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!

Yellow Island ~ 2014

Ah, it's been a bit too long since I've blogged! First, I need to report updates to the year list, which have just happened in the last few days: barn swallow, cliff swallow, and chipping sparrow put me at 154.

Last Sunday I got to take an excursion to Yellow Island, known for its spring wildflowers. I'm so lucky I've been able to visit the island for several years in a row after dreaming of going there for a long time!

Approaching Yellow Island

It turned out to be a great time to visit, not only because of the blue skies and warm sunshine, but because nearly all the main flower groups were in bloom. The fawn lilies, one of my favorite to photograph with the macro lens, were a little past their peak, but there will still plenty in bloom:

The shooting stars were also winding down; Yellow is a few weeks ahead of San Juan Island in terms of its flowers, as on San Juan the shooting stars haven't peaked yet.

By contrast, just starting to bloom were the chocolate lilies and camas.

I love the leaves of the chocolate lilies, and I liked this shot of it best in black and white:

The other abundant species is harsh paintbrush:

 

Careful observation also yields all kinds of other species, such as....

Saxifrage

Blue-eyed Mary

Small-flowered prairie star

Sedum

You need the macro lens to capture the beauty of individual flowers, but it's hard to portray the splendor of so many flowers in bloom across the hillside. I tried anyway:

I spent some time sitting on my favorite part of the path, surrounded by flowers:

Of course, with that many flowers, I wasn't the only one there. There were plenty of bumblebees and other insect pollinators, as well as more than a couple rufous hummingbirds. They sure do blend into the background!

While on Yellow Island, I got the excited news that K-Pod was headed into our inland waters for the first time this spring. When we got back to San Juan Island, that meant other afternoon plans were altered as there was a chance to see them from shore. I caught up with them at South Beach, where I watched them head south in their family groups. They were far away, but was it ever nice to see some orcas again!

The K13s off South Beach

Here's hoping that's just the beginning, with much more to come in the near future!

Yellow Island Trip ~ 2013

Last weekend, as part of my parents' visit to the island, we took an excursion over to Yellow Island, the 10-acre Nature Conservancy property north of Friday Harbor in San Juan Channel. While it is known for the amazing wildflower blooms that usually peak in April and May, it's a beautiful place to visit any time of year. In addition to some lounging harbor seals, we saw a nice variety of bird life including a pair of olive-sided flycatchers, numerous rufous hummingbirds, and lots of singing white-crowned sparrows:

It's an idyllic place, with beautiful scenes no matter which way you look:

As you can see in the above photo, just because the peak wildflower season is over doesn't mean there aren't still wildflowers to be found. The fireweed (Chamerion angustifolium) in particular was both abundant and beautiful. One stretch of the trail involved walking through a fireweed jungle, with the densely growing flower stalks tall enough to be towering overhead. I had to spend some extra time there....

There was still evidence of some of the flower species the island is better known for - they've just all gone to seed. Here are the bulky seed pods of the chocolate lily (Fritillaria biflora):

A few of the other species I saw were gumweed (Grindelia sp.):

...and nodding onion (Allium cernuum):

....and harvest brodiaea (Brodiaea coronaria):

As always, it was another great visit to Yellow Island! My friend Phil is the caretaker there and always provides lots of great information and hospitality - thank you to him too!

A few other recent sightings...on June 29th I heard a willow flycatcher (164) at Land Bank's Westside Preserve, the same place I added to the year list last summer. Also, while birding with my dad at Cattle Point on the 30th, we found 15 Heermnan's gulls (165), a species that arrives this far north after it concludes its breeding season down in Mexico.

Last night, on July 1st, Keith and I went for an after dinner walk at American Camp. I'm inspired to get out there more around dusk after my last spectacular sunset visit! As expected, the wildlife was again active, like this rather tame (and probably human fed) fox in the parking lot:

We saw other more skittish foxes out on the prairies, as well as these interesting insects, which I believe are ten-lined june beetles (Polyphylla decemlineata):

A woman we saw who seemed scared of the foxes thought they were hunting gulls - unlikely. More likely is they were hunting these beetles, which I've seen them eating before and are large enough to provide at least a little bite-sized protein.

I've already got some other great blog posts lined up, so there will be more posts following in the near future!

