Last weekend I was taking a two day course at the Environmental Learning Center at Deception Pass State Park. Class didn’t start until 9:00. I’m an early riser, so for me, there was plenty of time for a morning walk on the sunny side of Goose Rock. The trail started right from the cookhouse.
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Walking through the woods, I heard the dawn chorus. Robins, wrens, woodpeckers and also the migrating Orange Crown warblers which are yellowish green and look very much like a Madrona leaf. So, there it was, in the top of a Madrona, of course. One calling to another, back and forth, back and forth, until I finally saw it among the gold and green.

A moment later I heard another migrant, the yellow-rumped warbler. This one was a bit easier to see with its striped back and yellow… rump. I knew it was going to be a good day.

Taking the perimeter trail I was looking for wildflowers. One of my classmates, Mosa Neis, was the caretaker at Pacific Rim Institute for ten years and now is caretaking at the Keystone Preserve, for the Whidbey Camano Land Trust. She is a botanist who specializes in our native prairie plants. She had said there might be Indian Paintbrush in bloom and sure enough!

The trail led steeply up the rocky slope where the morning sun shone brightly. My heart leapt at the sight of the bright reddish orange blossoms. And so many other flowers popped up between the rocks. I racked my brain trying to remember, like meeting old friends after months apart. Was this blue-eyed Mary? It had been so long!

A fluffy white flower got me thinking, bog orchid? Here? No, it finally came to me. Death camas. I rounded a corner and there was the indigo blue camas, so important for natives who harvest the bulb, careful not to mix them up with the fluffy white death camas. They don’t harvest the root until the flower has passed, which makes it tricky.

There were other frilly white flowers, Columbia saxifrage, yellow spring gold, pink prairie star and sea blush that Mosa identified for me from my pictures. Yellow buttercups, red flowering currant, and Oregon grape with their clusters of gold atop its spiky green leaves. Lush green miner’s lettuce has a tiny white bloom. Madrona trees were flowering, too, with white tufts at the top of each branch.

Mergansers called from the water below and seals watched me as they floated lazily on Cornet Bay. I admired the view of Mount Baker on the eastern horizon. People at the marina were getting their boat ready to go. It was time for me to get back for class. I felt like I'd slipped in an elective before class started. Outdoor learning is the best kind. And what a great way to start the day, exploring, meeting old friends and making new ones. So many flowers! So many birds! So many sunny days in a row!

Maribeth

Thanks to Mosa Neis for introducing me to my new friends.

Join me and Janet Hall for an Earth Day walk from Camp Casey at 1 pm, April 18-start at the Whidbey Camano Land Trust booth.

For lots more Earth and Ocean Month activities click here.

Last night, after a balmy day, the full moon was peaking between wispy clouds in a peaceful sky. This morning I awoke before dawn to the rush of wind and rain on the roof. It’s April Fool’s Day. This teasing weather can be so frustrating to me. I’ve been using these sunny days to prepare my garden, bringing in manure and digging it into the beds. Some seed packets say, “Plant as soon as the soil can be worked.” And I am tempted. But years of experience has taught me to wait. April showers bring slugs and rot seeds in the ground. Waking up to yet another stormy day reminds me not to be foolish and to have patience.

Though I’m anxious for spring, I must say there are wonderful things about winter. One of my favorite birds spends the winter with us on Whidbey. As spring approaches, I will welcome the warblers, but I’ll be sad to see these birds go. When it’s not too stormy, I like to walk on the beach near my house and in the winter, I look for Harlequin ducks.

I was a whale watching guide in the 1990’s. Our boat left from the Everett Marina sailing north through Saratoga Passage toward the San Juan Islands. In the spring, as we passed Goat Island at the mouth of the Skagit River where food is abundant and the bay is protected, we’d see waterfowl in every direction. I had a bird book and binoculars on the bow trying to identify all the different species and point them out to the passengers. That’s where my bird watching truly began.

Ducks are big and sit on the water, much easier to see than little songbirds that twitch among tree branches, or raptors that fly so fast and high. But after years of studying birds, my favorite duck isn’t among the others in the protected bay. It likes rough water. When I take my beach walk, I look for it on the point where the storm waves and boat wakes crash against the rocks. This week, I was so pleased to sit and watch them. As the name implies, they’re colorful characters. The males have striking markings. And their mousey squeak is just delightful.
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Harlequins congregate in winter at areas where there’s plenty to eat. They’re excellent swimmers and dive up to 70 feet deep for fish. While I watched, a group of Mergansers approached. The male Harlequin dropped his head and scooted toward them in a rush. The Mergansers swam around them, giving them space.

