This afternoon, J. and I walked down through the neighborhood park, with two explicit goals and one vague intention. The goals: to show J. the beautiful field of camas in bloom, which he hadn't really noticed in past years, and to see if we could find any newts in the creek. The vague intention: to get a distant glimpse of D. and his classmates at work on a movie they're making for history class, about the New Deal. But they were done for the day before we headed to the park, so that was out.
The field of camas is quite pretty, still, although it has only half as many camas plants as it did ten years ago, and we saw only one white flower among the dozens of purple-blue ones, where there'd been half a dozen white flowering camas plants there when D. was little. Camas grows from tubers and was a staple of the Kalapuya people. We took quite a few pictures of the meadow, then we headed down to the creek.
I thought it would be hard to find the newts, that they'd be hiding under rocks or in the mud. Last year there had been a Saturday morning event with a nature guide to show the newts to little kids, so I figured they must be plentiful, if only one knew how to find them. So we applied ourselves with some effort, studying the banks and rocks and such.
It turns out they're right there in plain sight, and not at all small, maybe 8" long including their tails. You just have to be at a part of the creek where the water is relatively slow and at least a few inches deep. We found one near the covered picnic area, then we found two by the middle bridge, and two by the north bridge. They can sit very still for a long time, then they rise to the surface for a gulp of air, then down they go again. Some of the newts were slowly swimming about, others just resting.
I've seen a newt near my driveway, and one on a sidewalk in the park, but I had no idea they were so easy to find in the creek! We estimated there could be 30-50 of them, given how easy they were to find and how close they were content to be to each other.
The field of camas is quite pretty, still, although it has only half as many camas plants as it did ten years ago, and we saw only one white flower among the dozens of purple-blue ones, where there'd been half a dozen white flowering camas plants there when D. was little. Camas grows from tubers and was a staple of the Kalapuya people. We took quite a few pictures of the meadow, then we headed down to the creek.
I thought it would be hard to find the newts, that they'd be hiding under rocks or in the mud. Last year there had been a Saturday morning event with a nature guide to show the newts to little kids, so I figured they must be plentiful, if only one knew how to find them. So we applied ourselves with some effort, studying the banks and rocks and such.
It turns out they're right there in plain sight, and not at all small, maybe 8" long including their tails. You just have to be at a part of the creek where the water is relatively slow and at least a few inches deep. We found one near the covered picnic area, then we found two by the middle bridge, and two by the north bridge. They can sit very still for a long time, then they rise to the surface for a gulp of air, then down they go again. Some of the newts were slowly swimming about, others just resting.
I've seen a newt near my driveway, and one on a sidewalk in the park, but I had no idea they were so easy to find in the creek! We estimated there could be 30-50 of them, given how easy they were to find and how close they were content to be to each other.