The 12th of June was a Sunday and after rising late, I decided to head over to Burnaby Lake for the afternoon, even though it was overcast. It was my last day of freedom; I was returning to work on the morrow.

On the drive over to the lake, I noticed a cute little striped spider crawling around on the inside of my windshield. I wondered a little about how he had gotten there (had he hitched a ride on my clothing or camera bags?) and resolved to get some photos of him after I got to the park. About five minutes later, I arrived and parked at the Piper Spit entrance. My spider was still up on the windshield. Here's the little guy.

I guess you can tell that my windshield is a little dusty in that shot, and you'll be happy to know that I've cleaned it since then. What I like about that shot is the two reflections of the spider in the glass.

This guy is a Jumping Spider. "Jumping Spider" is actually a name given to any member of the family Salticidae.

I'll digress a bit here to talk about modern phylogenetic biology ("biological classification"). Linnaeus' old kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species system of classification has been replaced with a much more flexible system, with levels of subdivision inserted wherever it seems appropriate, genetically speaking. Not all of these new levels of subdivision have names, not every group of organisms has a name, and if you divide a group into subgroups, those subgroups don't all have to be at the same level.

For instance, the Salticidae (Jumping Spiders) contains three things: the group Lyssomaninae (containing six genera), the group Spartaeinae (containing 15 genera), and the "Salticinae Division". The Salticinae Division contains the group Hisponinae, two unnamed groups of two subgroups each, and a large group called the Unidentates. The Unidentates contains three groups directly, an unnamed group of two subgroups, and a "miscellaneous" group, and a subgroup called the "Free-embolus Group". And the Free-embolus Group itself contains four groups and a "miscellaneous" group. The point of all this is that there are many further levels of grouping and subdivision here than I learned in high school, and all this is just between family and genus! But such is the power of DNA and anatomy studies, I guess.

However, one nice thing is that, in case you learned the old Linnaeic system, families are still bigger groups than genera and smaller groups than orders, and genera (the plural of "genus") are still groups of closely-related species.

If you're interested in this kind of stuff, you may want to have a look at the Tree of Life, a web project that documents the current state of phylogenetic biology. It can be found at http://tolweb.org. The page for the Salticidae is at http://tolweb.org/tree?group=Salticidae, where you'll see a visual representation of the groupings I described two paragraphs ago (along with a very handsome Jumping Spider, and lots of other interesting information).

Okay, so I've got a Jumping Spider. Jumping spiders don't build webs; they hunt for food (insects) during the day. They are reputed to have keen eyesight, good reflexes, and can jump 50 times their body length to catch prey. This guy's body length was about a centimeter, so he'd be able to jump at least half a meter, which is pretty impressive considering how skinny his legs are.

One last really nice thing about Jumping Spiders is that a world expert on them, the guy who maintains the Tree of Life section about them, lives in Vancouver. He's a fellow named Wayne, who works at the University of British Columbia. I sent Wayne my photos and he told me that the particular spider I have here is a Salticus scenicus. It's in the unnamed group of two genera that's in the Unidentates, which is in the Salticinae Division.

Anyhow, here's another shot of my scenic little passenger, after he jumped down to the dashboard. I took a few shots like this one, and then herded him onto a piece of paper and let him off on the ground beside my car.

I went in, and as I was the only customer, I chatted a little about the local wildlife with the parks employee who was staffing the place. She was kind and told me about some beavers that I've yet to find, a mixed-species pair of teals that seemed to be nesting in the area, an eagle's nest across the lake, and about having seen a Purple Martin fly over the day before.

It was a nice little chat, but I had birds to chase and so I bid her adieu and headed out to the spit. The first bird I noticed was Lulu, who was resplendent despite the greyness of the day.

She was watching me carefully, as a pair of her kids were sitting nearby. In the next photo, I caught the kids with their eyes closed, but in general they weren't really keeping their eyes closed or settling down to rest.

On the right one you can see what appears to be two wing feathers coming in; I've read that this is a rather uncomfortable process for birds. Maybe that's why these little ones were a little restless.

That was it from the spit. I've vaguely known that, aside from the spit and the equestrian paths, there were a few other entrances to the park around the lake, particularly ones on the southwest side. This day I resolved to go find at least one of them and check it out. So I drove around, keeping the lake on my right, and eventually found a well-marked park entrance at the Rowing Pavillion.

The Rowing Pavillion is a place where folks who want to put their rowboats in the water can do so. I don't think it's intended for your basic I-wanna-go-fishin' rowboats, but rather for high-society rowing: sweeping or sculling, crew or dragonboat racing.

Waterlillies coated the water near the pavillion, and I started off with a few shots of them. Here's one I particularly liked, both for the vivid color and for the bugs I got in the shot.

At the Rowing Pavillion, there is a set of fairly decrepit bleachers, and on the back of the bleachers, there are a number of small swallow nestboxes. Many (if not all) of them were in active use by Tree Swallows. I parked myself by the first box and took a slew of photos as the swallow couple came and went, catching and bringing food to their young'uns.

Here's one of my shots, showing a little swallow with its mouth open (gaping), hoping the adult perched on the outside will give it some food. I only got a few shots showing the child gaping like this.

I walked around the bleachers and through a corridor in their middle. When I got back near where the pavillion is, I noticed a little silvery spider near a crack in the wood on the side of the bleachers.

Life is sometimes odd and full of coincidences, and when I went to figure out what kind of spider this is, I discovered that it's a Jumping Spider. I've done about a year of photojournals (a little more if you count the emails that eventually evolved into the photojournal) without seeing a jumping spider, and then, on the same day, I see two different jumping spider species in entirely unrelated places. Go figure.

I had thought that this silver spider was a Playcryptus undatus, but Wayne the Jumping Spider Guy tells me that its the closely-related Platycryptus californicus. It turns out that P. undatus is bigger and lives in the east.

That was it for the Rowing Pavillion, and I jumped back into my car and headed around the lake some more. Eventually, at the end of the road, I came to another park entrance, known as the Glencarin Trailhead entrance. It's just a parking lot and a trailhead. I parked and headed out eastward along the trail.

It was quite a nice trail that weaved through the woods, sometimes in view of the lake and sometimes not. At one place, where I had a nice view over a marsh to the lake, I saw a Woodpecker on one of the snags in the marsh.

I don't know if that hole on the snag was his home. I didn't see him go in there.

The next bird that I found was a Bushtit who, like Lulu and the Tree Swallows, was busy taking care of his kids. It looks like this guy's children are in for a nice, juicy little grub.

Thinking that I could use a little grub myself, I turned around and headed back towards my car. The only thing that deterred me from this mission was the call of a Swainson's Thrush. When I heard that call, I looked around, and was surprised to find the thrush on a tree limb that was not only relatively out in the open, but also quite nearby. I took advantage of the opportunity he presented and shot a few portraits of him. He cut quite a dashing figure, don't you think?

He was my last subject of the day, and I made it back to my car without further encounters.

Grubbing for photos, so that you don't have to,
Tom