Rock Paper Lizard

Lulu Island Bog Fire, Richmond BC, July 2018

2018-07-31T14:50:00.000-07:00

Picture from CTV helicopter, facing north. The north-south road is Shell Road. The forest to the right of Shell Road is the Richmond Nature Park.

Lulu Island is the main island of the deltaic archipelago that comprises Richmond, British Columbia. The city of New Westminster claims a small portion of the upstream end of the island, like the tail of a skink, where the street signs are blue instead of green, but for the most part Lulu Island is Richmond.

Near the centre are several quarter sections (half-mile squares, slightly more than 100 acres each) that represent remains of the former domed bog that once covered much of the eastern half of Lulu Island. West to east these are the Garden City Lands (long cleared, but presently being redeveloped into an urban green space), the forested Department of National Defense Lands (DND), which contains a small military base in its northwest corner, the Richmond Nature Park (west half). which contains the Nature House and a network of trails, and, across Highway 99, the east half of the park, which contains a single loop trail.

All this land is covered in a thick, spongy layer of sphagnum peat, which burns happily when dry, and is very hard to extinguish because the fire can spread below the surface along tree roots and resurface somewhere else.

Bogs burn. It's part of basic bog ecology. Fire opens the cones of the shore pines and clears the scrubby understory, allowing cranberries and slow-growing bog blueberries to flourish. Lightning is rare here, so most Lulu Island bog fires have been anthropogenic. As long as there have been people on this island they have been setting fires, either managing the vegetation, or for less productive reasons, or by mistake.

The fire broke out late July 26 or early July 27 in the southwest corner of the DND, very close to the Nature Park. It is assumed someone camping in the bush is responsible, but that has not yet been officially announced.

We live about 2 Km from the fire. I woke up at 4 AM to a strong smell of smoke and closed all the windows. It has been hot here for the past week or more. Few homes here have air conditioning. Until recently it was rarely needed. Windows slammed shut all over the island.

Then the wind shifted and sent smoke to Vancouver. Richmond calling.

But it was also sending the fire west, toward the Nature Park, where I used to work. I went for a ride, concerned over what I would find.

From S side of Westminster Hwy, west of No 4 Rd. (0.6 Km from fire). The smoke column seemed relatively dainty. Westminster Hwy and Shell Road were closed to facilitate water access and the staging of equipment. I had to circumnavigate. A bike is good for that--you can cut through condominium walkways and back lanes.

View from Granville Ave, 200 m east of No. 4 Rd (0.90 Km from fire). About 10:30AM, the heat of the day was ramping up, and the fire no longer seemed dainty. Trails of the Nature Park had been closed by this point. I know there was a children's summer camp scheduled for that day. I'm guessing they had to cancel it.

View from 300 m east of Francis Rd and No 4 Rd (2.7 Km from fire).

One news report said fire briefly spread to RNP but was put out. Fortunately the winds were light.

An aerial photo in the online Richmond News today showed the burned area to be about as shown in black.

View from home, 1 PM, July 27.

At about 3 PM, a small Cessna jet zoomed overhead, only a few hundred feet up.  

I watched from an upstairs window as it circled the fire, even seeming to pass through the column of smoke.

I found the plane on Fightradar24. By the end of the day this map looked like a ball of yellow yarn.

After the Cessna had sussed out the situation, four Air Tractors arrived, small but maneuverable water bombers that use their pontoons to scoop and drop water. The Cessna was the bird dog, pointing the way.

"Here I come to save the day..."

For several hours the planes flew between the Fraser River and the fire, scooping and dumping water, a fine and effective (and noisy) ballet.

Air Tractor and Cessna bird dog.

By early evening the smoke column had thinned considerably. The fire was still active (4 days later, it still isn't completely out), but it was contained. Since then, Richmond Firefighters and members of other agencies have been in the bog, clearing brush and digging in what has to be miserable conditions--very hot, very smoky, very dense brush. This has been close to a record-setting heatwave, and there has been very little rain since mid-June. Most people wouldn't want to walk through the bog in this weather, let alone do strenuous work. The weather is predicted to cool down over the next few days, perhaps even rain. It feels wrong, in this place where at other times of the year it rains for weeks on end, to actually find yourself looking forward to the return of precipitation before the end of summer. Okay, rain a bit.

Then back to sun. No one wants a grey August.

Lifer

2018-03-28T19:51:00.001-07:00

I got a lifer today
Say's Phoebe
An odd name
Sayornis saya (in Latin)
"Say's Say-bird"

It's a tyrant flycatcher
Which is a good name for a bird family
It has orange undersides
Not a common trait

I don't see many lifers these days
Because I have been birding since I was ten and am considerably older now
And don't go out of my way to see a lifer when it is reported on the birders' hotline
Because I just don't see the point*
Someone will post a picture
Then a bunch of other people will too

*Apart from meeting other people who share your weird hobby
Which may be the point of a lot of things
So, okay.

In any case the Say's Phoebe was on the birder's hotline
And was really close to the outlet mall where members of my family like to shop
Which is also where the planes land on top of you
Which is pretty cool
The heavies from Asia and Europe
So I went

Plus I've always loved phoebes
The Eastern, nesting under the eaves of our cottage back home
The Black I got to know in California
I could complete my phoebe set

I met a birder at the site
From his binos I knew he knew where it was
His instructions were perfect

Tick.

