Moth Madness - March 6, 2022

Well, I just realized that I'm actually adding highlights from 2 days here. Yesterday, I was on a longer hike out on Wilderness Peak at Cougar Mountain. I was pleasantly surprised when I heard a Northern Pygmy-Owl tooting on the way down. 

It hadn't sunk in that I hadn't come across one of these little guys since I started this project. Nice!

Today, it was a shorter walk on the same side of Cougar - the Bear Ridge Trail. I'd had plans to go a bit farther than I did, but I got stopped by the sheer number of moths flitting around the early part of the trail. Indian Plum seemed to be the flowers they were after, and sections of the trail that had lots of Indian Plum were pretty thick with these little guys. 

I was not really prepared, just had the phone camera on me, and it's just not easy to get pictures of these tiny moths! Getting close enough before they fly is one challenge, and the other is hoping that the camera focuses properly. This first image came out good enough to get one identification: 

Mesoleuca gratulata - Western White-ribboned Carpet Moth

This is a member of the geometer moth family. Geometer (earth measurer) is a name that makes sense when you've seen their larvae, also known as inchworms! They bunch up their bodies, bringing their hind legs to their forelegs, then reach forward to straighten out again. 

This one... 

I'm still working on. I'm pretty sure it's another geometer moth. It was so similar in size, structure, and activity to the other one. I had several pictures of this one, and the one feature that is a sticking point for me based on those pictures is the almost plain orange in the hindwings. There's a little bit of speckling, but the hindwings really are almost completely orange. The forewings have much more patterning, obviously. In the best lit images, the lighter patches are looking tan, while the darker patches are a mix of black/dark brown/speckled with light spots. It's very rocky road ice cream. Those dark patches are really two bands, as can be seen here - one running along the trailing edge of the forewing, and another right through the middle parallel to the other. There's a little bit of smudginess close to the head as well on the forewing - visible here. 

One more image for perspective. 

Great little hike - I got nearly nowhere, but had fun watching moths and turning over logs. 

Salamanders on Echo Mountain: 1/31/2022

Birding in Douglas County and Klickitat County put me behind a little bit, so there have been no entries for some time! 

But, in the spirit of not giving up on a good project, I thought I'd hike Echo Mountain, and give a few logs a turn, looking for amphibians! This was not the first time I've done this on a hike, but it's the first time I've had success!

My first salamander was a Long-toed Salamander, with a big yellow stripe down the back. This was not too far from the water, which... come on, Tim, why weren't you checking places like this (near lakes) for amphibians more often? Given the reaction when the log was overturned (no reaction at all), I am guessing this little guy may have been hibernating. 

Salamander number two! This is a Northwestern Salamander. The fun thing about these salamanders is that they are extremely toxic. They would kill nearly anything that tried to eat them, except... for local garter snakes! The two species have evolved in response to each other, building up toxicity and resistance to the toxins respectively. Similar to the other salamander, this one was pretty unresponsive, and likely in hibernation. 

White Flag; Overtime

Well, my timeline for this project did expire! 4/25 and my 425 days wrapped up with me squarely in the low 200's. Other projects have come in and taken over the focus, and I just flat-out realized how out of reach this was! 

Any other blog I've written has had a clean ending, but I don't think this one will. Why? Because I was out yesterday in the Renton Natural Area, and caught sight of a Short-tailed Weasel! Well, not just because of that, but I absolutely got it added to the Tally at right. I've got more exploring to do locally, and with things opening up, perhaps there will be more opportunities to do that exploring with people that know their mushrooms, their mosses, and their fish. 

So who knoooows when this will end, but it will certainly be something that is edited at a breathtakingly slow pace.

Mushrooms - 11/26

I had to get around to these guys eventually, and some boletes growing out in the yard were the push I needed. All of these phots to sort through!  I hopped online and found the Puget Sound Mycological Society, and (of course) blasted them with 20 images at once. The autoreply came back letting the mushroomID user that they are swamped right now, and as such, they need two things: 1) Try to figure it out before you send a request, and 2) Send one at a time. 

It's been interesting to cull through the images, and I thankfully got a lot of them with stems, gills, and caps taken from different angles. So I'm going to spend some time making an honest ID effort here, and will type it up once I figure it out or get stuck. 

1. Fly Agaric

I went out the day after a good rain up to Echo Mountain and came across these guys. Same species of mushroom, apparently! The bottom one seems to be Yellow Fly Agaric - there are many subspecies. I am waiting to hear about the top one. These are the classic toadstool mushrooms, and are quite universally as toxic as one would expect. 

Amanita muscaria is what I was going with, just based on pictures, but I did get a response on these from the PSMS - A. muscaria is seen around here, but is European, and more likely to show up around imported plants, where it is seen rarely. Amanita chrysoblema is our local one, very common, and found near native plants. This is what the DNA is telling people, even if 99 percent of the field guides would not tell us that. . . yet!

