Back to the Coast

 We’ve been back to the Oregon Coast twice since we saw thousands of sooty shearwaters on Sept 12.  Lots of shearwaters still being seen along the north coast, but not where we go on the central coast.  Ah well, treats like that don’t come along every day.  

Meanwhile a trip to the Coast never fails to be enjoyable.  September 12 was sunny, cool and a brisk breeze blew most of the day.  The fifteenth was a much mellower day:  first cloudy, then sunny for about an hour and then early fog rolled in completely erasing what I was drawing.  We picked up fish and chips and drove inland about five miles to the Dean Creek Elk Refuge. 

 Here are my elk notes:  

I just had fish and chips from Ungers with 14 bull elk and Dale.  We are obviously looking at the ‘wanna-be’ club, i.e. the bulls that haven’t been able to gather a harem.  As we ate we watched several half-hearted sparring matches, some grazing, some resting, and one bull did a through job of urinating on his long neck hairs before heading off in the direction of another bull’s harem.  Why do cow elk find stinky bulls attractive?  

After eating, we drive on down the valley to park on the roadside and watch a bull tending his harem.  This is a handsome fellow.  His dark rack with light tips is the biggest of the racks we’ve seen this evening.  Both the bull and his cows look sleek and athletic.  His has about 20 cows bunched in a meadow.  

He was slightly off to the side when we parked, but soon lowers his neck, tips back his antlers and flehmulates (flehmening = a deer or elk peeling back his upper lip and sniffing the air to see if a female is in estrus).  The bull picks up speed and enters his herd of cows.  

Lots of sniffing, but none of the cows seem ready.  

This end of the valley has long been darkened by shadows.  In the distance sunlight is just leaving the last bit of meadow.  Night will soon take over.  Time for us to head home.

September 19

Mellow, grey day on the Oregon Coast.  The weatherman promised a sunny afternoon, but he was just pulling our leg.  Still, it’s very pleasant.  No wind.  Even though visibility is decent a foghorn blows long, low blasts.  

While we eat lunch (fish and chips again), one immature gull waits patiently.  As soon as I feed him a couple of French fries, his companions fly over.  

This adult called and strutted and tried to convince the others that all handouts should be his.  All his posturing doesn’t keep me from tossing fries to everyone.  

When we run out of food for the gulls, all but two fly back to their central-waiting-area, a good spot from which they can watch for any humans with food.  The two gulls near us plop down on their bellies and digest.  

(end of journal notes)

I was lucky.  I gulped my food down -- yummy -- and started drawing.  Our friend Eleanor ate slowly and Dale fell asleep after his fish and chips.  I drew all three sketches before Eleanor and Dale were ready to move on.  .... Well, I did finish the crosshatching later.  

Lots of Birds .... Lots!

I knew something amazing would come along and that I would just have to find time to start blogging again.  Whether I can keep it up remains to be seen. 

Oregon Coast:  Sept. 12, 2012

After watching hundred of sea lions at Simpson Reef for a couple of hours Dale and I drove about half a mile farther south along the Oregon Coast, to a point where we hoped to see a whale or perhaps an interesting bird or two.  At first glance it looked all too quiet --  very scattered gulls and a vast expanse of Pacific Ocean.  I knew the stiff breeze blowing from the North would make it extremely difficult to spot a whale’s spout.  The white puff of steam would be whipped sideways and disappear amongst all the whitecaps.  

Then, with binoculars, I picked up one of the awesome sights of nature -- At first I thought I saw hundred of birds, then I realized it was literally thousands of birds heading North into the stiff north breeze.  They reminded me of a long thin band of large swallows tipping and turning and constantly flowing North. I could see enough to tell they were basically a very dark brown.  No distinctive markings.  I wondered if they were some kind of petrel.  

We watched for about ten minutes, went to a nearby shelter spot to eat our lunch and returned for another look.  The birds were still streaming North.  

Once I got home I unsuccessfully tried to figure out the puzzle for myself.  Then I turned to OBOL, Oregon Birds Online.  Lars Norgren soon answered my call for help, “I'm sure those were Sooty Shearwaters, the most abundant bird in Oregon, sometimes a million are off our shore at this season.”  He went on to say they nest in New Zealand and Tasmania, then move in a figure eight across the Pacific.  

Now that I know the birds are sooty shearwaters I started reading.  Another population of sooty shearwaters travel the Atlantic Ocean.  One place says radio chips show the Pacific birds travel up to 18,000 miles in a year, another site says nearly 40,000 miles!  So far they travel more miles than any other birds that have carried radio chips.  The shearwaters can also dive 225 feet, but often feed on the surface.  They eat squid and small fish.

Japanese call the shearwaters ‘bakatori -- Japanese for crazy bird.   The Maori in New Zealand call them ‘mutton-birds,” so named for their oils, fats and food.  The young are harvested just before they fledge.  

