Oil Patch

The interpreter was walking up the hill on his way to the grocery store, where there was a two-for-one sale on suet. Nearing the intersection, he heard what sounded like a gunshot. This was followed by a liquid splat, something viscid landing on pavement. On the far side of the four-lane street a white pick-up truck had backed up, then pulled out from its parking spot, leaving behind a crumpled plastic container. The interpreter understood what had happened. For some reason, a plastic bottle of motor oil had been lying on the road near the far curb. When the truck backed up, it compressed the bottle, causing it to rupture violently and send a sheet of oil over the curb lane.

As the interpreter reached the corner the light turned yellow. On the far side, a Filipino couple in their forties was hurrying to catch the bus that was approaching the stop on the interpreter’s side of the road. The woman saw the light, and stopped, but the man thought they could make it. He grabbed his wife’s arm and pulled her into the intersection. They hit the oil. The woman’s feet shot out and she landed on her back. One of her shoes flew off and skittered to the middle of the road, ending up on the yellow line. The light changed from yellow to red. The man looked at his wife, at the shoe, at his wife…

The woman struggled up and hopped on one foot back to the curb. Her husband followed. Traffic, which had been waiting, started flowing through the intersection. The bus the couple had intended to catch glided through.

In a lull in the traffic the husband ran to the middle of the street to retrieve his wife’s shoe. He darted back through moving vehicles and handed it to his wife, who was standing on one foot, gripping the top of a parking meter. She snatched the shoe from her husband and swung it at him, smacking him on the shoulder. She unleashed a verbal barrage in a rapid-fire Tagalog. After a few seconds the husband said a few words. They looked at each other, and laughed.

The light went yellow, and then red, and the traffic stopped. The woman dropped her shoe and gracefully slid her foot inside. She took her husband’s arm and they crossed the street as the interpreter crossed in the opposite direction. He studied their faces as they passed, and saw two people completely happy with each other. He felt a wave of sadness, a longing for something from long ago. You see, not only did the interpreter live in a difficult, unpredictable present; his past had been more or less along the same lines.

Stepping onto the far curb, the interpreter turned for a last look at the couple. He said, wistfully, “I once loved someone that much.” He had forgotten about the oil.

As he fell, he twisted and flailed at the parking meter. Clutching it, he sank to the sidewalk.

A woman carrying shopping bags looked down her nose. “Drunk!” she said.


Next story...

Raccoon hungry.

Yesterday, before the rain.

It started raining overnight and rained heavily until about noon. Now it has stopped and the neighbourhood is gurgling, a chorus of unclogged downspouts.

At the bases of cedar hedges and other places the snow didn't pile, grass and soil are reappearing, finally. Yesterday's raccoon tracks were the first I've seen since the snow started --and I've been looking for them. He has a nightly routine, but like the rest of us has been interrupted. I don't know what or where he eats, but he must be hungry.

Will the rain not start again? Environment Canada says it will, a lot. But do they really know? Everyone's jittery. Surely more's coming. We've been short-changed before.

More rain! More rain! We're tired of walking in snow, unable to find food.

Alas, no VATH.

Last night we were promised wind and rising temperatures and rain, which gave us hope. (These posts are starting to sound like entries from the Donner Party. Really, it's not that bad.) The wind kicked up, then suddenly disappeared. The temperature stayed right where it was, and the rain fell...as snow. It snowed much of the night--wet, heavy stuff.

Weather frog: things not improving.

Wake-up (sidewalk-shovelling) temp was about 2C, meaning melt was occurring, but not in a way you would notice.

Then, 8:30, drive-time. Cars were backed up from the school, around the block. When we got closer, we saw why. The road is still only one lane (one set of ruts, to be more precise), which cars going in both directions must share. Cars trying to exit the school's looping driveway were blocking those trying to get to the entrance, and vice versa. No way in, no way out. Children were having to get out of cars half a block from school and walk!

Eventually a smart dad (no, not me) took it upon himself to act as traffic cop, for which everyone seemed grateful. He got things moving again. Pickup is in an hour or so. We'll see how it goes.

I walked to Paulik Park to see what was new. This pool of water was. Much of the park is low-lying, and if we receive 40mm of rain tomorrow night and another 40mm on Wednesday, as advertised, things could get swampy. It was deep, clutching snow, and at one point I started thinking that a better plan for the morning might have been a pot of coffee and a view out the back window. I was hoping for a VATH (Varied Thrush), but this was not to be.

I stood a while and listened to thousands of little bits of slush and snow dripping off the trees. I have heard that exact sound before, but in a very different place: snapping shrimp. I must be yearning for the tropics, too (in addition to VATHs).

P.S. No sign of Squeaky, the Anna's Hummingbird. Thank you to the very kind person maintaining the feeder.

Snow-covered and no relief.

Schoolyard yesterday.

Twentieth day of snow. Some has melted, but more has fallen. School starts again tomorrow and the roads and sidewalks remain a mess. Monday, 8:30 AM-- drive-time-- could be a challenge. Overnight we are to have wind and rain and warmer temperatures. We’ve been promised a big melt several times, which never came. Perhaps this will be it.

A holiday of snow would have been more fun had we had some topography to slide around on. An inescapable reality of this silty, sandy, rivermouth island is flatness. Flat from coast to coast to coast to coast. Good for cycling, sub-par for tobogganing. We can see the mountains with their ski hills, but they’re over there, several bridges and cities to the north. Not easy to get to from here.

Yesterday I saw three kids trying to toboggan down the heap of snow at the corner of their driveway. They were giving it a good try, hanging on as if they were in for some hair-raising fun, but really, when the front of the sled is at the bottom of the hill before the back leaves the top, it isn’t the complete experience.