Salmon - nitrogen bomb.

2017-11-19T15:46:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, miraculously, our scheduled trip to the Fraser River Eagle Festival at Harrison Mills coincided with a break in the rain. Today the weather throughout the region reverted to November.

Harrison Mills is at the confluence of the Harrison and Fraser Rivers, about 50 miles upstream from Vancouver. Before joining the Fraser, the Harrison flows around the tip of a sandy peninsula, at Kilby Provincial Park. In this picture, facing west, the river is flowing right to left around the point to meet the Fraser flowing west on its south side. Notice the lumpules scattered along the shore. The larger ones are the carcasses of chum salmon.

Back around the northern flank of the peninsula and a short distance upstream the Harrison broadens and contains a silty delta known as the Chehalis Flats, created by deposits settling out from the inflowing Chehalis River and Weaver Creek, whose winding channels continue into the flats, producing a web of sand bars and channels. Within the faster flowing watercourses, where the bottom is sufficiently gravelly, chum salmon spawn. And here, on the flats, bald eagles feast, hundreds at a time.

I took no eagle pictures. I had only my phone to record the scene, and phone pictures of eagles would be sadly inadequate. The following images from the Eagle Festival Flickr photostream show nicely what the birds looked like: Eagles on flats, eagles in trees.

Oblivious to bird and human, the salmon fulfill their biological imperative, having spent years at sea, swimming who knows where, surviving who knows what.

After that? Struggle upstream into freshwater while undergoing dramatic alterations in form and physiology, spawn, and then die, but not easily. Salmon have death throes too.

But that's just the start of things:

Bears and other large mammals drag salmon from streams up to 500 meters into the forest where the remains gradually decompose and act as fertilizer. The elements in their tissues, and in the waste products produced by carnivores then become available to the ecosystem.

In Gwaii Haanas, Haida Gwaii, it was estimated that 3,611 salmon carcasses, 63% of an entire run, were transferred from the river into the surrounding forest by as few as 3 to 8 bears.

Eagle numbers and breeding success are correlated with the abundance of salmon carcasses left behind in spawning streams.

In some places the timing and success of mink reproduction is related to the availability of salmon carcasses.

Coastal Alaskan Brown Bears obtain virtually all of their nitrogen and carbon from salmon.

Bottom-dwelling insects in salmon-bearing streams in interior BC obtained up to 60% of nitrogen content from salmon tissue.

Vegetation near salmon streams contain significant amounts of marine-sourced nitrogen.

The more salmon in a run, the more nutrients available to the ecosystem, and the more productive it is. This inevitably includes an increase in the invertebrate prey species that nourish developing larval salmon.

When a salmon stock diminishes all plant and animal species within their food web are to varying degrees impacted. This includes salmon themselves, whose decaying carcasses influence the survival rates of future runs.

It's almost as if the ocean is the lungs, the rivers are the blood vessels, the forest is the living tissue, and the salmon are the corpuscles. Unlike the circulatory system in a single animal, however, the fish only travel in one direction, and their vital cargo isn't oxygen, required for the fueling of life, but rather carbon, and, especially, nitrogen, elements essential for its construction.

Once you start to get salmon, you realize that we spend most of our lives in a bubble of remarkable ignorance, clueless of how the heck our world works and needs to keep working for the whole darn thing to stay alive.

Chum Salmon, blessed nitrogen bomb.

Mer-town.

2017-11-04T20:53:00.000-07:00

Steveston Harbour, looking a bit grim, as if something bad is afoot.
(So to speak.)

Steveson is a fishing village at the mouth of the south arm of the Fraser River. It is now part of the City of Richmond, and is one of the oldest non-indigenous communities in British Columbia (and was inhabited by indigenous people prior to that).

It has a long history of fishing, especially salmon, and still is an important fishing port, a place to buy seafood right off the boat.

It's a tourist town too, but not to the degree of some seaside villages on the edges of large metropolitan areas. It is still a vital part of the day to day lives of Richmond residents. There are family restaurants and dental offices and a pub and banks, a bike shop, a fancy underwear store -- stuff that normal folks use. Our dentist is on the main drag, which has a false-front, frontier town look, in a wood-sided building that was previously a fishing net sales and repair shop.

Steveston is also a common TV and movie filming location. The ABC show Once Upon a Time was filmed here for the first six seasons, for which it was renamed Storybrooke, Maine. That show has moved production to Seattle, but there's always something going on. Those people dressed in black, drinking coffee, talking into walkie talkies, standing around--the endless list of names people--arrive, take over a block or dock or parking lot, and it's just the way things are.

Which can be annoying. I was barred from walking down the dock last week by a couple of black-clad burlies. Something was being filmed at the far end.

"What is it?" I asked, which rarely results in a satisfying answer. It is usually a pilot for something that, if produced, will be so far in the future that this conversation will have been forgotten, or an episode of a show on a streaming service that you have to pay for.

But this time, it was another ABC show. "Siren," the burly who was allowed to talk said.