I know they’ll be moving to fresh water soon. Harlequins are monogamous and pair off for years. They fly with their mates up into forested mountain rivers to nest. I saw some flying up the Solduc River once, in Olympic National Park. They build their nests in tree cavities, on rock cliffs, or sometimes on gravel bars. The female selects the site after meticulous inspection and lays 4-8 eggs. Then the male departs for his molting ground on the coast. When the chicks hatch, the mother duck introduces them to calm water nearby where they find their own aquatic insects to eat. After about a month they begin to dive for food and eventually move to deeper, rougher water. I’ve seen them on the Pacific coast in September in large groups with their teenage offspring.

So, on this stormy morning, I’m not fooled by the few days of sunshine between storms. Though we’ve passed the equinox, spring is inconsistent. My seeds are sprouting inside in flats, and the Harlequins are still frolicking on the point just a short walk away.
 
Maribeth
For more details, images and recordings of Harlequins, visit the Cornell Labs website here.

We left Whidbey under an “atmospheric river of rain”. The deluge flooded the highway, drenched the ditches, and made our escape to the eastside that much more satisfying.

“Look!” I said as we stopped in Cle Elem, “Blue sky!”

As the afternoon unfolded, basalt columns flanked the roadside. We crossed the Columbia River and entered the scablands left by the Ice Age Floods.  We gazed at the alien landscape. The sun came out and temperatures warmed. What a contrast to the week of cold wind and rain on our forested island.

It was late afternoon when we checked in at the Othello Sandhill Crane Festival. We climbed aboard the Crane Viewing bus along with a couple of dozen other excited birdwatchers and headed to the edge of town. In the fields we saw the cranes in groups picking through the stubble. Binoculars and cameras popped up as we leaned out of the windows.

There’s a thin line between appreciation and harassment so we didn’t always get out of the bus. We moved on to other sites where we spotted other birds, but our last stop was the best and we all got out quietly in awe. There were hundreds, no thousands of cranes, flying in at sunset. They spread across the far end of the field and down the hill. We couldn’t see the end of the line even with a spotting scope.

That evening, Paul Bannick gave an engaging program about North American woodpeckers with stunning images on the big screen. He linked each species with its habitat, ponderosa pine, oak savannahs, northwest rainforests, arctic tundra, and how they find and stash their food, excavate homes and provide homes for others. The presentation ended with some suggestions on how to improve habitat for these fascinating birds.

In the morning, we returned to the conference with a full slate of activities to choose from. There were classes on painting, photography, geology, swans and snow geese, frogs, and bird watching tours by bus, boat, or a walking tour of the neighborhood, which is where I went.

Our guide pointed out the gulls in the school yard, the crows in the park, and the first violet-green swallows just back from Central America. We stopped below a grove of trees in a park where we saw signs of owls. A flash of movement caught our eyes. A Coopers Hawk sat in a tree 50 yards away. As we moved gradually closer, I lost my view of it among the branches. But I could see its shadow against the tree trunk. Then I found it, and it found me, and sprung off across the sky.

The next class I took was with David Lukus called Understanding Bird Song. He’s an amazing naturalist. Most bird watchers know about the Merlin app offered by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology that listens to birds and identifies them for you. But David has the Ravenlite app from Cornell that shows the image of bird calls. His presentation showed song images, bird images, recordings of bird songs, and bird behavior, teaching us how and what the birds were communicating. It opened up a whole new world of understanding for me.

We enjoyed our next class on Crane behavior and another one on Burrowing Owls with lots of fun videos and stories about the birds, other wildlife, and biologists involved with conservation and restoration work. It was a full day with another evening program on Cranes.

We woke before dawn on our last day and boarded a birdwatching bus with a retired biologist. He took us on a tour to farm fields, wetlands, rocky cliffs and dusty sagebrush. We stopped for loggerhead shrikes, chukars, curlews, yellow-headed blackbirds, kestrels, killdeer, pintails, wigeons, great horned owls, a few cranes and about a billion snow geese. We left the conference well satisfied and ready for the long drive home.

Taking the scenic route from Ellensburg over Blewitt Pass, the mountains were stunning. A contrast to the flatlands of Othello. After passing through Leavenworth, Icicle Creek was roaring white. We climbed through the Cascades, over Stevens Pass and followed the rushing Skykomish down the other side. We were the last car on the ferry at sunset and made it home just before dark. The Great Horned Owls were calling.

Maribeth

I'll be leading a hike for the Whidbey Camano Land Trust on April 18 starting at Camp Casey where there will be many activities celebrating Whidbey Earth and Ocean Month. For more info click here.
 

The day was clear and bright. I had no plan except to take a spin around the Olympics. I’d hoped to get an early start but it was afternoon by the time I caught the ferry. Still, I wanted to make the most of this glorious day, knowing that it would not last.

