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Week Thirteen, June 11-17
Sunday, June 17, 2001
Natalie and I returned to Puget Gardens at the lower end of Puget Gulch today to do some work on a project to map the trails. A group from Bates Technical College here in town plans to help build a handicapped accessible boardwalk along the creek, and we need to map what exists there now before determining which trails will be included in the boardwalk.
We arrived at the park at a perfect time for bird watching. Just after taking the photo of the brightly colored primrose above, we noticed a small flock of cedar waxwing birds feeding on berries alongside the site where a house stood up until its removal some 7 months ago. I stalked through the breast-high grass with clover growing underneath to try and get a good angle for taking a picture of the cedar waxwings, but I never could get a good shot. Instead, their images are burned in my mind, which is always more lush and detailed than even this digital camera can depict from the natural world around me.
We ventured down to Puget Gulch right after Natalie finished writing an article about the Puget Creek Restoration Society and what we are doing down there to help restore salmon habitat. The article will run later this week in the Tacoma Weekly newspaper. As part of her research for the article, Natalie borrowed a folder of newspaper clippings about Puget Park and the gulch, and I spent time last night reading through them. The park has an interesting history. It is older than the state of Washington. Tied with Point Defiance Park as the second oldest park in Tacoma, Puget Park began as a 20-acre section at the top of the gulch in 1888. Over the years the city and metro parks added land to make the 66-acre park that exists there now, including the gulch and then once-manicured non-native plants in Puget Gardens at the northern edge of the gulch. Over the years a few notable events have taken place in the gulch, including at least one murder and a couple of people who died after apparently jumping from the top of the Proctor Street Bridge at the far end of the park. And the park has survived with its name after an effort in 1919 to rename it Memorial Park in remembrance of the 51 people from Tacoma who died in World War I...
Saturday, June 16, 2001
This was an odd day, touched with mortality. I suffered most of the day from a splitting headache, but we still managed to make it to W and M's handfasting ceremony at Pt. Defiance Park, where I took the photo of the squirrel above.
The touch of mortality came just before we left for the handfasting...when our next door neighbor called to ask if I could come over to help her watch her husband, who is living with liver cancer. He has had the cancer for more than a year now, and earlier this week I spoke with him and he was still doing pretty well, even though he had noticed in recent weeks that his strength was failing. Well, earlier this week his health took a dramatic turn for the worst, to the point that he cannot remember much at all.
It is tough seeing a close neighbor, someone who Natalie and I have really appreciated over the seven years we have lived next door to him, sliding toward death's door. It is the nature of things, but it still is hard...and the contrast between the hopefulness of a handfasting and the dire feeling in the air next door was a bit much for me. As much as anything, that juxtaposition led to my near-migraine.
Friday, June 15, 2001
Finally, I caught a western tiger swallowtail butterfly in a photo, but this butterfly above is a survivor. Look closely at the lower left wing and you can see where a bird took a big bite out of the butterfly, which I noticed feeding at a dame's rocket bloom next to the snowball bush in our side yard. Despite its injuries, it seemed to do fine, flying from bloom to bloom.
Natalie and I made a short trip down to Puget Creek this afternoon, to check out the most recent planting that was done this morning. They planted willows and dogwoods and other native plants along the creek, right next to the area where we cleaned out blackberry vines last weekend.
Thursday, June 14, 2001
Another sunset caught the eye of Natalie and I as we drove home tonight from the monthly meeting of the Puget Creek Restoration Society. I snapped the shot above of a sailboat anchored near the Old Town Pier just after the sun sank below the Olympic Mountains.
On this day I spent most of my time immersed in nature, riding my mountain bike on a difficult switchback trail in the hills above Renton. I did one lap of the difficult route, then spent time exploring and watching a red-tailed hawk as it sat on top of the supports that hold high voltage power transmission lines that run overhead of the trail. Just as they do here at home, crows were diving at and harassing the hawk. And, when the hawk launched into the air, the crows' swooping approaches caused the hawk to change its flight pattern, fluttering in the air, slightly changing the angle of its wings. I wonder if crows have always harassed raptors? Or is this a relatively new behavior? Growing up as a child in the country, I never saw this behavior. I would bet it has to do with the presenve of hawks and eagles in an urban setting...
Wednesday, June 13, 2001
Add another close relative butterfly of the painted lady to the list of butterflies I have seen in the yard so far this year. Natalie and I took Rhia for a walk this morning, and after walking up the alley to return home we found the butterfly above nectaring on a dame's rocket bloom in the back yard. I was pretty sure it was a new type of butterfly, so I snapped a series of shots of it, then didn't get around to identifying it until tonight. It turns out I was right. It was a west coast lady, a relative of the painted lady that I saw in the yard about three weeks ago and also a relative of the red admiral butterfly that I saw in the yard a couple of weeks ago.
I almost got a second butterfly photo for today, when Natalie pointed out a western tiger swallowtail next to the snowball bush in the yard. I rushed out to get a shot, but once again the butterfly fluttered off to the other side of the street before I could get the camera focused on it. Maybe tomorrow...
Tuesday, June 12, 2001
I took a look at a photography Web site on the Net today that inspired me to take some more close up photos of insects in our back yard for today's entry. This page from the Photographica.com Web site reminded me of some of the photos I have already included in The Equinox Project since its inception in March. And so, I took the shot above of a ladybug on a dock leaf in the back yard, under the limited light offered by cloudy skies above.
Monday, June 11, 2001
It sure didn't feel like spring or summer today. Between midnight last night and 9 a.m. this morning, more than an inch of rain fell in my rooftop rain gauge. The rain continued to fall well into the afternoon before things cleared off a bit. The brief clearing was just the ingredient needed to set off thunderstorms in the southern end of Puget Sound country tonight. I spent more than an hour watching the clouds, watching to see if funnel clouds would reach down from the bottoms of the storm cells, watching hail pummel the roof over the back part of our house, and then eventually watching the rainbow that formed when the sun sank in the west, falling below the edge of the clouds to create a huge multi-colored show over Commencement Bay to the northeast of our Tacoma home.
The photo above shows the dark storm clouds along the southern edge of the cell, with a church tower in the foreground, while the shot below shows the rainbow rising in the distance. Both shots were taken from the sleeping loft at the back of our house, looking out across the alley...
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