The Truth About Northwest Butterflies

     Yesterday Sandra and I went for a walk along the Columbia river.  We had discovered an area preserved as a meadow, with daisies and lupine, fronted on the river side by a fine stand of cottonwoods.  This area, in what is becoming suburban Washougal  is under development.  The new cement walkway, which extended for about a half a mile, may soon be the termination of a bike trail  extending all the way to the I-5 bridge in Vancouver, almost twenty miles away.  In the meantime, it provided some relatively undisturbed grassland and forest.

So which one is the sasquatch?

   Early in our walk, Sandra spotted a bald eagle high in the cottonwoods.  Everynow and then an osprey would circle the eagle and they would talk to one another.  Half a mile further we encountered an area under development with lights, a small slide and a sasquatch toiling against a cable.  That hairy ape, according to my son James, gives its name to this area,  At this stage it is locally known as Sasquatch Park.  

   Just beyond the sasquatch, Sandra spotted what is so far the best bird for our trip.  She had discovered a house wren singing in a small tree.  If you look over the apes right shoulder you can see the tree. 

    The wren was extremely cooperative, giving us several minutes of song from a distance of about twenty five feet.  So cooperative was this diminutive songster that I was able to nab the picture you see here with my point and shoot camera.  

   I have a long and varied relationship with house wrens.  They are one of several wrens that occur west of the Cascades,  Bewick's wren, with its rufous coat and bold black eyeline was my first wren, seen in my parent's yard.  What we used to call Winter Wren, now split from its East Coast cousin, to become the Pacific Wren, is a tiny bird that sings its heart out in the moist coastal forest.  Finally, the Marsh Wren (you can guess where this furtive bird lives) makes up the other wrens found west of the Cascades.

The House Wren sang his heart out.

    Thirty years ago, house wrens nested behind a board in our house in West Salem.  After a couple years I made a bird house which they used for several more years.

    Three years ago we visited my nephew Andrew and Shawn in San Rafael, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge.  They had a charming duplex, the back yard of which was a dry hillside.  Deer, coyotes and a variety of birds would appear at times on that hillside.  One day I noticed a family of house wrens living in a pile of dried sticks.  Two days later the owner had the hillside cleared, presumably to protect against a brush fire.  While this may have made good sense, it was a bummer for the house wrens.

   Which brings us to this happy songster.  While the wren was the best bird for the day, the main point of the outing was to look for butterflies.  Although we saw two species of bumblebees feasting on the lupine, and there were daisies and dandelions in abundance, we saw no lepidoptera.  If this field wasn't tailor made for nectaring, what was?   In my disappointment, I wrote to Daniel Rubinoff at UH Manoa, my go to butterfly source.  Daniel wrote back,

Bumblebees flocked to the lupine, but their were no butterflies to be seen.

 "Yeah I think that Teh Portland area is even worse than foggy Berkeley where I grew up!  The combination of cool weather and conifers doesn't help much... down by the river, where there is open space you might have better luck."

   Well, not so far!  But  a few chirps from a house wren is a good tonic.  And Daniel's advice will undoubtedly lead to an expedition into the mountains.  What could be better than that?

jeff