Another Dusting

It snowed lightly through the night so we awoke to a small accumulation. The snow was of a good sort that wasn't sloppy wet but still stuck together to make perfect snowballs. It has been snowing ever so lightly for all of the day as though the clouds can not help themselves and would stop if they could but the snow just seems to keep leaking out. It's like shaking icing sugar through a sieve.  We went for a walk around the gorge and the fish hatchery.  From the footbridge we could spot some salmon still swimming in the river and numerous dead ones on the bottom.  The hatchery is not a fish farm!   You can read about it here if you like http://www-heb.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/facilities/capilano/history_e.htm

It was only a short lunch break but it was nice to get out in the crisp air and walk beneath the frosted cedars and see how the snow helps to detail the foliage especially the light green beard lichen growing on forest branches.

Snowlichen copy


Oh, the Bird Alert fellow called Ken to follow up on the Snowy Owl sighting. They chatted for a bit and he mentioned that there was a King Eider here in Vancouver of all places, hanging about with the Scoters on the shores of Stanley Park! We shall have to go have a peek!

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Cone Scribbles

Too chilly to draw outdoors today so it is a bit of a cone study. I find drawing cones difficult because they are so very 3-D and they pattern to the right and then the left and open up towards the top and slant off in all directions, whirling and twirling, twirling and whirling...
I received these particular cones in the mail. Isn't it nice to receive cones in the mail? I knew what they were before I opened the box because they smelled so resinous. My mother sent them to me as a surprise gift as she collected some when she was on holiday in the states. Did you know that you can order cones from suppliers in the states who do nothing but collect cones and ship them off to people who use them for crafts and such? Well, they do.  I don't craft with them, I just like looking at them.
So what I have here is a Ponderosa, a sequoia, and a pinyon.  The ink ran though so I will have to do a better study of them later.

Cones

So I also forgot to mention that my husband called me from work yesterday to tell me that he was standing there staring at a Snowy Owl. Yep. They migrate south through to Washington in the winter and on occasion you can spot them. Some years they are easy to suss out and other years there aren't so many. It's all depending on the lemming supply up north. When they fly south, their diet switches to water foul. Ken said that he could even see his feathery feet. He sat there for ages being dive-bombed by dozens of crows ( the owl, not Ken) but not moving in the slightest. He said, "PAH" to those crows. At any rate Ken phoned the Snowy Owl sighting into the Natural History Society who sponsor the Rare Bird Alert. That'a boy!

Coldish again, around -1 and very grey.
sunrise- 7.46 am
sunset- 4.16 pm

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And there went November

Well there were no further snow flurries at lower elevations but the mountain behind us certainly received a fair dusting. Very pretty from what I could see of it between the low, puffy clouds brightly lit by the sun.

There is a nice collection of bracket fungus growing on a cedar stump near the path I take when I walk my  longer route. I decided it deserved further consideration, upon which, I'm still not sure what kind of bracket fungus it is (of course). I can only conclude that it is a <b>ganoderma</b> of some sort but of what kind I can not tell as there are many brown-on-top-white-on-bottom ganodermas. Ah well. If anyone should ask I will just cough into my sleeve and say ganoderma simultaneously. If they ask me to repeat myself I will just run away.

sunrise- 7:46 am
sunset- 4:16 pm

Bracketfungus copy

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Run Salmon Run

So I noticed that in the past few days there have been dead salmon showing up in MacKay Creek which runs through a heavily developed part of the city.  They are either chum or coho salmon and are measuring approximately 15 inches. Very pale white with maybe a tinge of peach but the tinge could be decomposition. Their faces hadn't changed into that hooked beak shape that salmon get when they start their run upstream. Maybe only some kinds of salmon do it. I will have to drop by the Salmon Fish Hatchery this weekend to find out.

Anyway, apparently a conservation group released fry into the higher up portion of the creek in the hopes of generating some kind of a salmon creek once again. One can suppose it is working since they are returning. Whether they make it back to the spawning ground is another question. It seems like a tough journey. I actually saw one alive, struggling its way up the creek. I wonder if it will make it. MacKay Creek starts quite high up Grouse mountain, about 2800ft and in a watershed so the water starts out quite clean but as it makes its way down the mountain it leaves the watershed and enters through two municipalities full of housing and commercial development. Moreover, neither municipality co-ordinates the management of the creek so at the moment, with all the neglect and abuse it is considered an endangered creek. I contacted the conservation group to see when they meet up. I wonder if they will contact me back.

On a lighter note, before I get maudlin, Maggie has turned into a Salmon Pointer. Not a bird dog this one, but a salmon dog. She was thrilled to search the banks for dead salmon and stand there waiting for me to see them. She didn't touch them, just over them. As we walked along the muddy path she would suddenly veer off and wait for me to follow her, something she never does. She rarely, if at all, leaves the path so I knew, before I saw the dead fish, that one was there. Okay, and if the wind was wafting the right way, I could smell it but boy was she chuffed when she found them ALL  BY HERSELF and ALL for me to count. So anyway, I now know there are approximately eight dead salmon so far...all thanks to my Salmon Pointer.