"Oh," I said.

"About an invasion of mermaids, or something."

"Really?"

He shrugged, and then listened to a thing in his ear. "Rolling," he said to the non-speaking burly.

I looked up "Siren" on IMDB. It says,

"In the mermaid-obsessed sea town of Bristol Cove, everyone's lives will change when actual mermaids come ashore, which soon causes a war."

Well this is going to make visits to the dentist more entertaining.

But really. How hard can it be to fight mermaids? I would think they're relatively easy to outrun. Leg-wise, they're more seal than sea lion. You could just sort of hem them in with a few sheets of plywood.

Here is a pretty boat angling in to the dock. I think she was about to be filmed. Perhaps mermaids are about to flop onto her deck, and this is where the mer-attack is about to begin.

I hope Quint isn't drunk

Big orange sun.

2017-08-07T14:02:00.000-07:00

It's been smurky (murky skies due to smoke) for five days. The wildfires in British Columbia that have been burning for weeks are mostly hundreds of miles north of and inland from here, and their effects didn't reach the coast until the wind changed last week and started blowing westward. The following picture was taken two nights ago, 90 minutes before sunset. Last night looked more or less the same, the sun an angry orange disk. At this time of day the sun should still be at a state where you wouldn't be able to pin down a colour, beyond "bright." It shouldn't look like a red-hot penny.

Our AQHI (Air Quality Health Index), a measure that includes fine particulate matter (particles 2.5 microns or less), ground level ozone and nitrogen dioxide, has reached as high as 7 out of 10. Seven is bad, but other places have recently endured much worse. On Thursday, Kamloops, 170 miles northeast and near several major fires, was 49 out of 10, the greatest Spinal Tapping of any measurement system ever. We, here, shouldn't really complain. We haven't been evacuated, and our communities remain unscathed.

Nevertheless, this dingy sky is becoming tiresome. To illustrate present conditions:

Planes taking off from YVR (Vancouver) a few miles from our home, look like this at mid-day:

And on it goes. Every day the weather forecast from Environment Canada promises us sunshine tomorrow, but by the following morning it has turned, literally and iconographically, to smoke.

Here is what our August sky should look like:

Yes, sweet blue, and filled with large, fluttering butterflies.

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone, or something along those lines.

2017-07-22T19:45:00.002-07:00

Target was here, briefly. It moved in, taking over many of the stores that had been Zellers, a Canadian discount chain, but its launch didn't go smoothly. As I understand it, they had difficulty adjusting their labeling and pricing system to metric measures and bilingualness, and opened with shelves lacking the range of inexpensive stuff Canadian cross-border shoppers could get at Targets short drives away. Target failed expectations, and shoppers pulled back, waiting for the company to find its feet, become the Tar-jet we had known. It folded within a year. Sigh. Folks here really wanted it to succeed.

The most conspicuous remains were the big red balls. Outside each door, Target had cemented a pair of large, concrete, red-painted balls, one to the left, the other to the right.

At our local ex-Target, those balls have persisted, at least three pairs, in situ, until this week when one broke its bonds and went for a rumble through the parking lot.

Unfortunately, and metaphorically, lacking a long-term plan or guidance system, it ended up trapped within another, less conspicuous artifact of the lost retailer, a shopping cart return rack. So there it languishes, waiting for the earth to tilt the other way.

These days, how many mall visitors even know what the big red balls mean? The couple below, do they consider the ball before them and ponder its significance? Do they notice its trundle-scuffed partner ensnared a hundred meters away?

Of course not. They are blindly in love, unable to conceive of how awry a plan can go.

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Owlet.

2017-05-11T20:42:00.002-07:00

A friend said, "There's a raptor nest visible from the road. It would be good to know what kind it is."

Subtext is the province is widening the road because they want to put a stupid TEN-lane bridge onto our island and need somewhere for TEN lanes of traffic to hang out before the clog-up at the four-lane bridge at the other side of the island.

The nest-thing was fine with me. Get away from a keyboard and tromp around in the woods for a while.

The woods are far from pristine. The understory is mostly a tangle of invasive blackberry that will happily kill you with a million punctures.

We could see the nest from a distance, and scrabbled a circuitous path to the base of the tree, a tall but not impressively old cottonwood.

We craned our necks, raised our binos. 50 feet up. No heads, adult or baby. The nest seemed empty. It was too small, too enclosed for an eagle, It was too large for a Cooper's Hawk. Red-tail was the probable owner.

"Or a Great-horned," I said. They use old nests. "But they should be fledged by now."

There was fresh white-wash (poop) on the ferns and blackberries circling the tree, We started searching for pellets. There were hemlock branches extending into the upchuck radius that could have deflected the pellets away from the trunk. I skirted wider, and found, sadly, this.

I had a hard time mentally assembling it. The head is upper right. It's a baby Great-horned Owl, an owlet, starting to fledge. Note the blue shafts of the pin feathers, lower right.

It was days dead. I shifted it a bit so that the talons were visible.

We have no idea how this one died. Siblicide is rare in Great-horneds, I have since read. We had mixed emotions, contentment in figuring out the ownership of the nest, and sadness over a dead owlet.

