This caddisfly, (Halesochila taylori),  usually found as an adult during the month of October is a dapper fellow, with Halloween colours of orange, black and white. It is sometimes called the October Caddisfly and is restricted to northwestern North America (Alaska, BC, Alberta, Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon).    It is a species of of still waters; the larvae found in lakes and ponds. This adult was perched on a cattail leaf in the pond. 

Sigh, maybe next pond will be this big! It would have to be big to hold the world's largest waterfowl. 

Beginning about mid November through to March or April we see or hear these bulky beautiful swans flying over Leaning Oaks on their way to or from a local wetland or field where they over winter.  The trumpeting call is a wonderful reminder of how sometimes there really is good news and conservation success stories.  

By the early 1900s Trumpeter Swans (Cygnus buccinator) had been harvested to near extinction. In 1932 only 69 were known to exist! In the early '50s a few thousand were found in Alaska.  And as you can see by the graph from the Pacific Flyway Council (2006) just the coastal population was 25 000 by 2005! There are still concerns about fragmentation of wintering habitat and development around their breeding grounds in the north - but they are doing alright now, with populations that continue to increase. 

Cryptic and dorsolaterally flattened, these beautiful bugs (in the truest sense of the word) are most often encountered on wood from the woodpile or only on very close inspection of a tree trunk. They feed on leaves and seeds and occasionally caterpillars or small beetles. They overwinter as adults and in the spring lay eggs that will hatch in a few weeks. The first adults are seen in August sometime. There are two species of Brochymena in BC and I definitely don't feel confident enough to say which this is ...but I am leaning towards B. affinis, the other option being B. quadripustulata. *

*Yea! The wonderful folks at BugGuide.net have confirmed that it is B. affinis. 

The larva of this long horned beetle feed under the bark of Douglas-fir. It is found through western North America -and despite the name that sounds quite pest-like, apparently it is not. The scientific name is Centrodera spurca.  There you have it. If anyone knows any juicy tid bits about this relatively common showy beetle, please share!

When I was at university, my parents took in a number of exchange students.  One of these, John from New Zealand, returned for a visit several years later and I picked him up from the ferry and drove him to my parents.  We arrived at the house and got out of the car.  "Just a minute." said John and he ran into the woodshed,  held a piece of cedar kindling to his nose and inhaled deeply..."now I know I'm back..."and he smiled broadly.  The smell of fresh cut cedar is a wonderful thing.
Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata) is a conifer with very rot resistant wood, so often used for fence posts, railings, and decking.  It splits easily in long pieces and much of my teenage years was spent splitting fence posts, railing and cutting cedar shakes to earn pocket money.  It is the wood of choice for coastal First Nation's canoes, long house boards and totem poles. The inner bark can be stripped, worked to make it pliable and used for matting and clothing.  The branches can be twisted into rope - the uses of this tree are just about endless.
Here at Leaning Oaks we have a handful of cedars, although several of them have died since we moved here, likely victims of recent hot, dry summers.  New recruits are non-existant on the property-they are heavily browsed upon by Blacktail Deer, which are at a very high population levels. 

The few Red Osier Dogwoods that we have on Leaning Oaks are along the vernal wetland, in the shadiest, moist part of the ravine. The dense shade makes them difficult to photograph in the entanglement!

Cornus stolonifera has bright, beautiful red  (rarely yellow)stems that make it a great shrub to have in a garden for winter colour. The white flowers are in small flat-topped bunches, followed by blue-tinged  white berries (drupes) that hang in clusters.  Red Osier Dogwood is so named because the twigs are used to make baskets.  

The bright red stem colour is best on younger shoots and gardens often prune heavily to control the height, increase the branching and maintain shoot colour. A number of named forms of this shrub are available including a dwarf selection. Hardwood cuttings are easily rooted in the late fall after leaves have dropped. 

