Just two trees

I keep taking photos of this same pair of trees at Oyster Bay.

December 13, 2016. Around noon.

Dec 20, 2016. Same time, darker day.

January 2, 2017. Snow on the trees now. And an eagle.

June 16. 2017. Mid-summer, 7 PM

October 22, 2017. 3 PM

May 19, 2018. 8 PM, near sundown.

November 28, 2018. 2:30 PM. Sundown is at 4:30 these days. A couple of dozen crows had just left, while I was unpacking the camera.

Except for the leaves coming and going and changing colour, these two haven't changed much from the first to the last photo, but it looks like the young forest at their feet has grown quite a bit.

Better late than never

I was running late. I didn't get started out for my Sunday afternoon drive (in the rain) until shortly after four. And by then, it was so dark that the colours had leached out of the trees. I set out with the camera, anyhow. I could at least watch tree silhouettes. And maybe see some wildlife, a deer or two, maybe.

Alder against the sky. 4:41 PM The camera sees more light than I do.

Chutes and ladders. And a pair of trees. 4:45. Quinsam Coal Barge Terminal

Crooked tree. 4:46

Looking out over Menzies Bay. 4:52 The bit of colour in the foreground was from my headlights.

As for wildlife, I saw four eagles, and a pair of moths in my headlights. No deer.

But Chia was waiting for me at home, and she's sort of wild.

Chia and her shadows. 10:15.

They're promising us rain for the entire week. I need to get some rain gear.

A Skywatch post.

Tree bones

Wind, salt, rain, blowing sand. Give them time, and they peel the thick bark off trees, snap off the branches, sandpaper the roots. Add a bit of moss and lichen and strew the resulting fantastic shapes all along the shore line and across the dunes. Ma Nature's modern art gallery.

Log, needles, lichen. And a sort of bird shape.

Standing statuettes, the innards of branch attachments. This wood seems to be tougher, more resistant to rot than the rest of the tree.

Log end and Big-headed sedge, turned yellow with the cold weather.

New tree, old tree, young tree.

Grandaddy stump, Saratoga Beach

Nursery

Life goes on ...

When a tree dies, it comes alive, more so than in its life.

Living trees are made up of about 5% living tissue, but when certain species die, they become literal garden beds of new life. These otherwise “dead” trees contain five times more living matter than when they were growing upright. (Garden Collage magazine)

And its useful life can extend as long as its "live" growth period. A 100-year-old tree dies; then it invites in a host of other organisms, and stands or lies there for another 100 years, gradually disintegrating. By the time it finally disappears, it may have nurtured a small forest of its own.

In any old stand of trees in our rainforest, we find nurse logs in different stages of decay and re-incarnation.

An old forest giant. I estimated it from a distance at about 2 - 3 metres diameter. Our Douglas firs have been known to reach up to 15 feet across.

This old stump supports several small trees, maple and fir, growing from the top, plus a few huckleberry bushes and a layer of moss. On its flanks, ferns, red-berry elder and salal have taken root, as well as the ever-present moss. 

The old stump lifts seedlings above the undergrowth into the light and retains a more consistent level of moisture, winter and summer, than the forest floor. In deep forest, they may provide almost the only suitable habitat for huckleberry bushes, which need air and light.

Look to the right; there's another old nurse log, mostly gone by now; the tree grown out of it has extended its roots over the edge and down into the soil. They will support the new tree on stilts even when the nurse has disappeared.

Another, much smaller, second- or third-growth stump supports three new trees. Their roots encase the old stump, by now too fragile to hold the weight on its own. Other residents: moss and a large colony of spiders.

Three more firs on a badly-decayed nurse log. The one in back is just getting started, with its top dressing of moss, where seeds will find the perfect planting bed, warm, moist, and sunlit.

Past their sell-by date?

Hard-working trees:

Woodpecker snack bar. Also ant, beetle, spider hideout and winter quarters. Future nest site (under construction).

