Shaggy Manes in the garden

About 5 weeks ago, we decided to plant our vegetables in concert with mushrooms. We wrote about it on April 26th (see the blog). We dutifully followed the instructions from Fungi Perfecti, enriching the garden soil with steer manure, worm castings, etc. then putting down layers of alder sawdust and mushroom spawn.

Since then we’ve been wondering what to expect as far as mushroom production. The household skeptic (Glen) has been uttering dire predictions of complete failure. I say that we don’t know what is happening in the ground under our feet and it might be a year before we do know.

So it was with great pride that two mornings ago Glen went out to the garden for the daily sunrise inspection and found two mushrooms pushing out of the sawdust. Glen brought in a photo he’d taken. I felt a burst of pride in our “children” and got all excited. Then a few hours later I went out to look for myself. The mushrooms had continued to grow and develop, making them easier to identify. What we had was a species of edible Coprinus species mushroom called Shaggy Manes.

I admit it - I was disappointed. Where were the mushrooms WE planted? But this is the classic lesson for nature watchers, and one that I have to learn over and over again. It can be covered by that classic proverb: Man proposes, God disposes. I go out into the natural world all the time with my carefully wrought plans about what I am going to see. Then nothing I planned on shows up, but instead, there are other powerful things to experience and learn from. I need to let go of expectations.

And I do love Shaggy Manes. I’ve seen them rise at McClane creek, along the trail edges where all the nutrients wash down and collect. In moist, foggy fall mornings, under the shadow of the trees these mushrooms rise like ghostly battalions, foot soldiers in the battle of decay & nutrient recycling They are a powerful life force and will not be denied; we have seen them push through asphalt in their drive to fruit, produce spores and ensure the next generation.

I wrote Fungi Perfecti about what had occurred. Jim Gouin kindly wrote back and concurred that indeed these were a Coprinus species of mushroom, and that the spores of this mushroom had most likely hitched a ride in on the steer manure. He also told us that the companion mushrooms that we had “planted” in April were now active in the interface between soil and alder sawdust. He suggested we leave it alone for now, but come fall, dig down to that boundary and see the mycelium thriving.

I am looking forward to that day.

Janet

The Lure of Kale

I am very fond of kale, how it overwinters through almost anything, pushes out scores of dark tasty leaves in the lean frosty days of early spring, and infallibly follows with handfuls of succulent stems and flowers like undisciplined broccoli. When allowed to proceed to the next step, kale then bursts forth with hundreds and hundreds of bright yellow flowers and finally thousands of seed.

These yellow flowers are a bounty for any number of insects, lured by pollen and nectar and even tasty greens. On just a couple of plants in ten minutes of watching I have easily observed at least five different species of bee, as well as hover flies, jumping spiders, and cabbage butterflies, (these butterflies a mixed blessing I admit). A dedicated nature journalist could easily tally dozens of different species over the course of its six week bloom time.

The lesson of the story of course is NOT to replace our gardens with fields of kale, (or any other one plant). The point is how easy it is to increase diversity in even a small garden by letting small bits of the garden go. There is a wondrous array of plants which draw in and nurture insects if we let them. The mustard and carrot family are insect magnets. Herbs like thyme, mint, dill, and lavender attract multitudes. Let a garden get a bit “seedy” and likely it will reveal some delightful surprises.

Glen

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photos by gb
kale in garden
weevils mating

Peregrines at the Port of Olympia

This morning I got a phone call from Ann, who works in a building near the cranes at the Port of Olympia. Ann is a devoted birdwatcher, and for years from her office window has watched a pair of Peregrine Falcons, who have a nest box on the orange southern-most crane at the Port. This year they are back, defending their nest and likely they have eggs they are incubating, soon to hatch.

Ann had several questions about what she's been seeing. Over the years she has gotten accustomed to seeing the same pair of birds: Peregrines mate for life and the adults stay year around to defend and re-use a successful nest-site. Individuals also have distinctive unique markings, so Ann has gotten to know the birds at the Port. This year, however, she called and told me that one of the birds was different: she had noticed it was much bigger than the other. She was wondering what that was about.

Among Peregrines ( and many other birds of prey) there is a factor operating called sexual dimorphism. What this means is that there are strong differences between male and female birds. You can easily see this in mallard ducks: the male has a bright green iridescent head and other bright feathers, while the female is a dull, dun brown, better for camouflage.

In Peregrines, females are often much larger than males. Their feather markings are the same, but there are distinct size differences. As Ann and I talked about this, it became clear that the female of last year had probably died. Ann remembers hearing that a peregrine falcon had been found dead this winter near the Port. The remaining "widowed" male must have courted and formed a pair bond with a new female, who happens to be gi-normous.

