Month: August 2008

Anyone following my web site for a few years must have known I couldn’t continue to resist buying dahlias for my own garden. I think I’ve shown more dahlias than roses from the Pt. Defiance Rose Garden, and I do spend considerable time sitting in my garden.

I’ve probably resisted because I consider the vegetable garden my domain and the flower gardens Leslie’s. However, I’ve ended up spending considerable time this year working in the yard this summer, even on flower beds, so I decided I could choose a couple plants to go in the front garden.

The first looked an awful lot like my favorite dahlias in the Pt. Defiance Dahlia Garden:

Originally I thought this would be the only dahlia we’d buy this year — I do have to save money for camera equipment, and gas, after all.

However, we were at a nursery looking for a bird bath and for plants that would do well in the shade. Unfortunately, I couldn’t limit myself to just those areas and ended up getting this rather unusual hybrid dahlia:

The rather large plant is a beautiful smoky color, complementing the ornamental grasses and unusual plants purchased by the previous owner.

Our trip back from the lighthouse at Dungeness Spit was much tougher than the five mile trip out to it. With an unusually high tide we were forced to walk in loose sand, rocks, and even on logs to keep dry. Even our sunshine disappeared, leaving us worried it would start raining before we got back.

Almost immediately, though, we started seeing more birds and animals, and I hadn’t gone that far not to take pictures. First, we spotted a large group of harbor seals. Although they splashed repeatedly, I only managed to get shots like this of them riding the waves and watching us:

Most of my attention, though was devoted to trying to get a picture of the terns that kept flying directly over my head and out to sea. It was nearly impossible to get a good picture of one in flight with the low-light conditions, but when I was forced to climb to the top of the ridge to avoid a large wave, I saw a massive flock of Common Terns on the other side of the spit.

My favorite shot of the day was this one of a pair of Terns catching fish.

Birding wise, though, I think this is the first time I’ve ever managed to get a shot of a Whimbrel, or even knew what one looked like, for that matter:

The first half of Wednesday’s trip to Dungeness Spit was limited to observing various kinds of gulls, which, fortunately, turned out to be more interesting than I would have thought. I’ve never seen gulls like these striking Heerman’s Gulls with bright red beaks and white heads, though they were starting to lose their breeding colors,

mixed in with gulls like this,

which turned out to be an immature Heerman’s Gull. I still find it difficult to get my head around the idea that totally different colored birds can be the same species.

Heerman’s Gulls, though, are not to be confused with this more common, at least more common here, Glaucous-Winged Gull flying by

nor with this Glaucous-Winged Gull with tan and black chicks.

which had nested on the lighthouse roof, our destination for the day, 5 miles from the start of the trail, and at least 9 miles back to the start of the trail, or so it seemed on a day of record high tides. It’s taken me two day to get enough energy back to actually sit down and start editing the pictures I took, though I’m sure the fact that I saw more birds on the way back added to the time it took to return, but that’s a story for another day.