We walked back to the car, a different route. We couldn't possibly retrace our steps through the blood-letting blackberries. We came across a log decorated with slime mold doo-dads. Life from death, death from life, a smelly, prickly circle, ugly and beautiful.

Small birds, their big dream-home.

2017-04-21T14:03:00.002-07:00

I came across a pair of Bushtits building their characteristic hanging-sock nest. Construction was well along, but there were still gaps in the weaving of moss, spider webs and other materials.

Here is the male, bringing carrying something soft and fluffy looking. Lichen? Innards of a lost stuffy? He took it inside, and a few seconds later darted out.

He was followed by the female. (Notice the pale eye? Males' eyes are dark.) She was in and out in a flash

The male returned, carrying a...caterpillar? There are young already? Rearing while still building? Renos are hard when there's Lego and Polly Pocket all over the place. (Speaking from experience.)

A closer look shows the object in his bill isn't animal. I'm not sure what it is, but it seems to more for building than eating.

On it went, taking turns, back and forth. The nest was just off a trail in a park, about 8 feet up, not as secure as one would hope. I figured I had given them enough unwanted attention so wished them luck and continued on my way.

Fun fun fun 'til the scary yellow centipedes.

2017-04-02T16:52:00.000-07:00

We arrived in Hilo on a Big White Boat, and the view over the side suggested that the most in-demand car on the Big Island was Mustang convertible. You could have it in any colour, as long as the colour was black, red, or silver.

Why? Retired baby-boomers?

Roof down, SPF 100 for when Panama hat blows off.

The Big White Boat eco-tour that took us to the Lava Trees also took us to the Pohoiki Hot Pond. This is a place where proximity to sea-bound magma heats the water and you can flop around like udon in a swimming pool-sized hot tub if the surf isn't crashing over the edge, which on this day it was. The surf was unusually high because of an approaching hurricane. No swimming today. No matter, No one wanted to swim. Everyone wanted to watch the waves.

There were other sight-seeing vans there. All the sight-seeing leaders, themselves surfers, were agog--and disappointed. This surf was their dream, and here they were, driving around another load of tourists.

Surf raging through dead branches. Not far away, red-hot magma is plunging into the sea, an explosive boil. Heaven and hell. When it comes to OMG, Hawaii sets the bar pretty high.

Surfers gotta surf. Many were there, more were arriving. Look. Real Hawaiians don't drive Mustang convertibles.

The waves were sprinkled with dots of hope and courage. The lineup.

Taking off. I wistfully imagined these seconds. All the way to Hawaii on the Big White Boat I had been reading William Finnegan's Barbarian Days. A Surfer's Life, trying to understand from his words what surfing must be like. Well here it was. Woo! (Wistful woo.)

Off to the side, newcomers were heading out from a wave-swamped bay.

Even with motorized assistance, it was a challenge.

Motorized assistance in the air,

Varying degrees of success were hailed by unheard cheers as the waves grew and washed farther up the shore, foaming among the black lava rocks were we stood, which had the unexpected effect of ...

Waking the centipedes!

A biblical number of scolopendromorphs was sloshed from its sleep. The individual in the picture may not look very big. Truth: It was scary big, as were its friends. They bite mean, and hang on. William Finnegan never mentioned them.

They scuttled among startled flop-flopped surf-watchers, who shouted creative expressions during the scramble to safety.

Backed-up a bit, out of the centipede zone, surf-watching resumed. Reluctantly, our group boarded the tour van and were on our way.

(Saw no Mustangs.)

Here is the Big White Boat:

From the forest.

2017-03-28T11:25:00.000-07:00

Lava trees, emerging from the forest, Hawaii.

(See previous post.)

On lava.

2017-03-27T15:55:00.000-07:00

The Pu'u'O'o eruption of Kilauea Volcano on the Island of Hawaii (the Big Island) has been going on for 34 years. Its lava has traveled above and below ground in different directions at different times, occasionally resulting in devastation to communities and infrastructure. Towns have been buried under meters of lava. A few homeowners have rebuilt, on greatly changed properties.

Recently, the eruption has been sending a firehouse-stream of molten lava into the ocean from Vent 61g at Kamokuna. I hope I'm getting the details correct. This is far from my area of expertise.

I've always found volcanoes fascinating. What science boy/girl didn't get in trouble at least once for using up the kitchen supplies of vinegar and baking soda?

Why this, now?

Partly because there have been plenty of neat pictures of Vent 61g on Instagram. I follow a number of Hawaiian Instagram accounts. Looking at places I've been before makes it easier to believe I'll return.

Here is a picture of Vent 61g from the Instagram account of @surrealshotz. It was posted in late January 2017. Imagine being there. Magma! Steam! Explosions!

We were there the year before, well, not quite there, and saw no magma. We did see a lot of lava though, the ropy, frozen, black pudding, the pahoehoe, of previous events in the Eastern Rift Zone of the Big Island.

It is probably nothing more than a strange coincidence, but the the Big Island looks like the head of a French Bulldog in right-side profile. Hilo is nestled in above the nub of a nose. On the picture below, the five shield volcanoes that make up the Big Island are indicated. As the name implies, shield volcanoes are relatively flat and spreading, as opposed to conical composite volcanoes such as Mount St. Helens and its Cascadian family.

