Thanksgiving, Post and Photos by Dennis Plank

Dennis has been getting his knees muddy and his back sore pulling Scot’s Broom on the South Sound Prairies since 1998. In 2004, when the volunteers started managing Prairie Appreciation Day, he made the mistake of sending an email asking for “lessons learned” and got elected president of Friends of Puget Prairies-a title he appropriately renamed as “Chief Cat Herder”. He has now turned that over to Gail Trotter. Along the way, he has worked with a large number of very knowledgeable people and picked up a few things about the prairie ecosystem. He loves to photograph birds and flowers.

This year with so many things seeming to go wrong (and a few right) it seemed like a good time to go back to the simple things.

I am thankful:

For Meadowlarks singing, Harriers dancing and Kestrels hovering;

For frost on bracken ferns and dew on spiderwebs;

For the first tiny bloom of Spring Gold and the first Shooting Star.

I am Thankful

For a prairie sunrise on a perfect May morning;

For a herd of elk grazing in the distance;

For a Savannah Sparrow tsee-tsee-tseeing in the grass tops.

I am Thankful

For the first rain of fall and a sunny Prairie Appreciation Day;

For winter oaks blooming with mosses and lichen;

For spring woodlands blooming with Lilies and Trilliums

I am Thankful

For a rainy spring day of pulling Scotch Broom;

For a sunny day in July digging out Tansy Ragwort;

For a crisp November day planting prairie flowers;

I am Thankful most of all

For each and every one of the hundreds of people

working so hard to restore and preserve

this wonderful ecosystem we call prairies.

Winter Birds, Post and Images by Dennis Plank

Dennis has been getting his knees muddy and his back sore pulling Scot’s Broom on the South Sound Prairies since 1998. In 2004, when the volunteers started managing Prairie Appreciation Day, he made the mistake of sending an email asking for “lessons learned” and got elected president of Friends of Puget Prairies-a title he appropriately renamed as “Chief Cat Herder”. He has now turned that over to Gail Trotter. Along the way, he has worked with a large number of very knowledgeable people and picked up a few things about the prairie ecosystem. He loves to photograph birds and flowers.

Winter Birds

Birders and bird photographers are fond of whining about the paucity of species to be found in the winter months, though luckily our winters rarely look like the picture above. When I started thinking about this post, I was predisposed to thinking I could count them on my fingers. Then I started listing them and before I knew it, I had a list of forty species that could be seen on our property. To verify my list, I asked my wife, Michelle, to compile her own list and then combined the two. That added nearly another ten.

While we are on prairie, we are bordered on the back by an old gravel pit that’s grown up to alders and a belt of youngish Douglas fir between it and our property line. We also have a small clump of Douglas Fir on the property, and I have a feeding station and my photography blind there. This obviously helps with the count. There are some species, such as the Varied Thrush that we only see when it snows.

 

Others, such as most of the owl species, that we’ve identified only by their calls.

The most abundant species on our property is the Dark-eyed Junco and we have almost exclusively the Oregon race.

However, last winter we had a stray from further east in the form of a Slate-colored variation.

The second most abundant group is the Black-capped Chickadee and Chestnut-backed Chickadee, which are hard to separate, though they don’t really seem to hang with one another. The numbers and proportions of the two species vary quite a bit from winter to winter.

We have discovered an interesting phenomenon in bird psychology here. In the eastern part of the country, it is very common for people to feed Black-capped Chickadees from their hands. Here, we have never been able to get them to do more than a touch and go, though the Chestnut-backed Chickadees are quite willing.

On rare occasions (it’s happened once in the 15 winters I’ve been here) we get a heavy influx of Red-breasted Nuthatches competing with the Chickadees. They’re not big sunflower seed consumers, but they do like the peanuts a lot. In the winter when they were so abundant, they got to the point where I would have more of them eating from my hand than I would the Chickadees, though most years it’s difficult or impossible to entice them.

Away from feeding stations, the Chickadees tend to form mixed flocks with Bushtits and Kinglets foraging through the trees and shrubs, but neither of those species is attracted to feeders so seeing them is a very rare occurrence.

Another common set of feeder birds are the “red” finches. We regularly have Purple Finches and House Finches in the winter, with their relative populations again varying quite a bit. Some winters it seems like we have all one species. When I first started doing bird photography we also had Cassin’s Finches, but I haven’t seen one since 2016. They are typically not Western Washington birds, but the prairie tends to attract plants and animals more typical of the drier side of the state.

Feeding the birds can have it’s drawbacks for a bird photographer. The last few winters, I’ve had difficulty with our local deer population photobombing me.

