Birds, San Juan Islands, sizes XS to XL

Washington State's oceanic shorelines are a wonderland for birders. There's your ocean, for starters. Then there are all the levels of the shoreline and variations thereof: rocky, muddy, gravelly, sandy. Take a few more steps east, and you're deep in a forest--anything from a mix of conifers and red alders to ancient temperate rainforest. This variety of habitat makes the shorelines a wonderland for the birds themselves, too.

Vacationing in the San Juan islands these past two weeks, up north near Canada's own islands, thus meant lots of bird sightings. I managed to get a few photos--forgive the resolution, my camera's just a little Panasonic Lumix, so once I get past the optical zoom's limits and it goes to digital zoom, the crispness is gone.  Still, they bring me back, with exquisite clarity, to the moment I saw these wild creatures.

I'll start with the XL birds:

Bald eagle, sighted over cove along Lopez Village, Lopez Island. I've seen hundreds of bald eagles since moving to Washington
State 20-odd years ago, but every time I see one it is still a thrill. This fellow looks as if he flew straight out of central casting.

Great Blue Heron, southern shore of Cascade Lake, Orcas Island. These guys sound positively
Jurassic when they take to the air on their massive wings and rasp out loud, croaking calls. They
fold their necks in flight so that the head appears to be resting on the back, instead of sticking their
necks out in front as cranes do.



Double-crested cormorant parent and chick, Anacortes ferry dock. This image doesn't
show the bird's slinky, snaky neck, but it does show the colorful sheen that you don't
usually see in the black feathers when the birds are just flying by as black silhouettes,
which is how I usually see them. I was charmed that my daughter's friend, who was

along on our trip, thought that the cables and spikes throughout the pilings and pillars

were put there to help keep the cormorants' nests and chicks from falling out, whereas

I imagined they were there to prevent nesting in the first place.



These barn swallows are having a conference on Turtleback Mountain near a stable we visited. At our campsite by Cascade Lake,
we were treated to aerial displays over the water morning and night as violet-green swallows swooped low over the mirrorlike
surface to snare insects. At dusk, the swallows clocked out for the night, and bats flickered in to take their place skimming
across the lake.

Song sparrows trooped regularly through our campsite and
fearlessly trotted across the table to retrieve fallen grains of oatmeal.
Many of them looked terribly tatty, with adults apparently molting
and fledglings trading up to more adult plumage. This little guy
even lacked a tail. I thought this was due to a narrow escape from

a predator, but I later found online images of young song sparrows

growing in their tail feathers, so I guess this is a common sight.

I was thrilled to spy a brown creeper, a cryptically colored bird as invisible on a tree as a

sole on a sandy seabed. I only noticed him because it was very quiet and I could hear his

little claws scratching on the bark as he hitched his way up a branch. Creepers are great

examples of niche-filling in nature--they go UP tree trunks, searching for bugs under bark,

while the red-breasted nuthatches (which we heard calling "yank, yank" in nasal tones

all day long) travel DOWN the trunk. Either way, hidden arthropods are doomed.

The tiny, mouselike winter wren (now called a Pacific wren, sadly) is more often
seen than heard--and the song produced by this little waif is an amazing torrent of
liquid notes; it's like turning on an ordinary kitchen faucet and having the Columbia
River pour out of it. Only without the plumber bills. An excellent bird.

Smallest of all were the rufous (at least I am 99 percent sure they were rufous)
hummingbirds that patrolled the flower-filled garden of the cottage we stayed in
at the start of our vacation. They spent all day probing and feeding at flowers,
interspersing these activities to conduct dogfights and chases to prevent each other
from gaining access to said flowers. I'd be sitting and reading, enjoying a cup of
coffee, and meanwhile furious "chips" and "squeaks" and menacing buzzing of wings
filled the air around me as the hummers waged their ceaseless border disputes. Best of
all, though, I got to see a hummer take a bath in a gigantic, 3-level garden fountain.
Very cute. These little birds pack a lion's bravery--I got too close to one with my nosy
camera, and it buzzed me, then hovered a foot in front of my face with what looked
like a very angry glare on its face, starting me down for 10 seconds before huffing off.

Can I Please Go Back on Vacation Now?