Ann has a great window out on the lives of these birds. She was watching the other day and reported a typical Peregrine hunt. The big female was hunting, zooming at high speed just outside Ann's window. Ann did not see the target prey bird, only a burst of feathers when the female falcon dove at high speed right into it (It was probably a city pigeon. Remember when Randy Johnson aka the Big Unit pitched a 95 mph fastball into a hapless pigeon at Safeco Field? Bird explosion.)

The female then deftly retrieved the stunned pigeon (all of this happening in flight, at speed) and took it off to a nearby light standard, where she perched and began to pluck the breast feathers. Ann reported that feathers were flying in great abandon. The Peregrine then ate voraciously, pulling out choice breast meat, then diving in further for the rich organ meats of heart, liver, spleen, etc. This whole process took about 20 minutes.

Finally this female left her plucking post, carrying a choice chunk of meat back to the nest box. Ann did not see what she did with that token: it may have been for her mate, who was perched, guarding the box & eggs. Other falcons such as kestrels are known to cache their extra food, storing it away for times of hunger. So it's possible this bit of pigeon ended up in a falcon cache nearby.

I remember hearing another story some years ago, from a crane operator at the Port. He has a good view from his perch, both of the Peregrines, and of Budd Inlet. It was during nesting season, when the Peregrine pair are especially, ferociously territorial. It was near dusk; the operator was looking out over the inlet and saw a Great Horned Owl, flying low over the water, heading east and making a fatal mistake of moving near the peregrine nest box. He watched as one of the falcon pair saw the owl and took off after it with deadly intent; he saw the falcon hit the owl at high speed, driving it into the waters of the bay. The owl was unable to get out, and drowned.

From the perspective of a nesting falcon, this was a smart move. Great Horned Owls are known to take falcons at night, when the owls' sense of hearing and night vision tips the predatory balance to them. From the perspective of the owl, it would have done better to wait until it got darker to start its night work.

A good place to watch these birds is from the waterfront near the observation tower. Look north for the huge orange crane: it is supported by a large concrete brace. Look at that brace and follow it up to the highest, southernmost edge. There is a gray nest box up on that cement ledge; often you can see the peregrines perched nearby, or flying nearby.

Another great resource is the Falcon Research group: www.frg.org. Based near Bellingham, this group was founded by Bud Anderson, who is a raptor biologist with a special expertise in falcons. Click into the page on Urban Peregrines; it gives a lot of insight into the lives of our local falcons. Also, FRG has a live falcon camera at the WAMU building in Seattle: look at FRG's website to find the link.

Janet
Resources: photos from the Internet

In the garden

Sunday was one of those sunny weekend days that are starting to be not so much of a surprise anymore. A quick trip to the Farmer's Market, where we drooled over plant starts, and then Glen and I went out to the garden. Our goal ( I say "our" loosely, as he does all the work, and I provide supervision from the side) was to get the early season cool crop veggies into the ground. Starts of leeks, onions, bok choy, and broccoli all sat by me, brave in their small pots, ready to face wind and hail and slugs in their own drive to flourish and produce seed...

We also had another idea. I'd been reading Paul Stamets' book Mycelium Running. This book is highly recommended, full of deep insights into the vast web of mycelial threads running through the soil right under our feet. One of his experiments some years ago was to do some companion planting of certain veggies with certain edible mushroom strains. It turns out that the veggies and mushrooms formed mutually beneficial relationships: the mycelial threads go a long distance collecting water and dissolved nutrients, which they then pump into the root systems of plants, while the veggies contribute their stored carbohydrates, converted from sunlight. It turns out that all members of these community flourish: the veggies are bigger and better, and the mycelium sends up big fruiting crops of edible mushrooms.
I was enthralled by this idea, so Sunday was the day to implement it.

We had to get some supplies: a yard of alder sawdust from Great Western Supply, and we also ordered (from Fungi Perfecti) mushroom sawdust spawn of Garden Giant Stropharia annulosa and Elm Oyster.

First Glen had to clean up the gardens, pulling weeds, chasing down quack grass and clearing out old brussel sprouts (ugh). Then we needed to provide some soil amendments: this garden is only a year old, and the soil still needs to be built up. He mixed in steer manure and some wonderful soil amendments from Gary Cline's Black Lake Organic line- a mix of nutrients, and glacial rock grindings. Finally he put on a layer of alder sawdust, then scattered the mushroom spawn, then another layer of sawdust. Finally it was ready to plant; he shook little starts of leeks free from their pots and buried them down.
At the end of the afternoon, two new beds were ready, full of good soil, lots of nutrients, alder sawdust and mushroom spawn. I could almost feel the mycelium start to reach out tentative threads, testing the ground and finding it good, very good.

