Coastal Wood Fern

The fronds of the coastal wood fern are uncoiling as they emerge from underneath the leaf litter. How and when does this button of wrapped vegetation form? It is so fascinating to visualize this frond slowly forming this tight spiral throughout the winter. Then at some cosmic moment, it decides to awaken and open up to spring.

I imagine that inside its balled up fist it is holding the dreams of ancient cultures - living in harmony with all life on earth. As it gently unfurls and releases its beauty, I am called to remember to be a caretaker of nature to protect it for now and future generations.

Coastal Wood Fern (Dryopteris arguta)

Coastal Wood Fern (Dryopteris arguta)

Pink Fawn Lily

The pink fawn lily is a vibrant star on the landscape during the cloudy skies of early spring. May it guide you to the wonders of nature.

Pink Fawn Lily (Erythronium revolutum)

Pink Fawn Lily (Erythronium revolutum)

First Day of Spring

“No mortal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of spring — but he will presently discover some evidence that vegetation had awaked some days at least before.”

Henry David Thoreau
March 17, 1857

Thoreau, Henry David. Thoreau’s Wildflowers. Edited by Goeff Wisner, Yale University Press, 2016.

Camas

Sweet Fragrant Cottonwood

As I walked along the river on this warm, sunny day, I was overtaken by the sweet smell of the black cottonwood. The buds are covered in a aromatic resin that permeates the air. As the leaves and catkins emerge, the casings of the buds are scattered on the ground beneath the tree. Check out these sticky and fragrant casts.

The female and male catkins are on different trees. The male catkin is a beautiful, red tassel and many of them were strewn around the ground as well.

As life abounds during this time of year, there is so much to experience and explore.

Bumble Bees

In the mid afternoon light, I was attracted to the radiant blooms of the red-flowering currant. As I walked over, I noticed that I wasn't the only one drawn to them. A bumble bee was merrily foraging and enjoying the cool, warm spring weather.

Bumble bee colonies are annual. Each year a colony will produce queens that will then mate and find a place spend the winter, usually underground. All of the other bumble bees die. Thus, the first bumble bees of spring are the mated queens that overwintered from last year. When they emerge, they will find a suitable nest site and begin a new colony. Old rodent borrows are a popular nest site.

Bumble bees are amazing pollinators. They are out in early spring, are able to fly in cooler weather and are generalist foragers. In addition, they are buzz pollinators. Here is a PBS video that explains buzz pollination that is worth watching. It’s only 3 minutes and 32 seconds. https://www.pbs.org/video/deep-look-bumblebee/

Another interesting tidbit is that, unlike honeybees, bumble bee stingers lack a barb. So they are uninjured when they sting you, which also means they can sting multiple times. That said, bumble bees are generally not aggressive except when defending their nests or if they are being harmed.

Liverworts

As I walk around the arboretum, I notice that many of the trees are covered with a green, magic carpet. Upon closer inspection, I quickly realized that there are many shapes, sizes, colors and textures to these plants. This opened up another world of life — mosses and liverworts.

After a storm I found a big clump that had fallen out of a tree. As I started down the road of identifying it, I narrowed it down to a liverwort. I’m still working on honing my observation skills, so I’ll wait on determining which genus or species.

This clump was interesting because there were spiders, centipedes and small insects living in it. On the underside was a maze of what look liked roots. I later read that these aren’t true roots, they are rhizoids. They are more about anchoring the plant than transporting nutrients. Long story short is that the more I read, the more there was to read. The diversity of life is unbelievably fascinating.

Ravens Building Nest

There have been a couple of ravens hanging around the last few weeks, and I wondered if they had decided to nest in the area. I went to spend time watching them today to see what they were up to. When I arrived in the area where they were, my suspicions were confirmed. I immediately heard the snap of a limb, and a raven flew out of a tree with a medium-sized twig. They were regularly making trips into nearby trees and breaking off branches. I watched them for an hour and a half, and I never saw them search for nesting material on the ground. The nest is next to the trunk about two-thirds up in an old evergreen tree. It was amusing to see them fly back to the nesting site. As they approached the site, they would sort of crash land in to the branches. You could hear their wings hitting the limbs as they flew into the tree. Also, they were very vocal as they flew in and out building the nest, almost as if they were fussing about how to construct it. I wasn't able to get a good photograph during that time, because there were only brief windows of opportunities as they flew through the canopy and they stayed fairly obscured from view as they looked for sticks. It will be interesting to see how ravens nesting in the area will affect the nesting of other birds nearby.

