And the World Keeps Turning

While it's been hard to find the motivation to blog in the last month, it hasn't been hard to find the motivation to go out into nature. Not only is April one of my favorite months on San Juan Island regardless, but it's been especially comforting to find some peace and sense of normalcy in these crazy times.

Before things really shut down and the stay at home order was put into place, we got out for one more on the water encounter with J-Pod in San Juan Channel back in mid-March. As we're quickly heading towards an unprecedented April with NO orca encounters, those two encounters from March are extra special and moments I replay often in my mind!

J-Pod in San Juan Channel on March 21st

Without whale encounters, the spring bird migration has received my extra attention, especially because I've been participating in two unique challenges over the last few weeks. One is an extension of our year-long challenge to photograph as many vertebrates as we can in 2020; since many of us are restricted to much closer to home for the time being, we're doing a mini 6-week photo blitz to see how many bird species we can photograph within 1 mile of our home. I had hoped to get 30 species, but am surprised to already have more than 50, with a week to go!

Hanging out with a red-breasted nuthatch in our yard

The other challenge is an extension of the year-long Fantasy Birding effort I'm participating in for the second year. What is Fantasy Birding, you ask? It's along the lines of fantasy sports, where you pick real-life players to be on your fantasy sports team and gain points based on the actions they take in real-life games. Here, you pick a region to virtually bird-watch in, and you score points based on lists real birders submit in that area to eBird. Again, due to everyone staying at home much more, we've started a sub-game called the Yard Squad Challenge. Captains chose birders from around the country (plus one international player per team) to bird their yards for four consecutive two week periods, and the race is to see which team can see the most species collectively. Both of these games, on top of the stay at home order, have meant daily bird walks from home and lots of time spent observing the changes in my neighborhood, whereas in previous years I might have watched the migration from further afield (like last year when we went to Westport!).

Watching migration from close to home means many more "first of the year" birds in our yard - like this yellow-rumped warlber

One highlight of this very local birding was a couple of weeks ago when, for every morning of the week, you could reliably see/hear all 5 of our local woodpecker species within a quarter-mile of our house: downy woodpecker, hairy woodpecker, northern flicker, pileated woodpecker, and red-breasted sapsucker.

The red-breasted sapsuckers have, in my opinion, the best drumming ditty of any woodpecker, made even better when executed on a man-made metal surface

A northern flicker briefly visits our suet - actually the hardest of our 5 local species to get a photograph of this year!

There's also moments like this quick visit from a sharp-shinned hawk to our feeder tree, which are likely to be missed when we're not at home as much. This juvenile was not successful in picking off any of our other visitors....this time!

And nothing says spring to me like the return of the swallows. Every year a pair of violet-green swallows checks out our nest boxes, but they have yet to use one. Will this be the year?

Thankfully, while some public lands are closed, other local natural areas have been open, so we have been able to go out and bird elsewhere on the island as well. This has turned up some other great finds that we definitely wouldn't have been able to see in our yard!

A bald eagle landing on a rocky shoreline with the Olympic Mountains in the background

A singing savannah sparrow

False Bay has been especially successful in turning up shorebirds this spring.

A flock of dunlin

Thanks to a tip from a friend and fellow birder, we also got to see a whimbrel there, a new species for my county life list! 

A few of our winter seabirds are still lingering, and some of them like this horned grebe are giving us a rare glimpse (for here) of their summer plumage before departing.

In late April/early May of each year, English Camp and the Mt. Young trail can always be counted on for many "first of the year" species, but this year was a personal record where in a single morning I added my first house wren, Cassin's vireo, chipping sparrow, Pacific-slope flycatcher, Townsend's warbler, and black-throated gray warbler all in one visit!

First singing house wren of the year at Mt. Young

I returned a day later to try for some audio recordings, and was surprised to find another species: a Townsend's solitaire! I only see one of these on the island every few years, and this time it wasn't a single one, but at least five of them.

Regardless of what's going on in our crazy human world, there's some comfort to be found in the fact that the cycle of life is continuing on in the natural world. I am very thankful all this is happening in the spring, as I can't imagine going through this without the ability to spend a lot of time outside in the sunshine! 

I will cut this post off here so it's focus remains on the birds, but there's another species that's an icon of spring on San Juan Island, and they deserve their own post!

The Best of Spring in the San Juans Part 2: Yellow Island Wildflowers

Six years ago Phil, the caretaker of Yellow Island, invited three of us local bloggers out to visit during prime wildflower season to see how we would each portray the island and its wildflowers in our unique style. (You can see my post from that visit here.) Phil is nearing the end of his tenure as caretaker of The Nature Conservancy Preserve, a post he has held for 19 years. In honor of his retirement, we made another visit out together.

