Month: October 2011

Death and Renewal

Considering how alive a rainforest is, it’s probably not surprising there’s a lot of dying going on. Not even trees live forever, so some of these ancient trees are dying, as revealed by the fungi growing on their trunks.

Mushroom

Fungi are a common sight in any old-growth forest here in the Pacific Northwest, though I’d never seen many of the varieties I saw on this visit. When we weren’t looking up amazed at moss and ferns growing on the trees, we were pointing out strange varieties of fungi growing on the ground, like this,

Mushroom

Mushroom

or this.

Mushroom

My first reaction was merely to admire the beauty of these fungi. At home, I tried to identify them by searching through several of my books and online. I never could identify them, but while online I did discover that fungi

… play a critical role in nearly every ecosystem. They are key in recycling dead vegetation and making the nutrients available for the next generation of plant life. They provide a source of evolutionary pressure as plant pathogens, and help keep rampant monoculture plant populations in check.

I probably already knew that, but it served as a reminder that in a healthy ecosystem past and present are intrinsically linked, a concept perhaps best symbolized by the nursing logs:

Nurse Log

Hoh’s “Hall of Mosses”

The highlight of our visit to the Hoh Valley Ranger Station was our visit to the

Hall of Mosses Sign

for a spectacular display. Living here in the Pacific Northwest I’m pretty familiar with moss, but I’ve never seen anything to match the moss found here.

Although the maples had lost most of their leaves, the moss made it seem they hadn’t lost a leaf.

Moss-covered tree

It was both beautiful and eerie, reminding me of the trees that attacked Dorothy and the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz and .

Maple Trees Covered in Moss

Luckily, most of the time I felt like I was wrapped in a comforting blanket of green,

Leslie Walking Under Tree Bridge

because both the sky

Branch Covered with Moss and Ferns

and the ground

Ground Cover

Were alive.

Visiting the Hoh Rainforest On a Sun Day

We spend Sunday and Monday on the Olympic Peninsula, beginning with a visit to the Hoh Rainforest on Sunday. Leslie was struck by this phone booth outside the visitor’s station,

Hoh Phone Booth

Though I was distracted by a visit from a pair of â€?”Robber” Gray Jays, who seemed eager to greet me, even if they had moved by the time I got back with my camera. Luckily, they were so habituated to visitors they weren’t in the least camera-shy.

Gray Jay

Though I’m usually eager to head out into the heart of the wilderness, I’m glad that Leslie convinced me to first walk the trails close to the headquarters.

I was so fascinated by the pond at the beginning of the trail that if we’d had more time to spend I could have spent hours trying to capture it’s subtly shifting beauty,

Pond

with Fall leaves floating across waves of green.

I’m not sure whether the bright Fall sunshine made getting good shots easier or harder, but the extreme light and shadows required luck and much time in Photoshop adjusting highlights and shadows,

Leslie Walking Trail

Even my widest angle lens couldn’t capture these giants,

Tall Tree

which had to be spliced together in Photoshop. Of course, you’ll have to supply additional imagination to appreciate how tall they really are.

A Frogging We Will Go

Right after I returned from Malheur, Margaret called Leslie and told her that Kylan had just checked a birding book out of his school library and was enthused to â€?”go birding.” Needless to say, Leslie couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take the kid(s) birding the next weekend, and, after I pointed out that birding around here is extremely slow, we decided to go to Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge.

Both kids were ready for anything, with binoculars for birding

Mira with binoculars

and jars to collect insect specimens

.

As it turned out, the first interesting thing we saw was this small, orangish frog.

Orange frog

After that sighting, I told them, as grandpas are prone to do, how I’d seen small tree frogs on the cattails in the past.

Sure enough, it wasn’t long before Kylan and Mira found small tree frogs sitting on leaves.

small tree frog

not just once but several times.

After I’d pointed out a bullfrog sitting low in the water, with just its eyes or head out of the water,

Frog with head out of water

Mira spotted one sitting on top of a log nearby:

Bullfrog on log

As you might have guessed from the (lack of) pictures, we didn’t see many birds except for Mallards and a few Great Blue Herons in the distance.

The kids seemed just as happy when I spotted this painted turtle way out in the pond,

Painted Turtle

well, that and the cricket that Grandma had helped Kylan catch.

One of the reasons Leslie chose to take them to Nisqually was so she could buy Kylan his own birding book. When we got to the store, though, he and Mira decided that they would rather have little stuffed birds than a birding book. Birds or no birds, Kylan pronounced the day â€?”the bestest ever.”