Red Buttons

Day 352: Mushrooms are popping up everywhere this autumn, demonstrating the most diverse collection of species I've seen in many years. My skills at identification of fungi are minimal at best. I know what I eat, and I know not to eat anything I don't know. I've gone as far as placing these cute little red buttons in Hygrophorus and have not ruled out H. speciosus, although they are not growing under larch (the species occurs under other evergreens), but even so, there are half a dozen species they could be, and without checking spores under the microscope, I can't be more definite. In any event, some Hygrophorus species are edible, but come with the caution that the common name "waxy-cap" is well-deserved. Apparently, even edible waxy-caps have all the gustatory appeal of gnawing on a block of paraffin.

If I Had A Hammer

Day 351: What's more fun than a construction work party? Why, a DEconstruction work party, of course! After long years of saying "We need to build new tent platforms" and then revising that to "Nah, the old ones will last another season," budget and volunteer opportunity finally came together in time for National Public Lands Day 2019. Traditionally Mount Rainier National Park's largest volunteer event of the year, roughly seventy people gathered in front of the transportation exhibit yesterday before dispersing into three separate work groups: trails, reveg and campground. The campground unit set themselves to moving the platform tents and then pounding apart the deteriorating wood bases, salvaging what lumber could be reused and discarding the reast. Meanwhile, a second group turned the picnic pavilion into a pro-tem carpentry shop and zipped through the assembly of the ten new platforms which will be put into use next spring. The Weather Gods smiled on our endeavours, holding off the rain (if perhaps not the cold) until the projects were done.

Myriopteris Gracillima, Lace Lip Fern

Day 350: This small rock-dwelling fern (Myriopteris gracillima, Lace Lip Fern) was a new one for me. Subalpine plant life tends to be a lot smaller than its cousins from the lowlands, and ferns are no exception. In fact, you might be forgiven for not thinking they were ferns at all, but rather the foliage of some vascular plant. The fronds of Lace Lip are only about six inches long and grow as a dense mat of greenery. The foliage is rather leathery and somewhat stiff. Recognizing it as something new for a natural-history post, I bailed over the edge of an embankment to get a closer look while Joe remained safely on trail. I thought for a minute I was going to have to ask him to pull me back up, but I managed to crawl up the scree on my own. The things we do for science!

Playing The Pitiful Card

Day 349: If ever there were experts at playing the "pitiful" card, Grey Jays would take the prize. Their call is a plaintive mew, not unlike that of a very young kitten, and they understand the power of eye contact, shifting their glance from your trail snacks to your own eyes in obvious interspecies communication. Don't tell me I'm anthropomorphizing. I've studied the corvids and I've lived with psittacines. The term "bird brain" should be considered a compliment. They understand stimulus and response, the "stimulus" being their heart-rending begging and the "response" that you share your lunch with them. If you analyze that closely, it's a bit more sophisticated than pecking a green button to get a treat from a laboratory dispenser. They know how to work an audience.

The issues involved in feeding wild birds are complex, and humans aren't really the brightest crayons in the box when it comes to understanding anything more complicated than "Do this" and "Don't do that." The average hiker sees no difference between giving a Grey Jay a graham cracker and giving it a few raw unsalted sunflower seeds. The reward for the human is the same: Jay sits on your hand or your head, and you get to take a picture to share on Facebook. The Jay, on the other hand, gets a mouthful of chemicals, sugar and processed grain in the case of the graham cracker, or something not too far removed from its normal diet which is digestible and nutritious from the sunflower seeds. I am not against feeding wild birds outside the Park; I am against feeding them the wrong foods. That said, I speak out against the practice in general because humans are largely ineducable on the finer points. But no, the Sheep Lake lot didn't talk me out of my figs.

Home Arts

Day 348: An unexpected windfall of Asian pears from my botany partner Joe set Tuesday's course of action. I spent the morning peeling them (a process which dyed my fingers a lovely shade of orange), and then dragged out the water-bath canner and my biggest cook-pot which was necessary to accommodate sixteen cups of pear bits. I prefer to chunk them up rather than canning halves or slices; you get more in the jar, and fewer jars require less storage space. I put them up in pints rather than quarts so I can parse them out judiciously over the winter months. That said, I've never canned Asian pears before and was unsure how long to process the firmer fruit, so gave them a slightly longer boil in light syrup than I'd have given standard pears followed by twenty minutes in the water-bath. A dose of ascorbic/citric acid product will keep them from turning brown. Oh yeah, that's the kitty quilt in the background. I'm a little over half done with the machine-quilting.

Washington State Fair 2019

Day 347: I entered three pieces in the Washington State Fair's Home Arts "Textiles" competition this year: a hardanger centerpiece, a tatted doily and a handwoven bag with a shoulder strap. Of the three pieces, the one I didn't think the judges would even give a second glance was the bag. Okay, I wove the body and the strap on two different types of looms (floor loom and backstrap), and it was fully lined, but it was just a simple tabby weave. Surprisingly, it brought me a first-place ribbon. The hardanger and tatting both took second place in their class. This was my second year at the Fair. Last year's entries also took two seconds and a first. I'm already at work on entries for 2020!

All For One Demo LIchen

Day 346: On October 6, I will be giving an "Introduction to Lichens" presentation for the Nisqually Land Trust, an indoor "nature walk" (as it were). To that end, over the next week and a half, I will need to gather specimens for demonstration, and of course I can't collect from inside the Park. Obviously, this means I'm going to need to go a bit farther afield, "farther" in this case meaning a 7-mile hike (round trip) out to Sheep Lake in order to obtain a sample of Letharia vulpina, a particularly interesting species. Since I was going to be hiking the PCT from Chinook Pass to Sheep, it seemed only logical to tack another 3.5 miles on in order to complete a MeadoWatch hike on Naches Loop. The weather could have been better, but the missions were both accomplished. Joe Dreimiller's assistance was greatly appreciated since he was able to reach a second lichen species (Bryoria fremontii) and pulled a chunk of it down out of a subalpine fir with his trekking pole. The remainder of my chosen samples will be easier to obtain from sites much closer to home.