Hunting the Horny Back Toad

I dreamed last night that I was composing a new post to the blog.  Hahaha.  Have you ever heard of anything so preposterous?

Oh, well.  Maybe it's time.  (But I won't be doing the dream post because that was some kind of poem or something, I'm not sure, but it was a bunch of lines consisting of short phrases.  I underlined the whole thing for some reason, but it was done in the old school typewriter way where you have to backspace and add the underscore beneath the characters you've already typed.)

I guess I've been on vacation.  Of sorts.  Vacation from Bloglandia.  (A frequent occurrence this year.)  And yes, we had two overnight trips recently, on consecutive weekends.  The first was, as I was beginning to tell you before I slipped away, over Chinook Pass to Yakima (and the Sun Country Inn - Home of the Hot Towel Boys!); the second was up to the Strait of Juan de Fuca (specifically to Port Angeles, with side trips to Crescent Lake and Neah Bay) where we were hoping to see some Tufted Puffins but were disappointed in that we only saw a couple of Gray Whales.

Yep, them were whales in the last photo post.  (And did you catch dguzman's comment?  Perhaps my favorite comment ever!)

Oh, but I reckon I ought to get back to telling you about the Yakima trip before I go into the trip to the peninsula.

So, last we heard, we were somewhere up around Chinook Pass, watching as the Jolly Green Giant and the Little Green Sprout shot marbles down the American River Valley.

Or something.

Down, down, down the mountain we drove, pulling off along the way.  At some point, the American River joins the Bumping River which then joins the Little Naches River which then becomes the Naches River proper.  (I think that's how it goes, but I could be mixed up.)

Down lower in the valley, the fir trees give way to pines, and then it's more deciduous trees (Oaks?  Sorry.  I suck at trees.)  And then it's more of a sagebrush steppe habitat.

Still plenty of green on the banks of the river and on the north-facing slopes though.

No sidetrips on this drive.  We went straight to the motel and checked in.  Bucko was still "humming from the road" so he laid down for a nap while I walked over to the Yakima Greenway.  The motel is pretty near the bridges over both the Yakima and Naches Rivers, and this time I had a rough idea of how to get to the trail.  (Unlike on a former trip where I wandered fruitlessly around some neighborhood with no outlet.)

I took my camera and binoculars but it turned out there wasn't much to see.  On the way, there were House Finches and a goldfinch and countless swallows (none who would pose for a portrait), and, once on the trail, there was nothing but stinking robins and flickers.  Under the Yakima River bridge there was a rough trail down to the water.  I could hear much tweeting down there and even saw a flash of yellow in the willows (warblers?), but after I worked my way down there I found nothing but mosquitos.  Bloodthirsty bastards too.  I beat it out of there and they pursued me all the way back across the bridge.

I gave up on the trail and started back to the motel.  On the road adjacent to the freeway, I saw a Merlin perched in a short tree.  I readied my camera and crept closer, but a cyclist rode by and it flew off.  Oh, well.  Bucko showed up then in the van (Air conditioning!) and we took a quick drive over to the trail access point.  Nothing there but more swallows and a single California Quail.

No time to waste though.  After a drive through the outskirts of town and a quick bite to eat, we were off to our next adventure.

So little time.

In a surprising development, I received an email on Wednesday informing me that Friday would not be my last night on the night shift.

No.  That very night, Wednesday night, would be my last.  Ah!  An extra couple of days off.  I can certainly dig that.

Yesterday, I did little other than recuperate from that abominable shift.  Well, and mourn Farrah's passing, of course.  But today - today, Bucko and I have much to do.  Places to go, etc.   So I thought I'd dash off a quick post and get started on last weekend's adventure update.  Oh, I'll get into the details later, but here are some more pretty pictures for you.

Our adventure began, as you doubtlessly inferred from the teaser pic, at Chinook Pass.  (Actually, it began in Seattle, specifically in the neighborhood of Ballard, but I have no pictures from that part of the adventure.)

Still quite a lot of snow up there.  And it was breezy and chilly.

But the snow was melting and green bits were getting greener, and wildflowers were blooming where they were able.