Since our sighting on Sept 12 we’ve been reading about other reports of huge flocks farther north along the Oregon Coast.  One night a raft of 10,000 or more rested in the fog near Newport, Oregon and over 40,000 were reported near the mouth of the Columbia River.  Most recently an estimate of 200-250 thousand were seen from Boiler Bay.  It is hard to imagine numbers like that.  I hope to see them again.

Gone Fishing

I am so busy!  Good busy, but busy!  I've got oodles of raw notes, photos, sketches, sketch ideas and just can't find the time to post because we are so busy learning a lot of new insects, picking blackberries, writing more raw notes, etc.  

And I've got a couple of projects going for which I feel a big commitment, plus I get frustrated when I can't find any time to paint or finish a sketch.

Soooooo ...... I'm not going to worry about blogging for awhile.  I suspect it will be sometime during our rainy season (Nov - March) before I fire up again.

So, for those of you who aren't familiar with American slang, "Gone Fishing" is just an expression for taking off .... sometimes quite literally to go fishing, sometimes to just go do something you want to do.

I hope you'll look forward to my coming back.

A Prickly Subject: Blackberries

Douglas Co., Oregon, USA

Blackberries are a royal cane .... or is it a royal pain?  I have a long, ongoing love hate affair with blackberries. Where I live is blackberry heaven / hell.  

In the late 1800s two varieties of blackberries were introduced into Oregon for their fruit.   One has sharply serrated leaves, tends to grow close to the ground, and knows its place.  The other, the Himalayan blackberry, took off on a wild stampede and soon was common throughout much of western Oregon.  Most of us have forgotten there is a quiet native blackberry and that there was once life without the Himalayan blackberry.

Untended field often look like unruly black berry farms.  Great big clumps of Himalayan blackberrries start as little clumps and soon there are island of blackberries all over;  Plus they love fence lines, disturbed soil along roadsides, and my backyard.  

Many years ago birds probably pooped the starter seeds into my yard.  It was about the time the garden had become too much for me to handle by myself ... and so I nurtured the patch in its place. I actually encouraged them, even watered them during the dry summer months.  Then, about five years ago, it dawned on me I had unleashed a monster in my backyard. My neighbors might not like the big canes reaching through the fence and doing their best to invade their backyard too.  

Since then I try to maintain a modicum of control over my blackberries.  Two or three times a year I trim them, making sure there is about a five foot blackberry free zone before our property line, and I nip and snip the unwelcome volunteers that pop up all over.  Of course my tidyness doesn’t last long.  Blackberry seem to be stimulated by a good pruning.  We even hired a friend to attack our patch with his chain saw, drastically cutting it back along the edge that faced our backyard.  When we left for Yellowstone I was sure that was the end of blackberries for this summer.  BUT, the blackberries loved it.  By the time we got home the butchered edge was a solid wall of blooms.  

Blooms are good, it was the great big canes rearing up out of the middle of the patch that worried me.  Blackberry can spread by seeds, by roots and by sending out huge canes which reach beyond the outer edge of the patch until they touch ground ... and then put down roots.  True to my goal of keeping my patch within controllable limits I set about cutting all the monster canes, all but one.  I was nearing the end of my project when I got to wondering, “Just how fast do they grow?”  I tied little twisties onto my remaining cane and sat down on a bucket to sketch it.  

Three days after marking and sketching the blackberry cane I went out to measure -- it had grown six inches!  No wonder I have trouble keeping up with them!  

On day six I went out to measure again. My experiment had been nipped off!   Fresh deer droppings suggest one of our nighttime deer is the guilty culprit.  

Diamond Lake Parking Lot

Umpqua National Forest, Oregon, USA

Diamond Lake is one of Oregon’s gems for outdoor recreating:  fishing, bicycling, hiking, camping, plus it is just a few miles from Crater Lake National Park.  Three of the last 5 days we’ve driven 180 miles round trip to spend the day at Diamond Lake.  But we don’t act like normal visitors.  We’ve spent hour after hour either on the edge of a parking lot or within 200 yards of it.  Cyclists flow past, children wade along the sandy shoreline;  we can see a small fleet of anglers.  We picked one of the hottest spots on a hot day to photograph insects ... and were so busy I didn’t even get any time to draw.  I promise myself, ‘next time I’ll spend a little time sketching.’  Meanwhile, between the two of us, we took about a thousand images to wade through need to delete 80% of them.  

Here are some of our treasures from our long days at Diamond Lake.....

This surprise came early.  I hopped out and spotted what I thought might me an odd wasp.  I called to Dale but he didn’t get there soon enough.  Fortunately I had taken several shots.  After we got home I pawed through our insect books... not a wasp ... not a fly.  Finally I realized it is a clear-winged moth.  Hummingbird moths are a classic examples of a clear-winged moth, but I’d never seen anything like this one.  Most clear-winged moths live in the tropics.  This one is quite likely a ‘fireweed clear-wing moth’ (Albuna pyrdamidalis).   On day three we both briefly spotted it again, this time near the fireweed patch.  

