Sand and water

Boundary Bay, on a sunny(!) afternoon:

Ridges and wavelets

Sand, water, sparkles. And Point Roberts.

And I found some surprising critters to bring home. Photos and story tomorrow.

Parched!

The rain finally came to an end. The sun came out. The puddles sunk into the ground. And, in the early afternoon, a raccoon made an unprecedented mid-day visit to my yard.

To get a drink.

"Excuse me, but somebody stole my pond!"

He drank quickly, then dropped to all fours and went on his way.

Spotty wonder

It's still raining. The lawn is all decked out for St. Patrick's Day, a luscious green that owes its bright colour more to the moss, thriving in all this wet weather, than to the straggling, drowned grass. My new flowers still sit in pots, waiting for a dry day so I can plant them; the leaf mulch on the back of the garden is a slippery, slimy mess. I may have to do the spring cleanup under an umbrella.

I was standing out there yesterday, keeping out of the rain under the overhang, staring dejectedly at my mud patch, when I noticed that the Pulmonaria has shot up two flower stalks topped with buds. Yay, spring!

Pulmonaria, and Creeping Jenny in back. In the rain.

This plant has stayed green and upright over the winter, without a complaint even when some of the hellebores froze and collapsed. I think it has grown some since last fall.

I had these when I lived up north; after 4 or 5 months under deep ice, they burst into bloom with the first sunlight of the year. And what blooms! A bold pink in the bud, opening to pink flowers that turn blue as they mature. The same stalk will have flowers in all stages; a mixed bouquet on one stem.

They grow happily in deep shade, in acid or alkaline soil, even in poor soil. It doesn't mind the rain, as long as it has decent drainage. And the slugs don't like them! (I wonder if they extend their influence to the plants next to them. I'll try planting the lettuce in a circle around this one. Maybe I'll even manage to get some salad before the slugs do.)

The plant is named for the leaves that look like diseased lungs; "pulmo" in Latin, giving us Pulmonaria, or lungwort (lung plant, from Old English "wyrt".) The name is easy to remember, true, at least if you've ever seen a rotting lung. But it does have other common names, more in tune with the cheerful flowers. Some, like Adam and Eve, Soldiers and sailors, Joseph and Mary, obviously refer to the two colours showing at the same time. The patterned leaves give us "Spotted dog". But did you ever see a green dog? And then there's "Lady spilt the milk", Spotted Mary, and Jerusalem cowslip. Take your pick, or make up your own.

Lungwort Trivia : Usually, when you see a silver leaf, the color is due to a layer of wax on the leaf surface or due to a lack of the green chlorophyll pigment in that region of the leaf. Lungwort is different. In this case lungwort leaves get their silver color from pockets of air trapped beneath the leaf surface. These pockets make the tissue above them opaque instead of transparent and the normally green interior cells of the Lungwort can no longer be seen. (From Plant Delights Nursery)

White collared moth

It looks like the mothing season has begun here. (About time!) We've begun to see those little flighty Indian meal moths here and there, and tonight, this one was sleeping on the curtain behind my desk.

White head, white collar, fringed wings. 1/4 inch long.

I don't remember seeing one like this before; even from a distance, that white collar was startlingly bright. The two little dots at the front are the tips of two curved, up-turned "horns".

I can't identify it, and after looking at 2000 photos on BugGuide, I checked the last page of their images. There are 4108 pages, at 25 photos each page! That's 102,700 photos of moths. I gave up.

I've submitted it to them, but I don't have much hope of an ID. With so many moths, who can come close to knowing them all? But then again, they have surprised me before.

UPDATE: 6 hours later; They've done it again! It's the White-shouldered House Moth, Endrosis sarcitrellla. Amazing people!

And thanks, Troy!

Candytuft

Plants in pots, sitting waiting for it to stop raining, so I can plant them:

They're perennials, so even if they're late going in, they'll be good.

Three days of non-stop rain, so far. Ah, March in BC!

And I didn't have the camera in hand!

