Life at the Lake

Lake Ketchum Art Galleries is another website of ours: Click on Art Gallery to go there. Be sure to visit it, if you enjoy contemporary art.
It features painting , drawing, digital graphics, and photography.

We also have a literary website, Kingfisher Journal, which you might enjoy. Go to Kingfisher Journal.
Its content changes regularly. It is published in four issues per year, but an issue may have several editions, so please keep coming back. The site emphasizes poetry, fiction, movies, and literary criticism. There is usually a fine painting on its masthead. Often the art is by a regional artist.

Please note: Life at the Lake is archived. (See below, lower column right.) Click on the hyperlink to visit some of our older entries.

Some Representative Views of the Lake and Its Environs

The sun has not yet set, but already the moon has risen in a scudded sky

A pair of wood ducks on our porch rail, where we have a feeder placed specially for them. The only duck with prehensile feet, they can (and do) perch in adjacent cedar trees. These shy ducks will not be approached and feed only when left entirely alone.

Facing West, a brilliant October sunset holds the eye long after the sun is gone to bed

Nearby tulip fields of Skagit Valley. Actually our lake straddles two watersheds, the Skagit and Stillaguamish. But the former is more famous

.
Four domestic geese arrange themselves in eye-pleasing fashion

Ah, my boat and dock, though I used the motor
rarely and prefer to row, especially when I fish

Early moonset on the lake, a pretty time of day

Yes, it is I, with a bigger-than-average rainbow. Most our trout are planted small, but grow an inch or so a month during the summer, and by fall are of
respectable size. We always let them go.

Life At The Lake

577

"Black is one of the primary colors." It isn't? You could have fooled me.

Lake has posted possible toxic algae warnings. It is alive with clotted green algae and streaming yellow-green filamentous algae. No longer do I dare to swim the dogs each day.

That's okay. They seem to want to stay away from the stuff.

576

There are three bluegill redds (that is, nests) at the foot of my dock; this is usually the case in early June. The water if very clear, the tiny stones very clean and shiny. In all three instances, I believe the adults have spawned and now it is the job of the male bluegill to protect the redd from all intruders.

Since the water is less than a foot deep and the nests are very near to the shoreline where my dogs go swimming daily, I am careful (but probably not careful enough) to protect the nests from being trampled by eight big, black paws. A couple of times in the past hot week the dogs have individually returned to land via the nest. This causes me to cringe. But shortly afterwards the nest look undisturbed and the male--a small dark shadow--is back on duty.

Soon he will be gone and the sparkling redd will be silted over. There will be no way to tell what it was or what it produced. But I think bluegill redds are quite productive and will yield many tiny bluegills, fish that will forage aggressively on plankton, then insects, and put on considerable growth this summer. And next year, with a little luck, I will catch a few of them and look closely at the flanks, and their black (not blue) spots, and think paternally of them as I carefully unhook them from my small fly in their tiny mouths and watch them swim away.

The children of my old age.

575

Today we salute Paul Bannick and his excellent book, The Owl and the Woodpecker. The picture of the great horned owl above is from the book. It lists for $28, but can be bought a bit cheaper at a number of online booksellers sites.

It is full of sharp photos that are a job in themselves to come across and marvel over. Here are two examples. The nice thing about picture books is that they can be returned to, time after time.

What a pleasure it is! Go buy it!

574

A year ago, the State Department of Ecology and the Snohomish County Surface Water Management utility was in the process of daily monitoring the lake. They came up with the following measurement for total phosphorous on that day:

Phosphorus - total

759 ug/l

What does this mean?

Well, it means that they found 759 micrograms per liter of phosphorous suspended in the water.

Is that a lot?

Depends on what you want the lake to contain of this super nutrient that produces water plants and algae.

Pure water (try to find some) would have none, no phosphorous in suspension. We have 759 micrograms.

Gene Williams, who heads the utility, explained this to me in an email by using a time analogy:

For explaining micrograms per liter (which is parts per billion), I like to use the comparison that 1 ug/l or 1 ppb is equivalent to 1 second in 32 years. So, these are incredibly small numbers for the amount of phosphorus that should be in a healthy lake (perhaps around 20 to 30 ug/l). And, in Lake Ketchum and in the stream coming from the farm, we see much larger numbers than this.

So this would equate with 12 and 2/3 minutes in 32 years. Not much, is it? Still it is more than any other lake in Snohomish County and perhaps in the state, with the possible exception of a few, including Lake Steilacoom.

Coming in second is not bad, when you are talking about pollution. Or is it?

573

Okay, so the tulip season is about over and we are into rhododendrons and azaleas, with a sprinkling of poppies in bloom. And, yes, the big red is out of focus.

Want to see it in sharp focus? Okee-dokee. Is it better? I thought not.

I vow to keyboard in more entries this summer. Yes, I've been sadly negligent.

A vow is not quite a promise, you understand. But it is more than a pledge.

Fishing, by the way, continues good, with about every tenth fish a holdover of 16-17 inches--a bright rainbow that must weigh about two pounds and fights as though he is an apprentice steelhead.