Critter bridge, creek dam, flotsam collector. Will likely host huckleberry bushes where the sun can reach them, next year.

Under a maple tree

The maples are glorious this year. Even the bare trunks. And the winged seeds.

I'm tempted to try climbing this.

Like little birdies almost ready to leave the nest.

It's cooler under the trees, but the bush is parched and crackly. There's a wildfire burning south of here, at Nanaimo; we need rain!

Mature bigleaf maple trees range from 50 to 100 ft in height (160 ft maximum) and 12 to 36 in. in DBH (133 in. maximum). Bigleaf maple is moderately long-lived; some individuals may reach 300 years of age. ...The root system of bigleaf maple is shallow and spreading on wet or shallow soils. (Oregon State University)

The field beside this tree is dry, but a small creek runs on the shady side of the tree. Maples lose their leaves when they lack water; this one seems to be doing well.

Abstract art, with wormholes.

On the shore in the rain, among the driftwood, I found this piece of bark. Just the one piece, about six inches long. The colour stood out on the wet beach, a bright orange, looking almost artificial, as if it were painted.

The inner bark of the red alder is reddish brown, and weathers to a bright orange-red.

 A red or orange dye was made from the bark to color red cedar bark and to make fishnets invisible to fish. (Native Plants, PNW)

A hint of pink

The snow is gone. Rain pounded down all day yesterday, cleaning the streets, the lawn, my steep, slippery driveway (Yay!). All that is left are the mounds of muddy snow in the corners of store parking lots and beside the driveways of neighbours more ambitious than I was.

Before the end, though, I shuffled through boot-top snow to the tip of Baikie Island.

Someone had made a trail here, too. Much appreciated.

At this time of year, the bare alders seem to take on a pinkish tinge towards the tips of the trees; a slight hint of redness against the insipid browns of the winter bush. Looking closely at a branch, I can see why.

Red alder, Alnus rubra. The long, greenish-yellow catkins appear before the leaves do; male catkins have a touch of red now, and will be quite red when they mature. The dark brown cones are last year's fruit.

Look at the very tips of the branches. See the new leaf buds appearing? They all have that bit of red, too.

Another branch, with cones, new catkins, and the pinkish leaf buds.

At this time of year, when the landscape is painted in grey, grey-brown, grey-blue, and grey-green, this glimmer of warmer colours is welcome. Summer is coming, believe it or not, it tells us.

Of mice and tree ID

Douglas fir.

Cone with "mouse tails".

I like Douglas firs; they're the only ones whose cones have these three-pronged bracts. And the cones stay on the tree year-round. Very helpful.

Legend has it that the bracts are the hindquarters and tails of mice hiding in the cone from predators. Tiny mice. (From Trees of the Northwest)

Standing tall

I've been taking photos of trees as I wander about, whenever I can catch one off on its own. Here are a few of them, in grey winter light.

Bare deciduous trees:

In grey light and melting snow. Oyster Bay.

One crow. Oyster Bay

Silhouette against mid-day light. Oyster Bay Nature Preserve.

Sunset, from Jubilee Parkway.

Same two as the silhouette, but from the far side, on a slightly warmer day. With crows.

Alder, Tyee Spit.

And evergreens:

Growing tips. Buttle Lake

On the shores of Upper Campbell Lake

Tyee Spit

Loaded with cones.Oyster Bay.

A Skywatch post.

Mighty miniatures

The forest along the south bank of the Campbell River is made up of mixed evergreen and deciduous trees, mostly alder, big-leaf maple, and Douglas fir. Beneath them, moss-blanketed fallen trees and branches crumble softly into the soil, helped along by clusters of miniature mushrooms.

It gives some perspective on the importance of fungi when we consider that without them the world's forest ecosystems would collapse. (From Trees for Life)

Tiny, fragile, long-stemmed grey mushrooms.

Yellow mushrooms, with red-eyed fly.

Another branch, another cluster.

