April 20-26, 2025

This has been an amazing week, with frosty mornings and brilliant warm days delivering countless flowers and insects.

Week in Review

What an amazing spring this has been for balsamroot flowers and boy oh boy are they peaking right now! It feels like the entire valley from Pateros to Mazama is a blaze of yellow and many places are absolutely blanketed in flowers!

Scattered amidst all the balsamroot flowers, bitterbrush shrubs haven't started blooming in the upper reaches of the valley but they are flowering around Pateros. It will be interesting to see how many days it takes for them to begin blooming in the upper valley.

As you'll quickly discover on any hike around the valley, or in the forest, balsamroots aren't the only flowers putting on a good show. There are too many species to list but look for the fuzzy purple balls of ballhead waterleaf, the yellows of glacier lilies, and the reds of paintbrush.

Arnicas are classic forest flowers that carpet the forest floor all around the Methow Valley, and they have started to flower almost as abundantly as balsamroots on dry hillsides. Take a moment to gently rub their leaves because arnicas have a delightful, calming smell.

This has to be my favorite time of year because along with all the flowers there are an astonishing variety of insects flying around. Among the earliest insects to show up are queen bumble bees looking for places to build new underground nests. While most bumble bees are some version of black and yellow, the Hunt's bumble bee is our most startling exception.

After spotting a Hunt's bumble bee, I was primed to look for color and was intrigued to discover another colorful bee flying around in quick bursts and looking like it was hunting. It turns out to be a cuckoo bee (most likely Melecta pacifica) searching for a ground-nesting bee called Anthophora. Cuckoo bees are kleptoparasites that lay their eggs in Anthophora nests where their young find the food they need to grow up.

I wish it was easier to identify the many types of bees, wasps, and flies that are out right now, but either way I love photographing them and celebrating their unique forms, colors, and behaviors.

Another insect that caught my attention was a huge, lumbering blister beetle, an insect you never want to touch because their oily secretions cause severe burning and are as toxic as cyanide and strychnine. They have a remarkable story that I explored at greater length in one of our very first Nature Notes newsletters, but part of the story involves masses of their tiny babies clustering together to form the shape of a female bee and emitting a female bee pheromone to attract male bees, then jumping on the male bee when he shows up. Ugh!

After a long fall, winter, and early spring, it's a delight to focus on flowers and insects again, but of course this has also been a very busy week in the bird kingdom. While the full tide of spring migrants hasn't hit us yet, the leading waves are already lapping at our shores. For example, white-crowned sparrows arrived in the valley and the first group of gulls stopped at Big Twin Lake this week.

Although white-crowned sparrows will soon be one of the most abundant birds in the Methow Valley, there are still lots of yellow-rumped warblers passing through. You might even find yourself walking along a trail with dozens of white-crowned sparrows flushing up from the ground as loose flocks of yellow-rumped warblers dash among the flowering serviceberries at the same time.

Other early arrivals have included Townsend's solitaires, subtle and easily overlooked birds. They like open forests and are frequently found on high exposed ridges, but I've been seeing them in areas that have opened up due to fires. You might hear their single eek call, but listen for their beautifully complex, warbling songs.

Finally, it's worth noting the steady movement of ducks through the valley. Over the past week there have been a lot of ducks on Big Twin Lake, but with the fishing season opening today the boats have scared them off. It would be nice if there were more lakes in the Methow Valley where ducks could find refuge from disturbance because they need to save their energy for migration and nesting.