Showing posts with label time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label time. Show all posts
Monday, July 3, 2017
A Time of Rapid Change
The prediction of great wind and rain didn't come through and today there are heavy gray clouds above as I portage to Lake Union. I walk in a sun break, then I walk in a sun shower, and then the rain changes to sleet and back to rain again. So it goes all of the way to the lake and then some. But, it is a fresh day and it reminds me of the beginning of spring in the midwest with bright sun, wind, and a bit of snow that everyone knows is just a farewell for winter. Hardly a bird to be seen in Lake Union, the shoreline entirely dead at the hand of marinas, houseboats and shipyards. The worst runoff in the lake isn't pollutants anymore, it is people that have built there houses on water, and the effect is no different than paving a wetland. Only the deep water birds and swallows find sustenance here. Portage Bay is no different, but ah, Union Bay, the garden. And I paddle into the garden with many herons today, with the west lodge goose nest in good order, with a snipe trying unsuccessfully to hide from me. I circle the bay just to breath it all in, dry cattails, ducks, geese, but no eagles. It has been two weeks since I've seen them hunting and with the coots scattered carelessly about, it is likely that the eagles are eating something other than coot for the time being.
I stop and examine the four scent mounds (photo) in the burial island channel. The castoreum of the beaver is clear on two of them and while it is not an unpleasant smell, it does not drive me mad with passion. 
Thursday, January 12, 2017
just give us a little time
The morning starts slow. I have been preparing a very large abandoned building for an art event and this weeks work has been physical. Morning comes feeling like the fifth day of a canoe trip. My heart says, "canoe," my brain says, "lie on the couch all day," and my shoulders and arms say, "just give us a little time to get into this canoeing idea."
I go inland to a river that I've not been on since spring, or maybe before spring. There is a possibility of thunder showers and wind and those things come best on a 60 yard wide forested river rather than a square mile of open salt marsh where my head is the highest point.
I put in at the Gifford Pinchot Memorial Tree. It is a sycamore tree nearly 30 feet in circumference and over a 100 feet tall. A reasonable memorial for the first director of the National Forest Service, a man who made science and stewardship part of caring for forests and wild lands.
I start upstream as I usually do on out-and-back trips on rivers. A narrow lane of forest shelters the river, which is ten feet or more down from the top of the banks. If there is any wind, I do not feel it. The river is as shallow as I have ever seen it. We have had a dry summer and I guess that the water is about a short foot below where I've seen it in the past. I follow the deeper water when I can, winding up stream within the winding of the river. The canoe has no problem clearing the bottom, but at times the paddle runs a bit in need.
It takes a half hour to make a first bird sighting - kingfisher. Followed soon by a great blue heron that will do three five hundred yard hops up river until turning a half circle around me and heading back to where I first saw it...a pretty typical observation for them.
I wade the gravel bar. I have waded this bar before, the water on either side too shallow and fast to bother with. It is the same as in other years except that the wade is just a little bit longer. I flush 19 common mergansers and an osprey. I think that most of the mergansers have been hatched earlier this year...they can all fly at this point. I also add a few more heron sightings. Then an immature bald eagle goes to air off of my right side...and that flushes a mature bald eagle behind me...it had let me pass without my notice.
Somewhere in the township of Avon the wind arrives. It bends the tops of the trees and mostly remains vertically distant from me. When it does come to the river it swirls and arrives from different directions rippling the water but impeding me little. I turn and head back, a little faster with the current, a little fresher with the occasional breeze. The mergansers are back where I spotted them. The herons have returned to their territories. The eagles and osprey are not seen again.
Friday, November 11, 2016
Merganser Gathering Time
One can talk one's self out of canoeing on such a day with the grey sky and, once again cold air. How glad I am that I didn't.
The tide is out, or near out, being hard exactly to know such things when you are 15 miles inland from the ocean. But, the water is lower than any other time that I've been here. I put in at the Connecticut River where the Salmon River joins up. The Salmon has become a favorite, a relatively unspoiled shoreline of forest and tidal freshwater marsh with only a few houses here and there.
I spot two recent beaver felled trees on the low marshy point that separates the Salmon and the Connecticut. A hundred yards is as close as I can get, the water from here to there just a few inches deep at this tide. It's a good sign that I've not noticed in the past.
At the big bend where the forest starts to take over from the marsh, there are a hundred swallows darting and weaving over the surface of the water. The man on the radio said they are among the first of the spring migration to appear. In the shallows of the outside corner are a dozen buffleheads, and farther up are what I guess to be fifty mute swans. When I count, by some freak of nature, I count fifty swans. Another ten are much farther up but still easy to spot. That is half of what I counted on my last trip last fall. I had hoped to collect shed feathers, which were all over on that last trip...but, it seems that swans don't lose many feathers in the spring. There is not one to be seen.
When the river necks down, the swans in the lower section (Salmon Cove) give way to the common mergansers. Usually seen in ones and twos, they are gathered in tens and fifteens, a spring behavior that I've seen before. I counted 58 in a single flock one spring in Union Bay back in Seattle
The current picks up as I near the Leesville Dam. From the bridge (the only bridge) it is a challenging current made more so by shallow water that dictates progress to a narrow bit of the river.
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