The Nature Issue

In March, our thoughts turn to Spring and we look for signs of it everywhere.  This month’s post is about the flora and fauna of Thornbush in March.
 

Such as Turtles

First, though, I need to document a great trip to Olympia for my niece’s baby shower.  We stopped at Nisqually Nature Reserve and saw baby great horned owls plus a lot of other wildlife.
 

And Mergansers

 

On the way home, I stopped in to wish Corbin a happy first birthday. 
 

Ethel helps Corbin unwrap--what could it be?



Spring time walk up Mt Young where Madronnas flourish.   





Madronnas on Mt Young

 

This crossbill is recovering from slamming into the window

Ahh, red flowering currant.  Can the hummingbirds be far behind?

Soopolallie - Shepherdia canadensis

Now that you've stayed until the end, I will tell you the bad news.  Fourteen chickens killed by a mink on St Patrick's Day. Mink massacres in the past have also occurred in March.  Is it because the stream is so high now that they come up from False Bay?  We still have eleven barred rock in the compost yard, but all the beautiful garden chickens are gone.  We won't be getting more chicks for awhile.

Eagle on the snag

Another vociferous sign of Spring, the eagle sitting on the snag just above her nest.  And it wouldn't be March without the Skunk Cabbage on the stream.  I think we can safely say that Spring has arrived. Next month--avalanche lillies!

Skunk Cabbage



Visiting Other Islands

I live on an island in the San Juan Archipelago.  When I leave home, I go "off-island", usually this is to the mainland or "America".  This month, I made several trips off-island to visit neighboring islands.  Let me introduce you to a few of these.

First, I visited Shaw Island, population of about 240.  Our County Textile Guild was holding one of our quarterly Meetings in the Shaw Community Center.  Since the basket group meets in this same hall every month, I am most familiar with this site.

house on Guemes

However, I've never been to Guemes, which is a five minute ferry ride from Anacortes which is on Fidalgo Island.  Two friends and I have always wanted to see Guemes so we made a special trip earlier in the month.  It's nice.  About the same size as Shaw which meant we were done touring it in about an hour.  We spent the afternoon walking around Washington Park, on Fidalgo, about two miles from the ferry.

Washington Park

On May 12th I had the opportunity to attend the Lopez Lamb and Wool Festival.  The Textile Guild put a booth up to promote ourselves to Lopezians.  It worked.  We got several new members.  It also was a lot of fun.

Alpaca

Navajo Sheep with four horns

Shearing a Sheep

And the very next weekend, my friend Liz and I met on Orcas for our annual spa day, this time at Rosaria Resort Spa.  We enjoyed a lovely day there and ate at Allium Restaurant, a foody place in Eastsound.

The next day, as we were leaving Thornbush to take a walk at Jakles Lagoon, we chanced upon this barred owl near our pond.  There's really no place like home.

Bluebirds and Books

Today I spent five hours hauling fir branches and digging out thistles with my hori-hori.  But this time the work was not on my own property.  I was with a bunch of Soroptimists doing community service for the Land Bank on Cady Mountain.  The project is a restoration of Garry Oaks which is where the bluebirds come in.  I must admit, part of the reason I signed up for this activity was that I had never been up Cady Mountain before and I was curious.  So I was delighted to see all the wildflowers in bloom:  avalance lily, fritallarias, camas, shooting star all over the place.  And a fabulous view across San Juan Valley to the Salish Sea.

Another plus was a guest lecturer who came to describe the ongoing bluebird project here on the island.  A few hundred feet away from our worksite sat an aviary with a nesting pair of bluebirds due to be released tonight.  It turns out that bluebirds LOVE Garry Oaks.  But as many of you know, the oak population has been overshadowed (literally) by Douglas Fir.  Bluebirds like wide open spaces and hollow trees to nest in.  They like places that are burned frequently.  That used to be the situation here before white men came and the Indians stopped burning the camas fields.  But even as late as 1960's, bluebirds were much more prevalent on the island.  So--restore the Garry Oak, restore the bluebird as well.blue bird project

Speaking of fires, and especially, wilderness fires, I read a great book a while ago by Timothy Egan called The Big Burn.  It is about a huge forest fire in 1910 that burned Northern Idaho and parts of Washington and Montana.  But it is also about Teddy Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and the beginnings of the National Forest Service.  It could be considered the beginning of conservancy movement here in the United States.  I recommend it.