Two lovely weeks spent up in the San Juan islands hidden in a cozy cottage and then camping by a lake explain lack of blogging and failure to tend to other responsibilities.

Cascade Lake, Moran State Park, Orcas Island, viewed from South End Campground

Watermelon Sherbet

Photo courtesy Steve Evans/Wikicommons

Watermelons are the essence of summer in the U.S. of A., right up there alongside flip-flops, barbecues, and ice-cream bars bought from the ice-cream truck trolling the streets. I can remember scorching summer days on Long Island in New York, where I grew up, and seeing the watermelon lolling in a water-and-ice-filled cooler as it chilled during dinnertime, looking like a Martian version of a pig wallowing in a puddle. It was all of a piece with summer--with the chut-chut-chut-fzzzz sound of the sprinkler, the buzzing of cicadas, and, in the evening, the sudden stars of fireflies.

Now, however, even though I still like the eye-popping colors of this oversized fruit (hot pink and lime green! What a show!), I realize I don't really like the taste of it very much. (That's not all that's changed--I remember it was fun to spit the seeds when I was a kid, but back then the seeds really were seeds, hard shiny brown things and not the small, flat, damp flecks they are now. Heck, trying to spit these seeds would be like expectorating Rice Krispies.)

So I wasn't exactly turning cartwheels of joy when my husband and daughter returned from a camping trip with an "extra watermelon" that nobody else had wanted. I would've been delighted if it had been a cast-aside cantaloupe, a leftover lot of lemons, or abandoned asparagus. But no, it was a big fat watermelon rolling around on the counter. And the two people who'd schlepped it home, it turns out, aren't particularly fond of watermelon, either.

I didn't have time to find it a new home, so I decided to chop it up and make sherbet out of it. Since I couldn't get to the sherbety part of it right away, I started by cutting it up and putting the pink flesh through a food mill to make watermelon juice. Doing this quickly reveals that a watermelon is indeed 92 percent water by weight: after cranking the food mill's handle round and round, the entire interior of the watermelon was reduced to a large container of thick, pulpy juice, with the only remains left behind in the mill a handful of seeds.

It was definitely a very pretty juice. I added some to a glass of seltzer with a bit of sugar, but that watermelon taste was still too musky for me, so the next day I followed some instructions I found online to turn it into sherbet. The recipe called for nothing more than some sugar, gelatin, and cream. After it had spun around in the Cuisenart ice-cream maker, I poured it into a pre-frozen metal loaf pan, put plastic wrap on top, and set it in the freezer.

I didn't have high hopes when I took it out the next day: It was frozen solid in the pan and wouldn't budge. It looked as if we could only eat it by scraping shavings off the top and enjoying them as a flavored shave ice. A little hot water bath for the pan, however, released it.

Now we had an impenetrable pink, melon-flavored brick.

It was a bit easier to scrape chunks off the bottom of the watermelon brick, though, and to my surprise it was actually tasty.

Today I made vanilla ice cream using a complicated recipe in Cook's Illustrated, a recipe that aimed to produce ice cream as smooth as that bought in a store, and in the article it pointed out that one of the ingredients they'd used in their tests was gelatin. They ruled it out as a failure because they noted that, like some other failed additions, it lent the product "an artificial texture and strange melting properties. The sample with gelatin refused to melt, even after 10 minutes at room temperature."

Which would probably explain our sherbet, too. Nobody's touched it since the first attempt to hack through it. So instead of a hog-sized watermelon snoring on the counter for weeks, we will have this giant pink Lego taking up space in the freezer.

The Mystery Plant

Seeing as this chilly, wet summer of ours, marked by leaden skies and head colds, is not exactly inspiring the garden to flourish or the gardener to hoe/weed/plant/dig/mulch, I figured I'd finally get around to a story I meant to write about last year: the case of the Mystery Plant.

The Mystery Plant rose up out of a long garden bed we'd created as an afterthought last year. That is, after leveling the ground and adding more pavers to our patio, we were too lazy to lug the heaped-up soil elsewhere in the yard and figured we might as well let the heap be a new plot that could border the area.

It soon stood taller than all the other new plants in that bed, and finally blossomed into a deep-throated, richly colored flower that reminded me of an orchid. For a day or so, I thrilled to the notion that perhaps some rare woodland species had taken root in my humble garden, reflecting an appreciation for our efforts to create a leafy oasis in the city without using any chemicals.

