Today's phenomenon is weather. What do snowy day birding pictures and New Zealand Mud Snails have in common? Continue on and become enlightened.
This morning Olympia WA awoke sporting a spanking new coat 3" coat of very white. And guess what? Just because it snows doesn't mean the birds go away or that you have to sit at home when you can go out and have fun just like you did when you were a kid.
The State Capitol and Capitol Lake
The 260 acre lake forms a reflecting pool for the Capitol building which as you can see was designed to look like the nations capitol. It is the center piece of a chain of interlocking parks along Olympia's waterfront that stretches about five miles and includes both salt and fresh water habitat. Capitol lake is currently very shallow because it needs to be dredged but no money was ever set aside to maintain the lake and if nothing is done it will become a cat-tail swamp within the next 20 years.
There is a controversial plan to open the dam and drain the lake but that just moves the problem out into the bay which will have to be dredged every three or four years in order to keep the shipping channel open. The mud of course is contaminated with a hundred years of industrial use and lawn and road run off. It would also very quickly make 500 or so boat slips unusable including my own so, in full disclosure, I do have a personal dog in the fight.
For the moment there isn't any money to do anything. The Port of Olympia and the marina owners will undoubtedly go to court to try and block it. This has been going on for 10 years and like all other planning in the NW it will stretch out forever because we are highly consensus oriented here.
Capitol Lake is just 6 blocks from home and has some of the best birding in the state. I counted 16 species today but unfortunately I don't have a $10,000 camera to take professional pictures, especially of the small,shy,birds so for photos I have to concentrate on birds I can get fairly close to.
YellerDog's Home Port (In a storm)
De Birdies
These guys are all Glaucous Winged gulls. Not sea gulls. There is no such thing as a sea gull. Members of the gull family are not confined to sea shores. Remember that the state bird of Utah is the gull. However I've always heard them called sea gulls and still think of them that way.
I'd just fed this flock a breakfast of dry cat-food to help them out on a cold winter day and also to draw a flock for pictures. There were about 50 gulls in total. I'm afraid what I gave them was slim pickings. It was about a quart. They could easily have devoured the whole 18 lb bag. ( I do have a ships cat name Tater by the way which is the main beneficiary of the cat-food.)
The birds in brown are juveniles. Birds with dirty looking faces are non-breeding adults and those with pure white faces are in their "nuptials."
This is Gulliver.
Of course he doesn't know he's Gulliver or even a gull but that's what I call him. Gulliver has been hanging out around the gate to our marina for several months and like all animals, once you get know them well enough, they don't all look or act the same. Gulliver is big and he's the head cock-rooster or the local feeding flock.
(Gulliver is in front. The smaller gull is a Ring Billed Gull which is a different species. There are fewer Ring Bills. They over winter here and breed farther north.)
Last summer Gulliver was apparently the father of a sickly gull I called Featherbutt from the Pootie Diaries. Here is a picture of Featherbutt with Gulliver in the background taken last fall. Notice that Gulliver has his winter non-breading colors. Featherbutt always had that awkward posture and begged constantly with the same mewing that a pre-fledgling uses. He didn't fly much and was very tame and when you saw him Gulliver was always around. Gulliver was very protective and would chase the other birds away and let Featherbutt get more than his share when you fed them.
They began taking "field trips" last month. I saw together clamming on the mud flats at low tide and I'd seen them out swimming together with Featherbutt tagging along like a trailer mewing the whole time. It appeared to me that Gulliver was trying to teach the kid how to make a living as a gull.
Last Sunday I saw Featherbutt at Boston Harbor Marina which is seven miles away. He was sitting on a log raft with a bunch other juveniles mewing away pitifully. I haven't seen him since. But I did notice that there was another gull hanging with Gulliver.
Meet the new Mrs. Gulliver all decked out in her snow wedding attire.
I'd been wondering what happened to Featherbutt and to be honest I'm a little worried about him but there isn't anything to do. When I came home close to dark last night Gulliver and the new gull were sitting on the fence together long after the others had headed in for their nights roost. Then the light came on.
Ah Ha, I thought, Gulliver has a new mate and like many birds species he sent Featherbutt packing so he could get down with making more kids. So to check this out I put a large cup full of food in one pile in front of them and they both hopped down and fed alongside each other. No competition here. They are a pair and it will be interesting to watch them throughout the breeding cycle the way I did a pair of barn swallows last summer.
Male and female gulls look the same except that the females are a little smaller. The Mrs is about 10% smaller. You pretty much have to see a mated pair together to tell them apart. At least in the case of these two there is also a very subtle difference in the shape of their heads. I don't know if that's a sexual indication or if it's about being individuals.