Big Island (Hawaii)

The bulldog's lower jaw contains what is called the East Rift Zone, mostly within the south-eastern Puna district.

In the Puna district, lava can flow above ground, or below ground, or both, considerable distances from Kilauea's caldera, which is inland, above the angle of the jaw. Close to the caldera, there have been numerous surface flows in recent decades, and much of the land remains blanketed in lava.

More distally (east), forest and agricultural fields cover a large proportion of the land, though scattered throughout are remnants of older lava flows. In places, lava layers from old eruptions have subsided and fractured, leaving the ground rife with deep fissures. It's a complicated geology, and driving around, it's hard to make sense of what has gone on, and is going on, underground, especially in green and bucolic eastern Puna. One could be forgiven for having no clue that the whole place is part of very active volcano.

We were on an interpretive tour from an ecotourism company based in Hilo. Interpretive tours are busman's holidays for me. Interpreters are the same everywhere. Our interpreter took us to see fissures.

Old, overgrown ones look like this. It was difficult to tell how deep it is. It's behind a fence to keep you from finding out.

We were at Lava Tree State Monument, close to the tip of Bulldog's jaw. Fissures were a side show. The main event was lava trees.

He cuts down trees, he eats his lunch

He goes to the lava tree.

On Wednesdays he goes shopping...

Sorry.

Lava trees are mostly-hollow tubes that form when red-hot lava flows through a forest, and then retreats. (I have a hard time imagining the retreat part, but apparently there's an ebb and flow aspect to lava.) Contact with tree trunks cools the lava, which solidifies. In return, the tree usually burns up, resulting in a hollow cast after the rest of the lava ebbs away. These lava trees were formed in 1790.

Lava tree and the interpreter (but not the interpreter).

Some lava trees have a hole on two on the side, into which you can stick your head, or at least a camera. Some are mostly empty. Others have greenery and other life inside.

Lava Tree State Monument has a short trail that loops among the trees and through interesting forest and forest-edge. It doesn't take long, and soon we were headed west to see the lava of more recent events.

This is Kaimu Bay, which previously featured a spectacular, coconut-fringed, black sand beach. It and the town of Kaimu were buried by lava from the Kupa'ianaha vent of Kilauea in 1990. Coconut palms have been planted to hasten the return of lava-bed to beach. It will take a while.

Kaimu is about halfway along the bulldog's jaw. The lava is 15 m thick, and meets the sea as crumbling cliffs.

The surf was active that day. Hurricane Olaf was passing to the south-east.

West of Kaimu is the town of Kalapana. It also was consumed by the lava, in the 1980s. I believe it is within the middle lava swath in the picture below.

On the horizon, mid-picture, there is a plume, whiter than the surrounding clouds. It is steam from the caldera of Kilauea, about 20 miles (33Km) from this spot. Vast sheets of lava spreading left to right notwithstanding, this gentle rise doesn't much look like a volcano, does it? Not at all like the conical papier mache, vinegar and baking soda landscapes of childhood.

Boglandia.

2017-03-22T21:33:00.000-07:00

I've spent much of the last two weeks walking the trails of the Richmond Nature Park, which contains a hundred-acre remnant of the extensive (Burns Bog-sized) peat bogs that once covered Lulu Island. Most was mined for the peat, and then converted to blueberry or cranberry farms.

As I mentioned a couple posts ago, I worked in this park for about 7 years. After a while I lost my sense of bog-wonder. The bog became an endless, exhausting battle against invasive species. I stopped seeing, or at least appreciating, the small, pretty things all around, such as the foliose lichen above, which, in this dismal weather, glows amid the bare branches.

The park is one of the last remaining local strongholds, which may be an overstatement, for Douglas' Squirrels, which are dependent on the cones of shore pines, the dominant bog tree. The park is surrounded by suburbs, home of Eastern Grey Squirrels, which are an introduced species and considered pests by most. People catch them in their attics or wherever and dump them in the park. It's good to see that the little Dougies haven't been displaced.

The Quaking Trail, through the middle of the park, is probably the least walked, but has some of the best little scenes. This stark white birch demanded a photo.

Decent Sphagnum hummocks with their associated flora remain, especially in a few spots on this trail, but make up a much smaller percentage of the ground-cover compared to when I was first there. There are several species, green and red. I would often ask children to touch the Sphagnum, to stick a finger into it. The consensus was that it felt like a brain.

Cranberries grow in the wet areas. These beauties have survived foragers, and a fair amount of snow. It's been a hard winter compared to the average. I believe these are escaped domestic berries, not the native species.

To bookend with lichens: Stars of the Quaking Trail were these tangles of reindeer moss, bigger than any I remember seeing, They are growing among Labrador tea stems, postcards more typical of the Arctic Circle than 49 degrees north.

The ground is soft and spongy, holding the winter's cold and rainfall. I almost want to lie down. I refrain, merely place my hands on the moss.

It is damp and cold, and feels like a brain.

Orange buzzler. (The name makes sense if you've heard one.)