My intertidal invertebrates are from a relatively temperate climate, where the water is usually warm enough even for humans to swim. And, being intertidal critters, they tolerate a variable temperature. So with my previous tankful, I set it in an open window; the normal Lower Fraser Valley air temperatures would keep the water in an acceptable range.

But Val, my anemone from Campbell River, is another story. She likes it cold. An average of 56 degrees would be good for her.

Most saltwater aquarists invest in a chiller, a refrigerating unit that cools the water and returns it to the tank. Very nice, needing some maintenance, but what doesn't? But they are expensive! The cheapest is more than the total I've ever spent on the whole setup. And they go on up to over $1000, besides needing a cabinet and a bunch of fittings, making a racket, and being a general nuisance.

So I've gone with the freebie alternative. I've filled a bunch of little plastic cups with fresh aquarium water, and put them in the freezer. Every morning and evening, and several times during the day, I dump some of the saltwater ice in the tank, and refill the cups with aquarium water to go back into the freezer. It takes about 3 to 5 lumps of ice to bring the temperature down to where Val won't go into a sulk.

At first, I would put the ice into the water very carefully, because the hermits would startle at the noise of a splash. They're used to it now. They don't even mind when an ice chunk bumps into them when they're climbing on the eelgrass.

So yesterday, I had dropped in the first two lumps of ice. There were several hermits climbing the eelgrass; no problem. One of the larger hermits made a flying leap onto the ice. His own hermit-sized ice floe! This is living!

Too bad it was melting so quickly; his claws lost traction after a minute, and he slid off the side and tumbled down to the sand.

And, of course, I had my hands full of ice, and the camera on the other side of the room. So you'll just have to imagine it.

To make up for that, here are three more tank pics. No hermit polar bears, though.

Another look at Val's column. She has pasted shells and stones and a lot of gunk all over it. If you look closely at the photo, you'll see an amphipod (bottom right) and, at full size, a number of copepods, some carrying eggs.

Just another Nassa snail, siphon extended, sniffing out his path.

Checking out a possible change of clothes. (He didn't go for it; didn't even try it on.)

These hairy hermits are among the most drab of all the hermit crabs; a dull brownish green, darker antennae with white spots, black eyes, and a hint of blue at the knees. Or so it seemed. This camera does colours so much better! The blue knees are vivid, the carapace patterned in blue-green and gold. And I love the stripy eye stalks! I never noticed those before. (It's worth right-clicking to see this one full-size.)

Purple

Hellebore in the rain

Whatever the weather ...

Hellebores are like the postal workers:

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
Inscription, New York City Post Office, adapted from Herodotus
Greek historian & traveler (484 BC - 430 BC)

It's rained steadily all day and night. My poor primulas are all tattered and moldy. Not the hellebores, though! Tough as nails, and not as prone to rust.

Why didn't I do this before?

More coffee break photography.

I was impressed by yesterday's photo of the anemone; I had been trying for a shot of that column for some time, and it was always just a blur of green. Working from a RAW file, the detail came out clearer even than I see it in the tank, with my magnifying lens.

So I did a small experiment today. I set the camera to record both in RAW and jpeg, and took a photo of a watercolour painting that hangs on my wall. Then I processed both copies minimally, cropping them down to a small section of the painting, which gave me 100% zoom on my processing program screen with the jpeg. (The RAW file can be zoomed in quite a bit more.) With the actual painting in front of me, I adjusted lighting to match on both, and on the jpeg, colour balance. Both got identical sharpening.

Results:

Can you tell which is which?

The top one is the jpeg, the bottom RAW.

• The second one has more definition; no blurring of brush strokes.
• The colours are truer in the second. I fiddled with the jpeg for a while, trying to adjust the colours to match the painting; it was never right.
• Even though processing the RAW file takes two separate sets of controls, and the jpeg only one, the RAW file was faster, because it needed less fine tuning at the final stage.
• For the same area of the painting, the RAW file gives me more pixels, which means I can zoom in even more without losing anything.
• Right click on each one, and open the link in a new tab. The jpeg is a small photo; the second one has over twice the area, so that much more detail. In this one, even the texture of the paper shows up.