2. Giant Funnel Cap

I didn't check this one, but it's giant.... it's a funnel... it's white... and the stem details looked similar to what I saw on an identification site. Apparently they are edible, although goodness, I'm not pushing my luck with any of these! They do stand out, so if I see one in the future, it would go through a more rigorous ID, and a second or third opinion. It was just fun to find something that big.

3. Turkey Tail Mushroom

This one was fun - a pretty common bracket fungus that lives up to its name, looking like a fanned out tail. 

4. "Did it smell like cucumbers?"

Hm?

This was the question I got to help narrow it down. This. . . is exactly why I started this nonsense. I mean. Not just cucumber smells, but because of the deep dive it would take to identify some of the things over the course of the year. It gives me a window into the world of people who *know this kind of stuff*. I will smell my little brown mushrooms from now on, and I may even try to do a spore print, but . . . yowzers, I got 5 mushrooms in before falling over this cliff. 

I am unlikely to become a serious mushroom person, but I want to be able to speak their language at least a little. 

To be continued. . . 

A Few Months of Moths

 

A Lucky Find

This particular moth may or may not have been a lucky find. I couldn't get it identified beyond the geometer moth family. My real lucky find was www.butterflyidentification.org. I was just putzing around trying to identify some of my finds, and coming up empty. I shot them an email with 8 images, and they responded back with some great help. 

Sure, a few of them, they needed more details - like the one above - but some others ended up being identifiable. 

White-striped Black Moth

Apparently, this little guy is also from the geometer moths. It was found at Snoqualmie Pass in July just as I started up the ski hill trail. 

Divided Olethreutes Moth

Same hike, a little farther up the hill. This was a puzzling pic, because of the lighting, which makes it look a little blue! This moth is in the leafroller family.

Western Tent-Caterpillar

You know these caterpillars! In some summers, we get crazy outbreaks of these, and they can completely devour the foliage off of plants. It sounds like more often than not, trees rebound well enough from the infestation - that was my experience when I had them on my property in some arbor vitaes. It would have been a weird year if I hadn't seen these. . . not that this hasn't been a weird year!

Single-dotted Wave Moth

And the final moth for the list - a Single-dotted Wave Moth. This is another geometer moth, which seems to make sense, as geometers are a huge family. Hopefully I'll have some opportunities to find a few more families as I move along with this. 

There's still a little backlog of flowers and mushrooms to get through, and it's a rainy fall day right now... so hopefully I'll be adding more soon!

Spider Season and other goings-on

Excuses for these three months? Car problems, COVID, and a crazy lot of writing work. No time, restricted life, and no way to get around with the free time that would arise. So I've been making mental notes, and getting pictures here and there, and finally am getting around to adding it all to the list. 

Spiders first. I'm not all that scared of spiders, but. . . I woke up to a Giant House Spider on my wall. This killed a couple hours of my day, in part because I have seen one before. The Giant House Spider is like... 5 inches across. That's fine. I have no worries about that, and comfortably believe that they are not a threat to people. All of these things I can state and believe.

They also happen to be the fastest spider in the world. 

That's the kind of information that the brain doesn't really need. I sat there and looked up at this thing wondering. . . how does that fact translate into my life at this moment? If I try to kill or remove this spider, is there going to be a flurry of spidering that I'm just not ready for?? So my options were 1) just kill it and be done with it 2) just put it into some Tupperware and walk it outside and be done with it, or 3) leave... and come back and wonder where it went, or 4) sit and watch for the rest of eternity.

I tried plan 4 for a bit, but eventually gave in. Plan 2, phase 2a was to send an exploratory poke up towards the spider to see what fast looked like before actually trying to catch it. He (I assume, based on my reading of September spiders) dropped to the ground and ran. . . at 1/498750439872 the speed my brain had imagined. I got him into some Tupperware and out to the yard. I felt good about it but was given layers of doubt afterwards. "You may as well have killed it. They live in houses - it won't make it." but then I also read that it was invasive (and when is that ever good?). So in the end, I don't know what happened to the guy, or even what my hopes for him were.

Other stuff:

Narrow-collared Snail-eating Beetle

Wow. This was kind of a fun find! Not only was it pretty easy to identify, but. . . it is doing its job in the picture, chomping away on a poor slug.

What is this??

I ask, because I found two different species that looked pretty good. Carolina Locust, and Bird Grasshopper.

An image of the locust: 

credit noted - snipped from insectidentifcation.org

There's a lot to like about the comparisons here - they are very similar in color and structure. Nothing jumped out that was obviously off and that shows in both pictures really well. 

Bird Grasshoppers:

This is attributed to "Karen" on whatsthatbug.com. It's so similar, although the little loops on the legs are pretty prominent in every picture I saw for this species (and many of the pictures looked very different from this one!), so I am inclined to think that it was a Carolina Locust. The habitat also matches up - my picture was taken along a dry powerline cut, which was almost exactly what most sites considered prime habitat for this widespread bug.

Boreal Bluet

I did make a run up to Snoqualmie Pass (just inside the 425!) for a July hike. There will be many other pictures to sort through, but this one was a fun find: A Boreal Bluet! This is a damselfly found at high elevations in the Cascades, and it stayed still long enough for me to get 10 bad pictures and this pretty passable one.