The skies were gray in Seattle and all the way up the west slopes to the pass, but to the east, loads of sunshine.

Don't you like this view?

Doesn't it look like some titan could drop a giant marble on that slope to the right, and the marble would roll down and then up the slope on the left slowing to roll back down a little farther down the valley, and so on and so on all the way down to wherever the valley ends?

Ah, well, time enough for marble-dropping titans later.  I've got to run.  Here's a nice jumbo pic of the valley if you're interested.

RIP, Farrah.
 
 
 


Love always,
              Earl

Ah.  I've got some good news for you, my friends.  Plus some extra good news.

First, we managed to slip a quick getaway into last weekend.  It's only our second multi-day adventure of the year, but I'm hopeful it's a portent of things to come.

And I'll tell you about it eventually, maybe by this weekend.  Here's a sneak peak.

The bonus good news is that my stint on the night shift comes to an end on Friday.  Hurray!  Back to decent hours.  And with one of my preferred organizations!  (The arts one, not the healthcare one.)

My skies may once again be clear!  Let's have a drink!

Oh, wait, I've still got to go to work this afternoon.

Drat.

Well, that really nice adventure we had a couple of weeks ago isn't getting any fresher in my memory, so I suppose I should get to telling you about it.

First: did you guess where we went?

Well, duh, you say.  That teaser picture you showed us earlier was of the Yakima River Canyon from one of your favorite scenic byways.  So, you went to the Tieton River Nature Trail to see the Lewis's Woodpeckers.

Obvs, you add.

I merely laugh.

Haha.

Like that.

Haha.  No, no, no, Smartypants.  Close, but no cigarillo for you, my friend.  Because we thought about it.  Yes, we did.  We thought about going to the Tieton River Nature Trail to see the Lewis's Woodpeckers.  But then I (me, me, me!) thought of somewhere even better.

You remember last spring, I'm sure, when we went down to the Yakima area for a belated birthday trip for Bucko?  And there we (us, us, us!) discovered the Cowiche Canyon Trail.  That's one of them Rails-to-Trails jobbers.  You know, where they take an old railroad line, remove the tracks and ties and whatever, throw in a bunch of gravel and leave it to the nature cyclists and walkers.  Well, anyway, when we were there last year, we saw a bunch of hanging nests along the trail over the creek.  Some even had bright blue strands of nylon rope woven into them.  (So pretty!)  Later on that trip, at Ft. Something State Park (sorry, I'm getting tired of searching the archives to look this crap up), the nature interpreter park warden person told us that these nests belonged to Bullock's Orioles.  (It came up because the orioles frequent Ft. Something too.)  We were too early to see them last year, but I expected the time to be pretty ripe for spotting some when we took our adventure a couple of weeks ago.

And so we went to Cowiche Canyon.

But, wait! first we had to get there.  Because getting there can be half the fun, you know.  So as you guessed (you were right on that part) we took one of my favorite scenic byways, Canyon Drive from Ellensburg to Selah.  I didn't take many pictures since I've taken so many before.  Haha.  Just kidding.  No, what stopped my shutter-click finger was the White Sky Morning we were having.  (The weather people had scheduled partly cloudy skies for later though, so I wasn't too worried.)

Oh!  But along the way, we kinda saw a sort of Life Bird!  "Sort of" in that it was one I'd seen before, but back in Oklahomo, before I was officially bird-spotting.  There were the usual swallows (Cliff and Violet-green) soaring around the canyon walls.  But then we saw something looking like a gigantic swift but with white spots on the undersides of the wings.  I knew I'd seen that before in my bird book and after several seconds of searching, I found it. A Common Nighthawk.  In mid-morning!  (Someday I'll concentrate on updating my eBird.  Who knows?  I may even be up to 200 by now.  Catching up to you, Delia!)

We made a pitstop at the Big Pines recreation area.  A lot of twittering going on up in the trees, but the White Sky Effect™ rendered all of the twitterers uniformly black.  Brewer's Blackbirds were in the lower branches, but I'm wary of them since they're known to attack innocent bystander's hairdos.  I did snag a single photo of a young one.

