Sharp-shinned Hunter

My, what sharp shins you have. Note a fortuitous blade of grass for comparison.

In the wilds of,...my front yard, the hunter became the hunted. Cliche, but true, all conveniently presented on a grassy lawn with no obstruction, and anough time to grab my camera.

I was just arriving home, when I heard a violent screeking, and looked over to see a small hawk pinning a starling to the ground by my doorstep. In no mood to share her prey, she flew over to the neighbor's yard, where it became evident that this was one starling no longer singing its foreign songs, and the racket was the hawk's victory chant.

Mine! Mine! Mine!

"She?" Probably, based on the word of the Fish and Wildlife biologist who I sent these photos to. Juvenile, perhaps. Smaller than a Coopers, which would make it a Sharp Shinned Hawk in these parts. A native culling a flock of invasives. One down, thousands to go.

Hawk struck starling a few times for good measure, but was not really eating it. More of a dance: lowering its wings over the kill, flipping it's tail up, turning, stamping. And screaming all the while. She kept an eye on me lest I look too hungry, but kept it up for 66 seconds (thanks, digital camera for the time-keeping) before...

No bird for you, alien feline.

This is just one of the neighborhood cats (the ferals mostly fall to coyotes, I think), but to watch it come in, fast and low, ready for a pounce after the run, was to see the hunter that lives in most house-cats. It came out of nowhere (OK, probably the alley behind me), answering the dinner call. Was it like me, thinking it heard a bird in distress? Or have the cats learned the hawk's "I killed a freakin' starling!" song? This unwild-cat was probably not ready to hunt the hunter, but would steal a starling if it could.

This time, it could not. But it did make me wonder about how this works out on the big scale. I mean, a huge flock of starlings in the fairly open setting of single family homes placed at about 8 to the acre in 1950 may (despite their European roots and havoc wrought on native birds) be a boon to the bird-hunting hawk. But how many times does the native raptor make a kill only to have it taken away by a cat? Or, how much of a hawk's time is spent eluding pets hungry for yet another hand-out? The massive toll of cats directly killing wild birds has only recenltly become clear (billions, by the way, if not billions and billions), but what about the effects of harrassment and competition on native predators?

Late arrival, eating nothing.

Off on a tangent, as usual. But in deference to the internet (for once), I did want to post some cat photos, and also to rant about something. Maybe cats have little or no effect on hawks' well-being, and although it could be said that the human tendency to clear forest, erect power-pole perches, and attract rodents (and scads of starlings) could benefit some raptors, our net effect is not so kind, what with overall habitat loss and diminishment of the native prey to which they adapted since time immemorial. Our footprint stomps out more native species than the cats, and after all, they would not be here without us, or hera and feral without our cavalier neglect.

Hopefully, by now, nobody is even reading this post. The hawk-photos were the point. The cat-blogging? Not so much.

Mission Creek, Flowing Again

Once upon a time, Mission Creek (or whatever its name was then), flowed into the Sound just north of Olympia Town. Then some people bridged it, and then some other people dammed it, making a sluice-gate where they could capture the salmon foolish enough to enter.

Then, decades later, some other other people got funding to remove the dam, to open Mission Creek once again to Budd Inlet and the Puget Sound.

Inland finally flowing into Budd Inlet

This is "restoration," which earns its quotation marks because it follows not the historically  or archaeologically or LiDARly documented channel, but instead an engineer's plan. Doing so meant digging into an archaeological site, which had been written off by archaeocrats as less-than-significant. (As it happens, some of that site was salvaged, as described here under the keyword "Mission Creek".)

You're looking at high tide, not stream flow.

So now the stream flows free,...at least as far as East Bay Drive. Maybe the beautiful shell beach will persist, or maybe not. Restoration is a guess what used to be, and a gamble on its return. Contractors get surveyors to show them where the 3:1 slope gives way to the 1:1, and work accordingly. One entity satisfies a mitigation requirement, another satisfies grant requirements, and another gets a truckload of archaeological data. But now the machines are gone; the work is done and paperwork is being wrapped up. Tides and waves, rains and freshets will get to work, re-sculpting this artificial natural estuary.

