Weather: Overcast, temperatures were in the 40s. There was some light rain. At the lake early this afternoon there seemed to be a wind out of the west. This evening there was light breeze out of the west or northwest.

Birds: At Swan Lake there were still a couple of Lesser Scaups. I also saw a pair of Northern Shovelers, and 3 American Wigeons. Several Savannah Sparrows were on the penninsula.

I saw a Red-tailed Hawk flying across from Swan Lake toward the experimental farm while looking around the muskeg on the beginning of Gavan Trail.

Flora: In the muskeg I noticed a Bog Laurel, Bog Rosemary, and Cloudberry blooming. The Three-leaf Goldthread seems to be well past it’s prime.

I also found a Plectania nafeldtii.

Other Notes: I saw a deer in the backyard around 10:45 this evening. It was pretty dark and I didn’t get a chance to see whether it was a buck or doe as it passed through the light from the windows.

A couple of days ago I noticed pollen cones maturing on a Sitka Spruce (Picea sitchensis). For some reason I had not realized that they started with the brown scales just like spruce tips (the new growth). It also occured to me that they grew in the same locations as you might normally expect to find new growth. This suggests that in years when a tree produces pollen cones on a given branch, that branch will not have any new growth. I suppose it’s possible that new growth develops after the pollen cones have dropped, so I will probably try to check on that throughout the summer.

Questions that occur to me include the following:
When does the tree ‘decide’ to produce pollen cones instead (presumably) of new growth? How early is it possible to tell whether a given brown-scaled bud is going to develop into a pollen cone or new growth? Is pollen cone production a regular cycle (every x-number of years) or dependent on available energy reserves and/or more or less random? How much of a given tree is devoted to pollen cones, and does any given tree tend to have at least a few pollen cones each year?