2017-03-15T17:42:00.000-07:00

Previously on Rock Paper Lizard: (My account of the Varied Thrush).

I saw a number of them this week, while wandering around one of my old haunts, the Richmond Nature Park. There were small groups of thrushes, in the deep deciduous woods that enclose the eastern portions of the trail loops, and in the more open bog forest in the northwest corner of the largest loop trail.

Female

For a second or two, a Varied Thrush was at the very beginning of the Twin Peaks opening credits, giving that remarkable 1990s show instant Pacific Northwest cred. The bird on screen was silent though, not singing. It was a female, looking a bit impatient. They don't like being filmed, or photographed. The one above is uncharacteristically inquisitive-looking. Usually they turn their backs to you, like this:

Male

Buzzling.

(Video by Mid-Valley Media Group, Oregon).

Nature Park revisited: Hemlocks in bogs.

2017-03-13T16:28:00.001-07:00

Herein I plagiarize myself, from this very blog, about this very bog. In 2008 I wrote about the different growth habits of western hemlocks in a mixed deciduous forest and the adjacent remnant peat bog in the Richmond Nature Park.

That was shortly after I had stopped working at the park, where my activities had included managing volunteers in the endless task of invasive species removal. For the past decade I haven't been back to the park much, mostly for Christmas bird counts and the odd special event. Our son, who was not yet born when I started working there, is now a volunteer, which was what brought me there today, waiting for him to finish. I went for a walk, with a phone from the future (relative to when I started working there), and took pictures.

And now the plagiarism begins (except for the photos):

Western hemlock, typical appearance.

Me (2008): The western hemlock is typically the most graceful of the native conifers, with a drooping leader (top branch), long branches that sweep downward, and feathery needles that stick out from sides of the twigs, producing flattened, fan-like foliage. It is the hemlock of the lowlands. As you climb the coastal mountains, you find it replaced by the mountain hemlock, which differs in having a somewhat less droopy leader, relatively shorter branches that tend to point upward, and needles that grow from the twig in all directions, like the bristles of a bottle brush.

Bog form.

Here in Richmond, at sea level, land of the western hemlock, where there are patches of peat bog interspersed with mixed forest, one notices a strange thing. The western hemlocks that grow in the nutrient-poor, acidic, Sphagnum-based peaty soil of the bog resemble mountain hemlocks in relative branch length and shape, and in needle arrangement. They look like mountain hemlocks -- church-steeple narrow and bristly, instead of spreading, graceful and feathery. In places where topsoil has been dumped on top of the bog (unfortunately, that includes most of it), the western hemlocks are tall and graceful, right next to frazzled mountain-looking bog-dwellers.

Bog form.

Is it the acid? I don’t think anyone knows. Another odd thing, the boggy ones seem not to produce cones. A bog is tough neighbourhood in which to grow. (/2008).

Look at this beauty, a lonely dancer, out in the bog.

Agog in the produce aisle.

2017-03-05T09:40:00.003-08:00

These are the flower heads of Romanesco broccoli

From Wikipedia :"...also known as Roman cauliflower, Broccolo Romanesco, Romanesque cauliflower or simply Romanesco, or more simply Broccoflower, is an edible flower bud of the species Brassica oleracea. First documented in Italy, it is chartreuse in color."

I was mesmerized by their fracticality, which isn't a word. I posted this picture in Instagram and quipped about a bushel full of fractals. (Which refers to repeated iterations of a geometric or mathematical pattern, such as a Fibonacci series--which this plant exemplifies.)

Also from Wikipedia: " The inflorescence (the bud) is self-similar in character, with the branched meristems making up a logarithmic spiral. In this sense the bud's form approximates a natural fractal; each bud is composed of a series of smaller buds, all arranged in yet another logarithmic spiral. This self-similar pattern continues at several smaller levels. The pattern is only an approximate fractal since the pattern eventually terminates when the feature size becomes sufficiently small. The number of spirals on the head of Romanesco broccoli is a Fibonacci number.

It is a plant worth looking at, for a long time.

Apparently you can also eat it.

Snow geese in Richmond, November 2016

2016-11-26T13:24:00.000-08:00

This is turning out to be a very big snow goose year in Richmond, BC. I haven't heard any reliable data, but a general opinion is that there sure seem to be a lot of them this year. I don't know how you would count them once they're here. They course around the city and beyond, dropping by the hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands into parks, schoolyards, and wilder areas near the mouths of the river. The flock in these pictures is grazing between Garden City Road and St. Albans Road, half a block south of Blundell Avenue. Large numbers have been visiting this green space over the past week. Today, I would estimate that there were between 10 and 20 thousand -- but how the heck to count them? They were in every corner of several acres of sports field divided up by baseball diamonds, tennis courts, and school buildings. I'm certain that this is the biggest flock I have seen in this city since they started overwintering here a decade or so ago.

This seems to be a "bigger" year than the last big one (2011-2012), which was when our son did a school project on Snow Geese in Richmond. A lot of information on the geese can be found here.

Snow geese, from Siberia to suburbia.

A diamond in the rough, a needle in the haystack, a blue morph.

Even a single bird is striking. A flock of thousands is something else. Something a lot bigger.