The end result may not be exactly what was there before, but it's a heck of a lot better than the dam and culvert that blocked Mission Creek until a month ago. There's a free-flowing connection to Budd Inlet instead of a 3-foot concrete tube--creatures will find it much easier to drift, swim, and crawl in and out of the estuary.

Eagle in Flight

American Eagle, Carefully Skirting Canadian Airspace

There are plenty of eagles in the Northwest, but seeing them hasn't grown dull. Instead, ubiquity makes it easier to appreciate the uniqueness of some encounters. Rather than a generic "I saw an eagle!" exclamations, stories emerge. A pair of eagles having conversation in their surprisingly little-bird voices. One hunting bird, hovering and eyeing a fish I could not see. The shrieking cacaphony of a gull flock as a massive eagle dove in an nabbed one of their cousins. The slacker eagle on a pile of gravel at a port, doing nothing in particular for as long as I could stand to watch.

I really like watching them fly. Even from a great distance, when size is hard to guage and the bird is nothing but black silhouette, the strength is evident. Neither as the crow flies, nor as the heron slowly flaps. A few times, I've seen them carrying fish. After capture and liftoff, they tend to grab the fish with one talon in front of the other, orienting the fish fore and aft in a streamlined grasp.

Usually, the eagle is too far off or too long gone by the time I get out the camera (just missed getting one passing 40 feet overhead last week). But a few weeks ago on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I got the shot above. It had something, but not the usual fish grasp. I viewed the shot, zoomed way in, and saw this:

 

Un-lucky duck.

Alligator Lizard

A few times this year, I worked at a place where Alligator Lizards were a common sight. For an instant, anyway, until they saw me and darted for cover. Then one day there was one that just sat there watching me, and even let me lean in close for a photo or three. Watching wildlife watch me is becoming one of my favorite pastimes.

I won't write about them as if I knew any more than anyone else can find online. I don't even know which species this one is. But I do have these photos.

Tidewalker 2013

Remains of an old fish trap in Squaxin country.

In a week or so, there will be another few days of fairly low tides, but already the minus-3's are a memory. I didn't get out for as many as I had hoped this summer, but I did manage to explore in Birch Bay on Memorial Day, to train some people in the extreme south Sound the next month, and spend another day on another bay in the north Sound.

Clamming near Chimacum

While everyone else is out clamming, I'm wandering around looking for fire-cracked rocks and fishtraps. Some of them tend to be suspicious: a guy in an orange safter vest, taking notes and shooting photos, not digging clams. Must be a game warden or regulator or something. But if I don't approach and ask to count their haul, or if I make small talk and then move on, they just think it's weird, an incredible waste of time. I'll admit that there are times when I'm walking by siphon after squirty siphon, leaving tasty clams in the mud, getting nothing but wet.

Following the clammers is a good strategy for tidewalking archaeologists, though. They dig holes and turn up the sediment, giving me a view. It's a less controlled version of the "shovel probes" that provide the bulk of archaeological subsurface data. From our chats, I often learn about what shellfish do well at a spot (a proxy view of traditional subsistence), and sometimes hear about artifacts people have found while digging the intertidal. Seeing the number and extent of holes from any given low-tide day also helps put in perspective on what an "intact" archaeological deposit is below the high water mark.

Fertility in Lummi Land

Truth is, I don't find a lot of archaeology doing this (although finding the occasional fish trap more than makes up for the usual monotony). Plenty of other things--like this mass of eggs stuck to a rock, or the Van Gogh swirl of eelgrass, or a boulder coated with colossal barnacles--plenty of amazing sights distract me from the lack of sites. A day hitched to the rythm of the tide, timing a walk to skirt the furthest reach at the lowest of ebb, movinng ahead of the flow and covering as much ground as I can, a day in synch like that can be deeply satisfying. Some days, the water is reflecting blue sky, and others everything is a cold metal grey; both have their appeal. Even when a cold rain pelts, I know that in an hour or three, the tide will push me back, I'll get in a warm dry truck, and drive back to a hot shower.

The other time of deep low tides, in the middle of the night in the middle of the Winter, is dark enough that I can rationalize not going out to archaeologize. I make no claim to being anything other than a fair weather tidewalker. Other than flaunting the small chance that one day I'll wander into some mud and get stuck as the tide comes in, there's not much swash or buckle to it. Mostly, there is no excitement, but some day I'll find an amazing artifact, and the few fish traps that have revealed themselves when the tide lays low have been professional reward enough. Someday, though, I may need to bring a bucket and come home with some clams...