It was combination of the seeing the clear-winged moth and wanting more time watching aphids that took us back to the parking lot for two more days.  Large carpenter-like ants had several little aphid colonies on a lone thistle plant. Dale spent hours just concentrating on their activity.  

There was a lot of traditional behavior, i.e. ants protect the aphids and in return they eat the sweet juice the aphids excrete.  The ants also appeared to keep the area tidy by removing exoskeletons the aphids shed as they grow. The ants tolerated some ants, probably members of their own colony, and violently attacked others.  

On the second day I was excited to see that lots of damselflies were emerging.  Very new bluets are tan and initially their flight is weak.   I soon found a damselfly nymph that had just walked out of the lake.  It was still wet and looking for a place to settle onto, where it would let its exoskeleton crack open and then the damsel would emerge.  I thought to my self, “Oh goodie, I get to finally see a damselfly emerge.’  I’ve watched dragonflies, but not damselflies.  But then I realized ants were playing havoc on the damsels that were emerging at this time of day.  My little damsel was soon attacked too.  Bummer.

This big, black long horned beetle is probably a pine sawyer (Monochamus scutellatus).  He inadvertently gave us a good laugh.  We had our good friend Eleanor with us on our second day at Diamond Lake.  During our lunch-break the beetle landed on the car next to us.  I quickly put down my nice tuna fish sandwich and grabbed my camera.  Eleanor grabbed her camera too.  Once he flew off I went back to my lunch ... I pawed through the back seat where I’d been sitting .... looked under ever shirt, hat, sketchbook, ......  No sandwich.  Finally I looked farther afield.  There was Eleanor leaning against a sunny boulder and munching on something that looked suspiciously like my sandwich!  She had inadvertently picked it up. Unfortunately she had eaten most of her own sandwich too!  Hummus, nuts and chips for me.  

Dragonflies and damsel flies have an unusual posture when breeding.  This Great Basin snaketail (dragonfly) is a good example.  First the male transfers his sperm to a little pocket on the underside of his thorax.  He then grabs the neck of a female with the tip of his abdomen and she swings the tip of her abdomen around to receive the sperm now stored in the sperm pocket.  This posture is called a ‘copulation wheel.’  Our parking lot is the best place I know to find Great Basin snaketails.  

It wasn’t bugs all the time.  The first day I looked and listened for spotted sandpipers near the shoreline and was disappointed.  All was quiet.  But the second day I heard the tell-tale calls of an adult and caught glimpses of tiny, fuzzy ‘teeter-bobs’ scurrying along the shoreline.  Both adults and chicks teeter frequently.  

Spotted sandpipers are one of those unusual birds where the male is usually the primary caregiver.  According to Cornell Lab’s Birds of North American Online, some females mate with up to 4 males, each of which cares for a clutch.  In other areas some pairs are more traditional with both adults caring for the young.  I looked carefully for a second adult, but suspect this is a clutch were Papa is in charge.  

Whistler's Bend

 Whistler's Bend, Douglas County, Oregon, USA

Dale and I often sit in one spot for hours ... but usually because we watching a specific wildlife event, or at least waiting for something specific.  A few days ago we spent a delicious, long day in one spot, but with no real agenda on our minds.  We headed out early to meet friends.  Weather reports sounded as though we’d be roasting by mid afternoon and ready to head home.  

But the weatherman is far from perfect!  It was deliciously cool all morning.  The sun didn’t come out until noon.  Meanwhile we our friends, Norma and Scott, were there ahead of us.  A few photographs got taken, Norma and I painted, but mostly we talked and talked ... and talked.  We did move from one picnic table to the next to keep in the shade.

Of course a few things caught our attention during the day.  When we first arrived two bald eagles perched across the river from us.  

The eagles soon left but before long we spotted a great blue heron, also across the river.  Unless he was temporarily behind a rock, the heron was in sight for the rest of the day -- Norma and I both painted him.  Part of the  day he slowly stalked prey along the river edge.  Twice he had long sessions of preening.  Herons are unusual in that they have a ‘pectinated’ middle toe nail.   Big word.  It means the edge of the middle toe nail has a comb-like serrated edge, enough to enhance their grooming abilities, but not so serrated as to actually cut.  Someday I hope to see this serrated edge for myself.  At least I found an excellent photo on some else’s blog:

 http://dantallmansbirdblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/pectinate-toes.html

Another pleasant visitor was a gangly group of large common merganser chicks.  Their bodies were nearly full sized, yet they still didn’t have any decent flight feathers on their wings.  At this stage of life they are already masters of their watery world.  Lots of busy feeding  in the swift, but shallow  water; then a cozy nap on a nearby rock. 

