Oregon estuaries: some panoramas

Salmon River Estuary near Lincoln City

Netarts Bay near Tillamook

damsels and dragons

There is a small freshwater wetland adjacent to our new apartment in Corvallis. A very shallow creek and pool is vegetated with large hummocks of Juncus effusus and an assortment of other plants. Tiny fish were abundant, the fatter ones (maybe full of eggs) darting away from short distance advances made by the smaller ones. In the strong afternoon sun today, bluish damselflies and large dragonflies with blatant black stripes on their wings flitted about. The ones with black on the wings were perhaps the common whitetail (Libellula lydia), a widespread species in the US (Haggard and Haggard 2006). Rarely, one of the whitetails would land on a sharp shoot of Juncus, but mostly these just zipped about for some unknown purpose, neither forging nor mating being obvious aims of their activity.

Dragonflies evoke images of very pre-historic times, when the animals and plants that dominated the surface of the earth we imagine to have looked like robotic creatures suited for a harsher world, more geometric and segmented than elegant. Dragons and damsels are beautiful insects and among my favorites. Juveniles are called naiads and live in freshwater habitats; both the naiads and adults are predators (Powell and Hogue 1979, Haggard and Haggard 2006).
   
Below is a shot of a colorful damsel I found a few years ago in the California Sierras that was calm enough to allow me to get very close:

References:
Haggard P and Haggard J. 2006. Insects of the Pacific Northwest. Timber Press.
Powell JA and Hogue CL. 1979. California Insects. University of California Press.

Ona Beach

We’ll soon be leaving the coast for the Willamette Valley, so I took a short trip this morning to Ona Beach, where Beaver Creek meets the Pacific Ocean.  This is a small estuary among small estuaries and is only partly under tidal influence according to the National Wetlands Inventory classification.  Nevertheless, there are some of the typical estuarine plants present right along the creek’s banks and intergrading into the sand dunes.  Here are a few pictures:
This is three square, aka Schoenoplectus americanus or Scirpus olneyi.  It seems to prefer sandy environments. In Netarts Bay along the sandy spit that separates the bay from the ocean, it grows in large monospecific patches in the low marsh.

This is Douglas’ aster, Symphyotrichum subspicatum in Latin. It is not a very dramatic plant until it is in flower.  It generally grows in upper elevations in tidal marshes.

An unknown species in the carrot family (Apiaceae).

This is a cool pattern formed by a filamentous alga (?Rhizoclonium) distributed across the sand near the outlet of Beaver Creek into the Pacific.

Adventures in southern Oregon

Crater Lake is the only national park in Oregon, but it is a gem, and it is surrounded by a number of other beautiful places in the southern part of the state.  The lake (which is touted as the deepest in the United States and loved because of its extraordinary clear blue water) developed as the result of snow melt and rainfall over the ~7000 yrs since the last volcanic eruption that formed the crater holding the beautifully clear water.

This is the pumise desert at the north end of the park.

Mt Scott, on the east rim of the lake, is the highest point in the park, approaching 9,000 ft. Snow lingered in patches.

Looking westward from the ridge leading to Mt Scott.

To both the north and south of Crater Lake National Park, there are wilderness areas (Sky Lakes and Mt Thielsen) and other scenic areas.  Miller Lake is near the Mt. Thielsen wilderness.

A manzanita with Miller Lake and the Cascades in the background.

Some flowers ready to burst in pinkness!

Our final adventure lay to the north where we discoved Salt Creek Falls. It is the 2nd largest falls in Oregon and is nestled in beautiful hemlock forest.  The falls are just over the crest of the Cascades (the west side), so the forests there are very different than the east side of the mountain range.  To the east, soils are dry and pine canopies (with little understory vegetation) dominate at lower elevations.  To the west, hemlocks and Douglas firs are present, pines drop out, and there is a more lush understory including rhododendrons.

Salt Creek Falls.

Dinosaur National Monument

I’ve been in coastal Oregon long enough to get very accustomed to mild temperatures, lots of rain and green everywhere.  But during the late spring I made a short trip to Dinosaur National Monument in eastern Utah.  It was comparatively warm and dry, even though apparently the state had pretty substantial levels of precipitation (snow).  Here are some pictures:

Petroglyphs

Lizards were common

A little hard to make out, but there are dinosaur vertebrae across the center of the picture.

