The North Cascades and Methow Valley

Last weekend we decided to take a trip east of here through the North Cascades and into the Methow Valley. We thought we would be enjoying autumn, but it ended up turning into winter! We also thought we would be focusing on birding, but it was the stunning landscapes that ended up stealing the show. Click on these pictures to view them larger, as the small versions don't quite do them justice!

First up was the drive along Highway 20 through North Cascades National Park. Glacial silt makes the color of the river an amazing turquoise!

The rain was falling but the roads were clear, with just a touch of snow at the top of the highest pass.

As we reached the Methow Valley, the sun came out in the late afternoon, and the colors were just amazing every direction you looked.

We hardly saw any birds at all in our first day of travels, but the deer were everywhere, as were the deer hunters. The deer over there as well as our deer on the island are all considered mule deer, but they're very different looking sub-species. The ones on the east side of the Cascades are much larger, more gray than brown, and even their morphology is different - their faces look like those of kangaroos!

On the second day, last Saturday, heavy rain started falling in the morning and turned into heavy snow as the day went on.

Despite the precipitation, the fall colors were spectacular, and really seemed to be at their peak.

Again, we hardly saw any birds, with the best sighting of the day being an American dipper.

By the time we went to bed, about 6-8" of snow had fallen. Overnight it turned to rain again, which compressed things a little bit, but there was still about 4" on the ground when we woke up. We were thankful we had the foresight to park our car at the bottom of the hill our cabin was situated on, or we might not have gotten out at all! It was such a beautiful sight to wake up to, however, though I kept having to remind myself this was October - amazing!

 I kept the camera on me all day and loved how this one turned out, which I took as we were walking down the hill to our car.

We headed into Winthrop for breakfast and afterwards had to take a walk along the Methow River, because the combination of fall colors and freshly fallen snow on an already stunning landscape was just breath-taking.

Back to pick up our things at the cabin, we again parked at the bottom of the hill, and a flock of birds caught our eye. We spent 45 minutes just walking the neighborhood road and finally saw more than a dozen bird species, including these two year birds that were definitely on our "hoped for" list for this trip!

Clark's nutcracker

Pygmy nuthatch

Unfortunately, even though the temperatures were warming, so much snow had fallen in the mountains that the highway we came over on was closed. This meant we had to drive the long way around, which was about twice the distance, but it was a route I had never driven before and the scenery was amazing! We just enjoyed it while driving but there's clearly plenty more new places to explore in Washington that will have to be featured on future blog posts when we get a chance to spend more time there!

September 1st and 2nd: Three Transient Encounters in Two Days

The end of August and beginning of September have been even crazier for transient killer whales in the Salish Sea in a season where sightings have already been off the charts. For a couple days we had Ts in as many as a dozen places throughout the Salish Sea, with multiple groups in Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the Strait of Georgia. By my rough count there were at least 60 whales in the area! Luckily a few of them did pass through the San Juan Islands and within our range as well.

On September 1st, the T60s along with T124A1 and the T124Ds made their way up Haro Strait. Jason and I just missed them at Lime Kiln but heard they were close to shore, so we quickly hopped in the boat and met up with them just north of County Park. I was super excited when it looked like they might go through Mosquito Pass, the narrow channel between San Juan and Henry Islands. Ts go through there occasionally and it's a place I've dreamed of seeing whales. These guys got partway in, and then seemed to second guess themselves. I'm anthropomorphizing here, but it looked like they were just cruising along when they got surprised by how narrow/shallow of a channel they were in, and then they had to have a little powwow to decide how to proceed.

Uh...do we really want to go this way?

All the boats including us were positioned to the outside of the pass, ready to follow behind them as they made their way through. Once they decided to abort continuing on, however, their direction change ended up taking them right through all the boats, giving us and everyone else a memorable head-on look as they aimed for Kellett Bluff.

After another detour deep into Open Bay, they followed the Henry Island shoreline for a while. We left them when they made another sharp turn to aim across Haro into Canadian waters.