Another good book I am reading currently is Winter Brothers A Season at the Edge of America by Ivan Doig.  It was written 30 years ago about a pioneer by the name of James Gilchrist Swan who settle with the Makaw Indians for a few years in the 1850's and later moved to Port Townsend.  But it is so much more than that.  It is history/anthropology/philosopy all rolled into one.  People familiar with the area around Cape Flattery and Lake Ozette will be fascinated.

And coincidentally, the book I read just prior to the Doig book was a memoir written by a friend and neighbor who starts his story off with a misadventure canoeing down the Ozette River.  This would have been in the early 70's just about the time my brothers and I rafted down the Ozette.  I'm feeling all wrapped up in this Pacific Northwest History, from Missoula to Neah Bay.  My friend Jim Lawrence's book is called Callous Hands, Hungry Heart.  He was raised on Mercer Island and came to San Juan Island as a back to the lander.  But he had so many adventures and problems to overcome, I'd use up all the space in this blog just listing them. 

The last book I'd like to review here was set in Upper Wisconsin, not the Northwest.  It is the The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: a novel by David Wroblewski.  It is a fabulous retelling of Hamlet, only the hero is a 14 year old mute dog trainer and Ophelia is his companion dog Almandine.  Oh, it makes me weepy, just thinking of poor Almandine. video discussing Almandine  This was a very good read.

So now you know what I've been doing this wet, cold April, although much of this reading was done in late March on planes coming and going from Hawaii.  It is just me and my companion dog, Suzie, here at Thornbush for the next few days as Roger is at a "Food Forest Workshop" at  Wild Thyme Farm near Olympia.  Tomorrow is MayDay and I plan on celebrating at the bonfire/potluck of friends down the road aways.  I made a pie using the first of this season's rhubarb yesterday.  Goodbye to April, the cruelest month and on to the merry month of May!

Feb, March and April Foolishness

I went to Hawaii, specifically Kihei on Maui, with my friend Lynn for a week.  It was very nice.  It was 83 degrees every day.  I got to snorkel and see humpback whales.  I ate a half of a papaya everyday for breakfast.  Lynn and her parents were excellent hosts. 



Anita and Lynn on a Dinner Cruise near Lahaina



Then I came home and it was still cold here.  But there were a few more daffodils and all of the grape hyacinths are in bloom.  Roger hung the bamboo gate and he repaired the pond boat (scow?) while I was gone.



Lenora showing off the Plumeria hairclip she got from Hawaii

The twins turned five on April 1st.  Roger, his dad, and I met up with the family at a Red Robin in Everett to celebrate.  We bid on and won pony rides for the twins at the Soroptimists' St Pat's Day Fundraising Dinner.  We anticipate a vist in May when they will be able to redeem their prize.



Audrey has two little plumeria clips in her hair.



Four days after my last blog entry in which I was pointing out all the evidence of Spring, it snowed four inches.  HaHa on me.  It seemed like nature was held in suspended animation after that.  There are signs of Spring, the peepers are peeping.  But it just feels way behind schedule.

On a rare unrainy day, I took a walk and watched the eagles.  Our own nesting pair had one fledgling this year.  I think I witnessed its maiden flight one afternoon when it took several slow circles around our pond, supervised by its very vocal mother

One nice adventure between snowfall and Maui was a trip to Orcas to celebrate Peggy Sue's birthday.  Four of us visited the spa at Rosario Resort, lunched in Olga, and went sightseeing at Moran State Park.  We tried to drive up to Mt. Constitution, but the road was still closed due to snow.

