Low Tide Shellfish Macro

I got a very nice macro lens this spring as a post-overtime reward and have been very happy with it. For those of you that follow such things, its a 60mm equivalent that can do 1:1 macro and has a focusing distance about an inch from the end of the glass. Low tide offers some pretty great macro opportunities and a few are below. Starting off with an oyster which most of you can imagine the scale of from experience.

Below is a snail on that oyster. You can see the one in the picture above as the little black dot near the top of the lip of the oyster. The biggest trick with pictures at this magnification is the focal depth is incredibly shallow and its very easy to have your intended object out of focus with the tiniest movement. Case in point only part of the snail below is actually in focus.

Here we have some barnacles feeding underwater. Their shells are maybe the size of a pea, which should give an idea what this new lens is capable of. For those of you bored by camera tech I do have a few barnacle fun-facts: they begin their lives as little swimming larvae which eventually glue their heads to a suitable surface and then spend the rest of their lives catching food with their feet. Throw in being hermaphrodites with the largest genitals-to-body size ratio of any animal in the world, and maybe you don't really want to be looking at them much closer than this ;)

6th Year Anniversary and 300th Blog Post Extravaganza

 For our 6th Anniversary the people of Vancouver took to the streets in a spontaneous moment of celebration and song. There was a multitude of street performers singing their hearts out and the crowds surged to join our happy day. Or our anniversary coincides with 'Make Music Vancouver,' a festival of street music throughout Yaletown and Gastown. Whichever description sounds best to you.

 We had a very pleasant evening out with a nice long walk along the sea and through the crowds, ending off with dinner at a little bar in the trendy part of downtown. Here we are posing for a quick selfie on the sea wall.

 Afterwards we had some honey wine we found in Sooke last year and a little piece of cake that Kathryn had custom decorated just to make me smile and swoon. All in all an excellent celebration and a great start for our next 6 years together :)

 

For those of you keeping score at home, this is also our 300th blog post. We only noticed because the setup showed we had 299 posts before this one so its not really a big deal, but does go to show that we have done a good job of sticking with this silly blog over the last 5 years rather than posting every 6 months and only talking about how we should try and post more ;)

I Guess Wee Otter

Bad title pun aside it is high time I talked about sea otters. Particularly the wee otter Katmai. Geordie and myself have never seen sea otters in the wild despite days of searching and missing them by a matter of hours. So we have to content ourselves with the guys at the aquarium.  A new addition is the mentioned wee otter pup nammed Katmai. 

We saw Katmai the day she was introduced into her new watery enclosure. Below she is exploring the edges and nosing about wondering about her new home.  She doesn't have that whitish head yet.  She won't get that until she is older.  They also have the densest fur of all the animals. It is so dense (nearly one million per sq in) that their actual skin never gets wet.

Katmai is an enclosure with an older female named Tanu.  Tanu has taken Katmai under her paw so to speak.  Both were orphaned and as they cannot be rehabilitated they continue to charm their visitors at the Vancouver Aquarium.  The 'awww' factor is quite high.

Orcas in Vancouver

On June 14 I didn't have to go far to find orcas.  Transients came into English Bay and then proceeded under Lions Gate Bridge and continued past Stanley Park into Burrard Inlet.  They turned around at the Main Street Docks just East of Canada Place before heading back out the way they came before crossing English Bay towards Spanish Banks and Point Grey.  It looked like they were doing some hunting under the bridge and at Spanish Banks too.  On the hydrophone we were able to pick up some vocalizations which was a nice surprise.  Here is one of them against the back drop of West Vancouver.

 

I shot some video which made it on the CBC National News.  The clip below is much better than their raw, unstabalized, it airs in onr hour cut.  Geordie edited it very nicely.  I hope by the end of the fall we can put another clip together.  If you are interested in whale watching I work at Wild Whales in Vancouver and there are lots of trips going out.

 

As always with embedded video, if you have trouble playing it, just right click and choose "Watch on Vimeo HD" to let it open in another tab. I find our various flash/ad blockers sometimes stop video from playing otherwise. -G

Blodel Conservatory- birdies and plants

Finally, Geordie and I got our buts on a lovely day to the Bloedel Conservatory in Queen Elizabeth Park.  It is on Little Mountain, south of False Creek.  The conservatory is the dome thing in the background.  Where the photo was taken is a quarry type garden.

Inside the Bloedel Conservatory were a plethora of exotic, tropical and desert plants and birds.  Below is a bromeliad.  There were also pitcher plants, orchids, various palms, ferns and flowering trees and shrubs.  A good place for a variety of camera lenses.  My favorite was bird spotting.

Speaking of some of the birds we saw, this is Rosie an African Grey Parrot.  African Grays are native to the Congo and one of the most intelligent of animals among dolphins and chimps.  We were fortunate enough to hear many of her odd sounds including clicks, clucks, chirps, warbles and funny noises.  I am not a huge advocate of parrots in captivity because of their intelligence but so much of their habitat is in trouble that this is often the only recourse. 

The Scratchy Story of Moulting Molly

 Elephant seals were nearly hunted to extinction around 100 years ago and have been gradually making a comeback in the last decade. This summer we were lucky enough to have a young female elephant seal live on Ambleside beach for about a month during her moult. While we have seen elephant seals in the past, this was certainly the closest we are likely to get to one and without the rocking of a boat to unsteady our photos.

Though they are the largest of the seals, there is a huge degree of sexual dimorphism within the species so females are often less than half the size of the males. As a young female, Molly was not much bigger than a california sea lion to begin with and certainly lost weight during her month on the sand.

Each year they undergo what is called a 'catastrophic moult' where they spend a 25 days or more shedding their skin and fur to bring in a new coat for the coming year. This is not only incredibly itchy, but it leaves the poor animals looking pretty rough and mangy for during a perfectly natural part of their lifecycle. This was so poorly understood until recently that even in the 90s the Department of Fisheries and Oceans would put down any moulting elephant seals they found, thinking that they were suffering rather than just hitting their annual puberty.