October 20, 2018
Nisqually Wildlife Refuge
We reached the Nisqually Wildlife Refuge at around 10 am. The air at the Refuge felt quite moist and cold and within a few minutes of being outside the car, it felt as if a chill had penetrated through the four layers I was wearing and settled into my bones. I don’t think I had felt this cold in a long time.
The first thing we noticed as we started walking out of the parking lot was a coyote hunting in the meadow right next to the lot. We knew it was hunting as it would crouch and then pounce at something in the grass and it did this repeatedly. The coyote was quite far away but I was able to make a quick sketch of it:
As we started walking on the trail going through the refuge we heard the calls of many birds including the Northern Flicker, which is a kind of woodpecker. It was hard to see the bird as it was sitting on a very tall branch and was at quite a distance away from us. We also saw a red-tailed hawk. It had a reddish/orangeish-brown tail and kind of chunky body. Here’s my rough sketch of what it looked like:
We also heard a chattering sound which, according to our professor, was the call of a belted kingfisher flying over us.
Next, we walked towards an old barn. In the grass surrounding the barn, there were a lot of Pacific tree frogs. They had surprisingly loud croaks. Despite being tree frogs, they were in the grass because in wet weather they come down to the ground to lay eggs. I was lucky enough to catch one of the tree frogs and get a video of it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xdFSjCuYmg)
As you can see, it’s skin is quite bumpy and slimy. Pacific tree frogs have really sticky toe pads which they use to climb trees and I could feel that stickiness as the frog moved over my hand.
In that same patch of grass, one of the students found this mushroom. I don’t know what the species is but it had a very pretty shiny golden-grey appearance.
The Nisqually Wildlife Refuge is home to an estuary- an environment that is a mix of freshwater and saltwater marshes. Because of this, the refuge has great biodiversity of species adapted to saltwater, freshwater or even both.
A dike had been built through the Nisqually River’s floodplain as park managers wanted to restrict the rivers flooding. It was amazing walking on the dike because on one side there was dense vegetation adapted to freshwater and on the other side was very sparse shrubby vegetation due to the high salt contents of the soil and water.
On the dike, we spotted what was the caterpillar stage of the Isabella tiger moth. As you can see, it was covered in dark “fur”.
We spotted many birds while walking on the dike too, including the American kestrel, the Northern harrier, the Short-eared owl, the Peregrine falcon (the fastest bird in the world!!) and the Great Blue Heron. The heron was moving its neck in quite a funny manner and was stationary long enough for me to sketch it.
My handwriting is quite illegible here as my hands were very numb from the cold. The really blurry text on the sketch reads “orange beak” as the heron did have a very distinctive orange beak.
I also got the opportunity to taste pickle weed which grew near the saltwater marsh. It was pink and green in color and quite short. The crystals on the plant seem to be salt crystals. It tasted very salty (like pickles) and was kind of crunchy.
While returning back to the parking lot we took a different route which went along an oxbow lake. The lake was surrounded by a lot of vegetation (including cottonwood and bigleaf maple trees). There were many mallards and a pair of gadwalls in the lake. At the edge of the lake, hidden among the dense weeds, we spotted the Virginia rail, a bird looks like a very small kiwi. The only other feature I could make out was it’s orange-brown belly as it was very well camouflaged.
Mima Mounds Natural Area Preserve
Our next destination that day was the Mima Mounds. The Mima Mounds were fascinating and I love that experts are still arguing over how they formed. I think that the mystery further added to their appeal, at least for me. The landscape is technically a savanna and looks very much like one, as it mostly has grasses and small shrubs growing on it apart from the occasional oak tree save for one big difference- it is covered in these strange mounds.
As soon as we entered the area, someone from our group (I think it was one of our teaching assistants) caught a garter snake.
I also got the opportunity to hold the snake. It was an amazing feeling holding this tiny snake in my hand, especially as it coiled itself around my wrist. The garter snake was brown in color and had the long lines running through its skin which were lighter or darker shades of brown.
Since we were there in the afternoon, the weather was much less cool and I was able to seat myself on top of one of the mounds and sketch the landscape in peace.
The trees growing at the edge of the grassland were mostly Douglas firs while the trees growing in the grassland were mostly oaks. The oaks were quite short.
Next, we traveled an area where a mound had been sliced through and we had the chance to at what these mounds were made of and come up with hypotheses of how they might have formed.
