Late June 2024
Pacific Northwest
More summer phenology from the islands of Washington state.
Part 1 Berries and birds
Berries are ripening sequentially, which is great for all the birds, mammals and other critters who depend on all those calories and vitamins. The salmonberries start the season, and are about done now. Red elderberries have been ripening for a couple of weeks. Trailing blackberries and Serviceberries are starting to ripen, and thimbleberries have another couple of weeks. Salal and Himalayan blackberries are late summer ripeners. Robins, Towhees, Swainsons thrushes, chickadees, BH grosbeaks, finches and other birds are rustling around in the thickets and by roadsides stripping berries as quickly as they ripen.
Clockwise from top left: Salmonberries, Red elderberries, Trailing blackberries, Thimbleberries
Perhaps my favorite of all the berry-feeding birds are the Cedar Waxwings. They are mostly summer birds here and I only see them in the vicinity of ripe berries. There’s a spot along my regular walk that has a thicket of soapberry bushes (Shepherdia canadensis, aka buffaloberry, soopolallie, or foamberry). Soapberry bushes only grow in dry exposed sites where other shrubs don’t do so well, and this particular spot is on the bluff above the bay, between madrona trees. Soapberries are called that because the berries contain saponins, which act as surfactants much as your household soaps do. Their tendency to create foam was used by Northwest tribes who whipped up the berry juice with some sweetener to form a frothy pink treat (known to First Nations as sxusem).
Soapberry bushes are either male or female, and this spot has several giant female bushes (male bushes are nearby).
The ocean is just on the left down a steep bank (you can hear it in the June 17 clip in the video below)
In June the soapberries ripen and my chances of seeing waxwings are pretty good. The berries taste horribly bitter to me but they’re obviously very attractive to waxwings.
Plucking a ripe soapberry. This was earlier in June — you can see unripe green berries
Hard to tell gender in Cedar waxwings but this is a female: she has a light chin. Males have black-feathered chins.
I took video over a couple of weeks before the waxwings left. The bushes are stripped of berries now but uphill and across the road is a clump of Bitter Cherry trees, and those fruits are just starting to ripen. The waxwings may come back to this stretch of road.
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Part 2 Wasps and wasps
There are various kinds of wasps around these days but two make up the extreme ends of the welcome spectrum for me.
I really really dislike and fear yellowjackets. They are aggressive and go out of their way to sting, based on my experience. This is early in the season but I’m already seeing them active in our yard and have been stung once this season. Spring weather was conducive to nest building: drier than usual and not as cold as it was the previous couple of years. The last straw was a nest being built and filled next to our garage door. To be fair, these are aerial yellowjackets rather than the ground-nesting kind, hence not quite as vicious, but still they are not good neighbors. They were a hazard any time going out to the driveway, and the bench I use to clean my birdbath is right there too. Mr O does not like killing things but I persuaded him to dispatch this colony (at night).
Before and after. You can see the cells were being filled with larvae.
I have traps set up now around the yard to — hopefully! — reduce the numbers as summer progresses but it will get bad in August no matter what once they enter their frantic stage.
Meanwhile, out at the sandy/clay bluff overlooking another of my nearby bays there’s a bumper crop of amiable Sand wasps this summer. Sand wasps are solitary but gregarious insects who dig burrows in soft unvegetated sediment into which they lay their eggs. They are not aggressive at all. Currently they are swarming the overlook area, buzzing around in the thousands just above the ground, but you can walk right through them and they simply move out of your way. I’ve read if you stomp on a female in your bare feet she might sting you, but otherwise they go their way while you go yours.
Adult sand wasps feed on nectar, and are good pollinators. Adult females prey on flies which she brings back to her burrows to feed her larvae.
Like insects in general, sand wasps are most active when it’s warm and sunny. I caught a photo of one in a rare moment of rest:
One sand wasp (Bembix americana)
Here’s a photo that catches several wasps and burrow holes in the field of view. You can see how easy the sediment is to burrow into.
I calculated that in the approx 35’x30’ area where they are active, given 4 or 5 per square foot (based on still photos), there are about four to five thousand sand wasps at this site. That many yellowjackets could annihilate the entire population of Washington state I expect.
Short video:
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According to references like the one linked above, what’s probably going on right now is newly hatched male wasps are staking out burrows where freshly hatched females are about to emerge. Males mate and eat, that’s it. Females mate, eat and raise their young, one larva after the next. Mating and burrow-building will go on for another month or two and then the bluff will get quiet again.
Summer is a busy season in the islands!
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Cool, with temps in the low 60s in the PNW islands today. Cloudy with light breeze. Possible showers later.
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