Broom and buoys

So I promised. Promised to tear myself away from the news, which seems to hold a glimmer of hope today, so there's that, and get back to posting photos of my peaceful surroundings.

Okay.

Last week I had a flat tire. Out on the highway, on the way out of town. I discovered that I had no jack in the car, so I got to hang around on the edge of the road until someone stopped and helped me. And so I wandered about exploring a site I had seen in passing and wondered about before, but never would have stopped.

It looks like an old, abandoned gravel pit, where off to the side, someone has used the space for open-air storage. Over the years, invasive Scotch broom has taken over most of the pit.

Scotch broom, Cytisus scoparius. Pretty but not a welcome sight.

Due to its affinity for light-dominated, disturbed areas, any disturbance activity, such as road or home construction near infested areas, can enhance spread. Scotch broom invades rangelands, replacing forage plants, and is a serious competitor to conifer seedlings; Douglas fir plantation failures in Oregon and Washington have been credited to infestations of this plant. (Invasive Species Council of BC)

When I was a kid, living in White Rock for a year, a neighbour had Scotch broom on his property. I loved it, even though my mom said it was a horrible weed. But it was so cheerful!

So bright!

Mom was right, of course. Here on the island, we have a native species that colonizes waste spaces, old logging sites, torn lands; fireweed. It leaps into open sites and prepares them for regrowth of the evergreen forest, while providing forage for wildlife. Broom prevents forest regrowth, and is inedible. Fireweed dies back as the trees recover; broom spreads and spreads and spreads. But it is cheerful!

Among the yellow broom bushes, someone is storing dozens of yellow balls.

Steel buoy floats, about a metre in diameter. Six fit on a flatbed truck.

I've wondered about these, seeing them here and there. If it weren't for the flat, I wouldn't have stopped to look at them, though.

They sort of fit with the broom, like some sort of enlarged seeds. Recently, someone has brought in a bunch of new ones, all shiny and yellow. They are probably for sale, although I saw no signs, and Google map gives no company name. Or maybe they'll rust and blend in with the broom. I don't think they'll re-seed themselves, anyhow.

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Se me ponchó una llanta en la carretera a una poca distancia de la ciudad. Y descubrí que no tenía gata para llantas, así que tuve que esperar al lado de la carretera hasta que alguien viniera a ayudarme. Y tuve la oportunidad para explorar un sitio donde de otra manera nunca habría parado.

Es un espacio que parece haber sido usado para excavar grava, y luego abandonado. Y como muchos sitios, ha sido invadido por los arbustos de Genista. 

Genista es un arbusto que se escapó de jardines y ahora cubre espacios abiertos. Es una plaga porque no provee alimentos para animales ni salvajes ni domésticos, e impide el crecimiento de nuestros árboles nativos. Y se extiende rápidamente, no dejando espacio para otras plantas.

Cuando era niña, me gustaba, porque el color es tan brillante, aunque mi mamá decía que era horrible. Mamá tenía razón, claro.

Tenemos una planta nativa que se ocupa de sanar tierras heridas, el epilobio. Protege la tierra y los arbolitos recién brotados, provee alimentos para los animales, e incluso para humanos. Y cuando el bosque empieza a crecer, el epilobio desaparece. La Genista es al revés; no deja crecer los arbolitos, ni se puede comer, y se queda para siempre.

Pero sí, es bonita.

A un lado del espacio, entre la genista, alguien está usando el espacio para depositar materias fuera de uso. Hay docenas de pelotas grandes, amarillas, como de un metro de diámetro, de metal, oxidándose lentamente. Las he visto al pasar y me preguntaba qué serían, pero no hubiera parado para investigar sin la llanta ponchada.

Parece que son flotadores para muelles y boyas.

Se mezclan con la genista, y casi parecen alguna especie de semillas gigantes. Recientemente han llegado más, nuevecitas, limpias y brillantes. Tal vez están en venta, pero no encontré anuncio o nombre. O tal vez se oxidarán como las otras. Por lo menos, no se van a reproducir.

Shelter from the storms

Found at the back of the vacant lot/new forest:

"Somebody loved me."