This particular mound was covered in a lot of coastal reindeer lichen.
The soil showed some stratification and was divided into layers of small rocks, big rocks and small sediments. The soil wasn’t very stable, as it was really easy to pull out the rocks and big chunks of soil just using my bare hands. I think that the only reason the mounds were able to maintain their structure through the thousands of years that they have existed is because of the plants that grow on them. Touching the gravelly soil, it seemed quite obvious to me that the only thing holding it together was the roots of all the vegetation on top of it. Also, the gravelly texture of the soil seemed to suggest that it might have been glacial outwash.
October 21, 2018
Mount Rainier National Park
This was the part of the trip I was most excited for as I have seen Mount Rainier so many times from the UW campus on clear days and I finally got to actually see it close up!
One of our first destinations in the National Park was an old growth forest. Here is what I wrote in my field journal while sitting at the base of a giant Douglas fir:
The Western Redcedar whose roots I have drawn here lay across the forest floor and was covered in moss. It was large and sturdy enough for me to walk on it and I clicked pictures of surrounding areas.
The forest floor was covered in mushroom, especially mycorrhizal ones. The mycorrhizal fungi form mutualistic relationships with the trees, especially the Douglas firs.
As can be seen, the old growth forest had quite a lot of diversity of habitat due to the variety of structures the combination of old trees, young trees, snags, nurse logs etcetera provides. For this reason, old-growth forest is quite valuable especially when it comes to the conservation of species like the spotted owl.
Most of the really large trees in the forest were Douglas firs, while the ones in the understory were mostly Western Hemlocks. Some of the other species we found in the forest were the rattlesnake orchid, the twin flower, bunchberry, and Loberia pulmonaria (lungwort). The lungwort is an important species of lichen as it fixes nitrogen into forms that can be utilized by the plants in the forest.
Unlike the rough gravelly soil of the Mima Mounds, the soil in this forest was much deeper and spongy and it was obvious that is had a lot of organic matter in it.
Next, we got to see what was the beginning of the Nisqually River.
The river was coming through between the mountains. However, the glacier it originates from was not in sight as it had retreated to behind the mountains, away from our view (possibly due to climate change). The retreating of the glacier has, over time, has made the landscape unstable and caused the glacial till and rocks to tumble down towards the river. Due to this, the height of the Nisqually riverbed has risen considerably and a lot of the vegetation along the banks of the river has been destroyed.
Our final destination of the day was Mount Rainier. By the time we reached the base of the mountain, the sun was high up, the sky had cleared and it had actually become pretty warm. This was going to prove to be a problem later, as the warm temperature plus the physical effort of hiking up a mountain made us quite sweaty, tired and dehydrated. (Making this experience worse was the fact that i had forgotten to bring my inhaler and as our altitude increased it got harder for me to breathe normally and I was coughing a lot).
Here’s a picture of the mountain from the starting point of our trail:
Since we had entered the subalpine vegetation zone now, most of the trees surrounding us were Mountain Hemlocks and Sub-alpine firs. These trees have shorter branches that are arranged in such a manner that allows snow to easily fall off during the winter thus saving the trees from damage.
The rocks in the above two pictures have originated from volcanic eruptions thousands of years ago as this is a very geologically active area.
If you look carefully at the glaciers, you will notice dark striations running through the glaciers horizontally. These are basically layers of snow from each winter separated by layers of dust that accumulate over the glacier in the summer.
Our trail was quite rocky and in some places has very tiny streams of water flowing through the sand and gravel. After hiking the trail, we reached a lateral moraine near the mountainside where we spent a considerable amount of time observing the landscape.
Here is the moraine and the view from it:
These are the notes I took here:
Something that stuck out to me about the heather is that the soil up there was very dry and very little organic matter and exposed to strong winds so obviously the plant would have to be quite hardy and resilient but our professor told us that the plant was very susceptible to trampling and kind of delicate so we had to be careful not to step on it.
I also had the chance to sit and sketch for a bit:
While being up on that moraine and having such a great view of the mountain was quite amazing we were also very aware of how much climate change is altering this landscape. The glaciers on Rainier are receding at very fast rates and in just a few decades all that will remain is the ice near the peak of the mountain unless strict action is taken to mitigate climate change.
Our trip ended with us hiking back down the mountain and starting our drive back to Seattle.
Field Journal 