It's the Water(shed)

Thanks to stevenl on olyblog for posting this down-Deschutes shot. He thinks the postcard dates to the mid-1970s, a time when the Olympia Brewing Company still ran strong, and was so proud of it's beige industrial sprawl they issued this image, rather than the charming old brick building.

Olympia's motto, of course, was "It's the Water," and we do have great water, our artesian wells are famous, delicious, and clean. But surface water is an other story, a sad one, as this shot illustrates.

In the foreground, the Deshutes River, in summertime flaccid flow. Could just be a dead-calm day, but I feel like there's an oil sheen. Maybe not.

As far as the river is visible, the brewery takes up the right bank. Since I'm too lazy to track it down, I don't know what they may have flushed into the river as part of normal operations, but up until about the date of this postcard, when Dick Nixon signed the Clean Water Act (what a liberal!), people and corporations did dump all kinds of things in the water. All this view shows is a treeless bank and acres of impervious surface, which when the rain kicks in will dump huge amounts of runoff compared to what the natural watershed would have, not to mention the sediment, railway grime, and other trappings of civilization.

Which the river then delivers to,...Wait, I cannot see. It disappears on the other side of the Capital Boulevard bridge, past more brewery buildings, over the spillway...I mean Falls, and finally past the old brew house, Olympia's most famous ruin. There's a park on the other bank now, and the old brewery is abandoned. You can kid yourself into thinking it's returning to nature as long as you deafen yourself to the I-5 din.

But really, the Deschutes is about to empty into Capitol Lake. Or, as stevenl calls it, the Fetid Lake Of Doom, or FLOD. Flotsam and sediment from the watershed settle out here. In fact, the muck contains the remains of Little Hollywood (Olympia's Depression-era Hoovertown), and before that a literally marginalized Chinese community, I think. The artificial lake relies on a dam that transformed the original estuary into a pond (yep, the reflection of capitol and trees sure is pretty) with a sluice being the only way out. So the estuary gets buried and eutrophies (yep, the low tides and summer algae blooms sure are ugly).

The postcard more or less hides The Isthmus, site of many a battle in this millenium. Positions on Isthmus development cause the city council to change, parts of it were Occupied, it is home to Olympia's second most famous ruin: the Mistake on the Lake. Walk around the lake, and you'll see signs explaining various positions in the Debate of the Lake: dredge it, restore the estuary, do nothing...There is no sign saying "Isthmus be Hell."

Meanwhile, the lake keeps filling with muck, and the water keeps flowing into Budd Inlet. The head of Budd is divided into West Bay, which is where the Deschutes comes in, and East Bay, which is where a culvert let's loose what's left of Indian and Moxlie Creeks. Most of the city between East and West is built on dredging spoils and fill.

West Bay is undergoing a transformation these days, as the buildings and piers of yesteryear's manufacturing concerns disappear. Some of it is undergoing restoration, as far as a railway embankment can be restored to a natural state. But people are not about to abandon the waterfront entirely, ceding it to nature. So pockets of "beach nourishment" gravel and chained-down "large woody debris" have to coexist with armored shorelines in a state that I will now call Percivaltory, after Percival's Landing on the waterfront.

In the postcard, it looks like there may be log booms in the bay. No more, although the POO (Port Of Olympia) is hopping, putting trucked-in logs on trans-Pacific ships. The watershed's wood (state timber excepted) flows all the way to China.

Nevermore

Corvidae are pointellism-resitant

I posted this shot, unaltered, earlier, somewhere. That day, a family of crows were pecking at the Virginia piedmont clay, reddening their beaks toward some unkown end. Cranking up the saturation on this shot makes it both more magical and real. I like the way the crow holds it's form while the leaves blottify. The leaves come and go, but the crow sticks around, her young and then his perching and pecking through woods dancing from growth to decay and back.

Ravens don't like having their photos taken, so I got no nevermore. The evermore of the common crow is enough for a non-poet, dirt-digger, woods-walker.