Blog 121 Lake Ketchum Art Galler

The wood ducks are back. At least a pair of them are and came to the feeder on March 26. And Miriam Lancaster, who saw them in the morning of the same day, said there was at least one more, a second male.

I immediately brought out our old feeder and stocked it with fresh food; by evening a pair had found our dock again. I presume they remembered it and the source of food from a year ago, and perhaps years before then.

We haven't been successful in seeing a large brood of ducklings raised to maturity in the past couple of years. "Rats," my friend the fish biologist Curt Kraemer, suggests. And that the rats get either the eggs or the ducklings in the bird house.

Wish us a little good luck this coming spring, will you? We shall need it. Or rather the woodies will.

Where did the winter go? I don't know, but I'm glad to have it gone and this early spring that exists in its place. Every year I catalog the plants as they set their blooms and open up. But not this years. Suffice it to say that everything is about a month early. And every year I walk around the yard and the shallow woods that lines the lake and snap photos of whatever strikes my fancy. Hence these early daffodils, with the brilliant yellow blossoms just opening up on their beds of green. And how quickly those new leaves and blossoms fade, whither, and droop.

The good news is that there are new blossoming plants coming into bloom almost daily. Those white buds on the ends of the willow leaves are among the first signs of Spring. And quickly enough they will be gone and the slender willow leaves will take on the look of having been there all winter.

Well, dude, they haven't been, so enjoy the newness while you may. Soon the rhododendrons will eclipse them with their gigantic blossoms, and . . . there you go! Spring on its far edge.

It is the spider time of the year. I've always liked the little guys, even the big ones. I find it hard to kill a spider, but sometimes must, and always feel sad afterwards.

They are so industrious. Those webs are not easy to construct, and take hours, days. And then they wait patiently for some fly or insect to blunder into the trap and provide them with a tasty meal. To watch one of them build a web takes great patience, and often I admit I am not up to the task. My attention wanes and I have places to go and things to do. Another time, Patient Spider.

Those circles, by the way, are called iris flare. the sun or else some headlight either gives them to you or doesn't. And either you like the iris circles or else or don't. Better like them, because you can't get rid of them without destroying the picture and, surely, you don't want to do that.

The lake is nearing its maximum height, that is, approaching flooding. Another inch or two and we will be at flood stage. But the good news is, the ducks of winter are arriving. And one of my favorites, the hooded merganser, is newly arrived. A pair of them, male and female, took turns diving for whatever small forage fish they find near my beach last week. And now there are piebald grebes (reportedly rare elsewhere, on saltwater), lesser scaups, many Canada geese, and buffleheads. It is easy to confuse, especially from a distance, bufflehead males from male hooded mergansers. But I can do it easily and find it is the only way I can impress my wife. I keep the visual trick private, of course.

October brings back the Canada geese, along with great sunsets. (Picture was actually taken September 30th.) A quick count indicated no fewer than 42 in this flock.

They are a sociable bird and tend their goslings with all the care of human adults. No, with more than that.

The lake is as low as I've ever experienced it. When I walk out on my dock to catch a trout, it is resting on the bottom and protests me. And my presence, my weight, causes it to cantilever.

Even more on the swallow subject. (These need to be read from the bottom up, as in the case of forwarded emails. That is, 579, 580, 581, and in that order. Dig?)

Parent barn swallows, and other swallows of their extended family, flock together late in the day to feed their juveniles. The traffic to and from our nest was heavy most afternoons, and I presumed it would cease when our juveniles had left the nest.

The following late afternoon we were under siege with adult barn swallows; they darted in and out of the porch heedlessly and with seeming abandon. What was doing on? Evidently they missed the fledglings, even though they had hesitantly flown off the previous day and were now gone from the area. So why were we being bombarded with adult swallows? Evidently something was wrong, and the wrong seemingly led back to me.

My chief concern was how to rectify my mistake. But it grew dark and the swallows ceased their attack.

The following afternoon Norma called out to me and drew my attention to the porch rail, which had two small birds perched on it and few feet away from where the destroyed nest used to be. They plucked at their feathers and fluttered their tiny wings. Could it be the fledglings? It sure look like them, and the way they huddled together was highly familiar. It was not jumping to a conclusion to identify them as our juveniles. But where was the third young swallow?

He soon showed up and took a position about six feet away from the others, as though sulking. And there they sat, three of them again, cheeping, until the flock of swooping adults spotted them and, sure enough, began to feed them with insects again. This went on for nearly two hours, as the sky darkened with the approach of sunset. Then the adult siege stopped--no doubt called off on account of darkness.

The next day I decided that the three baby swallows had flown the nest--after all, I had seen them each leave. And the nest was so messy, what with all the bird shit down below having cemented it self to the deck.

So I scrubbed it all clean with a hoe and detergent, and removed the nest, since it too was filled with crud. It came down with a small thud and I hauled it away in the bucket with the other litter.

The three barn swallow chicks are of a size and about to leave the nest on our front deck. There has been much activity over the porch and lawn and lake, as adults sweep in in copious numbers and deliver fresh insects to the three eager mouths. This has been going on for days--perhaps weeks. And now our three chicks are perched on the lip of the nest, stretching their wings and peeping.

At noon, one left the nest for a short flight, only to return after a minute or two. Then the second. I missed it all, but saw them preening on the porch rail, a dew minutes later. But the third chick was still in the nest and indecisive about entering the new world of flight. In preparation he took a few more insects from the swooping adults, rose up on his hind legs (so to speak), fluttered, flapped his wings, but his feet and especially his toes remained grounded.

I stood there watching as the minutes ticked by. I had a lot to do this afternoon. After about forty minutes--forty wasted minutes, by our common clock-- I decided to do something that needed doing. I returned an hour later.

All three chicks were gone. They were out in the common world, the world made available by flight. And I had missed the climax, the hesitant third chick.

Tomorrow morning, even before breakfast, I will check them again. I have a hunch that, even after his first flight, the third chick will be back in the nest, accepting free food from the adults, and fluttering indecisively again.

This morning Norma sighted along the long grass on our shoreline the first brood of wood ducks in over two years. Great news.

Then they were gone. They numbered at least four and were small, newly hatched. This portends great things--or am I getting my hopes up just to have them dashed again?

There must be two or three hundred people who live along the shores of this small lake. At public meetings (two a year), people report sightings much different from each other. Some believe and report seeing such a wealth of things that nobody else has seen that some of us must disbelieve the others, or else distrust our own eyes. It is as though we each live on different lakes.

Yes, I think we do. That must be the case. I can't very well call my neighbors consummate liars.

"Black is one of the primary colors." It isn't? You could have fooled me. (See painting above. Yes, it is by me.)

Lake has been posted with 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.

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.

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.

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:

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

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.

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.

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.