The distinctive Orange Peel fungus occurs on disturbed, compacted soils along trails or gravelly soils (or perhaps just plain gravel like here!). Aleuria aurantia is a tertiary decomposer and thus very important in the ecosstem. Other fungi, or primary and secondary decomposers do the initial organic material breakdown, then A. aurantia comes in and breaks down the complex molecules. Some are absorbed back into the fungus for nutrition and the rest is used by plants and soil dwelling organisms for their nutrition. We don't have many of these around...at least not this year which is too bad. After you have stopped cursing someone for flinging their orange peels on the path, you can appreciate the splash of colour that these provide on days like this where there are only many shades of grey.  

These small pointy caps are found singly or in clusters on well rotted wood. Mycena haematopus is found in the spring and summer, mainly on the shady slopes below the Big-leafed Maple. It is called blood-foot or Bleeding Mycena because a red liquid exudes from the base. I also found "Bleeding Fairy Helmet" as an English name but that seemed a bit macabre. 
Thanks to Tracee Geernaert for ID help! 

It is hard to imagine Leaning Oaks without Anna's Hummingbirds (Calypte anna),  they are nearly ever -present with their songs that sound like radio static, the small squeak notes that the males give during courtship flights and the constant buzz of activity around the feeders and flowers in the garden.  When we first moved here however,  Anna's Hummingbird had not yet colonized the property and I can still remember seeing the first one in the garden on a sunny October afternoon.  
Local researchers and naturalists, many of them associated with Rocky Point Bird Observatory, have located nests, followed successes and banded Anna's Hummingbirds and are slowly learning about the remarkable lives of this species.  Anna's Hummingbird probably arrived on southern Vancouver Island in the 1950's.  The species breeds nearly year round, with some females building multiple nests a year here.  They sometimes will reuse a nest, or even a one  of a Rufous Hummingbird and they will often re-use nesting material  - sometimes while the chicks are still in the nest!  Alison Moran from the RPBO hummingbird project tells of a female that had overlapping nests where the nest material was reused this way for four successive nestings.

 The Brown Hive  (Euconulus fulvus) is another very tiny snail found in leaf litter at Leaning Oaks. This is a holarctic species found in both the old and new worlds and there are introduced populations in western Australia.  The foot of this snail (not shown in these photos) is extremely long and thin, and overall, a Brown Hive on the move is a rather elegant mollusc.  
Many snails which have protective shells have anatomical peculiarities caused the twisting of the body up and into the shell. In the case of this snail the anus is located near the right eye of the animal, which, at the risk of seeming overly critical, sounds like a design flaw to me.  Like many snails it is a hermaphrodite, that is it has both male and female  gonads. The penis of this snail as a finger like projection.   Hives are named after old-fashioned bee hives, which are similarly shaped.  

Golden-crowned Sparrows (Zonotrichia atricapilla) are mainly spring and fall migrants at Leaning Oaks, although elsewhere on southern Vancouver Island they are common throughout the winter months, and have, very rarely, lingered and bred.  They are mostly skulkers, hiding in thickets and hedgerows, coming into the open to feed on seeds in the ground or in low weeds. In fall when they arrive they often sing, a mournful clear song that can be remembered as "Oh dear me" or "I'm so weary" which is the source of another common name "Weary Willie".  

One of the commoner boletes found on southern Vancouver Island (Xerocomellus chrystenteron, formerly Boletus chrystenteron).  Chryst comes from the Greek krysos or gold and enteron refers to the "innards". The photograph does not do the beautiful golden innards justice. This mushroom made me think of crackly cinnamon and brown sugar on toast with butter.....

These tiny cups were found on a piece of cut Douglas-fir wood, waiting for a drop of rain to sploosh out the peridioles (egg) as far as a couple of metres. The sticky mucilage that the eggs sit in within the peridium or nest will help them stick where ever they land. The outer wall of the peridiole will eventually decay to release the spores contained within. This is  Nidula candida, nidula meaning "tiny nest" in Latin and candida meaning white.  

When they are younger they have a lid that covers the inside of the nest -this had disappeared by the time that we found these ones. 

Sadly these spiffy beetles are  nonluminescent beetles , so despite their name they do not fly around at night producing delightful bursts of light from their backsides. They are active during the day, another departure from what I always believed about fireflies. This species, Ellychnia hatchi is relatively common in the pacific northwest.  