Fire and ice

January sunshine warms bare trees with their feet in frozen puddles.

Old leaves, drowned and frozen, feed new buds in the sunlight.

Sunlight blazing through a dead blackberry leaf.

Old and new.

Detail of last year's leaf.

Snails in sediment

During the cooler months of the year, most of the vacant lot is under an inch or two of water. I progress by stretching from one clump of dead grass to the next, mostly getting my feet wet when they squelch down into the mud.

In one of the pools, I noticed a patterned stone, with a handful of gravel nearby to sort of stand on. Up close, I saw that the pattern was formed by trails in the flocculated sediment.

The little circles where grass blades dip underwater mark the surface, about an inch above the stone.

I couldn't get close enough to get a good look, but once I checked my photos, I found the artist.

Do you see the snail?

Zooming in closer:

I've saturated the colours of the snail a bit, to make him more visible.

I don't know what species this is, nor how he survives in puddles that turn into hard, dry clay in the summer.

Other, shallower puddles had their share of snails, too, as well as many tiny, darting specks, too small and too fast to identify. I took photos, but all I got were the snails. Pretty ones, if extremely small.

Three snails here, and a few ostracods. (They look like tiny pink marbles. Can you find them?)

And here's a land-based snail. Or what's left of him, after a winter in the open.

Common garden grove snail, broken and bleached.

More about these ponds, in summer, with ostracods and other goodies, including, maybe, a relative of the trail-making snail. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Got him!

Well, sort of.

I went across to the vacant lot/new bush, to see what's happening in January. It was as expected, soggy underfoot, treacherous with trailing, leafless blackberry canes and rusting wires, bleak under its coat of dead grasses and bare trees. But there was life there, and I followed the trails, bending to watch things swimming under the ice of the puddles, or chase a beetle until he scuttled under a mass of rotting weeds.

I rounded the base of a rise near the back of the lot, and there, almost spitting distance in front of me was a coyote. A big adult, looking healthy and alert; well fed.

He saw me at the same time. By the time I'd focused the camera, he was racing off into the bush along the creek.

But I got a photo. Not a good one.

Just the top of his back visible. The orange thing is a piece of trash caught in the branches. His head is behind that.

I retraced my footsteps, and went around the hill to enter the creek bed from the far side, hoping to maybe catch another glimpse of him. But he was long gone. What I did find was his scat.

Coyote scat. A nicer word than poop, but the same thing. By the feather remains, I gather that he's been eating birds.

Looking up coyote scat id for confirmation, I learned a few things.

• Recognize the shape of coyote scat. Coyotes produce scat that is about the diameter of a cigar and is tapered at one end. (ehow.com)

Check. The taper isn't too obvious in the photo, as it's at the far end and tangled in the grass.

• Droppings will also be frequently located at strategic locations such as cross roads and along trails as coyotes use their droppings to mark territory. (ICWDM)

Check. This was a well-travelled trail I was following.

• Coyote scat often does not have much of a scent. (Wilderness College)

Check. I didn't notice any scent. A dog's droppings, fed as he would be with processed dog food, has a strong, offensive smell.

• In one Missouri study of coyote scat, local coyotes were found to have consumed 47 different animal species and 28 different plants.* Thus, don’t be surprised if your coyote scat contains fur/hair, berries, nuts, garden crops, bone bits, grass, leaves or dozens of other appetizing tidbits. (Nature Skills)

This guy has been eating meat. Birds at least, probably rabbits; I've seen several in the undergrowth along this creek. I wonder if he'd also tackle young raccoons? Several raccoons that I've seen have been maimed in some way; one has no tail, another has lost an eye. In a fight with a coyote?

(More on the vacant lot goodies tomorrow.)

Priorities

Grasshoppers are extremely frustrating beasties. They hop away from directly beneath your feet, you see them fly and land, you know exactly where they are. But they aren't, not any more. They're over there. Or behind you. Or further on. So you take a step in that direction, and they erupt from beneath your feet, from a spot you've just examined thoroughly without seeing any sign of them.