(More of a brownbird, I'd say.)

We saw some larger birds with what looked to be yellow on them (hard to say with the White Sky Effect™) and I eventually figured out what they were, but I've forgotten now.  Must not have been too exciting.  Ah, but there were more nighthawks.  Dozens of them.  Flying up over the river, soaring and diving, occasionally landing in the trees.  The bugs were out in force, especially by the water.  I guess the nighthawks gotta eat when the eatin's good.

We left Big Pines, stopped for lunch in Selah, then drove to the Cowiche Canyon trail, though this time we started at the other end.  The grade is pretty slight, but we thought we'd rather be walking downhill on the way back to the vehicle.

We were shot at near the beginning of the trail.  Well, not shot at per se.  Shot near, maybe.  I don't know.  There was a whole lot of shooting going on.  There are a couple of houses alongside the trail there at the beginning and at one of them someone was having a lot of fun with their firearms.  I thought they might be shooting at birds in their family-sized orchard, but Bucko thought they were probably target-shooting.  Whatever.  It scared the bejesus out of me so I sped-walked through that part.  I could hear orioles singing around there, but I wasn't slowing down for nothing.

Once we were safely (I hoped) past the gunfire, I slowed down and waited for Bucko to catch up to me.  He was the first to spot an oriole.  I think he saw a couple of them before I even saw my first.  No matter.  I was enjoying the trail.

And the wildflowers.

Some sort of penstemon, I think.

When Bucko caught up to me, I'd just seen a blue bird of some kind.  A bluebird, I thought.  Western Bluebird seemed likely.  But as I watched it and listened to it from across the creek (it was very vocal and very active - hopping down into the brush, then flying to perch on bare branches, then flying elsewhere seconds later), I realized that it was something else entirely.  Another "sort of" Life Bird!  A Lazuli Bunting!  Hurray!  Bucko's been wanting to see one of these forever (as have I), and we did catch a quick glimpse of one last year on our Methow Valley Adventure, but it was a female and it was on the wing.  This was our first male.  Such a beauty.  It was just too far away for good pics though, I'm sad to say.

I was really hoping to see a Canyon Wren.  I've only ever seen a couple of them once several years back, hiking around Vantage.  I didn't know what the heck they were until I consulted my book.  (Tiny, orange, thin beaks, very pretty song - I thought they were Rufous Hummingbirds that had taken vocal lessons.)  We heard one last year at Cowiche Canyon, but we never saw any.  This trip turned out the same, I'll go ahead and tell you.  We did, at least, see several Rock Wrens.  This one here was perched above us, and though we could see it pretty clearly through binoculars, the White Sky Effect™ resulted in a mostly crappy photo.

The White Sky eventually started letting some blue in, just little spots here and there.  The Yakima area is usually blazing hot by this time of year, but they were having a cool spell and the temperature was a very comfortable seventyish.  It was shaping up into a glorious day.

I was so relaxed.  I told Bucko it was like aromatherapy.  We kept smelling what I immediately imagined to be skunk cabbage, but of course, there's no skunk cabbage in them there parts, so what I was smelling was genuine skunk!  Ahhhhhhhhh.  Oh, and the sagebrush kept blowing its tangy scent on us.  And wild roses were everywhere. At one bird-watching spot, we were surrounded by roses and the smell was heavenly.  It was like I was drowing in a sea of little old ladies.  Sweet!

We saw a few more Lazuli Buntings and some more Bullock's Orioles, but none would come close enough to have their pictures taken.  A Cedar Waxwing was more obliging.

It was nice to see everything so green.  Late April had been a great time to visit, but early June turned out to be just as nice.

Everything was growing and blooming.  And in the most unlikely of places.

We turned back not too far from the other end of the trail as we were about halfway through our water supply.  I was eager to reach each of the spots where we'd seen orioles or buntings before.  The return trip was even nicer, now that the sky had mostly cleared.

We passed one rocky formation in a hillside that formed a sort of sunburst pattern.  Bucko wondered if it was a former lava tube.  (I didn't know what a lava tube was, so I kept my wondering to myself.)

