Saturday, May 12th, we went on an excursion with the Washington Native orchid Society to a location in Thurston County, Washington. The location itself is protected and we had to get permission to visit and sign papers promising we would not post any pictures that revealed the location we visited.
We went to see several plants, the Small-flowered Trillium, rare and endangered, and the Fairy Slippers which grow in abundance at this location. A bonus, however, was the Common Camas (Camassia quamash) which was blooming everywhere and in several locations along the way covered whole fields with blue.
After visiting a rare hanging fen and finding the Trillium, we spent some time by the river where we found a native Western Tree Frog, lots of Spring Azure Butterflies and a crab spider which had captured a butterfly and was feeding on it (in the picture the spider's fangs can be seen sunk into the body of the insect).
The Fairy Slippers were nearly finished at this location but we did find some in the woods including something I had never seen before, a clump of them growing on a log and not in the ground. We concluded that since they were near the bottom of the tree they had been uprooted when the tree fell and continued to grow there.
2 comments:
your effort to capture the frogs portrait certainly paid off.
I remember chasing him all over and finally he sat still. Lovely little guy, isn't he?
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