For the identification, I want to azdragonflies.com, and found this: 

The bar is tough to see, but all other markings matched up well. Other bluets are so similar - it took a few rounds of looking through them to settle on this.

Firefly?

No picture, sorry! Hiking at Squak Mountain, I saw this little guy. My friend snapped a picture and used an app to identify it as a firefly. I asked for it later, and he'd deleted it, because it "wasn't a great picture". (He needs to see the images in this blog!). I was surprised to hear that there are absolutely fireflies in the Pacific Northwest - they just don't glow! Ellychnia is the genus, but there are many species within, and I couldn't have made a guess just from my recollection of the beetle.

Updates have me at 205. . . but there's actually quite a few flowers and fungi to get through. 425 is going to be a stretch at this point, but it will be fun to push it and see what I can find!

Echo Mountain again, of course.

It's been hard to get out, and Echo Mountain has been a good option this week when I've had an hour to escape. It's off of 196th, which runs from Petrovitsky to the Maple Valley Highway. Spring Lake Park has a little parking area for it, and it is maintained by King County.

The trails here are pretty extensive, and I've actually gotten lost once. I walked up to the peak, and thought I was following a clever way back. . . but ended up on the other side of the mountain! It gets pretty wild as you move off towards the Maple Valley Highway, and morphs into an open space. I've loved this spot because it's one of the more pristine places nearby. The birds shift: from crow to raven (heard one today), from house finch to purple finches (and red crossbills today).

It's also a place where I have had Northern Pygmy-Owls kind of regularly (if twice out of three attempts can count). And today there were Barred Owls.

Appears to be a juvenile top and adult at bottom

I did this a little backwards, as this was the end of the walk, not the start, but it was just fun to actually get to see them. Fun. . . outside of the hissing noises and threatening looks. I moved along.

My real reason for getting up Echo Mountain is that the top has been noted as a place that holds some rare plant species. I went up blindly thinking I would just take some pictures and figure out what I was seeing!

On the way up, I got heavily distracted by things that I did recognize: trailing blackberry, thimbleberry, wild red huckleberry, and finally... salal!  I just need to get a salal pie now. . . challenging in part because you really have to pick them from the stem. Nearly any other berry, you grab the berry and get all you want. With salal, this results in the berry kind of sliiiiding off of a sleeve, and it's just not the same. This is a native plant that was used as an important food source. I am going to start gathering them for my morning yogurt, and for drying if I can get enough of them!

Salal

Well...I'm still working on the pictures. I had a few times where I just took the shot, and thought that it had come out a little sharper than it had. But still there should be some guesses for these guys. Cross checking against plants that the local native plant people have noted up at the top.

So... I now look at the note from the native plant society...

"In late April a fine assortment of plants should be in bloom. Chocolate lilies (Fritillaria affinis), deer's tongue (Erythronium oregonum), two species of wild strawberries (Fragaria vesca and virginiana), native self-heal (Prunella vulgaris) underneath a blanket of serviceberry (Amelanchier alnifolia); and growing on the steep, seepy, mossy rock faces two species of monkey flower (Mimulus guttatus and alsinoides), goldback fern (Pentagramma triangularis), maidenhair spleenwort (Asplenium trichomanes), and Wallace's selaginella (Selaginella wallacei). Later in May the mountaintop turns pink with sea blush (Plectritis congesta) and in June a big bloom of fool's onion (Triteleia hyacinthina). On the 1 mile trail to the summit look for slender toothwort (Cardamine nuttallii) and sweet cicely (Osmorhiza chilensis), along with a full complement of our lowland forest species. On the return you can take a trailless route to a nice bog/fen complex with Sphagnum spp., bog laurel (Kalmia occidentalis), Labrador tea (Rhododendron groenlandicum), wild cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccos), and of course some fine Carices."

and then I look at the calendar, and see that it is June. . . and apply the palm to the face. But why not look up some of the plants that were in bloom a month ago... just in case.

Native self-heal

Ha! One, anyway. This one is one I had seen around so often, I just hadn't registered it as rare. . . or identified it!  It is a native, and considered a yard weed. The name comes because it can be used for throat ailments. 

Chocolate lilies, no. Serviceberry... I feel dumb now, because I feel like I've seen it around? No monkeyflowers... I had actually hoped to find them! 

Goldback fern - obviously I have to go back and look for it. Ferns stick around. I'm guessing the same is true for. . . spleenwort? what's a spleenwort??

Wallace's sela... slage... that stuff looks familiar, and I'll look more carefully as well. I just figured mossy stuff I would never identify. But is that even a moss? Lycophytes are... something I'll read about. Sea blush and fool's onion, no, and no.

Slender toothwort and sweet cicely are a maybe. Not ones I got pictures of. 

What did I shoot?

1.

Well, there was this low-grower with delicate white flowers. This will be some research. . . Other pictures were meh, but this one I feel like figuring out for sure.

Also on the walk:

snaaaaaaake!

Puget sound garter snake. I may have had this one before... but this "counts" for sure.