April 23, 2006
Byrne Creek Teems With Life Months After Toxic Spill
Southeast Burnaby's Byrne Creek is burgeoning with life two months after someone dumped a toxin down a storm drain killing some 700 trout and salmon, along with other aquatic life. It's hard to keep nature down, life just keeps bubbling up no matter how our cruelly our supposedly superior, smarter species abuses it.
Yumi and I rambled through the Byrne Creek ravine this sunny, warm afternoon, and were rewarded with an abundance of bugs, birds and baby fish. We saw a pileated woodpecker, a finch, towhees, robins, chickadees and several species of ducks.
The female red-eared slider turtle that someone dumped in the spawning habitat a few years ago was out sunning on a rock--though she's an invasive species it was nice to see she had survived the toxin and come out of hibernation. As for how we can tell she's a female when she dives under the water as soon as we get within 10 meters of her, well, it's all in the tail. Boy turtles have noticeably thicker, larger tails than the girls do.
Insects abounded, some "good" some "bad." The good included bumblebees and crane flies, the bad were represented by tent caterpillars. I guess caterpillars are not really bad, but they do munch so heartily upon trees!
Here are a few photos we snapped:
A cutthroat trout fry hanging out in the creek.
A crane fly larva we spotted in the creek.
And a crane fly (?) that skittered along the ground and up my pants!
It takes patience squatting by the creek to spot some of these beasts.
A water strider.
Bright green algae appears in the creek in the spring.