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Week Fourteen, June 18-24
Sunday, June 24, 2001
This has been a day to rest, after being on the run all week. Rainy weather kept us inside, other than the short breaks when we made it outside to shoot photos. I had hoped to work on a new fence in the back yard to help hold in our dog Rhia and our newly inherited from the neighbors springer spaniel Abe, but the rain was just too much. Maybe I will get out and work in the yard tomorrow...
I shot today's photo alongside the rabbit cages in the back yard. The feverfew, an herb, was speckled with rain from the off-and-on drizzle and the one major downpour during the day.
Saturday, June 23, 2001
Chalk up another type of butterfly at Puget Creek. This morning Natalie and I wandered down to Puget Creek to walk along on a native plant tour led by Scott Hansen, and as it turned out, conditions were perfect in the Puget Gardens section of the park to find a lot of butterflies and dragonflies dancing about on the breeze. I watched at least three or four bright yellow western tiger swallowtails flying overhead among the trees near the entrance to the gardens, and just inside the hedge that separates the road from the gardens the swallowtails mingled with veined white and cabbage white butterflies. But a third butterfly caught my eye. I could tell from the start that it was something I hadn't seen yet this year, either at Puget Creek, in my yard or on our nature travels. And I must be getting better at identifying these creatures because I thought from the first glimpse that the new butterfly was some kind of admiral, sort of like the red admiral I saw in our yard a couple of weeks ago, but with different markings.
It took me at least an hour to finally get close enough to the butterfly to snap a decent photo. And after catching it sitting on a rhody leaf near me, then finishing our time at the creek and heading home, I found out it was a Lourquin's admiral, a common butterfly in the Western U.S., but one that I had never seen before. It still strikes me how many types of butterflies I can see here that I never bothered to notice before my interest in them piqued a year ago. All of the time that I lived in the country, where surely these butterflies were all around me, and yet I never noticed them then.
Before we finished our native plant tour of Puget Gulch I was exhausted. Why? Well, a short distance up the trail we found a downed log that had the brambles clipped back from on top of it, exposing it as an obvious path someone was using to cross a marsh to the side of the gulch. I walked across to check it out, and after winding my way through this new trail up the side of the gulch it was obvious that some kids, fresh out of school for summer, had cut along a animal trail to create their own route into the gulch from a home up above.
Then, after getting back onto the trail and rejoining the plant walk, I noticed along with Scott that on the edge of the steep gulch above, just opposite of where I had been checking out the kids' trail, someone was illegally cutting tree tops and throwing them down the side of the gulch. I had the bright idea of trying to get up the gulch and photograph the people in the act, so that we could go after them for breaking the law, but after an exhausting climb straight up amongst the ferns, I realized there was so much debris that had been cut and rotted in the area that I couldn't get the last 20-30 feet up to the people cutting. Instead of getting a photo, I ended up yelling at the fellows in my best imposing voice that they were breaking the law, that their improved view surely wasn't worth the legal trouble and fines, and that I would come back when they weren't there and get their addresses. Of course, according to Scott and city lawyers, I can't do that. Unless someone is caught in the act and they can be clearly identified, we can't do anything about their illegal cutting and habitat damage. Nevertheless, even though I already knew this, I wanted to get the morons to stop their cutting. And stop they did.
Getting back down the side of the gulch was much harder than getting up. There was no trail, so I was going cross country through sword ferns nearly as tall as me, and when I did get to the damp bottom of the gulch I had to pick my way across a marsh to get back to the trail. I have a new respect for the density of ferns and other vegetation in the upper gulch now. It was an exhausting adventure after scaling both sides of the gulch and taking in the surroundings. And while I didn't get to take part in a lot of the plant tour, and while I managed to lose the lens cap to my digital camera in my attempt to catch the tree cutters, it was still a good if tiring visit to the gulch. I know it a little better for the adventure...
Friday, June 22, 2001
The bank of deep pink clouds highlighted by the sinking summer sun was the perfect end to a pleasant day in which Natalie and I celebrated the solstice a day late with a 3-mile walk in a nearby wetland. We ventured over to Belfair, at the end of Hood Canal where the Union River meets the saltwater in a large estuary laced with handicapped accessible trails at the Theler Wetlands. This is an area we will have to highlight if we get the contract to write a birding book about Washington. Its trails include a boardwalk through a forested wetland as well as a longer trail on top of a dike that separates the saltwater of Hood Canal from the freshwater areas on the other side of the dike. We saw a wide variety of thrushes, redwinged blackbirds, robins, swallows, kingfishers, crows, mourning doves, creepers of some kind that I haven't taken the time to identify yet...just a wide range of birds in a relatively short walk.
The Theler Wetlands remind me in many ways of the 5-mile trail and birds that can be seen at the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge. And like that refuge, the wetlands houses an education center with exhibits open daily and plenty of interpretive signs and information about the flora and fauna of the site. It is a great resource and really cool that it is so accessible.
