The Daily Bucket is a regular feature of the Backyard Science group. It is a place to note any observations you have made of the world around you. Animals, weather, meteorites, climate, soil, plants, waters are all worthy additions to the Bucket. Please let us know what is going on around you in a comment. Include, as close as is comfortable for you, your location. Each note is a record that we can refer to in the future as we try to understand the patterns that are quietly unwinding around us.
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October 7, 2019. Seattle.
Today was bird count day. Every week I count birds at three locations along the southwest shoreline of Seattle’s Lake Washington. I’ve done this for close to 20 years now.
There was wind today, with Alder and Cottonwood branches falling all around me at the first stop. The birds were hiding, though I could recognize a number of them from their calls - American Robins, Black-capped and Chestnut-backed Chickadees, a Bewick’s Wren. There were no Cormorants perched on the lakeside piers, though I expect to see one or two this time of year.
Lat week there was a Western Meadowlark at my second stop, a delightful vagrant that took me by surprise, but she had moved on. Only the usual year round suspects were present today - Song Sparrow, Junco, Chickadee. The wind had picked up, enough that I chose not to walk under the leaning cottonwood tree by the path that leads down to the lake. There may have more birds along that path, but they were quiet, and if they were there they just didn’t get counted this week.
The first Crows showed up at my third stop, just two of them. There were a dozen Mallards, too, but no Gadwalls, which is a change from this year’s summer Gadwall:Mallard ratio where Gadwalls outnumbered Mallards 10:1. I have no explanation for this, nor can I explain why there were so few Mallards on any of my summer counts this year or why so many more Gadwalls nested in this place than in previous summers.
At the end of day I followed a tattered, pale orange and brown checkered butterfly as it was blown by the wind from the lakeshore into a grove of trees. It wasn’t a butterfly I recognized. It struggled against the wind, but didn’t have strength enough to avoid being pushed into a spider web. The spider acted immediately. I did too. “No!”, I said out loud, and gently tapped the now combined pair of them with my finger. The butterfly flew free.
I don’t know why I did this. I am usually neutral about how this predator/prey thing works, and am able to step aside and watch. The pair of Eagles double-teaming a raft of coots. Crows stealing Robin babies. Osprey carrying fish on their final sightseeing tour over my house. OK. Some Coots end up being the bones of Eagles. Some baby Robins grow up to be Crows. Some fish get to fly.
But not this time. I’m aware that my act may have deprived Spider of a meal she needed to finish incubating her eggs. But this butterfly, this windblown, no-name butterfly, this Butterfly was the center of my universe. I did what I had to do.