Update:

Video from near South Arm Community Centre, December 27, 2016.

Azollapalloza.

2015-08-15T08:55:00.001-07:00

A species of mosquito fern (Azolla sp.) has blanketed the man-made slough at Terra Nova Rural Park in Richmond BC. In places it looks solid enough to walk on.

It isn't. It's a billion tiny floating ferns.

Blue Hawaiian

2015-04-16T19:49:00.001-07:00

Please, not here too.

You would think paradise is easier.

It isn't.

The place wipes you out.

Yet you'll sell your piano to go back.

Aloha

How it went down. (The green flash).

2015-04-15T16:25:00.000-07:00

About 6:35, ten minutes to sunset. Time to start taking pictures.

The beach at Fort DeRussy Park is a good spot, quieter than the rest of the strip.

It's getting close, dropping like a stone. A big yellow burning gaseous stone.

Down in front!

Okay, good.

Two guys started talking about the "green flash," and whether tonight was a good night for it. I missed it a few nights earlier, perhaps because I had too soon rendered my retinas temporarily blob-struck. Some claimed to have seen it.

Hm.

Supposedly in the second(s) after sunset, the longer wave-length blue-green light makes a last desperate grab to stay in the present day, and a green crescent, or even an upward-shooting ray can be seen.

This night I was ready for it. A good night, clear horizon, calm weather, no deer-like staring at the thing.

December 31, 2013: I watched the sun go down from exactly the same spot, the sun setting on the year. When it sank into the sea, the beach erupted in cheers as if it were the ball in Times Square, which, given the time difference it may as well have been. There were no green-flash exclamations or musings. Everyone was probably already drunk.

There it goes, and faster than you would expect. You know how a cough drop melts away in your mouth if you have the patience not to chomp it to bits, how that last little bit is one second there, and then gone?

This time, no one cheered. Ho hum, another day over, mumble about what to do next.

But do you see it? The green flash. Had the camera shutter opened a split-second earlier, it would have been clearer in the picture, because it was there. I saw it through the view-finder.

See?

Humuhumunukunukuāpuaʻa, also spelled Humuhumunukunukuapua'a or just humuhumu for short; meaning "triggerfish with a snout like a pig...

2015-04-13T15:24:00.002-07:00

That was from Wikipedia.

The Waikiki Aquarium has one, a Humuhumunukunukuapua'a, but we didn't see it on the first pass through. The aquarium is relatively small, and it didn't take long to peruse the inside exhibits, which are very well done, and then go outside, where there are a few more exhibits, and then go back inside, passing through the gift shop. A woman working there asked, "Did you see the Humuhumunukunukuapua'a?"

I was pretty sure we had not. I had heard of this fish, because people like saying its name, but I had no mental image of it and had seen no sign inside or outside explaining where to look for one.

She plucked a metal key tag from a rack. "It looks like this."

Oh. It was a kind of triggerfish.

"There's one in the outside tank." She described in detail how it endlessly swims a particular route through the tank, and where to stand to get a picture of it.

Well why not? We went back to the outside tank and stood where instructed to, and voila.

Humuhumunukunukuapua'a

It has an odd legal history:

From Wikipedia: "The reef triggerfish was originally designated the official fish of Hawaii in 1985,^[3] but due to an expiration of a Hawaiian state law after five years, it ceased to be the state fish in 1990.^[4] On April 17, 2006, bill HB1982 was presented to the Governor of Hawaiʻi, which permanently reinstated the reef triggerfish (humuhumunukunukuapuaʻa) as the state fish of Hawaiʻi.^[5] The bill passed into law on May 2, 2006, and was effective upon its approval.^[6]^[7]

Close-up of Humuhumunukunukuapua'a. Beauty.

One should naturally be glad it was permanently reinstated as the state fish.

This is my favourite shot because the lighting helps show the thoughtful expression typical of triggerfish.

Thank you to the kind woman in the gift shop who told us how to see this fish.

Basically pointless collection I failed to make: dogs in leis.

2015-04-07T15:55:00.001-07:00

On a previous visit to Hawaii, I made an image collection of people carrying surfboards along busy downtown sidewalks. Why did I do that? Because I found downtown surfboard toting pleasingly odd.

This time, had I been more clever about being similarly silly, I would have realized early-on that another basically pointless image collection easily made in Hawaii is dogs wearing leis. The picture above was on our last day there.

The pictures below, of Surf Dog, were taken on the first day. There were other lei-laden canines seen over the intervening days, but I was too sun-addled to realize what a scrapbook I was flipping through. I failed to digitally record them.

Arf.

Surf Dog.

Sand makes her tired.

Gifting bird, for Easter

2015-04-04T17:25:00.005-07:00

If ever you are among the first of the general public to be admitted to the Honolulu Zoo, hurry to the Southern Ground Hornbill enclosure and be their first visitors of the day. That's what we did one day last week. (Not pre-planned, just turned out that way.)

Southern Ground Hornbills are great big black birds with scarlet fleshy facial features.

"One has something gross in its beak," our daughter said.

True. It was holding a dead hatchling bird, I'm pretty sure not a hatchling Southern Ground Hornbill, minus its head. The hornbill stuffed it through the metal mesh, as if presenting it to us.

