Midway through the spring symphony of colour the delicate Lithophragma parviflorum stands tall, swaying gently and popping out with the palest of pale pink petals that look as though they have been cut out of paper and glued to a central disk.   The range is southern BC to California and east to Utah and Colorado where it is found in mesic sites. 

Subtle; Collinsia parviflora appears without the bang of the other meadow flowers.....but one day you look down and there are clouds of blue drifting between the grasses and other more brilliant blooms. There is a "large-flowered" version as well that are only a few millimeters larger. More subtleties! 

This tiny, cheery annual grows in vernal wet seeps.  The thick masses of Mimulus alsinoides look like a solid yellow river tracing these seeps along a west facing cliff. As long as it doesn't get too warm or dry, they will last for a month or so. The red dot looks as though it must be a guide or landing pad for some pollinator but neither of us have seen anything on these flowers or can find a reference to a pollinator.

Large showy trilliums are found in the moister, shadier lower lying areas of Leaning Oaks. Trillium ovatum are found nestled among the willows and below the cedars. The flowers change to pale pink as they age and when I was first on the coast I was convinced that they had to be two different species. The seeds are attractive to ants which will drag them back to their nests for the larvae to feed on and thus effectively dispersing the plants. 

Bulbous Bluegrass (Poa bulbosa ssp. vivipara) is an introduced grass that grows in disturbed areas and dry places.  Its a very distinctive grass because, instead of producing flowers and seeds like grasses usually do, the inflorence produce small bulbs which start to grow on the flowering head.  As the summer approaches, this grass usually dries up, and the bulbs fall off and loose their leaves,  but are able to resprout with autumn rains.  
This species has had an interesting history.  First used in the west as an agricultural crop it was promoted as a weed control in alfalfa fields, where this grass could outcompete other species.  Now it in itself is regarded as a weed in some parts of western North America. 

A number of years ago, Leah started working a lot on Dragonflies and Damselflies and it was quite exciting to see her delve into a new group of organisms and begin to get to know them.  I decided that perhaps I should do the same and trying to learn the Bumble Bees would be fun.  I was completely unprepared for how challenging Bumble Bee identification would be and how interesting this group of insects are.  Couple that with increasing conservation concern for the rapid declines in some species (and rapid increases in others,  as it turns out) it made for an interesting - if challenging area.  One of the challenges is that many of our common species have different colour patterns.  This species for instance, has a number of colour forms and is  one of the species that often has a large area of orange on the abdomen. Others, like the one in the photograph here is black and yellow only, with no orange.   The black and yellow only  colour pattern is increasingly common as you move south, so that it is the predominant colour pattern in the western states.  Yellow Head (Bombus flavifrons) is an early species here, Queens start becoming active in April.   Bumble Bee identification here has been assisted greatly by the arrival of a new book in the past month:

Williams et al. 2014. Bumble Bees of North America-an Identification Guide.  Princeton University Press.  

This is our commonest woodpecker at Leaning Oaks.  At this time of year their loud and varied calls can be heard through out the day.  They are frequent visitors to our suet feeders, where they are definitely the messiest of the species that use them.  Fortunately Varied Thrushes, Dark-eyed Juncos and other species are always around to clean up the spilled suet.  Almost every winter we get a bird or two with yellow instead of orange feather shafts and undertail feather colour.  These are usually hybrid birds between "red-shafted" and "yellow-shafted" forms. 
Northern Flickers use our larger nest boxes as night time roosts, but they are very difficult to see entering  them.  They enter the boxes at dusk and at considerable speed - blink and you miss it.

The shootingstars form thick, patchy mats around the property. The flowers range from deep, deep purple to the odd white one. We transplanted a few plants from areas where they were growing thickly and not flowering (deep shade) to the lawn and these have spread to thick clumps in just a few years. Another English name for Dodecatheon hendersonii is "mosquito bill" which aptly describes the shape of the flower with it's strongly reflex petals exposing the pointy corolla. The round to oval leaves form a basal rosette. D. hendersonii is found on the west coast of North America from southern Vancouver Island to California in areas with moist winters and dry summers.

This is a recent arrival in B.C., with the first record from the province in 2003.  Polistes dominula ( P. dominculus) spread quickly and our first record here at Leaning Oaks occurred in 2005.  This species looks superficially like our native Paper Wasps and Yellow Jackets, but they are thinner-waisted and fly with their back legs dangling, which gives them a distinctive appearance.  The make paper nests, but these lack the familar outer envelope of our Paper Wasps and Bald-faced Hornets.  Instead the honeycomb shaped paper cells are plainly visible and guarded by attendant wasps.  Biologically this is a fascinating species, with a lek breeding system, multiple founders at a colony,  worker specialisation and swarming behaviour in the fall.  The numerical increase and speed of spread is a bit alarming, and they can be at very high densities.  They feed heavily on insects, especially caterpillars and the effect of this new species on our local ecosystems is not known.  Nests are usually placed 1-2 meters above ground, often near or on human build structures.  We have seen them on cedar-rail fences, in the brackets that hold our hot tub cover, mailboxes, under picnic tables, inside bird houses, in wood bins and under deck railings.  
The paper describing the discovery of this species  in B.C. can be found here:  http://journal.entsocbc.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/82

