This May Explain the Robins in February

Walking the dog last month, I looked up as I took my usual route through my Kent neighborhood, and looked up at a tree, still bare of leaves. But in it were about a dozen robins, looking back.

I was startled not only by the size of the flock, but that they were there at all. And then the trees. Even my daughter noticed. One day, the trees were in bud or seemingly bare, and the next, full extravagant bloom. In early March.

This great story explains what I'm seeing, I think. While we might think of global warming only affecting the polar bears (file that under it sucks to be you), it in fact affects everything. Including birds that hatch too early, only to starve because the insects aren't out; same goes for the butterflies in Virginia, or other carnivores up the food chain. And as this blog post notes, global warming-or cooling, whatever the cause, will affect us.

It was followed up a day later by this story in the PI.

Photo by Jennifer Conner

Global Warming is Real, and it does make a difference on our beaches

I wonder what I'll see when I'm out on the beach this summer, doing the beach naturalist bit.

Last year, we had oceanographers in, telling us that the temp in the oceans and puget sound was climbing by small ticks, which make a significance difference in sealife we don't see, and very quickly, in the sealife and birds we do see. This article, sadly shows us what's going on in the depths.

Watching sockeye flirt, one last time

Looking out at the downpour this weekend, I was glad that I attended the Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence, last weekend, when at least the sun was shining as about five of us hiked up the Cedar River Watershed, where the public is usually not allowed, to watch sockeye shimmy their way upstream.

Standing by the banks of Landsburg, I watched about 25 of the fish, slowly undulating in the river current. Every once and awhile a male would try to flirt (which amounts to the male flipping its fins in her face) with a female as she was about to create a redd and lay eggs. Or the males would charge at other males, including two-year-old jacks, with the same idea.

Often sunlight would sneak through the cedars and scarlet sparks would erupt from the river, as the band continued its slippery dance. I tried to take a picture, but wouldn't you know it, battery was dead. So I downloaded this free picture from the Manzanita Project at the California Academy of Sciences. Sockeye runs are fading out that far south, where runs once flourished, according to the experts on this trip. Blame global warming.

As frustrating as it might be to fertilize a females eggs, all these fish were going to find further frustration upstream, as Seattle City Light diverted the whole lot of the run into pens and dumped them downstream. The reasoning: too many sockeye (the endangered species are allowed up the river, but not these guys) attracting too many bears that would put too much poop in the river. Seems a bit of a stretch to me, but our cheery guide insisted this was needed to keep the water clean and avoid building a treatment plant.


Some of us, me for one, really didn't buy this reasoning, as we watched 20-lb sockeye jump again and again against their holding tanks. Some of the fish go up the river four times before they give up, spawn and die. The experts on my team questioned how trace elements like phosphorous, is going to get into the inland ecosystem, since generally these elements have only one way of getting into the inland environments: Fish to bears to poop.

At this point, Janice Mathison, from the Seattle Aquarium pipes up "I knew it, poop does make the world go around!"

So what happens with this wonderful creatures when they decide to become saltwater fish and then switch back again? According to Orlay Johnson, a NOAA geneticists, literally the fish have doubled up on genes and turn them on and off as needed. The moon, water temperature, hormones and age all determine which genes are in the "on" position. And that guides when these fish decide, usually after four years -since the eight year cycles have been fished out -to go upstream to flirt, spawn and die.

Closeup photo provided by the Jeremy Sarrow of the California Academy of Sciences/Manzanita Project