I picked one to see the gills. They're a pale cream colour, with a greenish tinge.

Witches butter. Almost every clump of moss had a dab or two.

Unidentifiable mushroom, so loved by slugs that only a few scraps of cap are left. With a baby banana slug, just leaving.

The underside of another slug delight in the same clump.

A bolete with a striped red stalk, and yellow tubes. Note the fly: red eyes, black thorax, orange abdomen. Compare to the one above: red eyes, orange thorax, black abdomen.

Except for the witches butter, which is unmistakable, I've given up trying to make a precise identification for these. I explained why in 2007.

How many different mushrooms are there in British Columbia? Nobody knows for sure, but the number of species is in the thousands, not hundreds. ... There are many more mushrooms out there than we imagined. If you cannot identify your shroom after carefully looking in a mushroom book, do not feel discouraged. Even the experts cannot identify a large number of them, because there are many that have yet to be named. Of those which are named, a large percentage require microscopic study before they can be distinguished from their close relatives. (From Terry Taylor's Ecology Notes)

Shelf polypores tomorrow.

Verticality

Enough bending down to look at the duff dwellers. I stand up, stretch my back, and look up instead.

Trees, mountain, sky over the Leiner River. (Click for a better view.)

The photo is as shot. That was the colour of the sky at 2:45 that afternoon; blue and slightly pink.

Update: I found the photo, as shown on the blog, to be disappointing, not as I had seen it on my screen before posting. Clicking on it, however, gives me the photo as it should be. I checked a bunch of other posts, and found the same thing: Blogger dulls the photos, even though it keeps a decent copy hidden, unless you click on it. Why is this?

A Skywatch post.

Very blue

Flowers so blue that the name of the shrub just had to be "blue blossom".

Ceanothys thyrsiflorus, aka California lilac. Native to California and Oregon, common here.

The lilacs have bloomed and faded. Now, the blue blossom takes over and will bloom through June. The blue is more intense, the tree denser than the lilacs. But they don't perfume the neighbourhood like a lilac does. 

A few other tidbits of information about Ceanothus thyrsiflorus: the blue flowers can be used to make a green dye (though why green rather than blue?), and all parts of the plant can be crushed and worked into a lather to use as a gentle soap, as the plant contains saponins. (From UBC Botanical Garden)

And butterflies and bees love it, too!

Staring into trees

When the birds in the trees see my camera and fly away, there's always still a tree to look at. In Mazatlan, the coconut and date palms, the banana trees, the mangos and mameys were old friends, but there were so many more, new to me, out in plain sight lining and sometimes invading the streets.

Coconut palm, with coconuts ready for the picking.

Green dates on a baby date palm, barely 6 feet tall.

Sidewalk tree.

Another coconut palm, in a vacant lot.

I stopped at many vacant lots, hoping to see birds, occasionally chasing a butterfly, but I had to limit myself to skirting around the streetside edges; usually the vegetation was too dense to penetrate. And usually towering overhead. This one was typical. The vine, I think, is a Monstera variety, and the tree at lower right is probably a banana tree.

Mimosa?

I have Googled and browsed for hours; I can't identify these long seed pods.

The trees I found that almost, but not quite, matched these had similar pods and different leaves and leaf growth patterns. Others had knobby or ridged pods; these were smooth on all the trees I examined. The leaves are individual, oval-shaped, opposite, at the end of a forked terminal branch.

Small citrus, probably kumquats.

I haven't been able to identify yesterday's tree, where the boat-billed flycatcher has her nest, either. Dense leaf cover, pale yellow, upright flowers.

Any help with identification of any of these is greatly appreciated.

In the green spaces, open grass and trees, not quite parks but more wide walkways between streets, fruit lies on the ground, split open, a fresh buffet for birds and small animals. I was surprised not to see many insects, apart from the butterflies. Maybe they're all nocturnal, or at least hiding from the heat of midday.

The mangos are still small and green in April; once they ripen and fall, they will add their perfume to the entire area.