Life on the Outer Coast

Reading yesterday's post convinced me that the viral fog lasted longer than Wednesday: it seems to have continued through Saturday. I've found that alot of things that seemed significant slipped my mind when writing that post. Like the weather, a few loons and maybe even a few plants.
Saturday's weather was interesting, lots of intense showers of hail with some lightning. It made looking for sparows a rather difficult task, actually didn't do much for mushroom hunting either. I'm sure that soon, if it hasn't already happened, that I'll be known as the crazy lady who wanders around in all weather looking for strange things living in odd spots.

Coughed myself awake relatively early, so got up and monitored the bird feeder (it is the first weekend of feeder watch). Decided to walk around the island in the morning instead of the afternoon to see if timing had any effect on the number and variety of birds I see. Not a noticeable difference from the last few weeks. It was a rather quiet walk, but I did see 9 Buffleheads and a Ring-necked duck on the lake. The latter is a new species for me on Galankin Lake. There were common mergansers and goldeneyes by the dock and a few juncos, chickadees and golden crowned kinglets in the alders. Also collected two mushrooms which are hopefully cooperatively drooping their spores.

I decided that since I had the wool and alum, why not test the local C. semisanguinarius for dye. Miriam Rice's "Mushrooms for Color" lists this species as a good dye mushroom. Started chopping up the mushrooms and noticed that some had red flesh in the cap and others had yellowish-orange flesh. More evidence that I did collect two species from the SJ quad. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to pin a name on the species with orange flesh and rusty gills. I haven't given up hope .
I chopped up the 3 mushrooms with red flesh and rusty gills and simmered them in about 1.5 cups of water. After about an hour, I added about an ounce of wet wool and a small bit of alum. This mixture cooked for about 1 hour. I let the wool cool in the dye liquid. The dye color was a nice cherry red and the wool a good salmon red (the photo color seems true). The wool dried just slightly lighter.
While the wool was dyeing, I worked in the garden. It was as usual, somewhat neglected. I pulled some weeds, cut down alot of dead vegetation and buried the flats of seeds that I had planted with the native plants. They should get the cold and the moisture that they need to germinate outside, I'm afraid I would have neglected the watering if I left them in the greenhouse.
Also dug the remaining carrots, mostly purple ones were still in the bed. The purple is only skin deep. The slices of carrot have an orange core with a purple edge, looks interesting in a salad if one likes purple food. The taste was fine.
Cut down the hops that had reached the second story. Saved some of the flowers, they looks kind of like brown paper roses. I'm fairly certain that their are of no use at this point to a brewer, but I'm not sure.
Birding was interesting from the garden. Particularly because of the sounds of sea birds mixed with the chickadees. There were two common murres down on the water about half way to the Tsaritsa rock can calling away at each other. Not sure if it was a juvenile with a parent or if they had some other social arrangement. Saw a group of 7 pine grosbeaks fly over, later one landed in a nearby spruce. It didn't stay long, but long enough to get a good look.

Not as many juncos in the garden as there are in town. The most I saw at one time were 4, all Oregon. There were 45 crows, 8 chickadees, one song sparrow and one winter wren at the feeder or in the garden.