A beautiful sego lily

Yosemite III: Hetch Hetchy

The O’Shaughnessy Dam, designed to provide water for the city of San Francisco, was in place by 1923 to drown the Hetch Hetchy Valley.  Before the valley was flooded, it was apparently comparable in aesthetic effect to the Yosemite Valley, though perhaps smaller in overall dimensions.  John Muir advocated hard to prevent the construction of the dam, but political pressures won out in the end and the valley became a reservoir.

Beautiful flowers of an array of colors were present on our mid-May hike.  Perhaps someday the valley will be restored.  It would then be many decades or centuries before the effects of the dam will no longer be apparent, but what an interesting experiment in ecological succession and restoration!

Yosemite II: The Falls

It has been a La Niña year, so winters in the northwest can be accompanied by higher than average precipitation. ENSO-linked precipitation trends are less clear for central California, but snowpack appears to be plentiful in the Sierras. During our visit, snow lingered in the Park above 5000 or 6000 feet elevation, though the California spring was well underway.  The numerous waterfalls around the Yosemite Valley were full, the water roaring onto the granite rocks below with a constant roar like soft thunder.  At Bridal Veil Fall there was so much water mixed into the air that the immediate area at the base of the waterfall had its own microclimate of soft rain.  In fact, up to about a half mile away from the falls, I could still feel the moisture in the air.  Vernal Fall, up the Little Yosemite Valley, presented a similar scenario.  Here the Mist Trail follows the southern bank of the Merced River from Yosemite Valley right up to the waterfall.  The trail then is composed of a long series of steep steps cut into rocky terrain leads hikers up behind Vernal Fall.  Here again, the volume of water was sufficient to greet visitors with a soft rain and make the steep granite staircase more dangerous.  I captured a beautiful rainbow made possible by the saturated air:

The upper and lower Yosemite Falls, together presenting a tremendous drop in water of over 2400 ft is probably the most impressive of Yosemite’s waterfalls to most visitors.  According to signage at the park, it is the tallest waterfall in the United States and fifth tallest in the world.  No doubt these waterfalls are beautiful and impressive.  I also enjoy smaller, more intimate, waterfalls.  At these waterfalls there is often opportunity to observe more closely the small moisture-loving biota like mosses and ferns that cling to life on the surface or cracks of bedrock.

Upper Yosemite Fall

Bridal Veil Fall



Staircase Falls



Nevada Fall

Yosemite I: Dimensions

Hoping to find some real spring weather in California, we left Oregon for a week of adventures down south.  This was our second visit to Yosemite; our first was during late November a year and a half ago.  Yosemite National Park is impressive partly because of its size.  Many of the natural features are of majestic dimensions in the park, from the numerous waterfalls to the granite precipices that form the walls of Yosemite Valley to the ancient giant sequoias in the park’s three groves.  It seems that everyone should leave impressed by these larger monuments of geologic forces and biological wonder.

The wonderful thing about nature in general is that beauty is present from the largest monuments of natural forces down to the smallest scales visible to the human eye.  Yosemite most impressively illustrates this principle.  Stately Pacific dogwoods and conifers are juxtaposed with both immense grey granite cliffs and soft blankets of small mosses and lichens on rocks.  There are cloud patterns in the sky, tree patterns on mountainsides, and rich patterns of bark ridges and valleys on the trunk of a single pine tree. From big to small, Yosemite is a treasure.

Uncertainty

Human life can be a cyclone of uncertainty at times.  Uncertainty, stochasticity and complexity are inherent in nature.  For us in our structured society, uncertainty can seem like the enemy.  But it is not. The enemy is our fear of uncertainty.  After a cyclone passes through a forest, a new generation of trees is always ready to spring forth.

Frogs and the sweet stench of swamp

It seems that there are not usually too many places on managed public lands where visitors are free to wade through a wetland.  Today I had the opportunity to get the boots wet and muddy in a coastal freshwater wetland at Beaver Creek State Park where a short dedicated trails runs right through swamp sans the usual catwalks. 

The wetland occupies the bottom of a valley extending from the coast to several miles inland.  The valley is sparsely populated with surrounding hillsides wooded with alder and conifers.  The abundance of alders suggests that the area had been logged at some point in the past.  The marsh as a whole itself appears to be largely dominated by at least 5 species of wetland plants: cattail (Typha latifolia), spikerush (Eleocharis), the invasive reed canary grass (Phalaris) and two species of Carex.   Other species appeared to include Potentilla anserina, bright yellow skunk cabbages, twinberry, trefoil, some grasses and Juncus. 

