7/5/2025   News  (link to here)

While Darchelle met Ellen and family at PCC for lunch I called Mom. Unlike the last time we tried to connect on Teams, almost two weeks ago now, today my voice was strong enough for her to hear me and we talked for over an hour. The bugs are mostly gone so she's been having lunch outside on the porch (or patio, I wasn't sure which) from time to time. The garden, and her pots on the back deck, aren't producing any vegetables yet but she has lots of flowers - peonies wrapping up, roses along the driveway at their peak and Shasta Daisies coming soon. A bear broke into the two nest boxes at the edge of the field in which chickadees and Tree Swallows had begun to nest, presumably the same bear that got a family of bluebirds in one of Rick's boxes down in the lower field. Mom has been taking in the bird feeders at night to keep it from getting into those as well. The new septic tank is all installed, replacing for $7800 the cesspool which has been rotting near the upper end of Mom's old flower garden since I was a child.
Speaking of lunch on the porch, I asked about Mom's neighbor across the street, also 97, also named Alice, who often walks over to say hi if she sees Mom out. She and Alice Proctor, while never close friends, have been summer neighbors for most of their lives. The Proctor's three-story shingled house was built around 1907 by a woman named Buttman who first learned about Jackson from Mom's great-grandparents on board a ship while crossing the Atlantic. Alice's grandparents bought it in the 1920's when they retired from keeping the White Mountain Inn 500 feet away across the field. According to Mom the house was built as a summer home (a dilatory domicile in the high society language of the Social Register +) and has never been winterized. Alice's parents Will and Louise moved in upon their retirement from running the White Mountain Inn sometime around 1950 but as long as I knew them, they migrated south to Florida for the winter. Alice migrates south to the West Side Road, only a twenty minute drive even at her age.
It was Will who taught me to kill trout. Seeing me walk across his front yard one day carrying a forked alder stick with several six inch Brook Trout dangling from it, he called me over to admire my catch. When he realized that the fish were still alive he admonished me, "You need to kill them so they don't suffer." He showed me how to stick my thumb inside the trout's mouth and snap its head back. "Always kill your trout" he told me in his gruff voice, and after that I always did. A few years later, when I was probably in seventh or eighth grade, he gave me some more advice. "When you're deciding what to do for a living, make sure that it's something you're good at. You need to be the best at whatever you do." At the time, living in rural New Hampshire and soon to start high school, that advice felt almost timely. When I finally did decide on a career nearly 20 years laer, it was my wife's advice that drove my decision. "If you're going to spend all your time on that computer, you need to figure out how to get paid for it.", she told me. I did and I was good, if not the best, at it. But I digress.
As we usually do, Mom and I talked about the books we've been reading. We favor similar genres, mysteries set in interesting locations, and historical fiction. Both of the mystery series which Darchelle and I have enjoyed over the past several years, the Inspector Gamache novels by Louise Penny and the Mike Bowditch mysteries by Paul Doiron, were recommendations from Mom. Today she had another recommendation, relayed from Sarah: the Irish Village Mysteries by Carlene O'Connor. I read the first chapter of the first one, Murder in an Irish Village, on Libby + and found it colorful, engaging and fast-paced, but perhaps a little too reminiscent of a romance novel for my taste. Pretty heavy on the Irish too but I checked out the audiobook anyhow to get Darchelle's take on it.
Later...Darchelle loved the story, the setting, the characters and above all, the reader's Irish accent, so we have found our next mystery series.

7/25/2025   Mom fell  (link to here)
My 97 year-old mother fell two days ago. As falls go it was minor but when she was complaining of back pain yesterday afternoon, she agreed to Dee's suggestion that they go down to the hospital to have her checked out. That's when I heard about it. Someone from the emergency room called me to ask for my consent to treat her, but they didn't know what was wrong. I found it a little alarming that Mom apparently couldn't herself give consent to be treated but the person on the phone promised to call back within an hour or so with more information, so we agreed to wait.
Darchelle and I were on our way to Walla Walla for the weekend so we stopped at the next gas station, which happened to be the cheap place in Thorp with the prominent sign proclaiming in big red letters "UNLEADED 3.84", and tried to contact Sarah in Sweden. She didn't answer, not too surprising considering it was the middle of the night there, but Darchelle was pretty sure she'd been able to leave a message. She sent a quick email too and we continued on our way, passing the remaining three hours of the drive in conversation with Susan Pellandini about her new job prospects. I eavesdropped, whispered my two cents worth of advice now and then (my voice was weaker than usual) and watched the temperature display on the dashboard. I was rooting for it to break 100 but it only reached 99, in Richland, or maybe it was Kennewick; I have trouble remembering which is which.
At any rate by then we'd heard back from both the hospital and Dee that Mom was OK, just a bit sore, and would be going home shortly with a fistful of Tylenol. This morning we heard from Sarah that the Tylenol hadn't done the trick and Mom had not had a good night. By the time I talked with Mom on the phone after lunch, she and Dee had returned to the hospital, confirmed that Mom's discomfort while breathing was not caused by Pneumothorax, and had prevailed on the nursing staff to arm her with Tylenol+Codeine for the next few days. Mom sounded better on the phone and she was able to hear me well enough that we had our best phone conversation in months.
I also enjoyed catching up with Sarah and Roger on FaceTime once we got the serious (albeit good) news about Mom out of the way. It's hot and humid in Sweden so they've been swimming several times a day but not in the evening, when the mosquitoes get bad. They missed most of the chanterelles, which fruited while they were at the magic conference in Italy, but were headed into the woods this afternoon to harvest blueberries, which are just coming on. The potatoes in their garden were coming on too and they'd just enjoyed the first of their traditional midsummer meals of new potatoes and pickled herring when wild boars came through during the night and plowed up the rest of their potato patch. Roger was philosophical about it; after all, he'd only planted the potatoes there because the boars had visited in the spring and plowed up the lawn. I suggested he procure a rifle and supplement what's left of their potato crop with some roast pork.
It is a bit ironic that my best conversations with family happen as a result of Mom's falls.

