Tuesday, Feb. 18, was my monthly beached bird survey. The by-the-wind sailors, Velella velella were thick in the wrack lines. Every so often, when the wind is right, these jellyfish relatives blow up on shore in great masses. The rest of the time, they sail along atop the waves. You can see their topsail in the lower photo.
The wind had calmed and left this beautiful, sunny day, wind free. Chief Kiawanda Rock was reflected in the wet sand.
With all the sunny days this week, I took several walks in our woods after cutting berries under the pines, a never ending chore. Sometimes, Shirley Puppy walked with me at least part of the way.
This day two deer watched me from the edge of the adjoining field.
They were curious but undisturbed by me...
However, the dog was another story. The sight of old, deaf and slow Shirley made them bolt over a fence and out of sight. Shirley never saw them.
In the woods, the mystery lilies were up, the ones that get eaten or trampled... or something... before getting very tall. Or one was up on my first trip.
The next time I went there were two and I decided to cage them in hopes of keeping the deer from eating them, if that's what happens to them.
The third trip I checked them and then walked down the deer path a little farther, and found two more wee lilies coming up, one on either side of this mossy log. Not sure how to protect these.
On one of my trips, a flock of colorful Golden-crowned Kinglets flitted through the mossy trees right next to me. But they moved too fast for me to get my camera on them and focused. So I just took shots as quickly as I could. Mostly I got mossy, out of focus limbs. But one photo did have the colorful head of a kinglet showing.
You have to look close. It is in the very center of the photo, above the limb running from upper left to lower right. Here it is zoomed way up... A kinglet foot is visible below the limb.
The rosy patch shows it is a male Golden-crowned Kinglet. The females just have yellow.
On Saturday, 2/22/2020, friend Carol, Johnny and I drove up Agency to look for Dippers. The last time we took Carol up was when the water in the creek was insanely high and no Dippers were anywhere to be seen. Today the creek was back in its banks, with plenty of rocks within it providing perches for Dippers. We saw six.
As always, I had to take a photo of the cliff reflection in the quarry pond.
Carol spotted the first creature in the creek... a beaver swimming upstream! It is at the far right in this photo.
The tree branches in the way made focusing difficult, so I trained my camera on a relatively branch-free area upstream and waited for the beaver to swim into it.
Here Carol watches for Dippers by the creek.
And here is the first one I was able to photograph without bushes in the way.
At the highest upstream bridge, where Dippers have nested in the past, we saw and heard this Dipper perched atop a stick in the middle of the creek. It was singing non-stop without ever opening its bill. The only movement was from the tail. Carol heard another one singing downstream from this one.
On the way back to our farm, we saw a couple more just below this waterfall.
What a beautiful day. The nights are very cold but the days this week have been lovely. It is fun to share this lovely world with friends, in person or through photos.
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