That did it. I switched the camera over to RAW alone. (It takes about 10 times the memory, so I may need the space that the second copy would take.)

About the painting: it's a watercolour by a local artist, signed AA Brooke, 1954. His father had been a professional artist, and told young A.A. not to go that route, because he'd never make a decent living. As far as I know, the son became a farmer. When I knew him, in the early 1950s, he was in his eighties, long retired, and had a garden full of roses that he was hybridizing.

Every summer, he would take his wife and camera to Switzerland and take a bunch of photos. The rest of the year, he painted from those photos. He made one for me, a small cottage on a mountainside. I kept it for decades, and then it was stolen in a move.

This one, I inherited from my aunt, and whenever I move, it goes with me in the car.

Coffee break photography

I've been working late; I took on a project that is turning out to be much more involved than I imagined, and I've had my nose to the grindstone day and night since Friday.

I took a couple of quick breaks to play with the camera. In the comments, a few days ago, Ceratina has been encouraging me to try recording in RAW, so this evening I took a few sample shots. And this morning (after 1:AM; time to be quitting, anyhow), I looked at them.

Wow! What a difference!

I've grabbed one at random, given it a quick shakedown to clean up the glass that I neglected to polish, and resized it. And here's the result:

Val, the burrowing anemone; detail of her column. She sticks pieces of shell and sand to it, but doesn't quite hide the warts.

Could be better, but that's the best photo I have seen of her yet, (check out the full size photo: right click/open in new tab) and the original is untouched, so I can re-process it when I have more time. The jpeg of the same shot was faded and noisy, and the colours were flatter.

And now, to bed. More grindstone work tomorrow.

Blue

Crescent Beach, Friday afternoon:

At the south end, almost at Kwomais Point

A half-dozen juvenile eagles were soaring over the point. This young couple were especially playful. The one in the rear repeatedly flipped upside-down to fly underneath the other, almost belly to belly.

Wet rocks and waves.

Blue and white and deep, dark grey.

Not blue:

Someone had tied this kelp stipe around and around a leaning alder.

A Skywatch post

Catching a few rays

On Crescent Beach, facing the afternoon sun, spring is well on its way.

Red alder catkins, male and female.

The male flowers appear before the leaves, hanging in long yellow and red catkins. The female catkins are small, upright and green; they mature to small, brown, woody cones that stay on the tree until the next spring. Pine siskins like to eat the seeds out of the cones.

More male catkins, and a few pink leaf buds.

Mustachioed babies!

In the One Thing Leads to Another department:

The other day, I posted this photo of a Eastern mud snail,

Nice schnozzle!

... and asked what animal it reminded you of. I suggested a camel/zebra cross, but Upupaepops came up with a walrus. So I had to look up walrus pics on Google. And yes, the snail does look like a walrus. Or a walrus looks like the snail; take your pick.

And I came across this video, which I mentioned in the comments, but it's too good to bury there.

A baby walrus, about 4 weeks old, was found abandoned near Barrow, Alaska.

'Way up there, at the tip, where the marker is. Google maps.

At 4 weeks old, he weighed 200 lbs! He was rescued by the Alaska Sea Life Center, and ... just watch the video. (2:18, but if you're impatient, forward to about 1:30 for the cuddliest baby ever!)



More information:
From ZooBorns, with more photos.
And a follow-up report, from Alaska Sea Life.
He is now in the Indianapolis Zoo.

He looked so awkward, trying to walk on two front flippers and dragging his rear, that I had to see how he operated underwater. And I found another baby video (3:51):

Video from Arkive. Left-click to open in a new tab. Otherwise, it closes this page.

Very graceful, but those two rear feet (watch for them at 1:43) come as a surprise. The baby nurses, and paddles his mother's belly, like a kitten does. (2:35) Keep on watching to see the parents hugging their child (3:12), just as humans cuddle a baby.