We got a closer look at a few orioles, but they always managed to keep some branches or something between themselves and my camera.

There were a few spots along the way where we'd heard the song of Drunk Robins, and finally, when we were back near the gun people's house (blessedly silent now), we saw one.  It got quite close to us and traveled along the trail with us for a way, but it always managed to stay upsun of me, so I couldn't get any shots of its pretty colors and markings.

And then we were done.

I wanted to take Canyon Rd back.  Now that the sun was out, we might be able to see what was up in the treetops at Big Pines.  Instead, Bucko made an impulsive turn into a WDFW site that we'd never noticed before and we got out to explore the woods near the river.

Orioles.  Galore.  All.  Over.  The stinking place.

Unfortunately, the bugs were kinda galore themselves.  I couldn't stand still for more than five seconds without being attacked.  We had some bug spray in the van but thought it seemed silly to get all sprayed down just before driving back to (relatively) bug-free Seattle, so we just took a quick (quick!) tour through the place and once again hit the road.

I'll get to telling you about last weekend's nice adventure sooner or later (I don't know about you, but my money's on "later"), but first I feel compelled to talk about The Weather.

So I told you about our late spring, right?  (Right??)  But here's the kicker.  We're also having an early summer!  I mean, is that a trip or what?  And it's wreaking bedlam (bedlam, I tells ya!) in The Garden.  Most of the stuff out there was set to be in high bloom around the time of our usual start of summer, i.e. the 5th of July or thereabouts.  But we had a heat wave a week or two ago that kicked all the blooming into overdrive.  Hence, some of the plants are putting out their showiest blooms right now, while some of the late starts and the planted-from-seeds have hardly started growing.

Oh, my.  The whole Garden Season is practically ruint now.

But look at this.

That's a voodoo lily (arum somethingus), hereafter known as a dumpster lily.  Because, OMG, that is exactly what it smells like.  A stanky dumpster!

Bucko inherited them.  When he bought the house, they were all over the backside yard.  He's tried digging them up and giving them to unsuspecting friends but he can never get rid of them completely.  Sure, they're nice to look at.  But be certain that you're upwind while you look.  The first two bloomed just after the heat wave broke and we had a southeast wind blowing.  That pushed the stank right back to our chairs under the canopy thing, rendering the area intolerable for a full day.  (The stank is only at full strenth for about that long, praise be.)  Another's blooming today.  The dumpster smell has been growing ever more pungent throughout the morning and early afternoon.  Now it's even wafting through the upstairs bedroom window.  And another one looks like it may bloom sometime within the next few days.  Yikes.

All I got to say is if that bastard is blooming come Saturday at Sitting-in-The-Garden-Drinking-Beer-Time, it's getting chopped and composted, pretty phallic flower be damned!

Sigh.

If only we could establish a wetlands in our weensy backside yard, I could be sitting out there huffing skunk cabbage instead.

But I guess that would have been a month or more ago, the skunk cabbage huffing, since this ain't the Big Four Pic-a-nic Area.

Oh, well.  Let's leave with something sweet, shall we?

Hey, did you see that crazy orange moon last night?  Well, maybe it wasn't orange where you were, but it certainly was here.

Or is the moon the same color everywhere?

And what causes that orangevity?  I think I read something about it once, but I don't remember for sure.  Maybe some special atmospheric doodah?

Anyway, it was beautiful.  I stood on the porch and stared at it for fifteen minutes or more.  Made me long for October.

I didn't bother trying to get any photos since my moonshots never turn out so well, but I thought I should at least try to recreate it for you today.

UPDATE:  Hugh, in comments, has solved the mystery of the orange moon.  It's a forest fire burning northeast of Vancouver.  So not really an atmospheric doodah at all.

A forest fire, yikes!  And it's only the beginning of June.  I'd invoke the Rain Goddess, but if She's thrice as responsive as the Bird Goddess, they'd still be out of luck up there.

Finally.