7/31/2025   July  (link to here)
We dedicated July to recovering from all our birdwatching in the first half of the year. We spent only two days in the field, submitted just seven checklists and saw or heard 68 species of which only two were new for the year. Our count of 319 species is 7 ahead of last year but 14 behind 2022.

8/02/2025   Northern Parula  (link to here)
Of the birds which we'd not yet recorded in Washington, the Northern Parula Warbler was probably the one we most wanted to see so when one was found in Lyons Ferry Park yesterday afternoon we immediately made plans to get over there. Darchelle wanted to leave as soon as we could pack the car but I pointed out that we couldn't get there before sunset so we left before sunrise this morning instead. We left at 0510 and crossed Snoqualmie Pass as the clouds overhead were tinged with salmon pink. "Pink sky in the morning, birders take warning" the old adage advises and improbably, we did run into rain, though not until we'd perused the Parulas (there were two!) and were back in the car writing up our checklist L+ notes.
When we arrived at the park at about 0920 we recognized the Denny's car in the parking lot so we pulled alongside and they assured us that yes, they had seen the bird, or more likely the birds, though it had taken over an hour to find them. During the four hour drive over Darchelle had several times voiced her hope that the Parula would still be present and the history of previous sightings suggested that her hope was justfied, but I resisted the urge to share her optimism. Most of the handful of records over the past several decades had lingered for at least a few days but one or two had been one day wonders. Regardless, we were both relieved to hear the Denny's report.
Liam came over to greet us while we were visiting with Mike and Merry Lynn. Mike was telling me about his YouTube series + about the desert flora and fauna of the Columbia Basin, 17 episodes begun in 2018 and completed just last month. We told them that it had been good to see them again then followed Liam over to the patch of trees and bushes where they had seen the warbler half an hour earlier.
We watched (Brian) and searched (Darchelle) for the bird, and visited with Elizabeth (both of us), for about an hour before Liam spotted it again in the same leaning alder at the water's edge in which he had last seen it. My view of the warbler was inconclusive but Darchelle, Liam and Jason took photos while it foraged ten feet above my head in a leafy young elm. After five minutes or so we lost track of it and soon afterwards, said our goodbyes. The others left but hoping for a better view and more photos, we continued our vigil. Our persistence paid off.
After an hour of watching the little beach under the leaning alder where goldfinches (American and Lesser), warblers (Yellow and McGillivray's) and other species (American Robins, a Lazuli Bunting) were coming down to bathe, I spotted another little bird drop down to take a drink. To my naked eye it appeared to have a dark chest so when it flew up into the trees I told Darchelle where I thought it had gone and she quickly refound the Northern Parula foraging in thickets at eye level, where it appeared to be pecking at, or perhaps eating, red nightshade berries. She got a few more photos then wheeled me over for close albeit partial views, a nice treat.
We counted 23 species during our three-hour vigil at Lyons Ferry Park L+. Robins seemed to be the most numerous though they were outnumbered by Barn Swallows. We also stopped briefly at County Line Ponds and Washtucna, accumulating 48+ species for our day, more than 2/3 of our total for the entire month of July.

8/03/2025   Ballard Farmers Market  (link to here)
Darchelle and Monica went to the Ballard Farmers Market today. Darchelle bought flowers for the kitchen, a Croque Madame crepe for me and a four-pack of Propolis SPA-H2O for herself. That's the non-alcoholic sparkling water counterpart to their Spruce Pale Ale which has become one of my favorite beers. She'd have bought me a four-pack of that but they'd run out. At $16 the crepe was a bit pricy but the combination of egg, ham, Gruyere, Bechamel and spinach was delicious.

