2/27 - Bump in the night; bouncing ball

Neither of us were ready for this

Mothra

Got a moth in my room. The moth was like "Aaaaah! let me out!" and trying to knock a tiny hole in the wall. I was like, "Moth, I'd like to, really. But you are a sign. I must identify you.  Hold still one sec."

Pint glass + coaster + moth + bad lighting. This didn't go all that well, and I have to tell y'all, this is an unindentified moth. I got some video of the little dude, and thought it would be enough to let him go and ID him later. I took him outside and

Oh, Hi!

Yep, that was my big plan. get crappy pictures, and then identify them later. I was amazed at how little I know about how to even look at a moth. I found a very helpful site with dozens of questions to narrow it down from 8 billion moths. And then, so many of the pictures have the dead moth pinned and splayed out. I'll have to see if I am up to the task, but I just don't know if I'm ready to start pinning them, folks.

So off they go into the question mark page (at right), and I'll just make a mental note that the porch light is there any time things are seeming a little slow.

I really did get to sleep

After the moth was excused, I got to bed, and then up in the wee hours to join the Marymoor walk Thursday morning. 

This was the highlight of the morning, for sure - getting to hear the bouncing ball call of a Western Screech-Owl from the boardwalks that head out into the north tip of Lake Sammammish. You can hear a few ducks in the background, and we also found a couple of North American Beavers, making a ruckus and swimming around in the water. 

Pixie cup lichen

Western Screech-Owls are a species of owl I had not come across yet this year, and it was nice to find one. They have had better days in King County, back before Barred Owls came in and pushed them out of several prime nesting areas. But they're hanging on! The wooded area on the south end of Marymoor is just about perfect for them. Large enough to be habitat, but not large enough to be of interest to a Barred Owl.

It can't continue like this

The tally is at 66. . . and it's 50 or so birds. The walk at Marymoor was 40 or more of those. I just want to clarify that I'm going to be finding birds and adding them to this list, but it can only go so far. 425 is going to take a couple hundred other things to get me to the finish line, so I'm not anywhere near 1/7 of the way there, as the math might imply. I almost made it 67, as the group saw a weasel during the walk, but I never had a look at it.

The lichen here is one of the few that I am familiar with by name. it's so distinctive with the tiny little cups on the ends of the stalks. I thought it was a hornwort the first time I found them - totally different kind of plant - but it was instead a lichen, part of the fungus kingdom, if I'm reading sources right.

Fungi have found ways to hijack algae, full-blown plants, toenails. . . they form relationships with organisms that are usually beneficial both ways. It had been my previous understanding that both members in this relationship would be their own species, and lichen was just like. . . lichen, but not a "species" per se. They appear to have their own little corner in the fungus kingdom, so maybe things are changing.