Another species with a surprisingly large presence on our property is the Western Bluebird, that comes through in flocks of up to a dozen birds once or twice a day and lets us know that they’d like us to put out some mealworms for them (see the Aiding the Bluebirds post my wife wrote).

They are invariably accompanied by a few Yellow-rumped Warblers and a horde of Juncos.

This year, they have also been had an American Kestrel following them in. Thus far we haven’t seen it succeed in taking any birds, but I suspect it’s done so or it wouldn’t be so persistent.

The Kestrel is one of the iconic prairie birds of our area and seems to be on the increase. They’re a common sight on the wires along the road in prairie areas. I’ve been seeing one this winter along the Elk Refuge north of Littlerock where I’ve not seen one in the past.

Another iconic prairie species, that unfortunately does not pay us visits, is the Western Meadowlark. They can be found on prairies like Glacial Heritage in flocks at this time of year and on any half-way sunny day, if you’re out pulling Scotch broom like a good volunteer, you’ll hear the males singing.

A prairie species that I haven’t included on the list because we’ve only seen it on Glacial Heritage once and that on only one Saturday workday a number of years ago, is the Short-eared Owl. They look and hunt amazingly like a Northern Harrier and when we first saw them that day, we mistook them for Harriers.

In the winter, our female harriers seem to leave the area, but we do sometimes see a male and some years they include out property on their regular hunting route.

Our list of winter birds is below. For simplicity, I just arranged them in alphabetical order by common name. If anyone has additions to this list, please leave a comment and we can augment it for later use. Please note that I’ve deliberately left off the water species other than Canada Goose since it spends so much time in open fields.

American Crow

American Goldfinch

American Kestrel

American Robin

Anna’s Hummingbird

Bald Eagle

Barn Owl

Barred Owl

Bewick’s Wren

Black capped Chickadee

Brewer’s Blackbird

Bushtit

California Quail

Canada Goose

Cassin’s Finch

Chestnut-backed Chickadee

Chipping Sparrow

Crow

Dark-eyed Junco, Oregon Race

Dark-eyed Junco, Slate Colored

Downy Woodpecker

European Starling

Golden-crowned Sparrow

Great-horned Owl

Hairy Woodpecker

House Finch

House Sparrow

House Wren

Killdeer

Long-eared Owl

Mourning Dove

Northern Flicker, Red-shafted

Northern Harrier

Pine Siskin

Purple Finch

Raven

Red Breasted Nuthatch

Red-tailed Hawk

Ruby-crowned Kinglet

Savannah Sparrow

Scrub Jay

Sharp-shinned Hawk

Song Sparrow

Spotted Towhee

Stellar’s Jay

Varied Thrush

Western Bluebird

Western Meadowlark

Yellow-rumped Warbler

Beautiful Moments on the Prairie, Post and Photos by Meredith Rafferty

Meredith is a photographer who marvels at the world around us, night and day. Her happiest moments are connecting with nature and capturing special moments to share with others. She volunteers with the Center for Natural Lands Management and the Nisqually Land Trust, and is past President of the Olympia Camera Club. She delights in the wonders of the Pacific Northwest, from prairies to mountains, rivers to Puget Sound, morning sunrises to magical night skies. You are welcome to explore with her on Instagram.com/ImageConnections.

Beautiful Moments on the Prairie

Four years ago in April, it was my first day as a volunteer with the Center for Natural Lands Management which leads volunteers for Glacial Heritage Preserve and several other prairie properties. A retiree, I felt I was game to spend the day on the South Puget Sound Prairies pulling scotch broom. I was a novice as far as prairies go but had picked up some knowledge of plants and certainly had experience with digging and hauling from a lifetime of gardens and yards. Besides, I knew that volunteers are the very best group of people to be around and looked forward to learning from them.

I did carry one tool unique to me that day, a camera. For me, every outdoor experience is an adventure of discovery. I view the task at hand as a contribution to the flow of life around me. My reward is to look beyond the task and see a special moment and capture it in an image to share with others. It could be a beautiful scene, a special creature, an intricate bit of life, connecting us to the greater world. There is always wonder and surprise. What would I find this day?

The surprise wasn’t the stubborn scotch broom. Many of you reading this blog know it well. A lover of open spaces and sun, scotch broom moved in and overtook many areas in the South Sound prairies. I remember as a kid when roadsides were planted with this drought tolerant, tough plant to help address soil erosion and provide green landscaping. My childhood home was next door to acres of it. The bounty of yellow blossoms turned into seed pods that twisted and popped the seeds; the sound could be heard like a sort of popcorn across the fields on a hot day. What I didn’t know then was the seeds were carried far beyond and lived up to 50 years in the soil, waiting for the opportunity to sprout. This means that pulling broom is a never-ending task of stewardship.