There is no doubt that this is the showiest native shrub that we have at Leaning Oaks.  It is a  valuable shrub for it's early bloom and ability to attract both species of Hummingbirds.  Indeed the arrival of Rufous Hummingbirds seem to be timed to take advantage of Red-flowering Currant and Salmonberry blossoms.  In British Columbia, the commonest flower colour is red (pink is commoner further south)  but even here we have found plants in the wild that run from white, blush, various shades of pink to brick red and intense scarlet. Not surprisingly, this is a widely available native plant in nurseries.  My garden blog on this species is the viewed blog I have written, which shows the interest in this plant.   Click here for that blog, which contains a list of some of the cultivars that are available for this species: 
http://gardennotesfromleaningoaks.blogspot.ca/search?updated-min=2010-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2011-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=7

Purple Dead-Nettle is a distinctive introduced species that is frequently found in disturbed places and lawns on southern Vancouver Island.  At Leaning Oaks it varies from year to year how much of this we have, and it is a common weed in our garden.     The purple leaves on the flowering shoots are showier than the flowers themselves, and nearly the same colour.  Lamium purpureum var. 
purpureum  is in the same genus as Yellow Archangel (32.) and since both are weeds here,  I must admit that its has discouraged me from using other species of Lamium in the garden.  This species is usually an annual or biennial plant.   They produce huge quantities of small seeds, in the hundreds or thousands.  Irrigated, they continue to bloom well into the summer or fall. "Dead"-nettle refers to the fact that the species superficially looks like stinging nettle, but is "dead" or stingless.

The white fawn lilies congregate in  moist, well drained soils; going for dappled sunlight (or is it dappled shade?)  Erythronium oregonum glow and offer a counterpoint to the shooting stars that come up just a bit later in the waves of colour that sweep Leaning Oaks in the spring.   The deer are very good at nipping off the buds; which reminds me of a line I overheard in a nursery; "I want to grow native plants so that the deer won't eat them". Huh? 

The overlooked part of the  lily is the patterns on the basal, lanceolate pair of leaves. They are a bit like the distinctive patterns on a giraffe; if lilies migrated, you could track individuals. 

Bushtits are irregular visitors to Leaning Oaks, tiny gray balls of fluff with a tail that are almost always travelling in a gang.  Flocks here have been as large as 28 individuals.  To date, we don't have records for May through the third week of July  and we don't have any breeding records from the property yet either.  They are commonest here during the winter months.

These are tiny birds that seem to play an endless game of follow the leader as the move around the neighbourhood occasionally gathering together in a small group.  The often visit our suet feeders, sometimes packing onto the hanging wire cages that hold the fat blocks so tightly that you can't tell where one Bushtit stops and the next begins.  Bushtits are relatively new immigrants to Vancouver Island, first recorded in the 1930's.  

I thought I knew where all of the Olsynium douglasii  were on Leaning Oaks - but tonight I found a new small group shimmering in the evening sun and swaying seductively in the breeze. Satinflowers are one of the earlier blooming flowers along the edges of the meadows, often showing in March. Douglas' blue-eyed grass is another common name. This member of the iris family just gets into Canada on southern Vancouver Island. 

Hairy Bittercress (Cardamine hirsutum) is a non-native winter annual that grows in our Garry Oak meadow, along paths and in the garden.  It flowers very early and by the first truly warm days of spring it is starting to form silicles (the seed pods) and is getting ready flick it seeds  at the slightest touch.   It can be an abundant winter weed in the garden.  For a few tricks on controlling this pest see Dave's garden blog: http://gardennotesfromleaningoaks.blogspot.ca/ 

This small....very small snail takes patience and keen eyesight to find! Vertigo columbiana is found in moist forests, under leaf litter, and in this case in the crack of a Big-leafed Maple. Thanks very much to Andy Teucher for the use of his photographs.

This woodpecker  has a similar colour pattern to the larger Hairy Woodpecker (28) and both species are found here in about equal numbers.  The bill on the Downy( Picoides pubescens)   is proportionately smaller though, less than the length of the head, which gives is a delicate look.  Both species are frequent visitors to our suet feeders.  Not surprisingly, Downy Woodpeckers spend more time foraging on smaller branches and thinner tree trunks than Hairy Woodpeckers do. 

A bright ray of sunshine,  Ranunculus occidentalis  is one of the earlier flowering plants along the forest edge and in the meadow at Leaning Oaks. Western buttercups have variable numbers of petals and there are seven recognized varieties in western North America. There are up to 14 petals according to EFlora and eight in Pojar and MacKinnon. (Plants of Coastal BC)

Red Squirrels (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus)   were more numerous here when we first moved to Leaning Oaks, but in the subsequent years our population of Eastern Gray Squirrels (see 5.) has burgeoned.  Our native Red Squirrel; a much smaller species,  doesn't seem to do very well with Gray Squirrels here, and they only seem to co-exist for short periods of time. The Red Squirrel in these photo has done better than the others and has been here off and on since August - a record 7 months! Given the size of the population of feral house cats and the number of Gray Squirrels in the area, we are amazed he has managed survive.

Our first Rufous Hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus) for the year, appeared a couple of days ago on March 24. They regularly return sometime in the third week of March and they are usually around until mid-September. The latest record we have for Leaning Oaks is September 21. The exact date records have been much easier to record since all of the sightings go into eBird. There has been some concern and speculation that the rise of Anna's Hummingbird numbers have led to the decline in Rufous Hummingbirds. That may be true, however there are many other perils that confront the hummingbirds including habitat loss on wintering grounds and changes in flowering phenology with changing climate.