Bad Feather Day-
I don't know what happened to this poor little fellow. Gulls have waterproof feathers but he's/she's obviously all wet and unhappy. He looks like the just came out of the washer and I wonder if he got into oil or something. It's going to be in the teens tonight and if he didn't dry out during the day he won't make it overnight.
Mallard Shaped Icebreaker-
This little girl was foraging in the ice right at the edge of the lake. We have a healthy population of resident mallards and they are very used to people. Taking mallard pictures isn't a problem.
Mute Swan-
Mute swans aren't mute so I have no idea why they are called that. However they are an unwelcome introduced species or so the WA Department of Wildlife says. It is illegal to own one in this state and if they can catch it they will kill it. The reasoning is that they compete against the favored native Trumpeter and Tundra Swans. They're big beautiful birds and it isn't their fault they got imported. Nor is it their fault that they are more efficient in using the resources that are available and winning the evolution game. Seems to me there should be an alternative to killing them. But then the state "manages" the non-migratory Canada Geese that had over populated and become a real nuisance.
I don't know if the rust color on the neck means it's a young bird (probably) but it could be an artifact of the light. This is a very long distance shot and is highly cropped. Most of the pictures have some Photoshop enhancement in the contrast. It was a very low contrast day. This one took more work to dig the bird out of the haze and falling snow than the others.
Black In White-
We thought the snow was all done by around noon but then it began snowing really hard again about 4:30 PM. Every evening around sunset crows form up in several congregations that can reach several hundred and head out for a communal roost somewhere on the west side, probably in Capitol Forest about 7 miles away. These guys were part of a tribe of about 50 with more arriving as I left. This location is around a mile from home and by the time I got back here they were winging their way overhead cawing their way into the gathering gloom.
Mud Snails-(And the mud flats/estuary)
Capitol Lake is infested with a pest called the New Zealand Mud Snail and as a result it's closed to boating or swimming.
Close up of the offender.
The New Zealand mud snail has no natural predators or parasites in the United States, and consequently has become an invasive species. It can reach concentrations above 500,000 per m², endangering the food chain by out competing native snails and water insects for food, leading to sharp declines in the native populations.[17] Fish populations then suffer because the native snails and insects are their main food source. Wikipedia
The state began temporarily draining the lake today. The overnight temps will be in the low teens for the next couple of nights which is very low for here. This is an attempt to freeze some of the snail critters but they've done it before and admitted that it had very little effect. The snails burrow into the mud and are insulated from the cold. The last time they did it, it was nearer zero and lasted for about a week but I guess they figure that it doesn't cost anything to try or does it?
My question is what how will it effect the birds. There are still hundreds of ducks and geese and coots on the lake. Will draining it during this cold snap adversely effect them?
And thus, from my perspective as a birder, the larger issue of breaching the damn and permanently draining the lake.
Each fall thousands of migratory water fowl either use the lake as a stop-over refueling station for further migration or winter-over in our favorable climate. This fall, at the peak, there were several huge mixed rafts of ducks that stretched all the way across the north reservoir which is what you see in the pictures above. There is also the central reservoir (below) and the south reservoir that is riparian in nature; all were full of ducks and geese and coots and a few swans.
Since birds come and go, it's conservative to say that the lake plays a part in the live cycle of 10,000 or more water birds every year. In the summer the lake is also the primary food source for the second largest bat nursery in the state; upwards of 3,000 bats per night scour the lake for biting, stinging, pestilent, insects and during the day hundreds of swallows and dragon flies take their turn at the watery feed-lot and it's surrounding eco-system.
So what happens to the birds and the bats and the beneficial insects? Well the scientists know the bat nursery won't survive and of course the ducks will have one less place to call home and all these changes ripple though the eco-system at large. Our resident Peregrine Falcons feast on the ducks and bats so of course then they will get put out of business and on and on. Maybe I'll write more about it later. It's at least a whole diary. But I couldn't pass up the chance to get pictures of the exactly what the lake-less "estuary/mud flat will look like.
Of course the snow makes it look better than it does live.
The issue is only partly aesthetics. There are conflicting opinions on the ecological impact. The fish people are all in favor of the estuary which is obviously economically driven because there was no native salmon run on the river. The lake dead ends at Tumwater falls which couldn't be scaled by fish until a ladder was built at the same time as the damn. However, toxic black mud isn't especially pretty. Now honestly wouldn't you rather live here and save the water for the birds.
Than here-