Birds

When in Kindersley ... check out the walking trail (thanks to Google Maps). It's still bare and brown and the reservoir is mostly frozen, but I did see a few birds and even a muskrat swimming around the ice.





I'm not sure where this Blue Jay found the peanut. Someone must be feeding them. I usually only see solitary Blue Jays, but there was a noisy group of them in this tree. Of course, they left as soon as I showed up with my camera.

Springtime

While the temperatures might be getting springlike and the snow is melting fast, nature is slow to awaken from her slumber. (More like a coma in Saskatchewan)



I visited Beaver Creek with my camera yesterday. The main things moving were the chickadees, and they're here all winter. People feed them a lot here, so they're quite inquisitive. If you hold out your hand (even empty) they will fly over to have a look. But there are plenty of leftover sunflower seeds on the ground for them to feed on. Despite their curiosity, they don't sit still for more than a few seconds at a time, so they're still a challenge to photograph.



I've been coming to Beaver Creek since I was a kid so I tend to resent how regimented it's become. I'm all for protection, but all too often it devolves into bureaucracy. Now there are fences and locked gates and official hours and official paths. If you want to protect it, put the parking lot back at the highway and let people walk. The most numerous and fanciest signs are the "Trail Closed" ones. It's a natural area for goodness sake. The trails aren't meant to run smooth and straight from your house to the mall. Trails are meant to meander and branch and run into obstacles or dead ends. You don't need an official "Trail Closed" sign to stop people walking into a flooded area, or into the creek. I think they'll figure it out. Places with beavers (like Beaver Creek) are always in flux. Trees get cut down and fall across the path. Areas get flooded or drained. I saw one tree wrapped in chicken wire to protect it from the beavers. Really? If they can't eat the trees at Beaver Creek, where can they? But the beavers had the last word - they had pulled down the chicken wire and chewed down the tree anyway. Fellow anarchists :-)

Sorry, off on a bit of a tangent / rant, as us old curmudgeons are apt to do.



There were still a few remnants from the autumn that survived the winter.







And a few that are around all year.





The only other wildlife stirring were, surprisingly, spiders. The first one I saw was skating around on the surface of the melting creek. I wonder if it was there deliberately, or fell in?



Then later I notice many of them on a sunny dirt bank. I think they're the same kind as the first. I assume they must have overwintered to be out so early. They look like hunters. I wonder if they were finding any prey?



Not much open water, so no reflections, but I still managed an abstract of the melting river.



Back in Saskatoon, the Canada geese are trickling back although no big noisy V's in the sky yet. No sign of crocus flowers, although the snow is gone from their usual spot and their green leaves are appearing. The gophers are starting to emerge. And a Hairy woodpecker (quite a bit larger than the little Downy woodpeckers that come to our feeder) was noisily hammering on a tree.

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Belize Spinytail Iguanas

These lizards were common on Blackbird Caye. My first thought was that they were iguanas. But looking closer, that didn't seem right. The locals said they weren't iguanas, they were "Garrobo". Which didn't help much because it seemed to be a local name. I think they are spiny-tail iguanas or ctenosaurs, maybe Black spiny-tailed iguana (Ctenosaura similis) (Which apparently have been introduced into Florida and Texas.)





Part of the confusion was that the smaller ones had much more distinct coloring than the larger ones.



This larger one had a hidey hole under a slab of rock behind our cabin. I'm not sure when it fed, we only ever saw him sunning beside his hole.



The older ones also had more obvious "spiny tails". This was one of the largest we saw. (They get to about 1 meter (39 inches) long.)



As long as you moved slowly and didn't try to get too close, they were fairly tolerant of people. But if you did spook them, they would skedaddle. Spiny-tailed iguanas are the fastest lizards in the world, clocked at almost 35 km/hr.

Most of the ones I saw were on the ground, but they would also climb on the buildings and trees .





They are omnivorous, feeding on leaves, flowers, fruits, and seeds as well as small animals.

See all 18 photos in this album

Belize Diving - fish

We saw lots of different fish diving at Blackbird Caye in Belize. There weren't a lot of big fish, but that's probably due to people fishing, since it's not a protected area. My photographs only covered a small fraction of the types of fish - just the ones that cooperated!



It took me a while, but I think I identified them all. Some are easy, like this French Angelfish, but others are tough. It's a bit like bird watching, except there is much variety.

Some of the fish hide, like this White-spotted toadfish (found only in Belize). We would never have seen them if our dive master didn't spot them.



The dive masters would feed the toadfish chunks of lionfish that they would spear. Lionfish are a destructive invasive species so they try to get rid of them. It's too bad because they are beautiful fish.



The Peacock Flounders are another one that can be hard to spot. They are in the left-eye flounder family with both eyes on top of the left hand side of their heads. Baby flounders have one eye on each side of their bodies like ordinary fish, and swim like other fishes do, but later on, as they are becoming adult, the right eye moves to the left side, and they start to swim sideways, which allows them to settle down flat on the bottom.



With the scorpionfish, often what I'd spot was their fin. Then I'd have to try to see the body it was attached to. The eyes are the other identifiable part.