Like other marshes I have been in, disturbance of the water logged soil exposed the strong smell of anoxia.  This marsh was interesting too in that the ground was very spongy in some locations.  A few birds, some dancing insects, and skittish brown frogs constituted most of the fauna I observed.

Newport, Ore. sunset

Nisqually NWR, Wash.

Cityscapes

City lights, courtesy of NASA, visibleearth.nasa.gov

Cities are living entities, imitations of natural ecosystems and individual organisms.  Cities have motion and vertical relief like forests; they have intricate twisted lines of communication and transportation not unlike nerves and arteries in the human body.  Also, like the body, their motion peaks in the day, then tapers in the night but never quite ceases.  Cities get sick, they grow and contract, they age. 

There is a certain beauty in a city, but it is sort of a sickly beauty – a bit too gaudy here, too shiny there.  City beauty just doesn’t compare to the beauty of a forest.  A city is not layered enough, nor does it smell as good.  Cities don’t decay or evolve at the right pace, they don’t re-mineralize their dead, they largely don’t purify and then re-consume their own waste water.  They develop opportunistically, like a forest, but use more rigid shapes and motifs than a natural ecosystem, lacking the reserve of millions of years of selection for genetic diversity and efficiency.  In a city, chaos is in tension with organization, whereas in a forest chaos and organization happily co-exist.  Only hardy individuals survive well in cities, but they too can eventually burn out because the pace and energy of city life is ruthless.  However, everything thrives in a forest, from the mighty conifers which will yet live many centuries more to delicate ferns breaking from a crack in bedrock to bacteria spinning and mutating and multiplying in soil and water.  Forest extinction and death bring new life and new opportunities for adaptation.  City growth focuses on large external infrastructure first (filling in the smaller places later), and often expands at the periphery at the expense of the core.  Growth in a forest is always occurring at the smallest levels, building up infrastructure from minute processes.  When disturbance strikes a patch of forest habitat, regeneration begins there and then, it isn’t exported to another neighborhood. 

Cities could be so much better if they look lessons from forests.  They could grow out of the land, keeping the native contours of the terrain and the native species already adapted to that spot of ground.  They could better keep the rhythms and colors of soil and plants and sky.  They could replace grey with green, like the green garden roofs appearing in some places.  They could rely primarily on local resources without sucking dry the life of other places.  City builders could learn that progression is more about continuous adaptation to change within the constraints of finite resources than accelerated growth that eventually collapses.

Little creatures

Over the winter break, the family took two day hikes in the Suislaw National Forest that runs along the coast range of central Oregon. Virtually all of the coast range is heavily forested (absent intensive logging, of course). It is wet and very green. Common trees include Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, hemlock, cedar and alder. Timber extraction has dramatically impacted many of these forests, degrading the aesthetic beauty of the landscape and probably affecting a number of ecosystem processes as well. Brown clear cuts dot hillsides right up to the scenic views of the Pacific; other recovering patches of forest here and there are manifest as carpets of homogenous dense evergreens.

Three small patches of wilderness have been staked out in the Suislaw, preserving small bits of land from this cycle of clear cutting and regrowth. Narrow ribbons of forest along streams and estuaries are protected too from logging, but visually, these bands of intact forest seem way too narrow.  Functionally, can they maintain cool temperatures and the right wood and sediment environment necessary for salmon?  Do the thin corridors provide enough habitat for large animals? 

I love hiking in dramatic landscapes (and there are certainly some left in Oregon's coastal range), but the less magnificent forests have treasures too. The key is to zoom in. Colorful fungi clinging to downed wood, carpets of mosses, and lichens of a range of interesting morphologies are common throughout the coastal forests. No matter the plainness of the forest cover, the little creatures can mesmerize. The beauty here in the coastal forest understory is manifest in shades of green and brown because the bright colors of flowering plants are generally uncommon. Close inspection reveals an array of forms in the carpets of lichens, mosses and ferns, but figuring out who is who is an intimidating task.

My best friend when it comes time to look at the little creatures is my macro lens.  I like trying to kneel or lay on the cold, sometimes wet ground, a few inches from the little creatures and try to steady my hand to capture something up close and amazing.  Moss sporophytes, powdered brown sori on the underside of fern fronds, insects, gills on the underbelly of mushroom caps, tiny flowers, water drops that appear like little crystals. A few shots of recent encounters with little stuff...