Scouring-rush Horsetail

I was walking past this patch of horsetails, and I was struck by the beauty of the structure on top that resembles a pineapple. It looked to so regal resting inside this black and white crown at the end of a slender, green stalk. This is where it produces spores for reproduction. Its stiff stalk is covered with small, abrasive grains of silica. As its common name suggests, it makes a good tool for scouring. This is such a unique and fascinating plant.

I enjoyed Daniel Mathews opening paragraph about horsetail in his book Cascade-Olympic Natural History: “Long ignored for being too primitive, common, and monochromatic, horsetails won their hour of media glory for sending the first green shoots up through Mt. St. Helen’s debris of May, 1980. They can crack their way through an inch of asphalt on highway shoulders. No wonder Quileute swimmers felt strong after scrubbing themselves with horsetails! And some Northwest gardeners feel weak after weeding them.”

Trillium

In Cascade-Olympic Natural History Daniel Mathews writes: “What a pleasure, seeing the year’s first trilliums in March or April, just when the winter rains feel like Forever! Quinault elders used to warn their youngsters that picking trillium would bring rain — a safe bet in Quinault country at that time of year.”

Rain is probably a safe bet here too, for which I am grateful. Trilliums are a soothing salve for soggy spirits in spring. Say that alliteration ten times really fast!

Mt. Pisgah has two types of trilliums:
Giant Trillium (Trillium albidum)
Western Trillium (Trillium ovatum ssp. ovatum)

On the website of Sevenoaks Native Nursery they told how to tell them apart: “The slightly mottled leafy bracts directly subtend the sessile white three-petaled flower, this is a good indicator of telling T. albidum apart from T. ovatum, whose flower rises above the leafy bracts.”

Definitions.
Sessile - Botany. attached by the base, or without any distinct projecting support, as a leaf issuing directly from the stem.
Subtend - Botany. (of a bract) extend under (a flower) so as to support or enfold it.

Giant Trillium (Trillium albidum)

Giant Trillium (Trillium albidum)

Giant Trillium (Trillium albidum)

White Fawn Lily

As the dawn of spring breaks over Mt. Pisgah, luminescent white lilies will transform the arboretum into a starry-eyed landscape.

White Fawn Lily
Erythronium oregonum

Heralds of Spring

The Bewick’s wren felt like the official messenger of spring on this warm, sunlit day.

Peterson’s field guide says this about its vocals: “Song suggests a Song Sparrow’s, but thinner, starting on two or three high notes, dropping lower, ending on a thin trill; calls sharp vit, vit and buzzy dzzzzzt.”

Listen to the sounds of the Bewick’s Wren on All About Birds:
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Bewicks_Wren/sounds

I regularly see a pair of American kestrels around the south meadow, and they often sit in the old, blanched snag out there. As I was attempting to photograph the female, the male flew down to mate. The encounter was brief and the photo is out of focus, but you get the picture.

Nuttall's Toothwort

The stem comes out of the earth in a graceful arch. At the end of the arch, a flower slightly washed in pink, bows in greeting to welcome you to the forest as it awakens to spring.

As plants sprout and flowers open, I’m always amazed at the hidden beauty lying below the surface. There is so much life just underneath my feet that I walk past unknowingly. In spring, an unassuming patch of ground becomes transformed into a marvel that stops me in my tracks.

Public Service Announcement:
It is important to stay on the trail and keep dogs on a leash during this time of year so that plants don’t become trampled.

Latin name: Cardamine nuttallii

Nest Box - House Wren

There are nest boxes dotted around the arboretum, and I volunteered to clean them out this year. When I got to this box, I knew it was stuffed full of sticks, because I watched a house wren build a nest in there last summer. I did a drawing as I observed him industriously find sticks and carry them back to the box. Even so, I was amazed at how many sticks were in the box when I opened the front. They were woven so tightly together that it took some effort to pull the nest out. I was curious as to how many sticks were in there, so I put the nest in a bucket and carried it home to count them. There were well over 500, but I want to be conservative in case some were broken in the process of removing the nest. That number is not counting the little nest on top that was made of smaller sticks, grass, pine needles, rootlets, leaves and whatnot.

I just have to wonder, what is the purpose of all these sticks? There is only a small opening into the nest which you can see at the top. The Cornell Lab’s All About Birds had this to say about their nests: “House Wrens pile twigs into the cavities they choose to nest in, either to make a bed on which to build a soft-lined cup, or sometimes mounded up into a barrier between nest and entrance, seemingly to protect the nest from cold weather, predators, or cowbirds.”

