Rowan and I went a couple of different places today. We stopped by Swan Lake briefly to take a look. We also took a walk through the park.

Weather: It was overcast for most of the day, with a very light rain that fell for a time. When we were at the park there was a pretty good breeze out of the Southeast. The sun broke through a little bit in the in the evening, and the winds had calmed.

Birds: There were at least a couple of Northern Shovelers at Swan Lake. I also saw Mallards with ducklings. There was at least one Tree Swallow that appeared to be gathering nesting materials.

Totem Park estuary was pretty quiet, but there were a few gulls out on the beach.

Flora: When riding up to the house, I noticed a strong slightly sour smell. I looked up in the direction of the wind and saw the Red Elderberry bush in bloom. I had forgotten that elderberry had such a smell.

The upper intertidal beach plants continue to grow. There was the start of flower buds on what I think is a milkwort.

I revisited the slime mold to take a picture of it, but it had changed dramatically since I last saw it.

Invertebrates: I was able to observe a spider with a web at our porch carry a fly back up to where it could be consumed later.

At the park I saw a number of pill bugs (aka potato bugs, sow bugs, or roley-poleys). The first one that caught my eye was about 5 feet up on the trunk of a Red Alder tree. The others were in a log along the very upper part of the beach. There many of them crawling about and crammed into nooks in the rotting log.

Found an interesting colored spider crawling on my arm today. Decided to take a closer look at it and try to get a decent picture of it. I happened to discover the spider while down on campus, but my camera was at home. In the mean time, while trying to keep it from getting too far away, I had a chance to observe some of its behaviors. It stick its back end up in the air and let off silk. Someone I was talking with speculated that it was trying to float away, but it seemed too big to have much of a chance of that. I finally realized that it was letting the silk out and waiting for it to catch on something. At that point it would crawl up the silk to wherever it led. (I discovered this when it crawled up off the stick I was keeping it on towards my face; a line of silk had caught on my hat.) I also realized that this is how the spiders must get their webs across wide spaces. I had tried to imagine how the spiders could managed to build a web across a puddle (to say nothing of the silk/webs that are frequently encountered across trails). It makes a lot more sense to let the silk drift across, then go along it then to somehow carry one end of the silk with the other still attached.