8/04/2025   Big Four  (link to here)
We drove up the Mountain Loop Highway out of Granite Falls east of Everett to look for a previously reported Tennessee Warbler around the west parking area for the Big Four Ice Caves. We didn't find it, nor had we expected to; a posse of Snohomish County birders had searched for several hours the day before without success and they had started early enough, like 0630, to optimize their chances. We on the other hand, despite going to bed early, did not arrive until nearly 10. I don't think our extra sleep hurt us much; we still counted 42 species L+ in the marsh and adjacent forest.
We scrutinized the alder grove on the east side of the west parking lot M+ where we believed the Tennessee had been seen, and where the American Redstart(s?) are known to hang out, but didn't see much activity so Darchelle wheeled me out across the marsh on the boardwalk (boardwalks are not my favorite substrate though I appreciate the access they offer) and around through the woods to the east lot. We took our time. I asked Darchelle to photograph some of the flowers and take a few landscape shots and she got some nice ones. We've been trying to remember to get habitat shots for a while now but since eBird began accepting them we've been more motivated. Maybe I'm getting bored with the birds of Washington, having seen almost all of them almost every year for the past decade, but today anyhow I was more interested in the flowers. Though I did enjoy the Vaux's Swifts zipping by at eye-level and so close that even I could discern some plumage details. Usually they're up around the treetops, which at Big Four (and many other places in western Washington) puts them half a football field away from me, well beyond plumage detail range for anything smaller than a Great Blue Heron.
But about the flowers. The common ones - Fireweed, purple Aster, Spirea - I recognized but others were unfamiliar. Unable to hold a hand lens up to my eye or lean forward to peer through the binocular microscope I bought a couple of decades ago for that purpose, I can't examine the details of foliage and flower structure to identify plants the way I learned in my college botany class, though thanks to that experience 50 years ago I can often make a pretty good guess as to the family of an unknown flower. That helps. The rest is up to Google. Google photo search is surprisingly effective for a ballpark ID and online sites such as the Burke Herbarium + for Washington are helpful for getting the species right. I hear there are now some impressive phone apps out there too but without functioning fingers, or an intelligible voice either for that matter, I'm pretty well fucked in the phone department. But that's another story.
With AI tools able to instantly identify any flora or fauna larger than a flea, maybe there's no point in trying to store that knowledge in my own head, but for me knowing the trees and shrubs, the birds and the bees (OK, maybe just the butterflies) is like recognizing friends in a crowd. They provide points of connection. We have history together. Whether birds or flowers or fungi, I remember them from other places and have known them in other contexts, knowledge and memories which enrich today's experience. AI just makes it easier to learn their names - the first step into any new friendship.
I made several new friends in the marsh today. Angelica genuflexa, named for the bended knee pose of its under-curled compound leaves. Stachys cooleyae, popular today with the local Rufous Hummingbirds. I met some old friends too. As a little boy in rural New Hampshire I used to add spikes of Spirea to wildflower bouquets of Black-eyed Susans and purple Asters. Back then my mother called it Steeplebush and it, like the Aster, was not the same species as we found in the marsh but rather a close relative. Regarding the Angelica, some and perhaps most species are edible with a sweet scent of anise or fennel but be very careful because in habits and appearance it is easily mistaken for one of the deadliest denizens of the woods - Water Hemlock.
In the woods it could be that plants bloom earlier than those in the open marsh because today we found more fruit than flowers. Red seems to be the preferred color. Twisted-stalk, Bunchberry (a height-challenged Dogwood), Thimbleberry and Devil's Club all had red berries on offer. We didn't see any takers today but I'm sure they'll all be gone by fall. The Thimbleberry has showy white flowers rendered ordinary by their abundance but a kissing cousin, the Purple-flowering Raspberry, was a very special plant when I was a kid in New Hampshire on account of its rarity and its beautiful magenta-purple flowers. The Common Hemp-nettle was new for me but is not native to Washington so I found it less exciting than the other new ones.
It was a good day for flower photos, not as rewarding for bird shots but Darchelle scored a few. The Kingbird was new for the county for her. All the vireos which we were able to identify were Warbling thugh Darchelle might have seen a Red-eyed. The Yellowthroats were not singing; this juvenile came in to see what the Song Sparrows were upset about. There was nothing to see. We had alarmed the sparrows by playing a recording of a Song Sparrow's contact/alarm calls. The metallic "trit trit trit" calls and whistled "wit three beers" songs of the several Olive-sided Flycatchers around the marsh along with a variety of American Robin calls and an occasional Raven or Pileated Woodpecker call provided the acoustic backdrop for our day. Also the squeaky notes of a family of Canada Jays in the on the south side of the marsh where the Catbird was supposed to be.
I'm a little shaky on the woody plants of the area, even some of the conifers, though if pressed I'd state with an air of confidence that the big trees around the marsh were a mix of Western Hemlock, Pacific Silver Fir, Western Red Cedar and Sitka Spruce. They grow fast; one fallen log 18" in diameter was only about 110 years old. Deciduous trees (it would be a stretch to call them hardwoods) were mostly Red Alder and Black Cottonwood. Presumably there were some Big-leaf Maples too but I didn't notice any. Willows 10-15 feet tall dominate areas of the marsh; I think they are Salix scouleriana but I'm not sure. I'm also not sure about the common shrub/small tree with small clusters of green fruits growing around and sometimes in the marsh. My suspicion is a hawthorne based on the fruits and the general appearance, probably Crataegus douglasii + but it would be nice to know for sure.
The female MacGillivray's Warbler was our first and last bird of the day. The Townsend's Warbler, not pictured, was our most numerous species; we found a flock of 20 foraging in an alder tree along the entrance road.