Fuzzy Alarm Clock

Around 4am every morning when I hear the thumping of running paws on the kitchen floor, through the utility room and finally with a bounce on the bed and his front paws poking me, I know that my fuzzy alarm clock has arrived!

Now that he’s grown up and brave and no longer needs to sleep on the bed, he still feels that it’s his job to wake me up. How in the heck he knows that it’s four o’clock is beyond me, but he seldom misses by more than a few minutes. He sleeps in the living room now, usually with his wooby blanket, (He’s not that grown up!) like a little kid, with his toys scattered all around. (They’re fun to step on in the middle of the night, especially the ones that emit a loud squeak!)

I suppose, as he gets older he’ll stop waking me up every morning, and I have to admit when he does stop, I’ll miss it.

Eckman Lake Ospreys

The same pair of Ospreys return every spring to their nest on the power pole out in the middle of Eckman Lake. They raise two babies, mostly feeding them Trout from the lake and Sculpin from the bay. When the babies are small they start a loud peeping cry as soon as they see daddy coming in toward the nest with a meal.

In the middle of July they begin stretching their wings while standing on the edge of the nest, and then after a few false starts they make a short flight to a nearby stand of Fir trees on the shoreline. Soon they discover how well they can fly and then the acrobatic air show begins.

I’ve been watching them from my kayak for quite a few years, and it’s always a thrill to watch the fledglings practicing their acrobatics, hovering and diving, circling and dog fighting with each other. Several times they’ve made me hunker down in my kayak when they whistled by, just over my head.

I’ve read that they mate for life, can live up to 25 years and what was interesting to me was that they winter in separate places, usually southern Mexico or South America and return to the same nesting site every year. They leave here in late August or early September for their separate winter vacations.

The parents have become used to me fishing from my little boat over the years, and mostly ignore me, but the new babies are hard to approach. I tried to get some video of them this morning but they’re already flying well enough to keep their distance from me. Usually the only time they put on a show is when I leave the video camera at home.

I did get this fuzzy picture of one of them as he flew over me on his way to the trees on the far side of the lake. Maybe tomorrow I’ll try again.

Squidlings

Last year while walking on Ona Beach, J.C. and I found a large glob of Squid eggs that had come loose from their hold fast and washed up on the beach. We collected a few clusters and brought them home. We put some in a small tank at J.C.’s house and I took the rest to work the next morning. Since I was working for the E.P.A at the Marine Science Center, and had access to all of the labs, I borrowed a large aquarium, hooked it up with a steady supply of unfiltered marine water, dropped the eggs in and hoped for the best.

A few days later when I arrived at work, (I was usually the first one in the building in the mornings,) I checked the tank and it was full of tiny, miniature squidlings swimming about, in their squirty, squidy way. Later that day I showed them to the head research oceanographer, and got permission to use one of the cool binocular microscopes located in another lab.

I came to work earlier than usual the next morning, captured some of the babies in a small jar and took them to the microscopy lab. Earlier, one of the scientists had shown me how to use the equipment, and where to find the concave slides I would need to hold the squid in liquid while I viewed them. It only took a few seconds to transfer them to the slide with an eyedropper, and when I peered into the eyepieces, and turned the focus knob a few clicks, I was rewarded with an amazing sight. Instead of little swimming dots I was now looking at squid! I could easily see their huge black eyes and through a transparent body speckled with brown spots I could see the heart beating. Then, amazingly, the spots changed color to yellow, then to orange, then to black and finally back to brown again. Sometimes the spots would get larger and then they would almost disappear. I watched in awe as they squirted around in the little pool of seawater on that slide and for a while completely lost track of time.

I had rigged a brine shrimp hatchery in the lab to feed them, hoping to grow them up to full size, (six to eight inches) but by the next morning they were dying at an alarming rate. I brought my video camera to work and took some fair video through the microscope lens, but they never did the color change again; I think they were lacking some natural food that I couldn’t provide. Later that day I took them out to the bay and poured them down into the water between the rocks. Hopefully a few survived, I guess none of them would have made it if we had left them on the beach.

Firewood

We finally found some firewood at a "reasonable" price,($160.00 a cord!) Some of the guys wanted $185.00! When we moved here in 1980 we got a cord of dry fir delivered for fifty bucks.
It's a good feeling to have the winter supply stacked and drying out by the end of July. This winter we'll be burning Alder, Fir, Spruce and Shore Pine. Last year we had quite a bit of Cherry but it's all gone now.
It'll probably take a couple of days to stack it, but there's no rush.

Camping at Five Rivers

Well, we tried out our camping rig Thursday night at an unimproved campground on Five Rivers. It was a beautiful, shady spot next to the river with a large fire pit and a makeshift grill someone had left behind.

We set up our tent, which has an opening for a vehicle, like a station wagon or a pickup, to be backed up to it and provide sleeping space.

Unfortunately the Toyota just is too small for two people, an air mattress and a double sleeping bag. We had suspected that it might not work, so we had a larger air mattress ready to set up on the floor of the tent. Oh well, back to the drawing board!

J.C. set up his new tent and he, Mike, Kelly, Carol and I had an enjoyable evening sitting around the fire.

Taz protected us from an invading crawdad