I haven’t seen much bird activity along my mid-August trails recently, but here at home there is always something going on.
The suet block, seed feeders, and peanut butter offerings are popular. The usual crowd of juncos is mostly juveniles in various stages of getting their adult plumage. Chickadees are regular visitors, having a bit of this and a bit of that. Nuthatches come for sunflower seeds but, oddly, ignore the peanut butter; earlier in the year, I saw them sampling everything.
A male hairy woodpecker still comes occasionally, hacking off chunks of suet. And the jays loudly claim gobbets of peanut butter and suet; they also hang on the side of the feeder over the pond, tipping little cascades of seeds down to the mallards. The yellow-rumped warblers and varied thrushes that were so attentive to suet and peanut butter earlier in the season have been gone for some time.
Hummingbirds have become quite rare; presumably most of them are on their way south.
Out on the pond, there had been three or four female mallards, all feeding on fallen seeds quite peaceably and tolerating my appearance on the deck to replenish the feeders. But more recently, they have been joined by other mallards, some of which have a tinge on green on their heads and a hint of russet on their chests, transitioning to or from breeding plumage. These individuals are more aggressive, often shoving others away from the feeding area. Now the whole group is more nervous and flighty, taking off in a panic when I go out on the deck.
Although I’ve had poor luck seeing birds along the trails and in the woods, others have been more fortunate. A friend who lives on Douglas can look out the window and down on some big red alder trees, where waves of warblers (Townsend’s, Wilson’s, orange-crowned) are reported to come by. And out on the dike trail, where I saw no little birds at all, expert birders saw two species of warbler and kinglets being somewhat agitated by a nearby merlin who surely had them in mind for lunch. So the woods were not as empty as they seemed to me.
A walk up Crow Hill to the big meadow showed us both blue and white gentians, fat seed pods of chocolate lily, some old bear digs in the moss and an old bear scat. Blue darner dragonflies zipped to and fro; we have several species here, not easy to identify. One female landed next to a pond, inserting her eggs into some mosses and brown grassy stems. Unless the water level comes up, any larvae that hatched would have to crawl a few inches to reach the water where they might find food.
A startled porcupine scuttled up a small pine and stopped, about fifteen feet up, just hanging on to the trunk. There it “froze,” not moving for long minutes, until we were well away from that place. It made a conspicuous lump on the side of the tree, but apparently it thought it was hiding, in a way…
A few days later, on a morning with only one big cruise ship in town, a walk on trails near the glacier visitor center took us past the stand of white baneberries (a color-variant of the red baneberry) not far from the pavilion. There were several new willow roses, produced when a little fly oviposits in the end of a willow shoot. This halts shoot elongation but the leaves of the shoot continue to develop, now forced to be crowded together, making the “rose.” The fly larva feeds on the inside of the rose.
Sockeye salmon were in Steep Creek. Some of them had been in fresh water for a while, as indicated by the moldy look of their dorsal surfaces; water levels were low in the stream, so tail tips and backs got exposed to air. I didn’t happen to see any Dolly Varden char, which often come up the stream along with the salmon and feast on fresh salmon eggs. There was no sign of bear activity along the stream, and only one small bear scat on a trail. A ranger confirmed that there has been a real lack of bear activity out there. I really miss the Valley bears. They used to come into my yard, roll around and eat horsetail, peer in the windows, and mosey on up the hill. It is lonesome without them!
• Mary F. Willson is a retired professor of ecology. “On The Trails” appears every Wednesday in the Juneau Empire.
A blue darner lays her eggs in a shallow pond. (Photo by Bob Armstrong)