You see one sitting still on a patch of bare earth, and you sneak up on it gradually, barely sliding your feet along inch by inch, hardly breathing. It doesn't move, doesn't seem even to be looking your direction. You raise the camera to your eye, slowly, gently, and there's nothing there. It's watching you now from 10 feet away.

So when I saw a big 'hopper in the centre of a cement slab the other day, I was surprised when it stayed put as I walked over to it, even as I got down on my knees in the mud next to it. That close, I realized why; there were two of them, and they were busy.

I think these are Melanoplus grasshoppers. I'll send them in to BugGuide to be sure.

I was able to get within 6 inches for this shot, with the camera resting right on the cement slab. I eased in half an inch closer, and they hopped it.

Weathered leftovers

More photos from the vacant lot: things found underfoot.

In an abandoned cement ring, water, seeds and other detritus is caught in a spider web. I liked the patterns reflected in the water droplets.

Just a dying leaf, belly up.

Zooming in to show the pattern

Leaves and a Nike hoodie. I often find good clothes here, just dropped as if on a bedroom floor.

Well, fire-starting stuff, anyway. Part of a 4'x8' sign for "Luxury Duplexes".

Face under leaves. Another part of the sign.

Some of the vacant lot critters, tomorrow.

Mixed messages

Sometimes, when the clouds threaten rain, the sun doesn't get the memo and keeps right on shining, sneaking underneath the clouds to warm the trees. I love the contrasts in these moments; all dark blue-grey above, yellows and greens below.

Here's the view from our vacant lot, Saturday afternoon.

Looking east, with the sun shining low in the sky behind me.

Alders, weed trees, in early fall colour.

Future forest. At this time of year, it's under a few inches of water. Most of the two-block vacant lot is alder and blackberry bush now; this section is still mixed weeds and baby alders.

Facing west, where there's still a patch of blue sky.

A Skywatch post.

Find the spider

It's been a while since I visited our vacant lot across the street. It's almost a small forest now, with a small clearing in the centre, half underwater. And I've come back with a stack of photos; weeds and seeds, skies and water, human leftovers, and some interesting critters. Skies tomorrow, I think.

For now, here's a hiding spider. I turned over a board under a stand of alders by the creek, and there was her messy web, and a flash of brown as she raced for cover. She's in the photo: can you find her?

Yes, there she is.

Now do you see her?

Mine! Mine! Mine!

I'm still sorting photos. I keep running across files that I had put aside for later, and then forgotten. I've started a list to be processed and posted; some are from as far back as 2009.

I found this tiny spider on a rock this afternoon, in a photo series from 2012:

"Hey! Who are you? And no, you can't have any of my lunch! Scram!"

Did she know she had such a large, threatening shadow? I doubt it, because when I came a bit closer, she dropped her meal and jumped back to assess the situation. I stopped moving, and she came right back to pick up where she left off.

"Better grab it quick or that nasty one-eye will take it. She can go catch her own. I'm not sharing!"

Looks like her meal was another spider, or maybe a small harvestman. She was welcome to it.

A couple of water bugs

In the vacant lot across the street, the ground is hard-pan clay mixed with old construction debris. It is marked on old maps as the headwater of Cougar Creek, but the creek has long since disappeared; all that's left is a shallow pond that dries up by summer, leaving cracked, hardened mud. After the spring rains, though, much of the lot is under an inch or two of water, and for a couple of months it teems with swimming and diving life.

It's early days, still, but the temperature is rising, and a few ambitious bugs are patrolling the newly-drowned roots and debris.

Still testing the new lens, I examined the water, where I could reach it without sinking in the mud. I saw a few water tigers, the larvae of predaceous diving beetles, about 1/2 an inch long, the same colour as the mud and only visible when they moved. The camera couldn't find them; it's not programmed to notice biological movement, as our eyes are.

I was surprised to see a water strider; it's really early for these, but this was a very small strider, a youngster.

This, the camera could see even when I couldn't.

The surface of the water in some areas was covered with tiny, sparkly dots that I only saw when I downloaded the photos. I'm thinking they're probably more ostracods, like I found there a couple of years ago, in June. If there's another dry day soon, I'll go over with a magnifying glass to check them out.

