BOOK CLUB IN THE CLOUDS

This past Sunday I was the guest hiker-speaker for the monthly adventure of the Alpine Trails Book Club, a high-energy group of hikers who love hiking and reading and talking about books in equal measure.

The trip leader had thoughtfully selected the Chain Lakes hike on Mt. Baker because of it’s elevation (5,400 feet) and stunning views of Mt. Baker, Mt. Shuksan, alpine meadows and lakes, and—ideally—cloudscape. The clouds did not cooperate but this did not matter one bit. This happy group literally laughed at the rain and the nimbostratus clouds that brought it all. A good thing I had dedicated a large chuck of my book, A Sideways Look at Clouds, to nimbostratus clouds and how it rains.

It was this kind of cloud, after all, that not only rained on us but that filled the lakes and created the waterfalls and nourished the wild blueberries that graced this lovely alpine trail.

The ten of us were pretty much soaked from the rain when we found our way to a covered porch at the Heather Meadows Visitor Center. The hot tea was poured into mugs and china (yes, real china!) cups and then out came the homemade cloud-shaped cookies (putting to shame my dozen donut holes I brought along as a visual aid while describing the origin of the word “cloud”—from “clod.”) And then one of the trip leaders brought out a pocket sling psychrometer—an old-fashioned (non digital) but time-honored tool for measuring relative humidity and calculating dew point—the temperature below which water vapor condenses into liquid water. This is critical information for hikers interested in knowing at what point they are going to be hiking in the clouds instead of under them.

Just as I was about to launch into a short reading from my book, we all smelled the sweet fragrance of wood smoke. The volunteers at the Heather Meadows Visitor Center had built a snap-crackling fire in the beautiful stone fireplace in this historic building crafted in the 1930s by workers in the Civilian Conservation Corps. So in we went to shed our wet gear and cozy up for a fireside reading about the marvels of nimbostratus clouds and the rain drops. It was a real pleasure as an author to have such an engaged group to talk and hike with—and flattering to hear their thoughtful comments and questions about my ramblings in the clouds.

The rain continued so we didn’t hike higher up into the clouds. Though we had a different kind of cloudy day in mind for this hike (like the one that happened the very next day) it was crystal clear that the clouds control the narrative and this was our day to fully embrace the nimbostratus. My rain hat is off to the fair- and foul-weather outdoorswomen literati of the Alpine Trails Book Club!

To learn more about the Alpine Trials Book Club (book list, adventure tales) please visit their wonderful website here.

What Murrelets Need

What tree surgeon Hoyt Foster discovered in 1974--a Marbled Murrelet chick hunkered down on a branch 148 up a Douglas-fir--provided critical clues to the nesting habitat of this federally threatened little seabird. 

Marbled Murrelets need a wide branch, preferably covered in moss, at least 50 feet up a tree that is >150 years old and no more than 55 miles from salt water. This kind of habitat was once amply available along the Pacific Northwest coast. Now, that habitat has been reduced to patches and fragments and the murrelet population has been steadily crashing.

In Washington state, the population has dropped 44% between 2001 and 2015 and continues to decline at the rate of 4% a year. This means, based on the 2016 population in our state, that we will losing 284 murrelets a year. The primary cause is the historic and ongoing logging of our old-growth and mature coastal forests.

On September 7, 2018, the Department of Natural Resources released a long-term conservation strategy that will help determine the fate the of the Marbled Murrelet on the 576,000 acres of land it manages for these birds and other wildlife. Much this acreage is habitat, but not all of it. An estimated 154,000 acres consist of murecelt nesting habitat. As you might imagine, the management of this habitat is hotly contested. The mature and old-growth forests provide both valuable revenue to our state when horizontal; they provide critical habitat to murrelets for nesting when left vertical. 

What Marbled Murrelets do not need is Jaime Herrera Beutler, the U.S. Congressperson representing Washington's 3rd district in southwest Washington. Though she believes she is doing the right thing to protect family-wage jobs in her district, her efforts in the murrelet arena are misguided (which is to say guided by the timber industry and misinformation) and will surely backfire if she continues to refuse to understand the basic habitat needs of the murrelet. Her constituents have more to lose than gain by supporting her position on managing our state forest lands.