On the boat I thought about where to go first. Dungeness Spit came to mind. What a great day for a beach hike, miles and miles of beach. A lighthouse stood like a punctuation mark at the end. I didn’t have enough time for the eleven mile round trip to the lighthouse and back, but I went out for a couple of hours, soaking up sunshine and looking at scoters, loons and grebes.

This sandspit was formed by the wash of sediments from the Dungeness River pushed by the currents in the Strait of Juan de Fuca to form a hook that protects winter waterfowl. Its twin, Ediz Hook in Port Angeles, was formed with sediments from the Elwha River, until the dams were built about a hundred years ago. Then millions of truckloads of gravel were required to maintain Ediz Hook and the ship harbor. When the dams were finally removed in 2011 and 2012 after decades of effort, the sediments began to flow naturally, again. Salmon swim up the Elwha into the pristine wilderness of Olympic National Park, again. It’s one of the greatest ecological success stories of our time.

When I first came to the Pacific Northwest and drove alongside Lake Crescent, it was love at first sight. That’s where I spent the night curled up in my camper. I used to live here working in the park so visiting is like a homecoming. In the morning, I walked along the bike path on the Spruce Railroad Trail. The lake was calm and quiet. I could hear trucks and cars on the far shore. There was Lake Crescent Lodge and my old home at Rosemary Inn.

I passed through an old railroad tunnel and noticed small birds clustering at the top. It was dark and I couldn’t tell what kind of birds. My Merlin app told me they were red crossbills but I still don’t know what they were doing up there.

Mergansers glided across the water as the sun tried to pry open a crack in the overcast sky. Mist rose up the Barnes Creek watershed toward Storm King. This is my happy place.

My wipers tapped rhythmically as I cruised west. Nearing Forks, where the road turns south, I looked across the open fields and sure ‘nuf, there were elk, just where I’d seen them last August. I stopped at the In Place where I got a belly full of breakfast. Then I drove on, passing the Bogachiel and crossing the Hoh, to Ruby Beach. The sea stacks are magnificent and the tide was low. I saw whales blow beyond the breakers. But rain was steady so I drove south crossing the Queets, until I made it to the Quinault. The four Olympic rain forest watersheds, the Bogachiel, the Hoh, the Queets and Quinault, all boast over 150 inches of wet a year. But the drizzle stopped for a while as I walked the trail with my umbrella.

I was the only one on this trail and it was late in the day.  I made noise so I wouldn’t surprise a cougar or bear. Though the rain held off, the forest was wet. The trail ran with water, ferns brushed against my legs and moisture dripped from the trees, but I was happy. I stopped on bridges overlooking the creeks and circled around massive trees and downed logs. Back at my van I changed into dry clothes and made a cup of tea. In the lodge I read by the fire as darkness fell.

The next day, I stopped at Jitters for a cuppa and scone on my way through Hoquiam. Then turning east, I headed for the Lena Lakes trailhead near Staircase. This trail, so popular in summer, is solitary in winter. Just 3 miles in and lovely Lena Lake stirs wilderness winds in my soul. I stood and absorbed the whispers in the treetops. Ripples crossed the surface of the mirror-like lake. Crisp snow and ice froze the steep slopes above the forest. A wonderous chill ran through me.

I camped at Dosewallips State Park. They have nice new showers in heated rooms. I got a spot in the almost deserted loop nearby and had a quiet night. In the morning, I walked out to the bridge and gazed over the river toward the snow encrusted mountains against a blue sky. A wisp of cloud circled the peaks like a scarf.

Nearing Port Townsend I texted Betsy and joined her at Fort Worden walking her dog, Layla. We invited Vicki and Joe to meet us at the new Indian restaurant for lunch and a good visit. Afterward, Betsy and I took Layla to walk along the Larry Scott bike path by the water. We saw a flock of black turnstones and a pair of red necked grebes. Curtains of rain were coming down across the bay. There was thunder and a flash of lightning! We hurried back by the marina and noticed the schooner Adventuress at the dock. I used to volunteer on that ship, and looked at her fondly. Layla jumped into the car, we hugged good-bye and I went to catch the boat.

On the ferry, I had a clear view of the whale on the wharf. Betsy, who works for the Port Townsend Marine Science Center, had helped prepare that skeleton for display. She came to Whidbey last summer to help butcher another grey whale carcass at Camp Casey. 
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I stood on the deck as we crossed through the Triangle of Fire between Fort Flagler, Fort Worden and Fort Casey with a lighthouse at each point. To my right I could see the Keystone Preserve with its big red barn. To my left was Ebey’s Prairie and the bluff trail. When we settled into the dock, it felt like home.

Maribeth

For more about preparing a whale for display, see Robustus in the Hike of the Week August 2025 in our archives. Or click here and scroll down.
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