It all makes me wonder; what do walruses think and feel? How like us are they?

Care and treatment of spring fever

Another day, another nursery. It's barely spring, but gardening fever has set in. We dropped in this afternoon at Potters. They'd just opened last Friday, and weren't near finished stocking; most of the area under cover was still empty, the tree and shrub section just bare mud, with a couple of cats. Workers dashed around, hauling carts of plants, tools, scraps of planking. A table held a box of small paint cans, and on a piece of cardboard, a paintbrush thick with drying blue paint.

There were three or four other customers; an old lady buying a hellebore, a man in to pick up a large order, another man who got into his van, empty handed, as we parked.

Most of the plants already laid out, perennials, are still tiny. There are few flowers, not even buds. The hostas in their pots were still under the mud. (Just like my hostas here at home.) But there were blooming primulas, tables of them. I found a couple more white ones; they show up so well in my deep shade at this time of year. And Laurie found the pansies he was after. And bought more soil. He always buys soil; you'd think he was trying to build a hill.

Half a table's worth of primulas. Not too many whites available this year.

Purple primulas

Pink and yellow

I loved these pale pink hellebores.

Most of our little load of plants. Laurie bought four more pansies and a fern.

It rained the rest of the afternoon. It's raining now. It will probably rain tomorrow. I don't mind; there will be plenty of time to start getting muddy.

The stuff of dreams

We didn't buy any of these, but I was tempted. Laurie didn't notice them; the ferns were just beyond, and drew his attention.

He cultivates one sunny patch suitable for veggies. He's talking about Swiss chard, which did well last year. I might put in a few lettuce again, to feed the slugs. I wonder if they like sweet peas?

Name this long-nosed beast!

Still learning how to manage the macro lens:

A mud snail, cleaning the glass wall.

Looking over the foot to see what that flashing light is.

That face! It looks, at this angle, as if it belongs to some large ungulate. A camel, maybe? Or a camel/zebra cross?

The secret beauty of carpet beetles

Sometimes the old and familiar takes you completely by surprise. Something you took for granted turned out to be completely wrong. Case in point . . .

I settled down this afternoon to practice taking macro photos again. For subjects, I had a small green worm, a hitchhiker in the eelgrass I collected for my hermits; and a carpet beetle.

The worm was fairly co-operative, given a tiny pebble to cling to for security. But there's not much to him; a long tube, green on the bottom, brown on top. A green spot at the head end. That's it.

Full length, stretched out, about 1 inch. A ribbon worm.

The carpet beetle was another story. After being incarcerated overnight (6 months in beetle years), he had one thought on his little mind: escape. I got dozens of shots of his retreating rear end. I gave him some grains of sugar, which did slow him down some, but only enough to gather energy for another run for freedom. Eventually I capitulated and put his glass plate over ice. Time slowed down. I got a couple of passable head shots.

Facing his captor. Defiant.

Even on a 1 mm. long beetle, coming in that close for a macro leaves a narrow band in focus. If I get the eyes, I get a blur for the body, and vice versa.

And at this distance, the flash works, but the beetle is in the shadow of the lens. I'll have to get a slave flash for better lighting.

Same photo, processed in a different program, (free Picasa), with sketch lines added. They give definition to the scales and facial features, but fade out the colours.

Now, here's the surprise. I've examined, fed, housed, cajoled, and photographed dozens of carpet beetles. I think they're pretty, with the orangey-brown, black, and white pattern. And they're available. They keep volunteering by sitting on my drapes or kitchen wall until I collect them. But other than the patterned back, the rest is done in a dingy battleship grey. Or at least, that's what I've seen.

But now I'm zooming in a bit closer, and the colours appear. In every photo from that distance, the legs show up green. The antennae are a reddish rust colour, the outer mouthparts green, the next ones in, white.

The camera overdoes the colours, so I desaturated them for the photo above; he's still wearing red, white, and green. I compared his colours to the worm's taken in the same spot. The worm is as I saw him, even at full saturation. Should I trust the camera? I'm not sure.