Rep. Herrera Beutler introduced an amendment to the House Appropriations Bill for Interior & Environment that would essentially result in the logging of everything but the bare essentials for nesting murrelets. Here is the text of her short-sighted bill.

This stingy bill should not be supported. It proposes to protect only the highest-quality forest stands. It will create silos of habitat for the murrelet and other species that benefit from contiguous blocks of forest. It will not contribute to the recovery of this imperiled species. It will not meet the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services criteria required of the Department of Natural Resources to continue legally harvesting their state trust lands.  

Jaime Herrera Beutler's amendment offers a bulldozer at a time when we need are well-honed axes, sharpened pencils, and sharp minds.

In its recently revised Draft Environmental Impact Statement, the Department of Natural Resources has offered several options for protecting forest lands that will eventually grow into murrelet nesting habitat. While it may irk some to set aside younger forests for future murrelet habitat, this is what is needed to give this bird a fighting chance. 

Murrelet chick ready to fledge. (Photo courtesy Hamer Environmental).

It’s Marbled Murrelet Nest Discovery Day!

The first Marbled Murrelet nest known to science was discovered 44 years ago—on August 7, 1974—by an unsuspecting tree trimmer who had never heard of this mysterious seabird.

Hoyt Foster.  Photo courtesy Susan Schwanke.

Forty-four years ago today, tree surgeon named Hoyt Foster arrived in Big Basin Redwoods State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California to do a routine safety trim at a popular campground. 

Hoyt Foster, age 47 at the time, didn’t know much about birds. He didn’t know that a robin-sized seabird called a Marbled Murrelet had been seen flying into the state park where he was working. He didn’t know that the location of the Murrelet’s nest was a mystery that had flummoxed birders and ornithologists for decades. 

Flip-line climbing of an old-growth tree demonstrated here by Tom Hamer (Photo courtesy Hamer Environmental).

What Foster did know was how climb and trim trees—the Big Trees—the old-growth Douglas-firs and Coastal Redwoods that were over 200 feet high and several feet wide. The trees that were too big and too remote to get into by ladder, cherry picker, or hydraulic lift. The 47-year-old Foster knew how to climb such trees with little more than a pair of spurs, a climbing rope, and a flip line.

It’s no wonder the mystery of the Murrelet’s nest wasn’t solved until 1974, well after the nests of all other North American breeding birds had been discovered. Few if any birders or ornithologists were also skilled tree climbers and, even if they were, none of them had thought to look high in the trees for a murrelet nest. 

Two Marbled Murrelets painted (not from life) by John James Audubon. 

While Hoyt Foster was trimming trees in California’s Big Basin Redwoods State Park on August 5 and 6, plenty of people were thinking about murrelets and searching for their mysterious nest sites. The problem was that birders were looking in the wrong places. The Marbled Murrelet is an alcid, (a web-footed seabird family that includes puffins and auklets) and most birds in this family nest on the ground along the rocky cliffs and outcrops of the Pacific Coast. That is where birders, egg collectors, ornithologists had been looking for the murrelet.

The color plate (above) depicts two Marbled Murrelets by John James Audubon from 1838. The bird at left is in summer “bark-brown” breeding plumage, the bird at right in winter plumage. This is likely the only image of murrelets available at the time, but is misleading. The penguin-like murrelets are shown sitting on the ground (which they never do) at the edge of the coastal bluff (where they do not nest).

Hoyt Foster probably didn’t know about the nesting mystery of the murrelet while he was working in Big Basin Redwoods State Park. He was simply doing his job as a tree surgeon, wielding his 24-inch pruning saw in 200-foot-high redwoods and Douglas-firs to remove potentially hazardous branches overhanging the park campsites. By the end of August 6--his second full day of work--Foster had trimmed five big trees. He was relieved to have gotten this far without injury or incident.

Around 2:30 p.m. on August 7, 1974, Hoyt Foster was perched 148 feet up in a 228-foot-high Douglas-fir. He had just eaten his lunch and was about to continue his climb when he came face-to-face with a creature hunkered on the wide mossy branch. The bird was covered with beige and brown downy feathers, and was later described by Foster as “a porcupine with a beak sticking out.” When he noticed the feet of the little bird, he knew he was looking at an unusual creature. The feet were webbed, but the bird was six miles from the nearest point on the Pacific Ocean.  