The three bloggers with Phil in 2012

The bloggers return with friends in 2018

I've never had a visit to Yellow Island that isn't spectacular, but first I want to say a few words in tribute to Phil, who is one of the most inspirational regional naturalists I know. He's not just passionate about one species or genre, but truly appreciates all aspects of nature, and enjoys they all through photography, citizen science, audio recording, and simply observing or being. Living on Yellow, he of course has a passion for plants, and you can read here his reflections on his years of seed collecting on Yellow Island. He has done countless citizen science surveys of both birds (on eBird) of marine fishes (while diving, for REEF). For years we've had a friendly county year list competition to see who can document more birds in the county, and despite spending a lot of time on his small island instead of my more diverse habitat here on San Juan we are usually pretty darn close! He serves on the local Marine Resources Committee. He's become proficient at making nature recordings, and has contributed so many bird song recordings that the Macauly Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology did this profile of him. He basically captured my happy place in sound form with this early morning recording of singing birds and the blows of a group of passing killer whales. Basically, he's a pretty incredible guy, a treasure to our community, and it's an honor to call him a friend! (Are you blushing yet, Phil? ;) )

Now that you have a glimpse as to why we wanted to visit him in his element for one last wildflower season, let's get to the flowers! The day we scheduled to go out dawned gray and rainy and I feared it would stay that way, but as if on cue as soon as we met at the dock for the short ride over to Yellow the sun broke through the clouds! The conditions were perfect for photography with bright light to capture the raindrops on the flowers.

Camas (Camassia sp.)

Camas (Camassia sp.)

Blue-Eyed Mary (Collinsia sp.)

I had to try black and white to capture this row of raindrops on a blade of grass - I like how it turned out:

Part of the spectacle of Yellow is the shear abundance of flowers, particularly on my favorite side of the island known as Hummingbird Hill. It's hard to try and capture in a photograph, but I try on every visit. Given how many photos I have, I can only imagine how many Phil has after all these years! That's the beauty and joy of photography though - you can always go back for more and try to see and capture something different, no matter how many years you are shooting the same subject or location.

Yellow has not only the abundance but the variety of wildflowers, giving a unique opportunity to see so many species in one place. While one photographic goal is to capture the multi-colored landscape of various species at once, another is to get nice portraits of individual species, both those that are abundant and those that are easy to pass by.

Large-flowered Blue-Eyed Mary (Collinsia grandiflora) - probably my personal favorite shot of the day

Harsh paintbrush (Castilleja hispida)

Broad-leaved stonecrop (Sedum spathulifolium)

Prairie star (Lithophragma parviflorum)

Meadow death-camas (Zigadenus venenosus)

Naked broomrape (Orobanche uniflora)

This last one is a tiny little flower, a species I learned about from Phil on that visit six years ago and that was flowering again in the exact same patch of stonecrop. It has no leaves of its own, so instead of conducting photosynthesis to get nutrients, it parasitizes other plants, with stonecrop being a favorite host. Despite being wide-ranging in both Washington and across North America, it is very easy to overlook!

It's truly hard to capture in words what this gem of an island is like. It's one of my favorite spots in the Salish Sea, particularly in the spring. I hope you'll  learn more about visiting Yellow Island for yourself here. I promise it's worth the trek!

The Best of Spring in the San Juans Part 1: Fox Kits

There are so many things to love about this time of year in the Salish Sea: the longer days and warmer temperatures, the return of migrant birds, the generally calmer waters, and the increase in whale sightings are just a few for me. But there's a couple other classic elements of a spring in the San Juan Islands, and one of them is the emergence of fox kits from their dens. Viewing foxes here has become increasingly popular, especially in the spring, so much so that the San Juan Island Visitor's Bureau had me write a blog for them about the topic. So if you want to know the details, you can read more about fox-watching on San Juan Island at the link above.

Sometimes we like to think we live in a wilderness here in the Salish Sea, but it's truly a very urban ecosystem that we are lucky enough to share with all kinds of wildlife. For better or for worse many of our regional animals are adapted to living near humans, but we should still do what we can to minimize our impacts on them and their behavior. As such, I made several visits to the regular fox dens at the south end of the island until I found a time where there were both not many people around. It was an overcast day, but two nearby dens were both active - I've heard from others that one family has six kits and another two, but they were all mixing and playing together.

While they're all of the species "red fox" they come in all different colors from orange to brown to gray to black. One of my personal favorites was this silver one with a single white sock (chasing its brother/sister):

But it's also hard to resist this face:

Much of the activity happens when mom or dad shows up with food. The kits seem to know the boundaries of where they're allowed to wander, but they go racing out to meet their parents as they come in for a visit.

Whatdja bring me, mom?!

More and more kits quickly gathered around - looking first at her mouth to see if she brought in any prey....

But then settling for a nursing session...all six of them at once! What a patient mama.

She tolerates their frolicking for a little bit before moving on, and they follow her to the edge of their invisible perimeter. (Side note: several other adults were visible sleeping in the prairie - my imagination says that they move away from the ends to get some actual rest without kits pouncing on them begging to play.)

Amazingly she makes a loop back right past us, totally unconcerned about our presence.

As she heads back out on the hunt most of the kits return below ground, but this one stopped for a moment to look out at the great big world beyond the den:

I just love having these guys as neighbors, and they are one of the highlights of spring here for sure!

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!