Now I'm sorry I released Mr. C. into the garden once the photo session was done. I need another carpet beetle! And a better light. What other glories have these critters been hiding all these years?

Circle tour

I have a theory - in the totally non-scientific use of the word, meaning a guess about evidence badly infected with confirmation bias - that the harder it rains, the sooner it will quit. After all, raining hard will drain out all the water up there sooner, won't it? And when it does, it can't rain any more, can it?

Laurie laughs at me, but I have one more bit of "proof"; Saturday afternoon, it rained so hard that I missed my regular exit off the freeway because I couldn't see it. And a mere two hours later, the sun was shining. See?

So Sunday, the sun shone all day, from early morning till dusk. Not a cloud in the sky above us; summer blues. Beautiful!

And, of course, we went to the beach. Boundary Bay, parking in Centennial Park, and walking south on the sand, then back to the car through the streets of Beach Grove. The tide was 'way out, and the walking was easy, but the wind was vicious; in spite of the sunshine, we were bundled up to the ears.

Laurie took this directly into the sun, so it turned out like a moonlight photo.  We both loved those ripples in the sand.

Sand ripples merge into water kicked up by the wind.

There wasn't much else to see out there; seaweed, sand, blue sky, and far in the distance, the bay. Glorious, but boring, from the cameras' point of view. Four or five eagles were sitting out on the furthest sandbars, just black dots with white tops at that distance. We found more camera fodder once we returned to shore.

Heather, primulas, pansies, and tiny daffodils.

Chickweed, a couple of inches high.

Paper-white crocuses.

We were surprised to see azalea so early.

More crocuses, my favourites; purple and white striped.

The first ladybug of the year, under the watchful eye of an old log.

This bee, Bombus melanopygus, I think, was working a heather patch. I chased him down until I got one fuzzy photo. Then he disappeared. Look at that nice new paint job!  The orange belly almost looks metallic.

Laurie found this old telephone pole with a crown of old man's beard reflected in the trunk of a car.

And back to the parking lot, looking out towards the bay. It's almost supper time; the  shadows are stretching. The clouds hide our circle of mountains.

Bare tree, with trash can. I do wish they wouldn't paint them in such intrusive colours!

Then off to Tim Horton's for a warming cuppa. Afterwards, we stopped in at the nursery to buy sea soil and manure. I got a bag of primulas, yellow and white. Spring is here; the garden beckons.

Tree on the sand

More reflections

Winter tree, White Rock tidepool

A Skywatch (upside down) post.

March plaint

It's raining cats and frogs. My hellebores are blooming in the garden, the parsley is green, the epimedium greener. This year's crop of foxgloves has sprouted - already! - and I would like to rake off the mulch to see if the bleeding hearts are up. But it's miserable out there, wet, muddy, and cold.

Ah, March!

Remembering summer, White Rock beach

Feeding time in the tank

My aquarium "how-to" bookshelf holds only three books, which I re-read frequently, and which all give conflicting information. Living things are like that; almost any rule about dealing with it has exceptions. So I read a chapter in one book, the related chapter in another, then go commune with my critters. They have their own ideas.

The books:

• The Conscientious Marine Aquarist. 1998. Very good, very detailed, well written. Most of it is not relevant to what I'm doing, though; the author's interest lies in the tropics, and the exotic species, whether or not they live together in the wild.
• The Saltwater Aquarium Handbook. 1991, 2000 edition. Much smaller. Good info on equipment, skimpy on invertebrates. Emphasis on purchased specimens, warm water animals, exotics.
• And the Marine Aquarium Guide. DeGraaf, 1973. Out of print. Dense. Very technical; a lot of chemistry and detailed engineering. A variety of methods and their explanation; choose your own. Extremely helpful, even though I followed none of the methods described; at least I know what to aim at, what to watch for.