So then I sat for awhile in the sun, admiring our work and feeling the novel sensation of warm sunlight on my back. I flashed back on just six months ago, 2 feet of snow icing over the garden. And now? Mason bees droning away, laying eggs and building their homes, Yellow-faced bumblebee queens hover over the newly turned soil, looking for a likely abandoned mouse hole to make this year's hive, the male Song Sparrow sings territory songs near his nest, a streak of thin white cirrus clouds drifts across the deep blue bowl of the sky. Under my feet, the mushrooms are stirring, and the soil is returning to life. It is a good day to be alive and in the garden.

Janet
Resources: Fungi Perfecti, Mycelium Running by Paul Stamets

On mason bees and other distractions.

A conversation with a friend the other day brought to mind Fiddler Jones of Edgar Lee Masters "Spoon River Anthology". The poem in part follows; I relish its ode to distraction.

Fiddler Jones

THE earth keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.
And if the people find you can fiddle,
Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.
What do you see, a harvest of clover?
Or a meadow to walk through to the river?
...
How could I till my forty acres
Not to speak of getting more,
With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos
Stirred in my brain by crows and robins
And the creak of a wind-mill--only these?
And I never started to plow in my life
That some one did not stop in the road
And take me away to a dance or picnic.
I ended up with forty acres;
I ended up with a broken fiddle--
And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
And not a single regret.

Nature keeps throwing distractions in my path which I am loathe to ignore and which continually interfere with well-intended plans. Over the last year I've been writing and rewriting a handout on rules for mason bees. Sometimes there are seven rules, sometimes ten, sometimes eight. I am content to abandon it as finished whenever I don't need it for a few months. I trot out one version for a class, revise it for a lecture, reconsider it in a display. The thing is, at different times of the season my interests wander to other bees and other gardens and other wild things altogether. With these wanderings my opinions also change and develop. It is hard after all to describe a landscape in one visit. One day is drab and grey and the daffodils pop with cheery sunshine, the next day the sunshine highlights the swelling buds of a cherry tree, another day and I'm brought up short by the accusatory chatter of a chickadee or drawn in by the enticing scent of Daphne odora. I guess I forgive myself for noticing all this abundance.

Writing rules for nature is a misnomer anyway. It is not so much an effort at writing rules as an attempt to discern them - to see rules already in place. My first "rule" for mason bee success - the bold print, unflinching, never-changing one - is also one of the more interesting ones to test. What is "Rule One"? It is that mason bees (any bees really) require fresh clean housing every year. Fail to annually replenish their nesting tunnels and along come a progression of parasites and interlopers. The thing is, after working successfully with multiple thousands of mason bees, it is the interlopers and oddities which intrigue me almost as much. Right now I am trying to successfully raise some tiny tiny parasitic wasps which I removed as larvae from some mason bee cocoons. Once I get them to adult, (if I get them to adult), I will then collect them and attempt to mount them. They will join the carpet beetles and the moths and all the others who comprise my “pests” collection. And I will continue to probe out new rules and accept new distractions and be grateful for them.

Glen

photo, male mason bee, 4/09

Frog Blog (2) The Singing of the Frogs

Last night my friend Nancy and I went to a local frog pond to spend some time sitting with the singing Pacific tree frog males. With the onset of warmer weather in February, male frogs head to the ponds and start to sing, calling in females to mate and start the next generation. As the days have lengthened into April, the singing has gotten more intense. Last night we decided to pay an after-dark visit, to experience the chorus, to look for frogs and hopefully, to find some egg masses. We were not disappointed.

My friend Barbara lives on the edge of a wetland, which also next door to a place where wetland plants are commercially grown in "wet beds". These wet beds are shallow temporary freshwater ponds, which for the tree frogs are ideal for raising tadpoles. Barbara has been hearing frogs singing from the wet beds for several weeks now. This was our destination.

So last night we left the house at 8:45 pm in the near-dark. It had reached 60 that sunny spring day and was still fairly warm. As we drove through the quiet night, the skies were dark and clear with a gibbous moon; the stars showed a frosty light, and Orion stalked the Lepus the Hare in the western sky.

We arrived at the wetland and parked, getting quietly out of the car, hoping we would not alert the frogs. Not a chance. As we sneaked up on the wet bed, it was silent as the tomb and we thought we'd blown it. We tiptoed around, setting up our chairs, fumbling with our flashlights, cameras, hats and trying hard not to giggle in the enforced silence. We didn't succeed at that, either.

We used our flashlights to scan the surface of the water and found a couple of frogs, looking very dead, but just playing possum. As soon as the light moved away, they hid themselves away.

We also searched for egg masses: I'd been checking the wet bed several times over the last 3 weeks and had not yet seen any. But viola! we were rewarded: several small clusters of greenish gel, containing fat round white eggs showed up, attached to the hardware cloth lining the bottom of the wet bed. These looked very new, very freshly laid.

