I don't know whether you know anything about geocaches or not, but there are several of them hidden at West Hylebos Park, one of which is mine. My cache gets muggled, which is what we call it when the cache goes missing, several times a year and was just muggled again the day before yesterday, so I made a trip to the park so that I could hide another cache container. Well, everyone knows that you can't just drop by the park and hide a cache without taking the time to scope the entire park out while you're there. The park was a busy place today. It was hard to find a pause in the traffic long enough to hide my cache container unobserved.
On the way out of my apartment complex I confirmed the fact that the barn swallows that had nested on the light in building three had indeed fledged. I made the apartment complex managment promise me that they wouldn't fix this light until after the baby birds were hatched and had fledged and then I would remove the nest and give them the go-ahead signal.
I climbed up on a stool and detached the nest from the light using a small hand saw. I have it in a zip-lock bag now and need to find some way to stabilize it. I want to save it for the education center that I dream about having one day, but since it's made out of nothing but mud and feathers and I had to saw through the stabilizing mud on the bottom to remove it, it's extremely fragile. Once I figure out how to stabilize it, it will go in the box with my owl pellets and become part of my collection for the future.
Some of the tadpoles look like this now. They look considerably different from when they hatched, but are not yet frogs.
But, some of the tadpoles look like this. This tadpole has all four limbs and has almost completely absorbed it's tail. These youngers use their arms and legs to propel themselves through the water and cling to grasses.
This is something that only dragonflies can do. Having already had it's eggs fertilized, the dragonfly on the bottom is dipping it's abdomen into the lake and laying it's eggs. The dragonfly on the top is still attached to the dragonfly on the bottom, fertilizing it's eggs. It's complicated in the dragonfly world. There are no male and female dragonflies, as each dragonfly is both sexes at the same time, each able to fertilize the eggs of the other, as well as lay eggs of it's own.
This dragonfly is beautiful. This is an eight-spotted skimmer, but the way the sun hits it makes areas of it's abdomen light up as if they're made of gold. My camera doesn't seem to be able to capture the true colors of the dragonflies this year. The ones in the photo above are a vivid turquoise blue, but my camera lens isn't able to see the blue that my eyes can see so easily. We have dragonflies at both lakes again this year, but not in the huge numbers that we had last year and the year before that.
There were frogs to be found in the park today, but not in great numbers. This one was at the Deep Sinks.
This one was in the tree-well near the owl tree.
But, today was a hot, sunny day, so most frogs with any sense at all were either in, or under, the mud, like this frog beneath the Brooklake bridge. Most people probably wouldn't even notice this frog, as it was no bigger than a dime, and was exactly the same color as the mud it was hiding in.
Please pay attention to this photograph and mind my words. The berry on the upper left is a salmonberry, which is delicious. The purple flowers on the bottom left belong to poison hemlock. They will also turn into berries, but posion hemlock berries will kill you in a flash. Note the fact that they're growing together. There are many berries growing in the park that you can eat. There are other berries growing in the park that will kill you faster than the EMT's can find you. Please don't put anything you find in the park into your mouth unless you're absolutely, positively, sure you know what it is.
After having said that, I'm a little bit hesitant to say that the salal blossoms are starting to form berries, which are beginning to ripen. Next to wild huckleberries, I love wild salal berries.
I'm photographing the tadpoles at Marlake, when I notice that the otters and muskrat are active. Wanting to photograph these delightful mammals, I continue down the trail between Becca's and Dana's houses, find a spot to stand, and freeze into position, not wanting to startle the mammals. So, I'm standing there in the grass like a statue and I see this silly garter snake headed towards me at warp speed and it dawns on me that snakes like this lock onto movement, and I'm not moving, so this poor little guy probably can't see me, because the only thing that's moving is my camera, about four feet off of the ground, and it's only moving in very tiny, slow, movements, trying to track the snake. Meanwhile the snake is moving at light speed, directly towards me, and I'm pretty convinced that it can't see me. I don't want to move, because then I'll startle the mammals and they'll go away, so I just stand there, watching this snake, as it slams head-first into the toe of my sneaker, bouncing off like a spring. After slamming into the toe of my shoe, I could see the tongue of the stunned snake flicking out of it's mouth while it tried to figure out what in the heck it had just run into. A few seconds later, the snake changed it's course, crawled around my shoe, and continued on it's way. The whole time this was going on, I was standing there trying not to bust out laughing; because, if I do that, the gig is up and I am not going to get any mammal photos today. Oh, gosh, sometimes Mother Nature really challenges me!
I remember when I got my last really good photo of a muskrat. I was so proud of that photo that I made copies of it and tried to give it away to my friends and family as gifts. They, of course, were horrified. What on earth made me think that they would hang a photograph of a rodent on their walls? It's not just a rodent, I said, it's a muskrat. It's a rat, said they! A muskrat, said I! It's not a Norway rat, it's a muskrat! This is the photo I took today. Look at that face. Tell me that's not cute. He's such a tiny, round, little guy, with tiny eyes, and invisible ears, and he's so darned cute that he makes me SQEEEE! How can you not think that's cute?
At the same time that the muskrat was munching away at the pond grass beneath the tree on the north side of the lake, a river otter was collecting cat-tail reeds on the south side of the lake, and disappearing with them into the reeds on the north side of the lake. The muskrat is tiny and round and doesn't have visible ears. The entire muskrat isn't much larger than the otter's head. The otter is long, not round, and has visible ears. And yet, the muskrat and the otter are both collecting greens, of different sizes, and carting them into the brown, chewed-off cat-tails on the north-west side of the lake. They must be building an apartment complex for rodents back there.
The growth in front of the viewing platform at Brooklake has gotten so tall and thick that you can barely see the lake anymore. Summer has arrived in the great Pacific Northwest. Get out and enjoy it while you can!
Teri I. Lenfest
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