And there were a couple of the small diving beetles, Acilius semisculatus. These swim smoothly and quite fast near the bottom (although in 2 inches of water, the bottom is near the top). Usually, I see them but don't get a photo; they're mostly gone by the time the camera focuses, so I was pleased that this new lens is so fast, even when I'm shooting from several feet away, through muddy water.

Quick shot before he disappeared under the roots.

Test shot. Nothing there, I think; nothing but gravel and old plants under two inches of water.

Red tips, brown tips

Last year's tansy, still tall and proud:

Brown tansy atop a mound of gravel and old cement leavings in the vacant lot.

This spring's greenery, promised:

New growth on the tips of a shrubby plant growing in two inches of water.

A Skywatch post.

Testing a new lens

I took my new 85 mm lens (AF-S Nikkor 85mm f/1.8G) out for a walk yesterday: around the yard, over to the neighbours' gardens, and across the street to the vacant lot. I came home very happy with it, and am even happier now that I've seen the results on the computer.

First, I took only one shot at some subjects, and almost all of those photos turned out fine. Where I took three photos, I had trouble choosing which worked out better; only a very few were total duds.

Next, I stood at the edge of a garden and took photos of daffodils several meters away, and the flies perched on them turned out in focus. No need to trample a neighbour's flower bed.

The vacant lot was soggy and muddy; I had trouble finding secure places to stand; I didn't dare get down on my knees to get photos of critters, nor even bend over to shoot, for fear of losing my balance. I took photos through several inches of muddy water, and the ground underneath turned out nice and clear.

I turned over a board with my foot, and shot the underside, from a standing position. Here's what I found.

Centipedes, pill bugs, and a tiny blue-headed snail.

The lens is fast, and without the need to crawl in close, I could get the centipedes before they ran off. And get them in focus, too. I took three photos of this group of wood bugs; all three turned out ok.

Large egg case. The shadow turned out a bit noisy.

On the mud where the board had been. The cluster of eggs glowed a true lime-green. I don't know what laid them.

Egg case, in a pale yellow web.

There were a few miniature red ants running on one end of the board, so tiny I had to bend over to see them. The camera did get them, but barely.

More test shots tomorrow, maybe the water pics.

Hard-scrabble existence - IRFD 2012

It's been a long, dry summer. Anywhere we are not watering, the ground is baked as tough as a high-fiber rye cracker, and looks as lifeless as a Martian desert. We (my grandson and I) set out to flip rocks in the vacant lot across the street without much hope of success. But there had been pools, the water retained by hard-packed clay, in June. And a shaded creek runs around two sides; maybe, maybe there would be something to see.

And we gave that big lot a good flipping; leaving no stone larger than a pair of fists and light enough to heave off the ground untouched. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Dry, caked soil; dry, flaked grass blades; dry blackberry canes, thorns at the ready. I ripped my legs in several places; will I ever remember to wear protective clothing? (Probably not.)

The creek bed was dry, even deep beneath the rocks. But on the edge, where some of the weeds were still green, we found life, at last.

Under a broken board; the wood held in a bit more moisture. One carabid beetle.

Next board; one tiny snail, probably dead.

And under a large rock slab, we found a spider in her web.

But look again at that spider. Look above her, on the upper left. See the pale tangle of legs, the remains of her recent molt? Now look below her; see the sunburst of legs? Another spider! It's not often we find two spiders in such close proximity.

The second spider has come out into the light.

The only thing that brings spiders together, even for a short visit, is sex. The one on the upper right is the female; her abdomen is large and round. The male, below left, is smaller, skinnier, and his pedipalps, or "feelers", have enlarged tips, visible in the photo as dark spots just in front of his mouth. He has excreted a drop of semen, and scooped it up with his pedipalps. He will carry this around until the female allows him to approach close enough to deposit it in her sexual organ, on the underside of her abdomen.

If he's lucky, he'll escape uneaten.

And another rock, another spider. Same species, much smaller.

Another rock. And a tiny spider, of the same species.

Back home, at the edge of the garden, where I've been watering, a colony of sowbugs sleeps on the underside of a rock.

