Magnolias

It's finally cherry blossom season! We went for a walk today and I took these photos.. nothing super exciting, but enough blooms to make me feel like spring will be here, sometime!

 Cherries..

Giant magnolias.. 

 And tinier magnolias..

Magnolias are so interesting.. they're very primitive flowers, meaning that they haven't evolved in a really long time. The petals are thicker, and the flowers don't have the same types of symmetry that you'd expect from a more recently evolved flower. They're beautiful though, and they make this city so much prettier!

Richmond Nature Walk

R took me on a surprise trip yesterday afternoon so that we could be outside and enjoy the SUN! We headed down to Richmond, to the Richmond Nature Walk.

As usual, we both really enjoyed watching the bird feeder.. there was so many birds! It was pretty fascinating to watch. We then walked through the boggy trails for a bit, and back to the bird and hummingbird feeders.

Male Downy Woodpecker.. You can't really tell in this photo, but the bill is about half the length of his head. In the slightly larger Hairy Woodpecker, the bill is about the same length as the head. These two are soo easy to mistake for each other.

 Male Anna's Hummingbird. You can sort of see the bright pink on his head.

 Much easier to see the pink in this one.

 Male and female Downy Woodpeckers.. doing a mating dance?

 Who can resist taking tons of photos of these little cuties?

Male Rufous Hummingbird. The female of both the Anna's and Rufous are so similar, they can be difficult to tell apart.

Let's do the time lapse again..

 R bought me a timer/remote for my camera a while ago, and I haven't had much of a chance to use it. We set up a few time-lapse things yesterday, and here are the subsequent videos!


This one is my dear plant, Oxalis triangularis. It opens with the sun and moves throughout the day. It's so suble thought, that these photos were taken over a period of 4.5 hours! Initially the photos were every 10 seconds, but we soon realized that it's quite a slow process, and changed it to 20s between photos.

 

This video was taken over a much shorter time period, only 20 minutes! The camera was taking photos every 2 seconds though.

Tacoma & Portland

This past weekend (long, long weekend.. ) my mom, sister and I headed to the States for a trip.

This is one of my favourite things about brick buildings - the really old advertising or names on them. Too bad Vancouver has so few of these! Both Portland and Tacoma (photo was from Tacoma) had plenty.

These two were from the bridge of glass, which goes over some huge highway and some train tracks in downtown Tacoma. It was pretty cool, especially with the different light from the sun. They looked like rock candy to me..

I am already regretting not buying more tea from this place. The Lord Bergamot is amazing, and I've only had it from a coffee maker in a hotel..

 A "flight" of tea - we got to try four different teas. They included Bungalow, Brahmin, Lord Bergamot, and a Chai latte. The last two were amazing, the first two were ok, but not our favourites. We left with 8 bags of tea between three of us..

One of the two lions guarading the entrance to Chinatown. I have to say.. it's probably the most boring part of the city! Nothing was open or even looked like it would ever be open. Nothing like Chinatown in Vancouver, which is full of little shops and stores. Apparently Chinatown is Portland's Main/Hastings..

 Bridal Veil Falls  - on Historic Highway 30, east of Portland. I'd highly recommend it, even just for the lucious coastal forests that grow along it. There's also some amazing views of the Columbia River and tons of waterfalls.

Ready for it? This is the second tallest waterfall in the whole US! It's called Multnomah Falls. It was actually quite pretty, although when we were there, it was raining about as much as the waterfall was waterfalling.. so quite a lot! We were drenched from a few quick walks, but.. worth the few minutes.

It looks like there's plenty of good hiking around these waterfalls, so maybe sometime I'll get a chance to do that. A rainy day when we had to head home was not the day for it..