T60C sets course for Canada

The next day, September 2nd, we got a surprise early afternoon report that another group of transients had appeared out of nowhere off Lime Kiln. Having again missed them from shore, we again headed to the boat, and again caught up with them not far from Mitchell Bay. It was the T65As and T100s, and at first they were traveling together in one mixed group.

Just north of Henry Island, however, they split into their respective matrilines. The T65As headed inshore, and we briefly followed the T100s as they continued north up Haro.

The T100s

The T100s off Battleship Island

As the T100s continued north, we headed in towards the T65As who were angling towards Spieden Island. At first it looked like they might take Spieden Channel, but instead they cut around the west edge of the island and took New Channel. This area, that we call the "back side" of Spieden, is a magical spot to see whales. The island has a steep cliff and is all forested on this side, with no developments. It makes a perfect backdrop for backlit blows, like we saw on this afternoon.

T65A2

More of the T65As

Later in the evening, after having been on the water and in general spending a lot of the day running around, yet another report of transients on the west side came in. I'll share here what I wrote when I got home from this encounter, adding in some photos:

A snapshot of my life: I'm at home and tired from a day of running around when a friend lets me know a group of transient killer whales is on the west side of San Juan Island heading south and hugging the shoreline. I'm at the wrong end of the island to try and see them, but to get those magic moments, you learn early on: if you can go, go.

When I get to my first stop at the south end some visitors let me know they've just seen whales pass by, which means I've missed them. I speed walk back to my car and try another spot further down the coast. I see the blows and a couple whale watch boats offshore. They're way further out than before but at least I see them. I settle down on a rock content to take in the sunset and collect what data I can from a distance. The other people beside me head back to their car, the final whale watch boat takes off to their home port, and the whales disappear for a moment offshore as the sun sinks towards the horizon. It sounds like a tranquil scene, and it was, for a moment.

The T36Bs and T99s offshore under the Olympic Mountains

  

Then I spot the whales again, and now they're all in a line aiming right at me. Even from a distance and even after all these years seeing seven dorsal fins all lined up at the surface takes my breath away.

They continue coming closer to shore, directly where I'm sitting, when they go on their long dive. Which way are they going to go now, up or down the beach? I had taken my shoes off but I put them back on. There's only one thing that can get me to run and I have a feeling I'm about to.

Indeed, the whales surface to my left, aiming right for the Cattle Point Lighthouse and right off the kelp beds off the beach. Let's just say I'm glad no one was their to witness my scrambling after them, though I assure you it was graceful, as I tried to take photos, run, and not lose lens cap, pen, data sheet, keys, cell phone, or sweatshirt, not aided at all by the ridiculously shallow pockets that are always in women's shorts.

I was a little bit behind them, but close enough to follow them around the corner as they cut a sharp turn right by the lighthouse and into Cattle Pass. I went as far as I could on the trail, then sat down to watch them continue on their way in the dimming light. Before making the long trek back to my car (did I really run this far?) I was surprised by a pair of fox kits, saw three deer silhouetted on the top of the hill behind me, and was passed by a bald eagle carrying the remains of a salmon to a nighttime roost. Oh, then on the way home I had to stop to take a photo of an owl.

It's a charmed life, I know, and I'm thankful for it every single day.

August 4: Alert Bay

On August 4th we packed up camp and took the ferry from Sointula to Alert Bay on Cormorant Island. On the way we saw a deer considering making a swim across the same channel - she decided not to:

Alert Bay is one of those places I had read about in books by some of my whale heroes so it was awesome to finally visit. A bald eagle welcomed us at the ferry terminal:

The First Nations cultural heritage in Alert Bay is amazing and well worth the visit. The U'Mista Cultural Centre is home to artifacts of the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw people, many of which were taken when the potlatch was outlawed in Canada from 1885 to 1951. Many of the masks and other items were confiscated by the government or in private collections but are slowly making their way back to their rightful owners. No photographs are allowed in the exhibit - so you'll have to make the journey to see for yourself one day. Outside the cultural center I was amazed to see another bald eagle perched on top of a totem pole. I managed to catch this photo just as it was taking flight:

Another must-see sight is the Namgis Burial Grounds, where totem poles and other grave markers are viewable from the road. Some families choose to maintain the totem poles while others believe letting them decay and return to the Earth is part of their natural journey.