Finally we settled down, turned off the lights and prepared to wait. I was not hopeful, thinking it might take 20 minutes or more. But I underestimated the hormonally driven males: within 2 minutes the chorus began again. There was one frog about 2 feet away from us who started things off. This was likely what they call the choirmaster: the leader of the band who gets things going. Several times over the 45 minutes we were there, the frogs quieted briefly and always, when they started up, his was the first voice to start up the songs.

We turned our flashlights on occasionally, trying to find all these calling frogs. We could only find two: one we believe was the choirmaster, sitting just half-submerged about 2 feet away from us, at the far corner of the wet bed, facing in. He kept his throat pouch inflated throughout; even when not singing, it was inflated. Unlike the other frogs, he did not move when we had the light on him. We speculated that these males might actually divide the wet bed into good calling territories; perhaps he had a primo one, and was unwilling to abandon it.
Other frogs were hiding under the plastic containers that held the plants. That seemed like a good choice for a couple of reasons: they were protected from predators, and the thin plastic might act as a resonating chamber, allowing their calls to be even more alluring to females ready to mate.

So we sat, in the dark, the frog song drumming on our bones. Overhead, the stars wheeled around the sky in their own ancient dance, and Orion almost caught the Hare. We felt a sense of deep honor, to be able to sit with the frogs and share their songs. And when the cold started to seep into our bones, we took ourselves home to warm beds, leaving the frogs to the night...

Janet

Rufous hummingbirds in migration

Early this Sunday afternoon I was sitting by the window feeder in the living room, pretty much minding my own business when SHAZAAAM! Our first female Rufous Hummingbird of the season showed up. Eighteen inches away from my fascinated view, she sat and drank for a couple of minutes. I quickly unscrambled my brain and reviewed her field marks: the most telling identification cues for her are the rufous wash on her flanks and wing pits, along with a few scattered deeply colored feathers on her throat and a muted green back.

Ten minutes later, it was our resident male Anna’s hummingbird Big Red. I wrote about this bird on February 16th; he had a hellacious fight with the then dominant female in our yard (Big G). He won and has been the big cheese in our yard since. His field marks include the distinct fuschia helmet over his head (green or black in low light) and an iridescent emerald green back and gray vest over his chest. He has no rufous whatsoever.

Ten minutes after Big Red flew off, a male Rufous Hummingbird flew in. He too sat and drank at length. He is vividly rufous - almost everywhere, except for a large scarlet-green iridescent patch that covers all of his throat and wraps around the side: this is called a gorget, which is a great word: it truly is gorgeous. All this within 20 minutes.

As the day has progressed, we have continued to see this variety of these hummers coming and going. I called with my friend Cynthia who has eight nectar feeders, and she too is seeing big numbers and varieties fighting and feeding at her nectar stations. We talked about the sheer numbers we are seeing; it is Spring migration season and we speculated that we are seeing a flood of migrating Rufous hummers coming through.

Some hummer watchers believe their migration movements are tied in part to the blossoming of Red Flowering Currant (Ribes sanguineum). Hmmm, is it a coincidence that we have one big bush in bloom in our garden as I write this?

Seeing this surge of hummingbirds in our garden reminds me of some field work I did years ago at Cape Flattery. In spring 1989 - 1991 I volunteered for a hawk watching project on a hill called Bahokus, overlooking the town of Neah Bay. This was a two-week stint starting at the end of March, since this is when the hawks tend to migrate through in the biggest numbers. The hawks would only migrate over Bahokus is certain unusual weather conditions, which meant that many days we were skunked as far as hawks. However, many birds use this same migration corridor, so a lot of time we sat around and watched whatever showed up (not a bad gig).

Rufous hummingbirds were regular migrants on Bahokus, and would suddenly show up at the hawk-watching hill. They had most likely followed the coastline north on their spring migration, only to arrive at Neah Bay, which is the northwestern terminus of Washington state. In front of the hummers was the Straits of Juan de Fuca, and to get further north meant they had to cross 13 miles of cold salt water to Vancouver island.

So we watched to see how they would handle this problem. Hordes of them would start to build up, hanging around for a few days fighting and feeding, mostly on thimble and salmonberry blossoms, probably restocking their fat stores. There were hummers everywhere, including in front of our spotting scopes, making hawk watching a little challenging. Finally one day we’d show up in the morning to start our shift and the hummers had disappeared, completely. That was the end of the migration.

But we don’t have to go to Cape Flattery to watch migration. It is happening right now, right in our own gardens, as herds of Rufous hummers move through. In a couple of weeks, the bulk of them will have moved on. Probably one male Rufous will take over your garden and feeder, and a few females will sneak in on occasion when his back is turned. So enjoy the spectacle of jewels in flight: it will soon be over.

Janet