Then I got a little concerned. This thing just kept growing taller and more vigorous looking, putting me in mind of Audrey from "Little Shop of Horrors." So I did what anybody would do when faced with a possibly carnivorous plant: I started googling.

How do you google an unknown plant? Well, you'd be amazed at how quickly you can find what you're looking for if you throw a lot of adjectives at the search engine. Some combination of the words "purple," "pink," "green pointy leaves," and "red stems" led me to a discussion board, where someone else was trying to figure out the plant volunteering in their garden, and that in turn led to a suggestion by another person who included a link to a possible species.

That species, it turns out, is apparently a plant that should have its mug on Wanted posters in every state of the union: It is none other than an Asian plant called Himalayan Balsam (Impatiens glandulifera), an extremely invasive non-native species designated as a Class B noxious weed in the "top 20" of non-native weeds in Washington State, which requires that the plant be controlled when found. Its aliases include "policeman's helmet" and, in the UK, "kiss-me-on-the-mountain."

The seemingly innocent flower was in actuality a ferocious destroyer of habitats, a plant that could overwhelm native species in wetlands and moist woodlands, shading them out and hogging all the light and nutrients. It grows seed capsules that explode, launching seeds up to 21 feet away from the plant, thus ensuring that it will quite literally sow seeds of destruction.

The little demon had smuggled itself into our garden by hiding out as a seed in the soil of a plant I'd bought in Kirkland--from a bunch of little old ladies holding a fund-raising sale.

I glanced out the window at the plant. Yeah, there it stood, pretending it didn't see me, gazing off into the distance, all innocence...biding its time. Evil thing, hoodwinking such nice elderly women as it embarked on a course of world domination. It didn't take more than a minute to yank it out by the roots, embalm it in a plastic bag, and bury it in the trash.

Pastries, Ponies, and Thundereggs in Portland

The heck with "Snakes on a Plane." My trip to Portland, Oregon, began with "Snacks on a Train." What a lovely way to start a vacation: hopping aboard a brand-new Amtrak train car in the wee hours of the morning and sitting back with a cup of coffee, some banana bread, and a brand-new book, with nothing (except quite possibly a nap) to distract you for the next 3.5 hours.

I met up with two friends from college days upon arrival (one of whom graciously hosted us at her Portland home), and we immediately set out in search of (a) lunch and (b) pastries. We found both at La Petite Provence. And then we picked up some emergency backup pastries at Pix Patisserie to tide us over the next few nights. When we weren't eating at Panero's or at Thai Peacock. (In case you're wondering, over the course of three days we did actually dine at places that did not begin with the letter P.)

Inside a thunderegg.

As for the thundereggs, they were not something we ordered at a trendy diner: we visited them at the wonderful Rice Museum, which is not at all about rice but is totally about rocks.

It's an amazing collection of geological splendor that also includes petrified wood, meteorites, and dinosaur and early-mammal fossils, all housed in a vintage 1950s architectural gem of a sprawling ranch house.

The thunderegg, which is Oregon's official state rock, is basically a rounded rocky blog that is unimpressive on the outside, but contains a core of minerals that form stunning patterns, many of which resemble traditional Chinese paintings, seascapes, and other vignettes, in miniature. The minerals are typically jasper, agate, or opal.

Also on display was a subdued stone that boasted a claim to being the oldest rock in the world. But it seems to be merely late-middle-aged compared to some of the older oldest rocks in the world, so perhaps next time I'll pause to read the fine print (maybe it's "the oldest rock in the world located in Portland" or something).

Tucker the Baby Psittacosaurus, however, was undeniably the cutest critter in the place.

And there was even a separate room filled with minerals that flouresced under black light. Very cool!

And of course we stopped at the incomparable Powell's to shop for books.

"What about the ponies?" OK, OK, already. I didn't see any real ponies, but did spy several toy ponies tied to old hitching rings embedded in the city's curbs, all there thanks to a community art effort called The Horse Project.

More pastries, more coffee, then back home to *sigh* responsibilities and expectations.

Bellflowers Ring In the Summer

You'd never guess it was summer here in Pugetopolis. Especially not by glancing at the sky as you pull on your Polarfleece jacket after having read the newspaper weather report declaring a week's variations on the theme of "cloudy, high of 50 degrees."