The larvae live in rotting logs and feed on a variety of invertebrates, including earthworms, millipedes, spiders and other larvae. All larvae of the family Lampyridae have light emitting cells--I guess this means digging around rotting stumps at night to see if they glow!  Another oddity of this family is that their blood is poisonous and as adults it oozes from the base of their wing covers as a defense mechanism. 

(Punctum randolphii) also called Randoph's Dot-shell or Randolph's Dot Snail.  The Dots are a family of tiny, air breathing snails.  Dot snails are presumably called such because of their tiny size.  This species is only 1.25 to 1.4mm across..so tiny indeed.  Leah's photo here is of one on a Bigleaf Maple leaf.

The species must be very common here, this one was found by friend Robert Forsyth, and he found it on the 3rd leaf he looked at.  He looked like he expected to find it on the first leaf.

Himalayan Cotoneaster, also known as Khasia Berry, is an naturalised  introduced shrub here at Leaning Oaks.  For the most part, it goes largely unnoticed on a thin soiled, dry slope in part shade.  This year however, the cold snap has come at exactly the right time to catch the foliage at the point of turning and the leaves have turned scarlet, making it stand out like a beacon in the woods. ( Cotoneaster simonsii) is native to the Himalayan mountains of India, Bhutan and Nepal and high elevations of Myanmar.  It is sometimes used as hedging material and grown for its dense growth and scarlet berries.  I have never seen it become an aggressive weed here, but it is considered such in some other places, particularly in Australia. 

This looper, a member of the Geometridae turns into a rather dapper brown and white, but fairly un-extraordinary looking moth. These two larvae were found feeding on Douglas-fir. According to the "Conifer Defoliators of British Columbia" by Bob Duncan, this species is a relatively uncommon defoliator that is not found in colonies. 

Sword Fern (Polystichum munitum) is the largest native fern at Leaning Oaks.  Big and showy it forms an important part of our garden landscape as well as occurring in the wild parts of the property.  Sword fern is evergreen with the older fronds dying off after the new fronds have begun to emerge.  Sword Fern was used by First Nations as a food item in times of scarcity.  The rhizomes were peeled and roasted. I don't know if it is still used as a food item  and I must admit when I look at the rhizomes they don't look particularly appealing. 
In the garden they respond very well to light fertilizing several times over the growing season and the plants there grow to imposing sizes.  On years when we don't get heavy snowfalls they sail through the winter, on snowy winters the big funnel shaped plants get flattened.
There are ten species of Polystichum in British Columbia, two at Leaning Oaks, the other is the Polystichum imbricans (species #25).

I laughed so hard when I saw this little guy; he so looked like something out of Dr, Suess! Dr. Rob Cannings brought me back to reality by identifying it as an immature member of the Reduviidae, or Assassin bugs, possibly Rhynocoris ventralis.
There has been some very nifty natural history observations of parental care within assassin bugs where the parent actively guards their clutch against predators or parasites. This sort of behaviour is highly unusual in the invertebrate world. 

In an attempt to narrow down the possibilities for which species of red-tailed Sarcophaga this was I started with looking for a list of flesh flies from B.C.. I came across a paper by Buckell and Spencer from 1945 in the Entomological Society of B.C.'s journal titled; A Preliminary List of the Flesh Flies of B.C.. Now what I found the most amazing was that out of the 27 species identified at that time for the province, 14 had been reared from the lesser migratory grasshopper, Melanoplus mexicanus! Cool, eh!? We don't know where the larva of this fly lived, but it would have been some moist, decaying matter or carcass. 

Members of this genus are often the first to arrive at a freshly dead corpse and therefore are important in the oh so fascinating study of forensic entomology. The rate of egg hatching and larval development at various temperatures and different conditions has been studied in depth in order to aid detectives that are attempting to pinpoint times of death. I remember being in one talk at an entomological conference where the researcher said that the best thing that a murderer could do was dump a body under a weather station (hmm, it seemed funny at the time...).