Also, to my surprise, there were wasps wintering over inside this fortress of twigs. There were 12 of them huddled together staying warm and dry. It is my understanding that the only wasps that survive the winter are the mated queens which will start new nests in the spring. I find it fascinating that they somehow find a place to be together. Are the queens clustered together from the same nest or a couple of different nests? There were two other nest boxes full of sticks that were used by house wrens, and they also had wasps inside them.

Oregon Grape Flower Buds

Some of the flower buds of the Oregon grape have a delicate blush of red - a warm, rosy complexion on a cool winter’s day.

As I reflect back through my posts, there are a many varied hues of red gracing the landscape: the flaming crest of the pileated woodpecker, the red nape spot of the downy woodpecker, the subtle red of the snowberry buds, the iridescent gorget and crown of Anna’s hummingbird, the flaring buds of the red-flowering currant, the whimsical flowers of the hazelnut, the gentle buds of the Indian plum, the blazing head of the red-spotted garter snake, the subdued, red breast of the American robin, the fiery red-breasted sapsucker and the calming buds of the big leaf maple. Life is miraculous.

Pileated Woodpecker

I’ve heard and seen the pileated woodpecker at the arboretum throughout the winter. Both the male and female have red crests. The red on the male includes the forecrown and he has a red mustache mark. It is a crow-sized bird. Its length is 15.8-19.3 in (40-49 cm).

It has a varied diet, but its primary food is carpenter ants. It will make deep holes in trees to get to the tunnels of these ants or woodboring beetles and termites. A woodpecker’s tongue is part of a fascinating system of small bones and muscles that wrap around the back and top of the skull all the way around to its forehead. This allows it to extend its tongue in search of prey.

In What It’s Like to Be a Bird, David Sibley writes, “The long tongue has a barbed and sticky tip, and tiny muscles that allow the bird to bend the tip of the tongue in any direction, so it can follow twisting tunnels, trap prey against walls, and pry insects and larvae out of their hiding places deep inside a tree.”

Click the link to All About Birds to listen to their calls:
Pileated Woodpecker Sounds

Downy Woodpecker

Downy’s are spirited birds that are fun to watch as they energetically move through the landscape. This little bird has bold black and white markings, and the male has a red patch on the back of its head. Despite its pronounced field marks, I usually hear one before I see it. I’ll hear tapping sounds as it explores for insects and larvae inside the wood and under the bark of small, tree limbs. I also frequently hear it make a call note which Peterson describes as “a flat pick, not as sharp as the Hairy’s peek!” (It can be tricky to distinguish these sounds.) I have been seeing downy woodpeckers throughout the arboretum all winter. I am looking forward to hopefully finding a nest this spring.

Sharp-shinned Hawk

As I was walking along the edge of the meadow beside the White Oak Pavilion in the late afternoon, it appeared as if something fell out of a tree. Suddenly a bird launched off the ground, and a flock of juncos burst out of the grass in a frenzy. I took a few steps into the woods to look behind some incense cedars. Just inside the forest feathers were flying everywhere as this immature sharp-shinned began plucking a junco on a nearby branch before eating it.

According to All About Birds by The Cornell Lab, “Songbirds make up about 90 percent of the Sharp-shinned Hawk’s diet. Birds the size of American Robins or smaller (especially warblers, sparrows, and thrushes) are the most frequent prey; bigger birds are at less risk, though they’re not completely safe. Studies report quail, shorebirds, doves, swifts, woodpeckers, and even falcons as prey.”

Hazel & Fern

There are a pair of rabbits that hang out in this little thicket next to the river. They forage along the edge, seldom venturing more than a few feet away from cover. I was walking along the trail the other day and came upon them foraging. Their instinct is to stay stone-still. I took a couple quick photos as they stood absolutely motionless. I decided to keep walking so they could hop into the bushes where they feel safe and can relax. I looked back after a few steps and one had already disappeared. The other one waited until I was probably fifty feet away before it moved into the bushes. They have large eyes and ears that are acutely tuned into the sights and sounds in their environment. There are many predators out at the arboretum, so they need to be aware. Whenever I see them, it reminds me to check in with my surroundings - listening to the river, feeling the wind, watching for birds, smelling the earthly scents in the air and tasting the yummy snacks from my pack.

Cleavers

Cleavers are an interesting plant. The leaves grow in whorls around the stem giving it a whimsical personality. It is covered with little bristles on its leaves, stalk and seeds. The stem is weak, so the bristles are good at clinging on to plants for support as it grows. It also means it will stick to pants, socks, shoes and surely the fur of animals, which enables it to spread its seeds around.

I found a small patch growing at the base of tree along the riverbank trail. I also discovered some growing out of an old bird nest. I wonder if the bird used some of the plant in its nest or if the plant clambered its way up there and deposited some seeds.