There were a few larger groupers around, up to about three feet long. This Tiger Grouper was at a "cleaning station" where smaller fish or shrimp will eat their parasites. The small fish will even swim into their mouths or gills to clean. (A certain amount of "trust" is required!)



We also saw Black Groupers, Nassau Groupers, and the related Red Hinds:







The long skinny Trumpetfish are interesting. They are actually related to sea horses. Sometimes they will hide by positioning themselves vertically in among soft coral. They can also change their color for camouflage.



There are also fish that live in holes they dig in the sand, like this Sand Tilefish (and also jawfish and garden eels)



And big eyed Balloonfish that can puff themselves up - like a balloon to deter attackers.



And so many more ...

















Like birds, male and female fish can look quite different, as with these Stoplight Parrotfish. But unlike birds, parrotfish (and others) can change sex.





Fish often look quite different as juveniles. For example, juvenile Spotted Drums don't actually have spots:



But at least they look a bit like the adults:



Whereas this juvenile French Angelfish doesn't look anything like the adult (the very first photo in this post)



And of course, there were schools of different fish (like Horse-eyed Jacks) in the more open water:



See all 68 photos in this album

Belize Diving - small stuff

It's taking me a while to go through my photos from Belize. That's partly because I like to try to identify what I photograph underwater. And that's not easy!

We've gotten to like the small stuff when we're diving - nudibranchs, christmas tree worms, crabs, shrimp, etc. I remember when I first started diving and the dive master would point out some tiny creature. I'd be struggling to control my buoyancy, mask leaking and fogged up, and I'm afraid I wasn't very interested. But with experience, the diving part is more automatic, and now I love seeing and finding these little critters. Rafael Murillo at Dolphin Dive in Loreto, Baja Mexico also deserves thanks for, over the years, showing us how rewarding it can be.

When non-divers hear you've been diving, they usually ask one of two questions: Did you see any sharks? How deep did you go? Neither is really my thing. I'd rather see a sea slug in shallow water. Sharks are ok, but really, they're just big fish.

For some reason, there aren't as many nudibranchs where we were diving in Belize. But Cardinal, our dive master for most of the time at Blackbird Caye, managed to find a few for us. We saw a couple of these Lettuce sea slugs:



The next was a Red-tipped sea goddess nudibranch. (head to the left, gills protruding at the other end)



And the last was this Black spotted nudibranch. (Although I'm not sure why it's a nudibranch since that means "naked lung" and this one doesn't appear to have that.)



You can think of slugs as snails without shells. One with a shell that I like to see are the Flamingo Tongues (does a flamingo's tongue really look like that?). The shells are actually plain white, the spotted pattern is their mantle (foot) that they wrap over the shell. (The things nature comes up with!) Here's one on a sea fan:



We came across these two with their mantles retracted, which apparently happens if they are attacked, although there was no sign of that. Maybe they're fighting (or mating?) in slow motion.



There weren't as many Christmas tree worms as some places, but they were still quite a few. You have to approach them carefully or they withdraw their "trees" and you're left with nothing to photograph. Each pair of trees is one worm. The trees are a combination of feeding filter and gill. The worms have a kind of tube shell but often it's hidden since they will build it inside a hole they bore in the coral.



The Star horseshoe worm is similar but without the spiral.



Feather duster worms are larger, and often not as brightly colored. These ones live in the sand rather than on the coral. It's hard to see unless you zoom in on the photo, but there are dozens of smaller fan worms in this photo.



We saw quite a few Sponge brittle stars once we learned how to look for them. Some of the big barrel sponges were covered with them if you looked closely. Other vase sponges like this one would have a single one in them. They were hard to get a good photo of because there would often only be a couple of legs sticking out with the rest of them hidden.



The yellow plant like thing is a Golden crinoid aka sea lily. It's actually an animal, related to sea stars, but with many more than five arms. Sometimes it's fixed in place like a plant, other times it's mobile.

I can never resist looking inside the barrel and tube sponges. Usually there's nothing inside them, but occasionally you'll find something like a brittle star or crab or shrimp. There were actually quite a few of these Coral banded shrimp around. The trick was to look for their white antennas.



The Pederson cleaning shrimp were also relatively common, but they're quite small and despite their purple color, they are translucent and hard to spot.



Here's a Yellowline arrow crab in a Corkscrew anemone, with an entourage of Pederson cleaning shrimp:



The arrow crab has amazing large red striped eyes. And a bizarre large "horn". I'm not sure if the fuzziness of the horn is part of the crab, or is algae growing on it.



I still often struggle to see what the dive master is trying to point out. It took me a while to realize this lump was alive, and rhythmically pumping water in and out of its siphon (the orange hole) to feed. It's a sea squirt, a kind of tunicate.



I'd seen these sea pearl alga in a photograph and thought they looked cool, so I was glad to find one. It looked just like a shiny marble.



I'll do another post with fish, but on the topic of small stuff, I like the little Neon gobies (around an inch long), maybe partly because they perch on the coral and therefore are easier to photograph (except they're also skittish). Usually there'd be just one or two on a coral, but for some reason there were dozens on this brain coral.





See all 34 photos in this album

See also a previous post about Slugs and Worms from Baja