‘Tis the Season for Christmas Bird Counts
Birders Bundle up for the Christmas Bird Count
For birders, the Christmas season isn’t about staying warm by the fire. Every year, thousands of birders across Canada get up at dawn to brave the elements for a full day of birding on a freezing winter day. This tradition is known as the Christmas Bird Count.
The requirements are simple: warm, water proof clothing, binoculars, a spotting scope, bird book, field check-list, lunch, a thermos of tea and good supply of cookies. At the end of the day, the birders gather for a potluck dinner, to tally up the numbers and species of birds seen, and share stories about the day’s adventures.
Christmas bird counts have been going on for more than a century. American ornithologist Frank Chapman of the Audubon Society organized the first bird census on Christmas day, 1900. At this time, conservation was a new concept, and scientists were just beginning to be concerned about declining bird populations. Chapman changed history when he proposed that rather than shooting birds, they be watched and counted. Continue reading »
Simply Salal
Salal Flowers
Thinking about salal, I can visualize the crisp, shiny green leaves sweeping through the understory, mounding up over the big stumps left from long-ago logging. I can hear the leaves slip and slap against my jacket as I bushwhack through thickets. I’ve seen its delicate rows of white bell-like flowers, and tasted the sweet, seedy dark purple berries. Salal is one of the most common native shrubs of the Pacific Northwest, and is, in my opinion, as emblematic of the coast as salmon or cedar trees. Salal (Gaultheria shallon) is a member of the Heather family, or Ericaceae, which includes many woody-stemmed shrubs, like rhododendrons, azaleas and laurel. Continue reading »
Fabulous Fall Fungi
Fly Amanita
When I opened my mushroom book recently, a sheath of loose-leaf paper fell out, with notes on various mushrooms that I had brought home for identification a few years ago. I still remember that day, when I laid the mushrooms out to take spore prints, and recorded their colour, texture, smell, growth form and habitat, trying to identify them (I did figure out some, but not others).
Fungi are a world unto themselves, being neither plants nor animals. Fungi do not have green chlorophyll like plants do, and cannot, like plants, manufacture their food from sunlight. Instead, fungi live off organic matter from living or dead plants and animals, and reproduce by simple, microscopic units called spores, rather than seeds. Continue reading »
Leaf Watching: The Comox Valley Top Five
My toddler son is keen to collect fallen leaves, clutching fistfuls in each hand and sorting them by shape and colour. He doesn’t know which trees the leaves belong to yet, but I am happy that he is out noticing things and exploring nature.
Most of the broad-leaved deciduous trees (trees that shed their leaves in the fall) are actually easy to recognize with practice. To start with, here are brief descriptions of the “top five” kinds of leaves that one is likely to see in the Comox Valley this fall.
Bigleaf Maple (Acer macrophyllum)
Bigleaf Maple
The bigleaf maple has the largest maple leaves in all of Canada, and the large yellow and rusty fall leaves provide some of the best fall colours in our area. Bigleaf leaves are deeply five-lobed. The brown V-shaped winged seeds fly down like little helicopters.
Maple trunks and limbs are often covered with luxuriant clumps of moss and ferns. The porous, calcium rich bark encourages plant growth. Douglas maple (Acer glabrum), is the only other common maple species in our area. This is a much smaller, more shrub-like tree that grows to ten metres high. Continue reading »
On the Trail of a Snail
Pacific Sideband Snail
Whatever the time of year, we always find something of interest on our nature walks. A few days ago we found ourselves on the trail of a snail, which crossed right in front of us. It glided slowly but stealthily over twigs and needles, toting a brown spiral shell on its back. When I got home, I pulled out my copy of “Land Snails of British Columbia” by Robert Forsyth, an excellent guide to our provinces’ slugs and snails, to learn more about this quiet but compelling creature.
In evolutionary terms, slugs and snails are very successful, with as many as 35,000 species of land dwelling slugs and snails in the world, and 94 species in BC.
Snails belong to a large group of marine and land-dwelling creatures called molluscs. The word mollusc comes from the Greek word “mollis” meaning soft, in reference to the soft-fleshed body. Continue reading »