead critters, seaweed, hydroids and diatoms when they can. Totally inoffensive. Except when they see one of their friends with something good; they're not averse to rolling him over and stealing his food. Especially if he is smaller than they are.

It's a dog eat dog world in there.

A bully, a devourer of barnacles (Leafy Hornmouth snail), and the pacifist limpet, who putters mildly about cleaning algae off the rocks and the glass.

Sunny interlude

Walking west from White Rock beach, I left a trail of goodies for the crabs and hermits. I couldn't help it; the stones and rocks are crowded with barnacles; at every step, I heard the crunch of another dozen crushed shells. Barnacle steaks, ready to eat as soon as the tide covered them.

Once the tide comes in, with or without my clumsy footsteps, the barnacles are in danger. Whelks drill through their shells and eat them, crabs pry their protective plates off, starfish evert their stomachs over them and digest them even inside their little castles. Flatworms ooze inside to eat them. Even the vegetarian limpets bulldoze the new homes of the youngest barnacles.

It's better out in the sunshine. At least they can sleep in peace!

Barnacles and miniature periwinkles on a rock face. Most of the barnacles have been eaten already.

There's safety in numbers; the odds of being missed are greater. But building sites are hard to come by.

When acorn barnacles are crowded, they grow tall, reaching for open water. And then other barnacles grow on their tips.

Barnacle scars on a stone, all that's left of somebody's dinner. There's enough meat in one of these large ones to interest a gull.

The rock face again. More barnacles and periwinkles.

Zooming in. Barnacle scars, empty barnacle rings, and a few sleeping barnacles.

Billions of barnacles and nary a sign of starfish or whelks. But wait 'till the tide comes in; they'll be there, ready for supper.

Scat, berries, and bugs. And a rat.

The Serpentine River lives up to its name. It winds across the flat Fraser Delta farmland, spreading out into wetlands where it finds opportunity, dawdling on its way down to the flats of Mud Bay. In the Fen, a wide, gravelled path winds with it, Northwest, then South again, almost meeting itself as the river carves out a bulbous finger of marsh.

I took a side path, leading across a small bridge, through a thicket, and past tall stands of cattails bordering a former lagoon, now mostly dry, cracked mud, in spite of the previous day's rain.

No wonder the birds are elsewhere! Two stubborn Canada geese waiting for the water to come back.

From here, the path turned west, ducked through a narrow tunnel of bush - I'm short, and the branches brushed my head - and then along a straight path, hawthorns and baneberry on the left, great mounds of the invasive Himalayan blackberry on the right, sometimes three times or more my height, and loaded with purple-black berries. I passed people with buckets, picking. I tried a few; ripe and sweet. Even after I had left them behind, when the breeze picked up, I could smell their perfume.

Hard at work, pollinating. More berries on the way!

He's carrying big bags of pollen to take home to the nest.

A common red soldier beetle, Rhagonycha fulva.

Another turn, a short, noisy walk alongside the highway, and then the path came out onto the river bank again. Beautiful silence!

This end of the fen is old farmland, with remains of fences and groves of hawthorn and crabapple, all showing their dismay at this dry summer.

Hawthorn, needing water.

Here the path is bordered on the inner side with weedy grass, all brown and dead. I poked along, chasing grasshoppers and big blue dragonflies, with no luck, and dodging coyote scat.

This one has some sort of fungus.

Besides the coyote scat, every few steps, (one with a hawthorn berry on top, like the cherry on a cupcake), the grass was full of rabbit pellets. Predator and prey, but the rabbits seem to be doing ok.

A hawk was patrolling this dry land, swooping low over the grass, looking for small birds and mice, and maybe a juicy rabbit, too.

Tiny fly, unidentified. About half an inch long. Update: Sand wasp. Thanks, Christopher!

White feather. What bird would this be from? About three inches long.

And a final surprise; swimming along the shore, going downstream at a good clip, I saw this big rat:

Not a house rat.

And over the river, a pair of swallows were catching mosquitoes. Good!