One thing that's for certain is that the cultural juxtapositions between the First Nations people and European immigrants are everywhere:

Alert Bay is also a formerly bustling fishing village. There are still a lot of fishing vessels in the harbor, but many have been seemingly abandoned, as was the old cannery near the marina.

We had time to do a little birding too, and the best finds (other than the bald eagles) were a large group of black oystercatchers:

And some black turnstones near the ferry terminal, which I caught in some surreal lighting as the smoke from the wildfires in interior BC made for an orange cast to the sun:

The weekend after leaving Alert Bay, we made our trek back down Vancouver Island to Victoria and then home to San Juan Island, where things had also been pretty quiet on the killer whale front. A group of L-Pod whales made a short visit while we were gone, but then even the transient killer whale sightings dried up for about a week. A combination of wind and bad timing would keep the orca sightings very sparse for me until just last night, August 19th, when I finally had another great transient killer whale encounter. I'll feature photos from that in my next blog post, but in the meantime, incredibly, we've gone more than 2 weeks again without any Southern Residents and are approaching a month without J-Pod. :(

Spring Changes to Summer

In mid-June we got two brief visits from L-Pod, but they weren't too accommodating for shore-based viewing. The L12s made one trip up as far as Lime Kiln, first spending some time resting off of Land Bank:

The L12s in resting formation

The second visit, from a larger group of L-Pod whales, offered only the most distant of looks over their two-day stay, before they headed back out to the open ocean.

A distant look at L91 Muncher from San Juan Island

Amazingly, but perhaps not surprisingly given the salmon numbers, the days continue to slip off the calendar and as we edge towards July J-Pod still has not visited us since the first of the month. They have been spotted a couple times - once in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and twice off of Tofino, and luckily off Tofino reports were they were finding a lot to eat. But the times have surely changed, and meanwhile we are left hoping that as the summer progesses, sightings of the Southern Residents in inland waters will increase as the summer goes on as happened later in the year of 2013 when sightings were also at record lows.

Meanwhile, there continue to be some transients around, though fewer than a few weeks ago. We did manage to have one nice shore-based encounter with the T36As and T65Bs where they spent more than half an hour "milling and killing" off of 4th of July Beach.

Other than that, sightings have been pretty slim, and we've taken some of our extra spare time to hand-tame some of the wild birds at our feeders. So far we've gotten red-breasted nuthatches, chestnut-backed chickadees, and even a downy woodpecker to eat from our hands!

Red-breasted nuthatch fledgling on my hand

Other than that, I've been left to enjoy and photograph all the other abundant wildlife (and wildflowers!) that lives in this special place I get to call home. I'll let the variety of the photos speak for themselves!

Curious raccoon

Female rufous hummingbird on nest

Deer fawn

Another deer fawn - this one in our yard!

Red fox in the rain

Lily pads at Three Meadows marsh

Oceanspray in bloom

A bizarre visitor to the intertidal zone - a turkey vulture

A female purple martin

On my last excursion, we headed down to Cattle Point, hoping for a first of the year Heermann's gull. They've been seen in Puget Sound, but not up here yet, though that should change any day. We didn't find out, but it's impossible not to take a photo of the eagles that regularly perch on the Cattle Point Lighthouse:

While looking up at this one, I happened to turn around just in time to see it's (presumed) mate fly by below the cliff behind us with a large fish in its talons:

Sure enough, the lighthouse eagle wasn't far behind, as it soon took flight after it's mate and/or dinner:

It's clear that there will be no shortage of things for me to photograph and report about on my blog, but I strongly hope that my next installment includes at least one visit from our Southern Resident Killer Whales!