holyoutlaw

Yesterday Julie and I went to a new park, Ft. Ward Park on Bainbridge Island. We had a pretty satisfactory day of birding, seeing pelagic and double-crested cormorants next to each other, so we could actually tell them apart. We also saw five harlequin ducks, the largest group we’ve ever seen of those. Lots of American Wigeons, which never fails to make us start singing “American wigeon, floatin’ in the sea-ee/American wigeon, nommin’ on sea-wee-eed.” And some Eurasian wigeons mixed in. There were a few surf scoters, lots of rafts a little too far out on the water for us to identify, we heard a loon and maybe kinglets, and a few other birds. Not least, we saw a submarine, escorted by a couple tugs, go up the passage. Anyway, here are my pictures.

Dessicated rose hips

Nootka Rose (Rosa nootkana)

Tall Oregon-grape flowers

Mahonia aquifolium

Cottonwood bud

Rock flows

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

Here are some bud, shoot, and seedling photos from North Beach Park:

Red huckleberry (Vaccinium parviflorum) buds

Inside-out flower or duck’s foot (Vancouveria hexandra)

One of the common names for this plant is the duck’s foot flower, because the leaves have three rounded lobes that look like… wait for it… a duck’s foot. If you look closely, or click through the larger size, you can see that the leaves already have a duck’s foot shape as they emerge from the bud. Vancouveria is very rare in Seattle, supposedly extirpated (locally extinct) but here it is. There is also vancouveria in Carkeek.

Indian plum or osoberry (Oemlaria cerasiformis) buds and flowers

Here is the entire set of North Beach Park photos (getting rather large). The photos I added today are towards the end.

ETA: The best spell-checker funnies for this time was “Malaria conformist” for “Oemlaria cerasiformis”.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.