Grey rocks, just rocks.

 Just because I liked this: rocks piled in a quarry near Little Bear Bay.

They'll eventually end up along a shore somewhere, maybe.

Today's travels: Brown's Bay and Lost Lake. I'll have some of the photos processed tomorrow.

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Una foto de piedras. Nada más porque me gusta. Estaban amontonadas en una cantera cerca de Little Bear Bay.

Hoy fui a Brown's Bay y Lost Lake (Lago Perdido). Mañana tendré listas unas de las fotos.

Aging well

 Another rainy day, with snow at noon, and rain to wash it all away by supper time.

So, another photo from storage.

Fading hydrangea, at the end of October.

Summer hydrangeas are beautiful, but I love the textures they develop in the fall. This one is tied together with spider webs, and I think there's a zebra jumping spider in the centre of one of the flowers.

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Otro dia de lluvia, con nieve a mediodía, y por la tarde suficiente lluvia para hacerla desaparecer por completo.

Aquí otra foto de los archivos: una hortensia, ya pasada de su frescura de verano, a finales de octubre.

Las hortensias son bellas en verano, pero me gustan las texturas y colores que se desarrollan por el otoño. Esta viene amarrada con telarañas, y creo que hay una araña saltarina cebra en el centro de una de las flores.

Shapes and textures

Tidying up: these are a few leftover photos from last month, taken in a friend's garden when I went to look at mushrooms:

A poppy, on its way to ripen seeds, wearing a fuzzy cap.

Red berries. I''ve forgotten what these are.

Arbutus bark. I love the colours and texture of this tree.

And the arbutus is growing it's own garden! A baby mountain ash.

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Estas fotos se me habían olvidado. Son del mes pasado, el dia en que fui a mirar hongos en el jardín de una amiga.

Primero: una amapola, formando sus semillas.

Segunda foto: no me acuerdo que árbol es este.

Tercera: un árbol madroño. Me encanta la corteza de este árbol, tanto su color vivo como la textura.

Cuarta: el madroño está cultivando su propio jardincito, con un arbusto "ceniza de montaña occidental", Sorbus sitchensis, creciendo entre las ramas del madroño.

Textures on the shore

Wind, rain, and waves rearrange objects on the shore, sometimes in surprising ways. And provide me with contrasting textures to look at.

Teredo-drilled log, sponge, ice. As found, well above the high tide line.

Also well above the usual high tide line; a small collection of rocks in a hollow near the root end of a log. As found.

On a lonely, icy stretch of Miracle Beach.

Rock, cloud, water

The colours and textures of Vancouver Island: grey, white, blue; hard, wet, barely there. Always cool, even at mid-day.

Looking southeast, down Georgia Strait towards Oyster Bay and Comox

This was last week; this week, the clouds have moved in again and the winter greys are back.

A Skywatch post.

Patterns and textures, critter version

It's critter season, finally! My camera is full of beasties, taken in and around my house. Out in the grass, as I work killing hawkweed, grasshoppers and spiders hop and scramble away from my vicious weed tool. In the evenings, the kittens practice their high jumps, trying to catch huge crane flies; mostly, they miss.*

And Sunday afternoon, in Oyster Bay, I chased another of those invisible grey grasshoppers across the sand. With each hop, he disappeared, and I searched until he saw me coming and leapt away again. I gave up, eventually.

This 'hopper was more forgiving.

Brown grasshopper on a rock face, Oyster Bay. Each body part, even the eyes, has its own pattern, from mottled, to striped, to stained glass, to herringbone, to the fern-leaf design on his head.

The snail had died and left his empty shell, pitted and bleached. I liked the texture.

He's more creamy than pink, but the colour bounces off my hand.

* I'm as bad as the kittens; I just abandoned this to stand on a dresser because a spider caught a fly on the ceiling above my desk. At least I don't try to eat the spiders, just take their photos.

Sand, waves, and distant snow

Wandering idly on a sunny afternoon, I ended up on the sand at Saratoga Beach.

It keeps on snowing over on the mainland. Only the lower hills are blue.

That pale beige line on the horizon is Mitlenatch Island. Somehow, no matter the weather on either shore, the sun always shines on Mitlenatch.

In spite of the sun, the wind was chilly, and by the time I'd reached the water's edge, (with flying, icy spray) the sun had hidden itself behind the clouds. I walked to the rocks, turned over a few and tickled a couple of crabs, then hurried back; my hands had gone numb with the cold. It didn't help that I was carrying a collection of wet clam shells for identification practice at home.

A Skywatch post.

Leaf

Colour and pattern in a fallen Big Leaf maple leaf.

Collected from a pile in the gutter. Ephemeral beauty.

Hair, leaves, lungs. And more hair.

I never get tired of looking at lichens and fungi, in all their myriad forms. These ones are all growing on wood, old and new.

Three lichens on a rotting stump, Upper Campbell Lake.

Fuzzy bracket fungi on a log. Upper Campbell Lake.

Lungwort (Lobaria pulmonaria) and moss on a living tree, Gold River.

Dry rot is caused by a fungus, too. Keta Lake.

Entire trees colonized by hair lichen. Rooney Lake.

It is estimated that 6% of Earth's land surface is covered by lichen. (Wikipedia)

Bullseye lichen

The passage of time marked in textures ...