Our walk was a bit rushed, since I had to return home and work a shift for Lycos by the late afternoon, but we still managed to spend more than 2 hours exploring the wetlands. And, on our walk back toward the car I was able to snap the photo of a perfect western tiger swallowtail below. Unlike the swallowtail I took a shot of in our yard, that had its tail chomped off by a bird, this butterfly was in perfect shape as it nectared at a bloom just outside the educational center at the wetlands.
After a tough, emotional week, this trip was a great way to start grounding and coming back into the swing of the season. In my infinite wisdom, I forgot to put any sunscreen on though, so tonight I am red and feeling the effects of a little too much exposure...
Summer Solstice, 2001
The longest day in Tacoma, Washington, here at the shores of Puget Sound, offered atypical high temperatures around 80 degrees Fahrenheit as well as a beautiful sunrise and an equally beautiful sunset. I woke early in the morning, around 5 a.m., to watch the sky turn all colors of pink and orange as the sun rose in the east over the crest of the Cascade Mountains. I'm seldom awake for the sunrise, but for some reason I woke right before the northern-most sunrise of the year. I debated for a moment whether it was worth the effort to get up, grab my digital camera from downstairs, and return to the loft for a shot of the sunrise, but I opted to take the photo, and after just watching a great sunset and the rise of an unusually bright Mars in the southern sky tonight, I am glad I sacrificed a little sleep to mark the season.
This was also a day of passage. We attended the funeral for our neighbor and friend, Warren. He will surely be missed, and all that we can hope as Elsie puts their house up for sale in the coming days is that we get some more great people living next door. It promises to be a summer of change...and the seasons march on...
Wednesday, June 20, 2001
I didn't spend a lot of time outdoors today, despite the gorgeous weather. But I did step out long enough to water the garden a bit, to hang some clothes out to dry and retrieve them, and to snap the photo above of a variety of purple daisy we have blooming near the front of our yard, just above the terracing on the west side of our lot.
I am pleased writing today's entry...when I set out to do this daily Weblog and photography project in March, I was unsure of where I wanted to take it. Should I take a photo of the same thing every day? Should I focus on just a few common views, say from the top of Mason Gulch or something? Or should I just let it show the passage of time and life from the spring equinox to the summer solstice? I think I found a happy medium that shows an interesting, or at least interesting to me, view of the passage of the season. Lots of flower blooms, sunshine, storm clouds, life, death...a lot of the everyday can be found in these three months of entries. And I have enjoyed doing this project so much that, even though I didn't plan on it at the start, I now plan to keep The Equinox Project going through the summer, fall...the foreseeable future. If nothing else it is a great way to take a multimedia look back at the year!
Onward!
Tuesday, June 19, 2001
It was a sad day, and a relief, when Natalie and I found out that our friend and next door neighbor Warren passed away this morning. He had been battling cancer for the last two years, and over the last week his health slipped from bearable to a stage where he was on pain medication and disoriented. It is sad to know my friend is gone, but he can't help but be in a better place now.
It's funny. Although we have only known Warren for the seven or so years that we have lived next door, he was one of those people who grew to be much more than a neighbor. He spent years earlier in his life growing up in the same town where I grew up, in Rochester, Washington. He had similar interests in the outdoors, in being active, in watching the weather. And every week, even in the worst of weather, I could count on running into Warren when I was outside doing one thing or another. He was either chopping firewood or gardening or tinkering around outdoors and I could count on a pleasant conversation every time we saw each other.
As Natalie said last night, now our cat Kiki who was Warren's best pal, has someone to pet him on the other side...
Monday, June 18, 2001
This day was largely spent on an environmental field trip. Natalie and I joined members of the Tahoma Audubon Society for a tour of the Puget Sound Environmental Learning Center, under construction on a 225-acre site on Bainbridge Island. It was an interesting trip, seeing what this center hopes to do in educating 4th and 5th grade students on a site that included a pond, a marsh (shown above) and a gulch with a creek that holds salmon habitat running below. Highlights of the trip included a pair of osprey that were crying out and circling the marsh while we stood in the tree cover on a trail at the water's edge, and spotting a bald eagle as it flew from its perch alongside the pond.
Besides Natalie and I, this trip had some interesting folks on it. Our friend Katrina from the Tahoma Audubon Society led the troupe, which included a couple of older members of the society who had special expertise about the area. One fellow had some interesting background on Puget Creek. He said that years ago he was excited about the salmon rearing possibilities of Puget Creek and Mason Creek, the latter at the base of the gulch very near where I live. He said that from his studies of stream flow, Mason Creek should actually be a better creek for salmon, but because of accessibility, Puget Creek has seen the bulk of salmon habitat restoration work. Hearing this got Natalie and I to thinking that we really need to work to start working on Mason Creek...
The secondary photo for today's entry is of a spider about to feed on its latest catch. I took the closeup shot alongside the marsh on Bainbridge Island.
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