Here. Have this.

The other ground hornbill seemed miffed. Something complicated and odd was going on.

Then we read the signage. (Only about 17% of zoo visitors bother to read the signage.)

The sign said, after covering discouraging conservation issues, "Entertaining birds to watch! Ground hornbills play with each other, mutually groom, intimidate each other and show off by displaying with leaves or food in their beak tips. These social behaviors serve to cement the bonds between the birds of a group, and motivate them to assist the breeding pair in raising their young..."

Something had gone awry here. The bird wasn't cementing bonds with his enclosure mate. He was cementing bonds with us. Hence the miffedness of the other.

Be among the 17%, read the sign:

Questions arise: Does the Honolulu Zoo supply the Southern Ground Hornbills with fresh decapitated dead baby birds every day to perplex and entertain the first lucky Southern Ground Hornbill visitors?

Do the birds regularly use them to miff each other?

Although we had no want or need of a dead, headless baby bird, we felt somewhat special because of the offer. (Especially after reading the sign. Please read the signs).

Zoo opens at 9AM sharp.

Kolea, spring dress.

2015-04-03T16:06:00.000-07:00

Pacific Golden-Plovers (Kolea) are magical, large-headed, big-eyed birds that rush around on lawns in Honolulu during winter months, chasing each other from prized patches of turf. They don't care what humans are doing. They're busy.

When they arrive from their Arctic breeding territories they usually resemble the bird above, typical shorebird brown-on-white. This picture was taken in December, when all the Kolea I saw looked just so. Sometime between late December and late March those in condition to breed undergo a spectacular transformation, becoming black-bellied and golden-backed.

They behave the same way they did in basic brown, ignoring humans while alert for rivals, but look at how they look.

They

look

fabulous.

According to Hawaii's Birds (Hawaii Audubon Society), many of those that remain in the islands over the summer fail to obtain full breeding plumage. Do they experience regret? Embarrassment? Relief?

Waikiki Tree Penguin. More.

2015-04-02T15:44:00.003-07:00

A little more than a year ago I introduced the blogosphere to the Waikiki Tree Penguin.

Last week, observations I made while wearing various aloha shirts lead me to suspect that this bird is an apex predator throughout Oahu, not just at far-flung prawn and tilapia farms. First hint was at the big Banyan tree (above) at Kuhio Beach Park, surfboard central along the strip. A flock of white pigeons perched on the tree exploded in terror as a big, grey bird flopped into their midst.

This bird is feared.

Of course no one else saw it. That's how it goes.

This is a bustling, urban site. Here is the view approaching the banyan tree (Google Streetview image), not where you'd expect to see a WATP, but there it was.

And then, a few days later, during the Prince Kuhio Day parade mentioned in the previous post, a foursome of White Terns flew down the avenue, angrily pursuing and pecking at a Black-crowned Night-heron (what the WATP really is) above the heads of paraders and parade watchers. They chased it into a dense acacia tree in front of the Louis Vuitton store, and I lost sight of it in the hullabaloo, which included a marching band...

being surveilled by a drone.

There's a lot to be learned about Waikiki Tree Penguins, what exactly they're up to. Someone who otherwise has little cause to wear his various aloha shirts should go back there and study them at length.

White terns of Waikiki

2015-04-01T11:24:00.000-07:00

Our first trip to Oahu was in December 2013. We arrived after dark, and the next morning for a few seconds I was excited by the white birds flying around the hotel, until it was clear that they were all pigeons. Waikiki has a very high percentage of all-white pigeons.

This time, last week (i.e., late March), we also arrived after dark, and partway through the first morning I realized that many of the white pigeons weren't. They were flying acrobatically, buoyantly, joyfully. They were White Terns, or Manu-o-ku, and it was breeding season.

Mom and Dad (probably) teaching a youngster to fly like an angel.

Not long ago, White Terns were absent from or rare on southern Oahu, but they became established along the south shore in the 1960s and 1970s, and are now common in parts of Honolulu, notably in the large parks in Waikiki, where they nest in trees, depositing a single egg in a crevice in a branch.

Adult with young in a tree in Fort DeRussy Park.

They are very easy to see, nesting in trees among the cyclists, skateboarders, Segway-lurchers, picnickers and everyone else in Fort DeRussy -- and likely in other busy urban parks.

Fluffy youngster.

The young sit patiently, waiting for adults to arrive with bill-fuls of tiny shiny fish.

What surprised me was that they have spread far beyond the relative peacefulness of parkland, and apparently quite happily. Last Saturday we were watching the Prince Kuhio Day parade on the main shopping street, Kalakaua Ave, and observed White Terns nesting in the trees along the boulevard in front of the high-end designer stores.

So while this was going on...

and this...

adult terns were coming and going, tending to their chicks.

In front of Luis Vuitton, mid-parade

They are fast fliers, hard to photograph in flight, but I like the washed-out look of the following picture,

with the shiny blue fish in the bill.

Youngster and at least one adult tern, watching the parade.

There was plenty to watch. We had not even expected a parade, and it was a lot of fun. Hawaii hurts my smiling muscles.