All last week we had cold & frosty mornings which turned into cool days filled with sunshine. After a particularly wet and windy winter, the combination of clear, bright light and the lengthening days has felt so good. Once I'd finished work on Friday I cut a handful of hellebores from the farm and filled my bike panniers with branches of quince and flowering currant. The branches had been cut whilst in bud two weeks ago so their flowers are just about perfect right now, giving us a welcome taste of early spring.
The following day I took a tour with naturalist Stephanie Fernandez (Skagit Guided Adventures), to see some of the natural landscapes & bird life nearby. We headed north towards Edison & caught sight of more eagles than we thought we’d be able to see at this time of year; most having already taken off for Alaska. Perhaps these ones have become year-round residents here. We saw many different bird species including snow geese in their thousands all congregated on one field, making a heck of a noise & eating leftovers from last year’s crops. All of a sudden they went quiet and took-off together in a vast white swathe.
After seeing the snow geese we went to a beautiful lichen-clad forest in Anacortes and another near Deception pass, to look at the native trees of the area; predominantly douglas fir, cedar, western hemlock and, just next to the coast, junipers. I cut a few pieces of their foliage to compare & get to know their differences, but I entirely forgot to take a single photo which is a (slightly annoying) sign of being completely engrossed. There’s also Salal (Gaultheria shallon) growing wild which is a plant I mostly know as a low cost cut foliage from the UK wholesalers, but now I know it’s native to this part of the world.
These coniferous souvenirs worked their way into today’s flower portrait, which incorporates a mix of native species with garden grown specimens and hopefully captures something of our gradual transition from winter into spring. I’d intended for the image to be a light and clear like the weather of last week, but dark clouds rolled in casting shadows and a more sombre mood into the photograph. I’ll have to be patient for my chance to capture lightness.
Another fascinating insight from yesterday‘s tour with Stephanie was found under a concrete bridge. There were hundreds of tiny bones and skulls on the ground, alongside what looked like the droppings of a large mammal. Apparently, when barn owls eat their furry prey, the bones and other body parts that they can’t digest are regurgitated in a large pellet which drops on the floor below them. With intriguing coincidence, last night in bed I opened up Mary Oliver’s ‘New and selected poems’ to a page entitled ‘Bone Poem’ which describes exactly what we’d seen under the bridge. I'll have to share some of my favourite Mary Oliver poems in another blog post, but for now here’s the one about the owl and the bones, with a picture below of what we saw…