And of course, there is plenty of information, usually contradictory, on the web. Reef aquarists forums are helpful. Here's a sampling:

• Reefkeeping - a magazine. The current issue has a good bit of info on adjusting water quality.
• Aquarium Advice. A useful forum.
• Reefs.org. A forum and a magazine.

And then, there's the local aquarium store. Which usually doesn't carry what I've seen discussions of, and I have to wing it. Still, they sold me my tank and filters, and 20 kilos of sea salt for aquariums; that's what has kept my critters happy this winter. And they sold me the hermit food.

Hairy hermit, with his breakfast of Crab Cuisine.

So, what do my guests order from the menu?

The hermits love the Crab Cuisine, even though it was not specifically designed for underwater hermits. It sinks nicely to the bottom, but after a bit of nibbling, it tends to crumble and float away. Val, the burrowing anemone, grabs pieces that float by, but eats them slowly. After a while, the hermits, having finished their serving, go prospecting in the anemone mouth for leftovers, which the anemone yields up without a whimper.

The crab (I only have one at the moment) can't do this. He loves the CC. He grabs a piece and runs off to hide in his latest burrow to eat in peace. Later, he may approach the anemone, but the venomous tentacles drive him off, and he gets to sit looking at that tempting chunk of food until a hermit walks in and takes it, right under his nose.

In a Chinese grocery store, I bought a bag of dried minnows, intended for human consumption. Nothing but fish and salt, the label said; it would be safe. I flake a half minnow into the water now and then; everybody is pleased: the crab, the hermit, the anemones, and any polychaete worms hiding in the sand. It does foul the water, though, so I like to offer it just before a water change.

Another Chinese food store, recently: I found a bag of dried shrimp, very tiny baby shrimp. Opening the bag at home, I realized that they were only partially dried, and still soft, so they're in the freezer. And this is dessert! As I drop a piece in front of one hermit, all the animals with legs start running in his direction. Fights break out, unusual in hermits. The largest grainy hand, the absolute pacifist, even attacked my finger. The crab abandons his hiding place to grab at the shrimp, and the hermits fight back. I drop more tiny pieces, a quarter shrimp at a time, scattered around, to break up the fights.

Some of the hermits take their prize and climb to the top of the eelgrass or a stalk from a kelp holdfast, where no-one can sneak up on them. Others just stand their ground, tugging away at another hermit's catch.

Nassa, hurrying.

And a minute later, the Nassa snails appear, as if from nowhere, heading purposefully towards the biggest chunk of shrimp. They will stay with it until there's nothing left.

Val, on a normal day. (No shrimp.)

What of the anemone? The books say (two of them) to offer a small piece of shrimp, touching the tentacles with it. Another book says to blend the shrimp, turn off the pump, and spray the anemone with the shrimp paste. I didn't get around to that, because an entire shrimp escaped my fingers in the tank, and floated past the burrowing anemone. Instantly, a tentacle lashed out, snared the shrimp, and crammed it into her mouth. The whole shrimp. And it vanished.

Val swelled up to her full size, column as high and as wide as I've ever seen it, tentacles waving enthusiastically. (Did you ever see an enthusiastic anemone? I have.)

I've fed the tiny orange striped anemones baby-sized bites. They're slower to grab the food, but when they do, they don't let go.

Val really doesn't need feeding. She manages quite well on her own. I saw her snatch a swimming amphipod.  And recently the crab molted. The old molt floated by, and Val grabbed it. It was wider than she is, and all legs and carapace. Never mind, she swallowed it, slowly, one leg at a time. The next day, she regurgitated the polished carcase.

And she had positioned herself under the pump. I didn't notice, but a fair-sized periwinkle snail was on the side, and when I went to remove the pump for cleaning, the snail let go and dropped. Right into Val's mouth. I quickly got my handy chopstick and tried to flick the snail out; no way! She closed right down, tight, a green ball with a pursed mouth, and the snail hidden away inside. Sorry, little snail.

The next afternoon, one of the hermits was wearing the newly cleaned periwinkle shell. Life goes on.