Grasshoppers

Check out this post from Rock Paper Lizard.

Merganser Pond, Saltspring Island

On the other side of Ruckle Provincial Park, the campgrounds are jammed, and people line the sandstone shoreline watching the ferries go by. But here in the woods: nobody. My father and I broke cobwebs across the trail as we walked up at 11 a.m.

Nestled among the cedars, a pond, abuzz with dragonflies: eight-spotted skimmers, blue-eyed darners (at least I'm pretty sure they were blue-eyed darners. I never saw one stop.)

Also meadowhawks mating...

They were leaving their eggs among the duckweed, which doesn't strike me as a very permanent spot. They must overwinter as larvae.


...lyre-tipped spreadwings...


...and duets of bluets.


And once we'd stayed still and looked long, we found we were surrounded by dozens of Pacific tree frogs, most of them small enough to perch on a fingernail.
Perched among the duckweed, they were hard to spot.


Here's a closer view.


Many of them perched on blades of sedge.


Here are a couple more tiny froggy pictures.

Where the giant yellow amoebas roam

This weekend I went up Rattlesnake Mountain, near North Bend, Wash., and had a delightful hike through the woods. We saw a couple dozen of these:

This is a slime mold: Fuligo septica, or if you prefer the common name, dog vomit slime mold.
What we're seeing is the mobile, amoeboid form of the slime mold, one giant oozing, branching, decaying wood devouring cell. At the right stage, and on a diet of wood chips or beauty bark, it can look so much like dog vomit that it triggers calls to the veterinarian.
Here's one that is a little further along in development:

There's a black, bruise-like blur in one spot where spores are forming. Eventually, it'll go through a series of changes, ending up as a blue-black sporing body.
Also coming into bloom on the forest floor was Indian Pipe. Indian pipe is ghostly white and fungus-like because it doesn't get its energy from sunlight. Instead, it uses a fungus as an intermediary to get energy from nearby trees.

Fossils, Saltspring Island

Stroll along the beach from my parents place on Saltspring Island and you can find shale deposits from the late cretaceous. And if you look closely enough at the shale fragments, you can find relics of the seafloor at that time. Here's my son with a piece of bivalve.

Beach critters, Saltspring Island

Barnacles feeding from their perch around a clam siphon


Nudibranch egg ribbon. What kind of nudibranch? I don't know.


Mossy chiton.

Is that a species of concern in my mother's petunias?

It's a duskywing skipper, probably Propertius duskywing. Washington lists the species as vulnerable, and British Columbia lists it as a species of concern because it depends on Garry Oaks, a tree which is becoming scarce in British Columbia, largely because great chunks of its habitat have been swallowed up by towns and suburbs.
According to the references, these insects are most likely to show up in May, though flights in July have been known to happen.

Black Oystercatcher, Gulf Islands National Park Reserve

As you might have guessed, I like black oystercatchers. This one was on Russell Island, off Saltspring Island.