Yes, finally.  We finally had a really nice Sunday adventure yesterday.  You want to know where we went?  (Yes! you enthusiastically shout.  Yes, Earl, please please pretty please tell us where you went!)

Well, here's a hint.

But unfortunately, I can't tell you about yesterday's nice adventure just yet.  I've still got to tell you about the not-so-nice adventure we had the weekend prior.  (But we don't want to hear about that, you whine.  We want to hear about the nice adventure, not the crappy one!)  Hey, now hold on there.  I didn't say it was a crappy adventure.  I said it was not so nice as yesterday's adventure.  That's what I said.  Just because you're thus far a product of my mind does not mean that you can broadcast my private thoughts to the universe.

So, no.  It wasn't "crappy".  It was . . .  Let's call it lackluster.

You recall that I've been complaining about this year's late spring (incessantly), right?  Well, I don't know what I was thinking, but when Bucko asked where I wanted to go for our Sunday adventure last week, for some fool reason I said that I wanted to go to the Big Four Pic-a-nic Area on the Mountain Loop Highway.  And this was two to three weeks before we traditionally go there.  You know, in the years when the spring is not so very late.

Well, I couldn't help it.  We've always had such tremendous birdluck there, and our birdluck lately has been crappy not-so-nice.  And I reviewed photos from years past, and everything was so lush and green in mid-June.  Surely, the last day of May wouldn't be that different.

Well, you know where this is going.

So things were just starting to leaf out up there, just starting to green up.  And when I say "up there" I don't mean, like, way up in the clouds or anything.  The elevation in Granite Falls is 410, while Darrington's elevation is 540.  The Big Four Pic-a-nic Area couldn't be much higher than that.  I mean, we've got hills in Seattle in that range.

So, yeah, the leaves were in the early stages of greenhood, and there was snow in places.  (Not surprising, that.  There's often still snow in dense shady spots well into June.)  But when we finally got there, we found the gate to the pic-a-nic area closed.  But we could see the loquacious ranger guy hanging around the signboard up ahead, so we parked outside the gate and went in.

Do you see that?  Skunk cabbage!  In bloom!  On the very last day of May!  Now, down in the lowlands that stuff blooms, I don't know, like, in April or something.  We'd even seen the skunk cabbage in that wetlands area at Snoqualmie Pass blooming when we drove through a couple of weeks earlier.  And though I love the smell of skunk cabbage (No, seriously, I love it.  That's because it smells like skunk.  And I love the smell of skunk.  I do.  I.  Love.  The smell.  Of skunk.) and I love the bright yellow parts (I forget what that's called.  The pokey-up thing in the center, I believe, is the spathe, but the part that surrounds it I can never remember.  Unless I've got it backwards.), I was disappointed to see them blooming so late in the year.

Oh, well.  I could see some bright pink salmonberry blossoms through the woods.

There'd likely be some Rufous Hummingbirds about.  And, oh! and some woodpeckers.  Cause they're there all year, I think.  Like Red-breasted Sapsuckers, for sure, and hopefully even (Bird Goddess, Bird Goddess, Bird Goddess) an American Three-toed Woodpecker which I've only ever seen once, but it was somewhere up in that neck of the woods, the one time I saw it.

Anyway, the loquacious ranger guy had meandered off somewhere by the time I got to the signboard, so I was able to peruse the signboard in peace.  And Lo!  I saw an announcement that construction was taking place on the bridge to the Ice Caves (finally after how many? years) and the trail to said Ice Caves would open sometime in August.  But!  The boardwalk through the wetlands was closed.  Oh, dear.  And I could even see the Vaux's Swifts (Cigars with Wings!) soaring and diving around over the willows and whatever between us.

So I headed for the other boardwalk/trail, the one to the Ice Caves parking lot, where last year I'd seen so many birds.  And almost right off the bat, I saw a Red-breasted Sapsucker, perhaps the very Red-breasted Sapsucker that's been up there in my blog banner for so long (with flies stuck all over its beak).  But it flew off and did not return.