But even autumn-in-July can't stop the bellflowers from blooming.

I don't know what species of bellflower makes up my garden's crop of volunteers. These flowers just started popping up in a small patch under the birch tree out front a few years ago, then quickly spread to the side gardens. Initially they were all a purple-blue color, but then lavender and white ones joined them.

I figured at first they were stray Canterbury bells that dropped in from another garden, but now I'm fairly convinced they're peach-leaved bellflowers, Campanula persicifolia, an Asian species that has naturalized in both England and the United States. They're tall, spindly, and self-sow extravagantly, matching the description of that species. ("Peach-leaved," incidentally, refers to their resemblance to peach-tree leaves, not the leaves' color.)

They all belong to the genus Campanula, which means "little bell" in Latin. Most of the names for this plant are inspired by its bell-shaped flowers: they're known variously as bellflowers, heathbells, harebells, and, weirdly, dead men's bells. Some species suggested thimble-related names: lady's thimble, witch's thimble, fairy's thimble.

The bees don't care what you call them--they love 'em.

These 3-foot-tall specimens are giraffes compared to many of the ground-hugging, alpine species. Many kinds grow on talus slopes or in other inaccessible places. According to a gardening book published in 1900, Nature's Garden by Neltje Blanchan (a lucky thrift-shop find), these little plants' beauty is so tempting that a person "gladly risks a watery grave or broken bones to bring down a bunch from its aerial cranny." (Hmm. Maybe that's where the name "dead men's bells" comes from?)

If bellflowers came not only in blue and white but also in shades of red, the garden would look like a giant, swaying American flag just in time for the Fourth of July weekend. (Very Martha Stewart, that would be.) They bloom throughout July, so they'll still be ringing long after the fireworks have been silenced. 

Jeepers, Creepers...All Over the Collards

Seeing a cabbage white butterfly fluttering around in the vegetable garden is not always a good sign.

Oh, sure, they pollinate plants, and they're pretty. And I somehow picked up the information, as a little girl, that if the first butterfly you saw in spring was white or yellow, the rest of the year would be a lucky one; but woe betide you if it were a dark-colored butterfly. (Which did not explain multicolored butterflies' prognostication value, and in any event was not a good thing for a hypochondriacal, superstitious, worrywart kid to add to her list of concerns.)

But if you're a collard plant, or someone who tends a collard patch, cabbage whites mean only one thing: tiny eggs laid on leaves that will hatch out into voracious caterpillars. Cabbage whites lay eggs only on host plants in the Brassica family, which includes not only my collards but also the red and green cabbages and the rutabagas I've planted.

I collared some collard thieves this morning while enjoying a dewy, cool moment of morning sunshine. Here's the little greedy-guts just before I tossed it into the yard for a lucky robin to enjoy (there was a robin watching from the top of the chimney, just like the bird keeping an eye on Peter Rabbit in that gardening story):

Last year I paid my daughter a nickel apiece to rid the collards of caterpillars, and she pulled in a tidy profit. This year, though, I think she'll quickly figure out that rescuing collards now means collards appearing on the plate later, and she hates collards, so why eradicate the caterpillars? The enemy of my enemy is my friend...

I also found what looked like a winged aphid surrounded by aphid nymphs on the underside of a leaf. Aphids have this freakish lifestyle in which an adult female, without ever having mated, give live birth to aphid nymphs. And those nymphs grow up and likewise give birth without ever having consorted with a male aphid. (In some species, a pregnant female aphid is carrying female babies that are already pregnant with their own daughters.) The males aren't born until fall, when females give birth to both males and females. Those aphids will mate and lay eggs that can overwinter.

The robin notwithstanding, the birds in general are being slackers and not doing much about the caterpillar/nymph situation.

Under some leaves, however, there are a few tiny spiders building webs no bigger than pennies--I'm assuming they're the spiderlings that hatched a few weeks ago under the toolshed door, and the miniature doilies they're spinning are certainly not up to capturing those big-fat-sausage caterpillars. Nor are the aphid nymphs likely to blunder into them. Oh well. Maybe if I raise the rates on caterpillar hunting, or find a six-year-old boy who'll pluck them off for a penny apiece...