Weather frog is threatening to resign.

Ditches as wildlife habitat: Elephant seals.

A juvenile male Northern Elephant Seal has decided to take a breather in a roadside drainage ditch in Saanich, which is on Vancouver Island near Victoria. There was footage of the creature on the local news, opening its mouth, baying and snorting at people. It appears to be in good shape, but in a place one would more typically expect to find an abandoned shopping cart. Local residents were shown doing their best, making sure the seal was safe from cars, dogs, other people, etc.

In November, an adult male of same species turned up dead at Nanaimo, which is farther north on the east side of Vancouver Island. Because of its impressive size, that creature created quite a different stir, and there was considerable speculation on the significance of its appearance -- as if it had been a visitation from a sea monster.

Adult male Northern Elephant Seal, Mirounga angustirostris. Image from http://www.britannica.com.

How did it get there? What happened to it? The second question was answered in part by a necropsy. The first serves to underscore a lack of knowledge of this species, which as far as was known, rarely appeared in British Columbian inshore waters -- a point not made in the news report of our much smaller friend in the ditch.

Adult Northern Elephant Seals can be enormous. Females measure about three metres and weigh up to 2000 pounds. The male, whose elongate, rubbery proboscis provides the name for the species, can be five metres long and weigh more than 4000 pounds. Prized for the oil in their blubber, elephant seals were hunted to near extinction in the late nineteenth century. The surviving population was declared protected by Mexico in 1922, and soon after the U.S. granted protected status. Free from hunting pressure, numbers increased rapidly. There are now more than 150,000 elephant seals, with large breeding colonies re-established on beaches and rocky headlands along the Californian and Mexican coasts.

Elephant seals migrate northward into British Columbia’s outer waters and beyond, and then back to southern haul-out sites, twice a year. The longest journeys are by adult males, some as far as between northern Mexico to the Gulf of Alaska. They remain at sea for months on end, usually alone, often thousands of miles offshore, feeding on deep-water fish and squid.

Their life at sea is a life underwater--deep underwater. I once attended a talk by a marine mammalogist who studied the diving physiology of these animals. He and his students ventured onto haul-out beaches in central California, and super-glued depth-recording transmitters to the resting behemoths. I remember the precipitous stock market-like diagrams on the screen. Elephant seals dove to incredible depths. Most dives were in the order of (only) 300 to 400 metres, but some were as deep as 1500 metres, the greatest depths known for air-breathing vertebrates. Also astounding --almost ninety percent of the time in the open ocean was spent submerged, usually in half-hour stretches, with rarely more than five minutes resting at the surface between dives. No wonder they are seldom seen. An elephant seal’s head is bigger than a breadbox, but next to invisible in the waves.

Elephant seals return south twice a year, once to breed, which happens in the winter months, and once again in time for what is known as a “catastrophic molt.” The deep diving necessary to obtain food requires that oxygen-rich blood be diverted away from the skin, to internal organs. Eventually the skin deteriorates to the point that its outer layers, along with its hair, sloughs away. When this happens, it is best to be high and dry to avoid hypothermia. The molt occurs in spring for adult females and juveniles, and in mid-summer for adult males. The seals remain on land without food or water until blood vessels extending through the thick blubber nourish the layers of tissue, stimulating the regeneration of outer skin and hair. Then off they go again, back to sea, an underwater, upside-down leap-frog into northern feeding latitudes.

Could the Nanaimo animal, and now, the juvenile male, be signs of things to come? As numbers of elephant seals continue to rise, perhaps individuals will be encountered in B.C.’s inner waters more frequently. But also, sadly, perhaps more will be found dead, not of natural causes. The Nanaimo animal was a healthy bull that in November would have been on its way south to try to establish a harem (only the fittest males mate, and with numerous females). Unfortunately, as indicated by the necropsy, that one’s amorous hopes were cut short by fatal injury to its backbone and ribs. Most likely it was struck by a large, fast-moving vessel, a thing as foreign and unknowable to an elephant seal as elephant seals are to most of us.

But now at least we have one new datum to add, regarding preferred habitats.

Ditches!

See also: River Find.

See also also:  Living with Northern Elephant Seals on the Farallon Islands.

Sharpie and Squirrels.

It's not unusual to see Sharp-shinned Hawks in Richmond, but it is unusual to get much of a look at one. Typically they've already shot past your head and disappeared into a hedge or behind a house by the time you've said, "Oh, it's a Sharp...."

To which the person with you replies, "A what?" No wonder they're known as Sharpies. The full name takes too long to spit out.

So it was a nice surprise yesterday when one showed up in the backyard, in view of the breakfast nook, to terrorize the squirrels who have taken to scrounging beneath the sunflower seed feeder.

Swoop after swoop. It wasn't clear why she was after them. Surely an Eastern Gray Squirrel is more than a match for a small hawk. Was she trying to scare away the squirrels, thus allow the preferred food--songbirds-- to return? Could that much be going on in a little hawk brain?

One of the squirrels (black one) was spooked, and hid beneath a branch atop the fence, doing a squirrel-version thousand-yard stare. The gray one, however, was annoyed, and climbed a lilac to battle(?) the bird.

They chased each other around in the branches for a few minutes like superhero rivals with different but matched powers, but never made physical contact. Eventually the squirrel gave up and went away, leaving the hawk alone in the yard. She flew down and landed on the fence.

Sharp-shinned Hawk, female.

Here she is, looking sharp. Notice her fluffy spats.

This is not quite as sharp an image, but I included it to show that they are pretty good at the head-on-backwards owl trick.