When Bucko joined me (the loquacious ranger guy had returned from his meandering and talked to Bucko for a long time - but that's okay, because Bucko likes talking to strangers), we stood for a while.  Paced some.  Moseyed a bit.  Nothing much presented itself.  We could hear drunk robins in the trees across the bog, but we couldn't see any.  Only sober robins showed themselves.

And so we walked back to the pic-a-nic area and poked around.  I was busy trying to get a photo of a Dark-eyed Junco (Oregon race) that was hanging around the pic-a-nic table (Juncos are always lurking around pic-a-nic tables), when Bucko called out that he'd seen something.  Indeed he had!  A drunk robin!  Two of them, in fact.  And just in case you're new around here or you've forgotten already, Drunk Robins are what we call Black-headed Grosbeaks.  Because their call has been described as sounding like drunk robins.  Or as Someone Wise once said, "It sounds like they're singing the robin's 'Happy Happy Spring' song but they've forgotten the words and so they just make a bunch of shit up."

Well, they wouldn't pose for photos, and they didn't even stick around for very long.  And it was getting kinda humid anyway.

So we split.

But we took our time going back, stopping at pullouts along the way to look at the river and climb on the rocky banks and stuff.

 

I'm ready to move -- outside.  Right now.

Really, I'm finding it so hard to be indoors lately.  We've had a long (for us) string of beautiful, sunny days with off-and-on perfect temperatures.

I just want to sit out in The Garden all day long.  (The Garden, if you're wondering, is the part of the property formerly known as the backside yard.)  Oh, sure, there's some actual gardening going on now and then.  Usually in the mornings when it's nice and cool.  But once I've gotten that out of the way, I just want to kick back in my big metal chair and bounce as I stare at all the purty flowers.

I suppose I should say - in the event that you're in the neighborhood and, on a whim, decide to drop in - that this isn't a fancy garden.  It's more of a Georgetown garden.  No, not that Georgetown.  This Georgetown.

By whichimeantersay, Pip, it's . . . um . . . informal.  The hedge side is, for the most part, a container garden.  Just lots of flower pots in all shapes and sizes and colors, some on stands or pedestals, some not.  The house side is the real (sort of) garden.  You know, the bedded garden.  But the border is ragged-to-nonexistent, the acanthus and voodoo lilies and lychnis coronaria and crocosmia are taking over, and the weeds and grasses, well, sometimes get yea high before I get to them.

Oh, and I should warn you, in case you do that dropping-in thing, we have garden art.

Tacky garden art.

Some old things Bucko's found in the garage and some not-so-old things he's picked up at the Goodwill for a buck or two.

Things like this.

It gets worse.  Trust me.

But I love it, I'll be the first to admit.  Our chairs are way in the back.  In the shade of the cypress trees and the neighbor's Empress of China.

And there's a structure back there.  You see, Bucko had this standalone canopy thing set up in the driveway that he worked under on the hot days.  And last winter, he kept thinking (aloud) that maybe he should take it down for the season, but he never got around to it, and (Goddess knows) I never much cared.  And, see, when we went to Pacific Beach at the end of the year and lived through the Mother of All Windstorms . . . well, we weren't alone.  That windstorm hit Seattle too.  We came home to find the canopy thing had been picked up and hurled into the next-door neighbor's driveway.  Fortunately, she was away at the time, so her van wasn't totaled, but the canopy thing was nearly totaled.  Corner supports crumpled, roof supports bent.  We dragged it over to the backside yard and straightened it as best we could.  Bucko said that he'd take it apart when the weather got nicer, but as the months dragged on, we both independently decided that we liked it back there (sans canvas top), and it might be nice all covered with vines and festooned with hanging plants.  And so there it is.

Since spring only showed up a couple of weeks ago, the vines aren't too impressive yet, but I'm hoping that they'll be at least presentable in another month.  I'm looking forward to the summer.  I hope I'll be done with this temp gig before long.  It's nice to have the mornings to sit out there, but it would be even nicer to sit out there after work with a nice, cold beer.

Oh.  And re: the dropping-in thing.  Don't expect any ginger lemonade or chocolate chip hashish cookies or anything.  This isn't Georgetown, you know.