Yellow Island Wildflowers ~ 2012

Yesterday afternoon I got to make a trip to Yellow Island, the 11-acre wildflower mecca that sits in San Juan Channel. It's protected by The Nature Conservancy and open to the public year-round, though the peak visitation coincides with the spring wildflower blooms for which the island is famous. The caretaker of Yellow is my friend and fellow birder, Phil, who had a great idea of bringing several island bloggers to the island together, inviting each of us to blog about our visit in our own unique way. I'll link to Alex's and Shann's posts here, so make sure to check back; this morning, I learned Phil used the visit as an opportunity to start his own blog, too! You can read his inaugural blog post here. Here are the four bloggers:

My first visit to Yellow Island as part of a San Juan Nature Institute field trip in 2009 inspired me to learn more about local plants, and opened up a whole new world of investigation on San Juan Island. Last year I got to go again, and the flowers were in such abundance (the biggest bloom Phil has seen in 13 years!) it took two blog posts to capture the flowers here and here.

After arriving on the island, we didn't have to walk too far until we were hip-deep in western buttercups (Ranunculus occidentalis), great camas (Camassia sp.), and harsh paintbrush (Castilleja hispida).

I walked straight to Hummingbird Hill, my favorite part of the island where the three flower species mentioned above grow in abundance in and among each other. It's a popular location with hummingbirds and bumblebees, and I was pretty happy there too!

Here are a couple views looking out from the hill:

With the exception of the above photos, I spent most of the visit with the macro lens on my camera to take flower close-ups. It was occasionally challenging in the wind, but I'm pretty pleased with some of my results. It turns out taking macro pictures of wildflowers is a great way to get a workout without even realizing it; today I'm sore from all the deep knee bends I must have done to take my 200+ flower photos!

Harsh paintbrush (Castilleja hispida)

Meadow death-camas (Zigadenus venenosus)

Chocolate lily (Fritillaria biflora)

Some flower species jump right out at you and dominate the landscape, but it's amazing the diversity you can see if you take a closer look. One species that was fairly common but could easily be overlooked is the Pacific sanicle (Sanicula crassicaulis), a member of the parsley family. It comes in two color morphs - yellow and maroon.

Speaking of color morphs, the camas came in two colors, too! The purplish-blue is the predominant variety, but I saw four plants that had white flowers.

Some of my favorite flower species are pretty small, like the broad-leaved starflower (Trientalis latifolia):

Another one I really like is the tiny small-flowered forget-me-not (Myosotis stricta). This whole head of flowers is smaller than a fingernail!

Another little flower Phil took the time to point out was naked broomrape (Orobanche uniflora) growing in a patch of broad-leaved stonecrop (Sedum spathulifolium), one of the species it parasitizes. Broomrape doesn't have any leaves, since instead of generating its own energy through photosynthesis, it taps nutrients from other plants.

Field chickweed (Cerastium arvense) is a flower I see a lot of on San Juan Island, and we saw some on Yellow, too. One plant I didn't recognize turned out to be another type of chickweed: common chickweed (Stellaria media):

Remember the tent caterpillars I saw at Three Meadows Marsh a little over a week ago? They're on Yellow, too, and they're getting bigger:

There were many members of the pea family in flower, both vetch and pea species. I'm not sure what kind of vetch (Vicia sp.) this is, but it was pretty:

Phil taught me the difference between the native Sierra-Nevada pea (Lathyrus nevadensis), pictured below, and the non-native beach pea (Lathyrus japonicus). The best way to tell them apart is by the size of the stipules (pairs of leaf-like appendages at the base of a leaf stalk): beach peas have large stipules, and Sierra-Nevada peas have small ones.

One of my favorite photos of the day is of the large-flowered blue-eyed Mary (Collinsia grandiflora). I like both, but the second one is my favorite:

And finally, one more flower picture (I probably could have made this Yellow Island visit two posts, too!). Cow parsnip (Heracleum maximu) stands out for its giant leaves, but its cluster of tiny flower is pretty impressive, too:

As the wind picked up, we headed to Phil's cabin for some snacks and good conversation. One of the most interesting things that came up was this specimen Phil's neighbor (meaning on a neighboring island!) brought him some fresh seafood, and in his trap was this creature that he believed was a hybrid between a crab and a shrimp. It's certainly not like anything I've ever seen before, and a little searching online didn't turn up anything about it Help me out, readers - do you know anything about this creature?!

EDIT: Thanks to blog reader Connie, who identified this as a galatheid crab (Munida quadrispina), also known as a squat lobster.  According to my helpful book Marine Life of the Pacific Northwest,  it's even known for being a nuisance in prawn traps.

As always, it was an honor to get to visit Yellow Island - thank you Phil! It was especially nice to do so with some fellow bloggers. I look forward to reading all your posts!

Underwater Video - First Takes

Winters on San Juan Island are very different from summers: the days are short, the weather is wet and gray, and the town is quiet. People get through the winter in different ways, but there are lots of different community activities to help pass the long, dark nights. Sports are my personal favorite. In years past I've played hockey and done rollerblading at open skate, and this year I've tried badminton and indoor soccer as well. This week I ended up doing all four, resulting in various types of soreness as I use muscles that have laid dormant all summer. I thought it was amusing, however, that the thing I was most sore from this week wasn't a sport at all - it was crouching on the dock taking underwater video clips.

I got a Flip video camera for my birthday, along with an underwater case. This is the perfect time of year to put it to good use because the marina is just full of schooling fish, and as a result, lots of other wildlife. We've had groups of seals coming through several times a day, plus different types of gulls and other marine birds, river otters, and the regular assortment of intertidal life.

I still have a long ways to go in getting the types of clips I think might be possible from right off our dock (including getting the camera lined up right in the casing), but here are a few samples from my first week or so of attempts. Featured here are a dock shrimp, a couple schools of fish, a cross jellyfish, a very brief look at a seal (they're proving the hardest so far!), and a Bonaparte's gull:

Jellyfish Invasion

There have been thousands and thousands of tiny jellyfish in the marina this week. They seem to come in waves - sometimes the ocean is full of them and other times you can only see a few individuals. Yesterday and today I spent some time on my hands and knees at the edge of the dock (with camera in hand, of course) to take a closer look, and I was surprised to see no fewer than six different species. My cnidaria ID skills are very amateur, so I'm definitely looking for input if anyone knows more than I do about my tentative species identifications.

The most abundant species is the aggregating jelly (Eutonia indicans), shown here against both a dark and a light background:

The next most abundant species, that really seems to come in waves, is the thimble jellyfish (Sarsia spp.):

The only one of these species I have seen before is the cross jelly (Mitrocoma cellularia), which has been abundant in recent summers though completely absent in years prior to that:

Now come the three I'm not so sure of, and which I only saw in very small numbers. I think this might be a water jelly species (Aequorea spp.). It doesn't seem to quite have enough "spokes", but it's the closest I can come with my Marine Life of the Pacific Northwest: A Photographic Encyclopedia of Invertebrates, Seaweeds And Selected Fishes field guide:

This one might be a hanging stomach jelly (Stomotoca atra). If it is, as the name suggests that would be the stomach hanging out of the bell, surrounded by the lips.

Finally, and this is another tentative ID but also another great example of why jellyfish common names are awesome, the closest I can come on this one is the blob-top jelly (Neoturris breviconis):

As with most wildlife viewing efforts, you end up seeing more than your "target" species. While taking such a close look at the water I also found this coonstripe shrimp (Pandalus danae) sitting on this giant plumose anemone (Metridium farcimen):