When I was first introduced to birding, I was amazed at how boring it was to me, endlessly so. We were out on a levee about an hour outside of the city on a lovely fall day and just standing there and looking for and at the occasional duck with the North Cascades and Mt. Baker hovering large as a backdrop. This was a beautiful, if muddy, setting and glorious to experience but not endlessly so and with nothing else to do! I was utterly beside myself with boredom after about an hour. Given that my future promised to be replete with such forays, I decided then and there that I needed to 1/ learn about birds and know where and what to look for if I was going to survive in this partnership and 2/ find some other "pacific" amusement which would fill the time, be of use, and help me through the hours looking for birds.
Well, these many years later, I can vouch for my complete commitment to birding and birds. I don't know when the "tipping point" occurred but somewhere along the line, I just got interested myself and often sighted birds first. So, at some time, I achieved goal number one and just didn't stop to think about it.
Goal number 2 involved photography. I was able to pick up rather inexpensively a couple of old 35 milimeter cameras and often took them along on these birding excursions for my purposes. I took countless shots of the mountains, the grasses, the sloughs, the birds, millions of wildflowers, etc. over the years and got rather good at it. I think it was in the midst of these years when the transition between photography and birding melded. Also, photography, the old fashioned way, became quite expensive.
So, I skip to yesterday when we travelled to Umtanum Falls (east of the mts.) to look at birds. We saw plenty! All along the road, the Yakima Valley Audubon has erected well over 100 bluebird boxes, each numbered and many occupied this year. We saw countless Western bluebirds flying into and around these many boxes. That should have told us something as, once we arrived at the creek and started hiking to the falls, we began seeing hundreds and hundreds of birds: grosbeaks, orioles, western tanagers, olive sided flycatchers, robins, yellow warblers, house wrens, kestrels, redtailed hawks, meadowlarks, brewer's sparrow, solitary vireo, song sparrows, juncos, cedar waxwings, bullocks orioles, stellar jays, catbirds, mountain chickadees, possible white headed woodpecker, ravens, and crows. We had arrived at a great time of the year and of the day (early to mid-morning) and heard and saw birds galore.
This hike was along a creek, as I've said, but on the dry side of the mountains. Normally, the path would be much dryer. Lately, though, the weather has been quite wet and the path was really sloppy in spots. At one point, having slipped and become muddied up, I decided to forego seeing the falls and just look around me. It was at that point, digital camera in hand, that I started to see a number of small wildflowers, lichens, and the beautiful ponderosa pine bark which focussed my attention to two specimens: Camas lilies (camas quamash) and Pinus Ponderosa (both pictured). Both were in abundance yesterday, large and beautiful. So, here they are, more fully examined.
The Camas lily was a very valuable plant for the natives as it's roots were used for a number of medecines and foods, bread specifically. On their journey through the western states, Lewis and Clark were introduced to the Camas lily and it's many uses by the Shoshone and Nez Perce indians and wrote a long passage about it in their journals.
The Ponderosa Pine is one of those trees that was and still is used in it's entirety. It's orange colored bark with the black lining in the crevasses is an absolute wonder and beauty to me and was used by natives to cover their houses. This is the third most harvested tree in the western U.S. and is used to build many, many houses. Natives used the logs for dugout canoes, the needles for insulation of underground storage, the roots for blue dyes, the boughs for sweat lodges for muscle pains, and the pitch as an ointment for sores, scabby skin, backaches, rheumatism, earaches, inflamed eyes, and as a sleeping agent for infants.
I just wanted to celebrate both these plants, large and small, for their beauty.
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