I usually organize chronologically, but this month's entry is a melange of events.  One last event to note is that Roger's father Al came to stay with us this past week.  Although the visit was planned, two days prior he had fallen from his bed and was not able to get himself up for many hours.  Therefore, we were very concerned and have had him under close observation these past few days.  For the time being, we will be subscribing to an emergency response system with a medical alert necklace.  But more hard decisions will be forthcoming.

Autumn 2009 and a Wake-up Call

At first I didn't think there was much to tell about. We didn't go anywhere and our visitors have dropped off quite a bit. We have had many visiting birds come through. Here are some evening grosbeaks checking out the fountain. In looking back over pictures and calendar entries, I see that things have a way of piling up. We've actually been quite busy this Fall here at Thornbush.

I'll start with a week in September when Roger's parents and his brother Leif visited. Here's a picture of them at the Farmer's Market which shows off another milestone--Eric and Roger are actually farmers! That's right--they are selling produce from our own gardens and orchards. And they bought a new, shiny scale to weigh it.



Then, about mid-September we went to the Permaculture Convergence held on the Kitsap Peninsula at Sahale Learning Center. http://www.washingtonstatepermaculture.org. Here's a picture of Roger and fellow permies at a workshop led by Rick Valley on Storage Strategies, Including Carbon, Water and Keyline.

We came back from the conference and a visit to Bjorn and the twins with horrible colds that lasted a couple weeks. This was very frustrating as we were then faced with (dum, de-dum dum)--the Tyranny of the Harvest, as my sister Rosalie puts it. Everything was ripe and ready to deal with. Apples, tomatoes, bell peppers, chard (always), beans, aronia berries, huckleberries (before the towhees got to them), everything! I've been dehydrating, freezing, cooking down and otherwise using up for weeks now.



The weather this past month has been exceptionally nice. It did, however, frost for a couple days early in the month which took out my canna lilies and turned everything a beautiful orangey gold.

There was also a couple chicks hatched about this time. Stella had been sitting on her eggs and not producing, so Roger borrowed a couple fertilized eggs from some friends who owned a rooster and put them under her. We now have two cute little chicks running around behind their foster mom. And two of the pullets from the compost yard are now laying so we will be knee deep in fresh eggs pretty soon.

The Second Monday Book Club from Seattle came up to visit me for the day the first weekend in October. Our book club has been in existence since 1987 and now that I have moved up here I very much look forward to their annual visit. This particular weekend in the San Juans is Artstock, in which various art studios open their doors to guests so we took advantage of the occasion and of the weather. The book was Folly by Laurie King. It is set on a remote island in the San Juans.

Here's the mandatory picture on alder bench with dog.

And now it is time for the Wake-up Call part of this post if any of you are still with me. On Saturday, October 17th, Roger woke up and had trouble speaking. I asked him a couple questions that he was unable to answer correctly, like what his birthdate was. We ended up calling 911 and the EMT's and paramedic came. His blood pressure was way too high. They were going to fly him to hospital in Bellingham in a helicopter but a storm was coming in. So for various other reasons, I had to drive him to St Joseph's myself from the 11:15 ferry. We made it to ER seven hours after his "event". They administered various tests including an MRI which showed five past occurrences of TIAs otherwise known as mini-strokes.

Roger remained in the hospital for two more days and they administered many more tests which gave no evidence of where these TIAs were coming from. So they sent him home with instructions to take an aspirin a day for the rest of his life and to see a doctor about his high blood pressure and cholesterol. This was a long three days for both of us. But since we would not have known about the four other "events" if he hadn't had an MRI test, I guess it was a good thing.

Here is a picture of our first major harvest of chestnuts. We have over a pound of them. We also grew our best crop of quinces this year (see yellow fruit next to chestnuts). I'm planning to make quince marmalade soon. The Tyranny of the Harvest is not through with us yet. (Dum de-dum dum)