Spring at East Point

As the month has gone on, the long awaited spring migrants have started to arrive and as the weather has improved I've been out more and adding to the year list. On the 9th I saw some greater yellowlegs (120) at Jackson's Beach. On the 15th I added black-bellied plover (121) and purple finch (122) at Fourth of July Beach along with dunlin and sanderling. Two days later I saw my first turkey vulture (123) of the year at Mt. Young. False Bay Creek turned up a nice mixed flock of violet-green (124) and tree swallows, along with a savannah sparrow, Wilson's snipe, and several singing marsh wrens.

Yesterday at lunch I saw an album posted by my friend Traci (of Traci Walter Photography) of an amazing boat trip she took up near East Point on Saturna Island in the Canadian Gulf Islands. She saw thousands of gulls and sea birds. I sent a message to my friend Phil, another bird-watcher who like me doesn't work on a whale-watching boat and doesn't get the chance to visit some of these places all that often. He got his own boat a little over a year ago and we had talked about the potential of splitting costs to go check out some of these great sightings when they pop up. "When we going, Phil?" I asked. He responded two minutes later - "How about right now?" With the afternoon off of work that sounded perfect to me. Half an hour later we were on our way up San Juan Channel, navigating through some of the unseasonable spring fog that still remained and hoping for clear weather at East Point.

Luckily, despite even denser fog in President's Channel where we were still able to spot a few harbor porpoise, the fog did clear as we headed into the glassy calm waters of Boundary Pass. We had to get into Canadian waters before we could see the gulls, but soon they were evidence both on the water and in flight - thousands and thousands of Bonaparte's (125) and mew gulls:

Most of the birds seemed to be northeast of the point, so before we headed up there we cruised by the Boiling Reef rocks to see the harbor seals and Steller sea lions hauled out there.

It was pretty awesome to see (and hear and smell) so many sea lions:

Right before we were ready to move on I spotted a small flock of birds along the shoreline right among the sea lions. They turned out to be half a dozen surfbirds (126). Check out this shot of them just to the left of this huge sea lion!

Lucky for us, by this time the birds had moved a bit closer. I've been lucky enough one other time to see such huge congregations of birds at East Point, but at that time the thousands of Bonaparte's gulls were actively feeding and flying all over the place. Most of them were sitting on the water today, meaning every direction you looked it looked kind of like this:

It was interesting to me that the Bonaparte's and mew gulls seemed to segregate into different flocks that didn't intermix much. We'd find ourselves among one species, then the other, then the first again. Most of the Bonaparte's gulls were in transitional plumage, with some still in winter and some in full, black-hooded summer plumage. Still learning the new camera and getting the action settings right, I struggled a little bit with the in-flight shots, but got these couple of take-off shots I like:

At first it seemed like mostly just these two gull species, but if you looked closer there were other seabirds in there as well. We didn't see the thousands (!) of long-tailed ducks Traci reported, but we did see several hundred - far more than I've ever seen in one place. They seemed to be really skittish, though, and mostly we saw several dozen at a time flying in the distance. There were a few exceptions:

We came across one active bait ball that was made up mostly of glaucous-winged gulls. Unlike the long-tailed ducks, they didn't seem to mind our presence whatsoever. They had more important things to tend to. Notice the gull on the right in the first shot with some bait fish in its beak:

The bait ball was surrounded with rhinoceros auklets who we assumed were herding the fish underwater, but oddly enough we didn't see any rhinos with fish in their beaks. We ended up seeing hundreds of auklets, too, all decked out in their breeding plumage now too. Many of them were striking kind of an awkward posture with their head's raised high, maybe some kind of courting behavior?

In much smaller numbers we saw several other species, too: red-breasted mergansers, harlequin ducks, black oystercatchers, common murres, and one bald eagle.

On our way back to Friday Harbor, Phil had to make a stop at Yellow Island where he is the steward, and I was more than happy to take a quick walk around the island to check out the early spring wildflowers. Yellow Island is always several weeks ahead of San Juan Island in terms of blooms - fawn lilies were out in abundance, and I also saw some harsh paintbrush and shooting stars. Here's a pair of fawn lilies in the sunlight:

As an added bonus, I also saw my first of the year rufous hummingbird (127) while we were there!

It was a spur of the moment trip, but often those end up being the best kind. It was a beautiful afternoon on the water with some amazing wildlife. Just what I needed! Thanks Traci for the head's up, and thanks Phil for driving!