The bird was captured and taken to park headquarters where park naturalists identified it as the only known downy chick of the Marbled Murrelet. The mossy branch where it was sitting was its nest—not a built nest, but simply a place in the naturally occurring moss and duff.  

The very downy Marbled Murrelet chick discovered on its nest in 1974   Photo courtesy Bruce Elliott (California Dept. Fish & Game)

The discovery ended the search for the nesting site of this small seabird whose secretive breeding habitats had eluded scientists for decades and brought to a conclusion the “last great ornithological mystery in North America.” This one nest proved to be the critical evidence that lead to subsequent scientific discoveries: that the Marbled Murrelet depends on old-growth coastal forests for nesting, that the logging of these forests along the Pacific Northwest coast is the primary cause the bird’s declining population, and that saving the murrelet from extinction requires protecting the murrelet’s nesting habitat. 

The Marbled Murrelet is the size of a robin, its egg the size of chicken egg.   (Photo by Nick Hatch, USDA Forest Service)

Thanks to years of scientific research and public support, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the Marbled Murrelet as a threatened species in Washington, Oregon, and California under the Endangered Species Act in 1992. Despite these protections, Marbled Murrelet populations have been declining rapidly. In Washington state, the murrelet population declined a heartbreaking 44% between 2001 and 2016.

This fall, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) plans to release a set of conservation strategies for the Marbled Murrelets nesting on our state-managed public lands. We’ll need your help during the following 60-day public comment period to ensure that Marbled Murrelets have a chance to recover and thrive in our state forests.

A coalition of Marbled Murrelet advocates—the Washington Environmental Council, Washington Forest Law Center, Olympic Forest Coalition, Conservation Northwest, Defenders of Wildlife, Seattle Audubon—will be analyzing the strategies and sharing their recommendation and information on how you can support the conservation strategy that will best help the Marbled Murrelet.

For the most up-to-date information, check here or the Murrelet Survival Project on Facebook. 

A Marbled Murrelet in breeding plumage taking off from the water. Photo courtesy Dan Cushing and S. Kim Nelson

And now  a short light-hearted video to celebrate Discovery Day. Click here and enjoy!

Deschutes Falls Park

I've never done a Polar Bear Plunge, but this was close--a plunge into the Deschutes River. This video shows one of my three friends (the one who is part mermaid, part river otter) swimming up this beautiful deep section of the river as is flows through a narrow canyon fifteen miles southeast of Yelm.

The Deschutes flows 50 miles from Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Lewis County, through Pioneer Park (the popular access point for tubing down the lazy section of the river), through Tumwater Falls Park, and then through the impounded Capitol Lake and into Budd Inlet in downtown Olympia.

On a cloudy Wednesday morning, we drove to this glorious section of the river now accessible to the public through a short trail in Thurston County's Deschutes Falls Park. The water in our first swimming hole was colder than other local lakes we've been swimming in--I'm guessing somewhere between 60-65 degrees F. I waded in up to my waist and then waited for the numbness to reach my brain, at which point I believed my body would just decide to dive in. 

It didn't quite happen that way but I got in and paddled around long enough to realize I was not going to seize up or get hypothermic. 

Just a short walk upstream along the river is the second swimming hole (the one in the video), though calling it a "hole" isn't accurate. It's a long, narrow canyon where you can swim the equivalent of laps. You can swim upstream to a point just below a small falls where the current is strong enough to keep you from going any further (kind of like Mother Nature's best "infinity pool" ever). You can then swim downstream with the current and--if you are lucky--with the resident American Dipper or Water Ouzel. One such bird was doing its little body-pump routine along the riverbank as it searched for insects on the surface water and between the rocks where it will dive underwater to dislodge them.

Like the Dipper, It's best to keep moving so you can stay warm enough to relax and enjoy the smooth, river-sculpted canyon walls, the bright wildflowers blooming in nooks in the rocks, the trees above the canyon, and the osprey circling and calling overhead. 

You will not grow numb in the cold water. The only thing that will be frozen is the broad smile across your face. 

To learn more about Deschutes Falls Park and to get directions, follow this link to the Thurston County Parks website.