I should have carried a shovel. Something has to be alive out there, besides spiders; the spiders are not starving. Maybe the other animals retreat deep down to where they find cool dampness while the sun shines.   I'll go and look one day soon.

Here today, gone tomorrow

We had a good, hard, pelting rainstorm a few days ago, all day long. Across the street in the vacant lot, that means we'll find big puddles, slowly draining through the hard-packed clay soil. They're temporary ponds, lasting only a few weeks unless it keeps on raining, but while they last, they're busy. Crows congregate around the larger ones, bathing and arguing. A few times, we've found mallards resting there. Insects drop in for a drink; beetles and snails rest in the cool mud.

At the far end of the lot, I stopped to inspect a new pond, a few inches deep.

About a quarter of the puddle.

The top layer of clay had dried and cracked; the cracks remain, even underwater.

But what were those tiny specks in the water? When I bent down to look, I could see that they were swimming about. Hundreds upon hundreds, thousands of them, as small as dust, and about the same colour as the yellowish mud. I took a photo with the flash, to see if that would make them more visible.

They're all over, but hard to see against the muddy bottom.

Zooming in, no flash. There are a few springtails on the stick, about 1 mm. long, slightly bigger than the swimmers.

The same photo, cropped. Now the critters are recognizable as ostracods.

Ostracods are small crustaceans, typically around 1 millimetre (0.04 in) in size, but varying from 0.2 millimetres (0.008 in) to 30 mm (1.2 in) in the case of Gigantocypris. Their bodies are flattened from side to side and protected by a bivalve-like, chitinous or calcareous valve or "shell". (Wikipedia)

Under a good lens, an ostracod looks sort of like a swimming clam. If the light is right, a hint of the body can be seen through the shell; imagine an amphipod, all 14 legs vibrating constantly, inside a clamshell, with a few legs or antennae occasionally peeping out.

They live in both fresh and salt water environments, from the poles to the tropics. I have often found them in sand or seaweed from the intertidal zone. Some 65,000 species have been identified; there are probably many more to be discovered.

These ones, the ones in my puddle, have selected a particularly difficult environment. The water is clear, there is plenty of vegetation to serve as food, but if the sun shines, their home will disappear in short order. Some species of ostracod will live for up to a year; these guys won't have the chance. A few weeks, if they're lucky.

At one end of the pond, there is a mass of fibers. Old moss? Leftover trash, well rotted? I couldn't tell. But the ostracods were less active around them, easier to photograph. Click to see the photo full size; you can see the clam shape, and on one, up in the right hand corner, a tentacle peeping out.

An ostracod at home in a bowl. The one eye is plainly visible. Some ostracods have two.

How do these animals manage to live under these conditions? First, they don't waste time. They spend up to 80% of their lifespan laying eggs. These eggs are resistant to dessication; they can "sleep" in dry soil for years, until the rains come again. Some adults and young are also able to go into stasis when the pond dries up or freezes.

And also, they reproduce in vast numbers. Most of the ones in this pool won't survive the dry times ahead, but enough will to produce the next generation.

Also in the puddle were a number of these swimming bugs, very fast, zipping around the bottom, occasionally popping up to the surface for a second or two. I think they may be the Acilius diving beetle.

And a water strider, one of two.

Examining the photos, looking for a clear shot of an ostracod, I discovered this snail on the bottom. It is a species I have not seen here before.

The white oval to the left of the snail looks like an abandoned clam shell. (Look at the photo full size.) This may be a molted valve. Like other crustaceans, the growing ostracod  has to abandon the hard outer shell, in the case of freshwater ostracods, 8 times.

There's an excellent YouTube video here, showing the live ostracod kicking inside her shell. Watch all the way to the end, when she suddenly starts zipping around.

And this is mind-boggling:

Ostracods possess the largest sperm in the animal kingdom in both relative and absolute terms. Ostracod sperm can be up to ten times the length of the male's body! Some male ostracodes need a special organ (Zenker's organ) to aid in sperm transport.

However, about a third of freshwater ostracod species don't worry about that; they are parthenogenic, and need no males to reproduce.