But what would be the surprise this day? It was a silkmoth, clinging to the grasses! Apparently newly emerged, it didn’t move much as I struggled to line up my camera about a foot off the ground. Cameras are little computers and this one was new to me so there was fumbling with its menus and buttons. Plus, I was learning that many of my photos would require me to sit, if not lay, on the ground to get level with my intriguing subject. People have often been alarmed to find me spread out in the grasses, unmoving. I’ve noticed that the older I get, the more alarmed they are!

 

 

 

 

As we worked and talked, I began to see the broom-pulling as part of a much bigger restoration cycle.

There is the clearing and the planting. There is also the collection of seed from native plants growing in the prairies. Cultivated at Violet Prairie seed farm and nursery, the collected seed yields more seed and young seedlings in quantities, which will cycle back to rejuvenated areas and give them a boost.

Intrigued, I wanted to learn more. In future blogs, I’d like to share more of the restoration and life of South Puget Sound Prairies as a volunteer with a camera.

 

 

Ecostudies Institute Broadens Its Conservation Capacity and Vision, Post by Gary Slater, images by staff of Ecostudies Institute or as attributed.

Gary founded Ecostudies Institute in 2001 and has worked to identify situations where Ecostudies’ knowledge, experience, and skills can be most effective towards advancing the conservation of birds, other wildlife, and their habitats. In 2020, he returned full time to Ecostudies as part of a transition team broadening the vision and conservation capacity of the organization. Gary has nearly 30 years of experience in nonprofit administration, conservation, and avian research, including work in the Pacific Northwest, south Florida, Venezuela, and the Bahamas. Most recently, his work has focused on conserving imperiled birds in prairie-oak habitats. 

Ecostudies Institute Broadens Its Conservation Capacity and Vision

In the last few weeks, Ecostudies Institute has undergone quite the transformation as a group of conservation scientists and practitioners in the South Sound Prairie community have joined the organization. This group, former employees of the Center for Natural Lands Management, is excited about embarking on a new course and using their skills and expertise to achieve tangible conservation outcomes.

Ecostudies Institute has a long conservation history in the Pacific Northwest. It was established in 2001 as a 501(c)(3) scientific non-profit organization in Washington State with a mission focused on conserving birds and other wildlife and the habitats they rely on in both Washington and Florida. For nearly two decades, Ecostudies has accomplished its mission through a combination of restoration, science, and outreach.

During its history, Ecostudies has built a strong foundation of conservation work. Ecostudies has coordinated and successfully completed large-scale projects for The National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and collaborated with numerous non-profit and academic institutions and private organizations. In Florida, Ecostudies worked on a number of projects in the Everglades ecosystem, including reintroducing two extirpated cavity-nesting birds, the brown-headed nuthatch and Eastern bluebird, to Everglades National Park. This Florida activity ultimately contributed to work here in the Pacific Northwest, where reintroduction efforts for the Western bluebird in North Puget Sound and Vancouver Island were modeled after those successful efforts.

 

With the recent arrival of new staff and expertise Ecostudies is broadening its capacity and vision. Based in Olympia, Washington, we now focus our efforts solely in the Pacific Northwest, where we will bring over 60 years of combined conservation experience to a region we are continuously fascinated and inspired by. One area where we expect to make a significant and immediate conservation impact is on the prairies and oak woodlands of Cascadia, especially here in the South Sound region where we are based.

 

Although we are still getting our feet under us after a period of inactivity, Ecostudies has already begun helping Joint Base Lewis McChord Military Base (JBLM) through a cooperative agreement. Under this agreement, we will assist our partners at JBLM in restoring, managing, and monitoring their prairie resources through a diverse array of activities, including prescribed ecological burning.

One of the fundamental approaches that Ecostudies will employ to achieve conservation goals is cooperative conservation. This model strives to realize improved conservation outcomes by developing shared goals and vision through partnerships, which, in turn, encourages information transfer, advances in cutting edge restoration techniques, and the development of integrated range-wide conservation approaches. Ecostudies will now coordinate the Cascadia Prairie-Oak Partnership, a community of people and organizations that are involved in prairie-oak conservation and species recovery efforts in western Cascadia.

In the coming months, we look forward to sharing more information about our conservation activities on our web page and social media; such as our new work with two federally listed butterfly species, the island marble and Taylor’s checkerspot.

We hope you check back with us and we look forward to seeing you out on the prairies!