From outer, new edge inward; leafy, greenish thalli shrink, turn grey, then whitish and crumbly as they mature.

In crustose lichens, the area along the margin is where the most active growth is taking place. ... Most crustose lichens grow only 1–2 mm in diameter per year. (Wikipedia)

Bee on mallow

I'm still reviewing forgotten photos. This one is from June of 2013.

Bee on mallow flower. I love the similarity of texture on the petals and the wings.

Zooming in to see the wings.

One more week till Christmas. And two days to the solstice, and the days will start getting longer again. Yay!

Study in browns

Western conifer seed bug on Bosc pear.

He loved the pear; kept walking around and around it.

10 more days. This time the 15th, I'll be settling into Campbell River. I'm packed and ready; what's going to be difficult is moving my little aquarium, critters and all, without stressing them. I'll discuss my preparations for this in a day or so.

The stones are alive

I love beach stones. Wading along the shoreline, I often pick up one to marvel at its colour or pattern, to wonder about its history. Sometimes one is too beautiful to throw back, and I drop it in my pocket. And later find it has turned a nondescript grey, all its life and lights left back there on the shore.

But stones underwater, or with the waves washing over them; what a dazzling variety of colour and texture and pattern!

"Dead" stones, out of the water. Mostly dull blue-gray.

"Live" stones, under a couple of inches of water.

Some of the patterns are a feature of the stones themselves, the end result of millennia of mixing and melting, crumbling and compressing. The water itself, even standing still, makes its own ephemeral designs; circles where a stone distorts the surface, stripes and swirls as wavelets sweep by, shadows from floating bubbles and weeds. All of these show up in the photo above.

Boring blue-grey? No! (It's worth clicking on this to see it full size to appreciate the detail on the two stones on the left.) 

Textured stones.

Water rippling over a mottled peach and grey stone.

More variety. Every colour of the rainbow, including violet.

Textures and shapes: Green on green

Tall ferns cast their shadows on the skunk cabbage leaves in Cougar Canyon:

The ferns themselves are those blurry pale shapes on the left. The dark fern shapes are all shadows.

Slugs or snails have been at work here.

Busy day tomorrow; we'll be going to Deer Lake, weather permitting. Goodnight for now!

Designer wear for the discriminating hermit

Hermit watching again, I noticed the textures of the shells they use for clothing. And the shabby chic look goes well on their gym equipment, too.

Abalone shell, much pitted, and (I think) turban shell on hairy hermit. This one is eroded, and then, after I'd scrubbed it clean to donate it to the hermits' wardrobes, it's been populated by green algae, and something that fills the pits with chocolate drops.

More shells coming: I'm following a couple of hermits bearing slipper snails.

Name this thingie

It took me a while to figure out just what Laurie had taken a photo of. And he sees faces in it that I can't.

What do you see?

Snail with a chimney? Sheepdog house?

Over on Fertanish Chatter, Bill has been posting photos of tree bark, asking the same question. He's on #9 already; this one's easy, some of the others, not so.

Sand and sky, with polka dots

The patterns and textures of White Rock beach at low tide:

Above the usual high tide line, fragments of driftwood slowly disintegrate.

When the wind lets up, the gentle wavelets are responsive to tiny local differences in the sand.

The five-pointed star of a dime-sized sand dollar.

Purple polka dots on the pincers of an angry crab. And drying sea lettuce.

Sharp points of a molted crab shell.

And the abdominal plate of another.

Seaweed draped over a rock, and floating in the shallow water.

Rocks, seaweed, and reflections. Looking west towards White Rock.

Rocks and empty sea. Looking east.

Critters and questions, next.

With our backs to the sea

Friday was a sunny day, for a change. We went to our usual spot on Crescent Beach, but in the spirit of change, we turned our back on the water, and explored the weather-beaten logs and weedy banks at the top of the beach. So many colours and textures! So many hidden corners! Here's a sampler:

Dying blackberry leaf

Graffiti on a silvery stump

Old, rotting root wood. Looks like some tortured painting by Van Gogh.

Crane fly. I had never seen one like this, and it wouldn't stand still for even a second. I chased it all over an upturned root of a tree, and then lost it. I think it's a Tiger Crane Fly.

Wild apple or crabapple blossoms

An unidentified plant growing out of dried eelgrass on sand

Lichens

I went around poking the camera into holes in stumps to see what the flash turned up. This was a spider's lair; the entrance was almost two inches across. I couldn't see a spider.

Laurie says this is a red-spined long-tailed salamander. I have my doubts. In a puddle caught by two adjacent logs.

Maple flowers. So tiny, so red!

Just a split stone, on a rotting log. The outside of the stone was nondescript; just a smooth greyish stone.

This was another hole in a stump. We could see the white slime mold, but only discovered the large cup mushroom when we looked at the photo at home.

Split stump. I like the texture, and the caterpillar-y incurled edges of green bark. The black circles are some kind of mold or lichen.

Spirea.

A tiny plant, blowing in the wind. I haven't identified it yet.

Another heart for Clytie.

And we were so engrossed in our pokings into cracks that we ignored the cries of a pair of eagles circling overhead. A man in the lane later told us that there's a web-cam over their nest. I looked for it on the web, and may have found it, at Hancock Wildlife. I think it's Delta #2. We'll look for it in the trees next time we visit.