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.

Three months??

Good news and bad news

COVID has made it an interesting few months. Good news that I stayed very busy throughout, bad news that I was too busy to work on the blog at all, but good news that keeping busy has finally allowed me to replace a stolen camera.

I had free time to get out to Echo Mountain today - not even the whole thing, as I had a morning Zoom call, but a little bit of rain had brought out some good targets for the new camera:

Slugs!

. . . and a snail. I almost struck out on snails, but did find one near the end. I started this post thinking "Certainly. . . certainly I'll be able to identify my little mollusk friends from the pictures today. . ." Here's hoping.

This will serve as my guide.  It's for Oregon, which should be fine, right...?  And it's set up like a dichotomous key for the most part.

1. 

This. . . is a slug

That was question 1:  Shell or no shell (NO)

Question 2: Where's the pneumostome placed on the mantle:  Huh?

Oh! erm. . . on the front part.

Question 3: Ovoid tubercules and a caudal pore, or diamond shaped tubercules and no caudal pore?

Looking like the first one on Slug #1

This gets us to the roundback slugs: arions. Only one black one in the bunch: Arion hortensis, or a Garden Arion. Although, to be fair, they mention that there are many other species, and a dissection is needed to confirm. . . yaknow, that's not happening!  This was enough to identify it as an introduced species from Europe. I will likely enter it in as A. hortensis, but count no other black roundbacks as a new species. 

2. 

Arion sp?

Same answers here, but we end up with a slightly different color. It could be A. rufus, which is a red or chocolate arion, although this one sure seemed redder...

3.

Arion rufus - red arion

With some research, I might get 2 figured out, but I like the ID for 3.  I also liked watching him (her? both?) eat:

chomp, chomp chomp

4.

It's hard to see the pneumostoma on this one, but this turned out to be a banana slug. Turns out it is a variable species, because these other ones were banana slugs too:

Ariolimax columbianus - Banana Slugs!

The picture that helped here was this:

And then I had the one snail: 

Pacific Sideband Snail - Monadenia fidelis.

This was another native.

Off to work updating the list. I'm about 150 days in so I should be around 150 species to be "on pace" with all of this. There's definitely some wildflowers waiting for me! I got out on a hike near Rainier recently, although that is decidedly out of the 425!

Addendum:

This went into the yogurt at breakfast the other day. The blackberries are the better, native blackberries - Rubus ursinus, which I found ripe in a little patch. The smooshy ones are Thimbleberry, which is so delicious, but a little seedy. The round red ones are Wild Red Huckleberry, which are romantically my favorite local berry. And finally, the light blue/purple ones. . . Oregon Grape! Oregon Grape is not something where you'd eat a handful of them, but adding them to this mix was not unwelcome.

Trailing Blackberry! Sorry, but you'll have to find your own patch.