Our last find was a beautiful beetle.  It was only about half an inch long, but its iridescent greens and reds more than made up for its size.  Even its underbelly was a coppery bronze.  Once we got home Norma had him identified before I even had time to wonder -- it is a metallic wood borer, also known as a Buprestid beetle.  There are several species of metallic wood borers.  Ours is probably a Buprestis aurulenta.  It’s a common insect found in forests of the Northwest.    The adults eat Douglas fir needles and lay their eggs in bark crevices.  The tiny grubs that hatch out usually take ‘a few years’ to mature, but under less than ideal conditions, such as in the wood of a picture frame or a rafter, they may even take 40 years to mature and one web site says even 50 years!  

Several time in my life I’ve had wood boring beetles invite themselves into my home, but the one that brings a smile to my face are the ones that came out of a madrone cane my husband, Dale, made and my father, Hammy, used.  Dale figures he cut the madrone at least five years before Hammy used the cane.  Then, during the brief period my father needed a cane, Hammy noticed a couple little piles of saw dust when he left the cane overnight.... and then he saw a black beetle.  We hurried up the emergence of the rest of the beetles by ‘ginning’ them, i.e. we put little drops of gin down their holes.  Sure enough!  Out came a couple more black beetles.  

That fond memory was the last nature encounter I had with my father.

Tourons

Anyone who has read this blog more than a few times knows I normally write about birds and bugs and whatever catches my eye in nature.  Sometimes I write about art.  Today I can’t resist commenting on a people encounter because it ties in so well with the last three posts about the sandhill cranes at Floating Island Lake.  

First of all let me say we mostly meet wonderful people in Yellowstone -- people from all walks of life and mostly people who wouldn’t be there if they weren’t interested in our natural world at least to some degree.  We find ourselves standing next to doctors, lawyers, biologists, waitresses ... the butcher, the baker, the candle stick maker.  Such a variety.  

My favorite Yellowstone person, my husband, Dale.

Often, when I have a question, I can soon find a person with the answer:  how do you tell a male from a female sandhill crane?  At what age does a bison cow first give birth?  What is that bright yellow fly I just found on fresh bison patties.  Sometimes we are the people with the answers.  

Many people cruise through the park in record time.  I remember standing next to one of our Yellowstone friends when a happy tourist pulled up to see what we were watching.  He’d seen the whole park in three days and was about to head home -- he’d seen it all.  Jason turned to him and drawled, “Well, you see, I come from Virginia where the soils are poor and we get hookworm.  We’re a little slow.  I’ve been coming to this same square ten miles of park for 25 years and I still haven’t seen it all”  

At the time I thought, “Wow!  25 years!”  Dale and I have now have our 25 years in and more.  The only year we skipped was the year of the fires when we choose to stay away from all the smoke.  

Jason and the happy tourist were both good people, just different from each other; definitely not tourons. 

'Touron' is the name given by ‘regulars’ (us) to the idiots (tourist + moron = touron).  Unfortunately there are a few of those. I probably got my maddest ever at a touron.   A cow elk was wading a swift, but shallow section of the Gibbon River.  She’s picked that portion of the river to cross because it was one of the few relatively shallow areas.  Above and below the river was narrower, faster, and deeper.  Her calf was already having problems with the current.  Everyone but one touron stayed put and watched.  The touron had a little camera and wanted a picture so he trotted down to meet the cow!  She shifted direction, the calf stumbled and rolled in the current.   While the cow and calf stumbled downstream the touron kept following them along the riverbank, keeping the two in the river.  I tried just yelling at the man first, but he wouldn’t listen to ME.  

Soon I was surprised at what started coming out of my mouth -- a few words I won’t mention.  I finally clinched it by saying I knew which car was his and I was getting a ranger.  That finally worked.  I’ll never know if the calf made it across.  By then the cow and calf where stumbling around a bend in the river and I wasn’t about to follow.  

My most recent touron encounter took place this spring at Floating Island Lake.  Generally people in Yellowstone are surprisingly friendly.  Strangers talk to strangers all the time.  I come back to Oregon and strike up a conversation in line at the grocery store and get odd looks, but in Yellowstone everyone does it.  So after the sandhill crane brawl (described in my recent post, Broken Toe:  Part II), I thought the three people standing near me might be interested in a little of Broken Toe’s history.  They had a scope on the cranes and had watched the battle.  Little did I know they were tourons.  

I walked the few steps to their tripod and started out saying I’d never seen cranes battle like that.  The man glared at me, “Battle!  That wasn’t a fight.  That was sex!  

I tried again, but he interrupted and sputtered, “It's Sex!  That's male dominance!”  and with that, he picked up his tripod and moved to the other side of his car!  I guess he thinks I’m a white-haired touron.