Deadsalmon


Oh. I forgot to mention that it snowed today. First of the season! 5-6 centimeters.

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A Fungus By Any Other Name

Don't you just love the names of fungi? People were really having fun when they came up with nicknames for mushies. Names like, Train Wrecker, Witch's Butter, Sickner, Poison Pie or Angel Wings.  There are some boring ones too mind you, like, "Small Mushroom With Navel". Out of all the things you could call it,  <i>that</i> was the best? I bet that person got excluded from mycology outings after that faux pas. "Oh there's Sir Daniel Wotherspun. Don't make eye contact. Did you hear what he named his discovered fungus? Quick let's hide in the boxwood maze".
"Oh yes, Ra-<i>ther</i>".

I like reading about mushrooms and drawing mushrooms but I'll be damned if I can tell which one is which even with the guide book. Nevermind if you don't have the guidebook with you on your walk. Just ne-ver-mind. There's no hope. I got lucky today though and that is one time out of five years lucky. I sketched some fungus growing out of a decaying tree and when I got home and flipped through my mushroom books I found NOTHING. So I turned to the internet and just as I was thinking what a futile search it was, I happened upon the picture and name quite accidentally. Turns out it is common as dirt. I reckon it was so common that it wasn't even worth mentioning in the books. Sheesh. Anyway, it turned out to be Candlesnuff Fungus or Staghorn Fungus.

Candlesnuff

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Fall Chestnuts

I had found these chestnuts a few weeks earlier on a walk through the park. I know there aren't any left now due to the obsessive cleaning by the park's people so I feel lucky to have found them when I did. Not that I needed more. Oh you know the routine. Don't play innocent with me.  Every year you pick some up and put them in your pocket and they mingle with the ones you picked up the year before because you are now wearing your fall coat from last year. It's the same with autumn leaves, you pick some up and put them in your pocket and forget about them. They get crushed to smithereens and the smithereens stick to your kneaded gum eraser and it's all a big bother to pick the bits out so you leave it and everything gets embarassing when you have to hunt for change when you buy a coffee. (I once had to tell a cashier, after depositing a stick on the counter in my search for money, that it was my dog's stick, even though Maggie was nowhere in sight.)  I mean there's only so much explaining one can do when it comes to pockets.
Anyway, these are the non-edible type of chestnuts... Horse Chestnuts or <i>Aesculus hippocastanum</i> and are not a true chestnut. Ha! Imposter! The true chestnut is <i>Castanea</i> and our favourite, the sweet chestnut, comes to mind <i>Castanea sativa</i>. Hmmm...come to think of it, it will be soon time to pick some up on the next shopping trip.

Chestnuts

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Another Grey Foggy Day

Went walking this afternoon around the seashore and everything was in fog. I thought the sun might burn it off by afternoon but there was no sign of it, not even a glimmer. Everything was just gone in a soft grey, dreamy blanket. Tankers at anchor loomed and disappeared and even the foghorn became muffled. It was business as usual at the seashore and there were cormorants, wigeons, loons, goldeneyes, mallards and oystercatchers going about their feathery ways. Autumn leaves are still clinging and the colours make muted slips against the dark cedars.


Leaves

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A Sunny Day

It's beautiful out and Maggie wants her walk. She sighs and implores with wrinkled brow. I ignore her and keep doing my work. She retires to the blanket but I know my reprieve is temporary. She will return with groans, sighs and wriggles. I explain, then, that we are indeed walking, just not right now. I am teaching her the concept of "later". She is teaching me the concept of "bored disgust" and retires to the couch to keep an eye on me. Hours pass and I make up my mind that at 2pm we shall go for a walk and let the paint dry. She reads my mind right as the clock hits two and leaps off the couch. "Later" has come!


Maggie

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Ivy

Ivy grows everywhere in our forests. Okay, not EVERYWHERE but anywhere humans have ventured forth into nature. It's not indigenous and there is nothing to slow it down. It climbs on trees until the tree can no longer support itself nutritionally and then is easily felled by the next strong wind. Ivy is like the corporate headhoncho of the plant world. It's shiny, evergreen and user friendly. Its graceful twining green is seductive. The next thing you know it's embedded in everything and growing over the native plants. It's difficult to remove and needs consistent effort on your part to remind yourself it can only end in tears.

Ivy

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A brine filled day.

 Yesterday I participated in a craft fair with some of my members from our watercolour group. We sold some of our cards and it's fun to hang about and catch up.  So in lieu of not being out and about sketching in nature, I'll post a few card images.


Edgeofthesea1



And here's another of sea kelp.

Seakelp1


And another of an octopus or goldfish, depending on which way you like to turn your monitor : )

Goldfish


It has been foggy the past two days and when I came home on the ferry it was dusk. The tugboats would come and go into the fog and sometimes you couldn't see anything at all, not even the lights from the shore and considering it's not that far away, that's saying something.  The foghorn was sounding and I could smell the creosote from the dock pilings. I could have stayed ages but my stomach was growling for supper and you just can't ignore that.
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