August 24-30, 2025

This summer's quixotic mood swings continued with temperatures soaring towards 100 degrees on hot days, then plunging during a round of clouds and scattered showers.

Week in Review

We're now fully immersed in the long, slow easing from summer into autumn, with the landscape drying out and turning golden in the blazing sun!

Everywhere you look around the Methow Valley, seedheads are bursting open, while insect mill around the diminishing numbers of flowers.

As expected when things are this hot and dry, most animals can be found around water. This includes insects gathering to collect moisture and dissolved minerals from the wet sand.

And, where there are insects, there are insect-eating predators. One afternoon, I found large numbers of juvenile cedar waxwings swooping back and forth and catching insects over the river. I didn't see any adult waxwings, so it's interesting that they all seemed to be juveniles.

Other conspicuous juvenile birds are the gangs of teenage American crows that are hanging out right now. Some of these birds might be adults, and there's no way to know for sure, but in general, adult crows and ravens remain on their territories to defend them, while juveniles that don't have territories roam around in gangs until they get old enough to start establishing their own.

A far more subtle sign of the changing seasons is the blooming sagebrush. Sagebrush, and other members of the Aster family, commonly bloom in late summer, when there are few other flowers, so they have the best chance of attracting pollinators. Our two most common species are confusingly similar but I found an example of the two species side by side so I could compare their leaves and inconspicuous flowers.

A Special Find

I want to highlight a special sighting this week because it underscores how much it matters that folks are paying attention and sharing what they discover. In this case, one of the followers of Methow Nature Notes on Facebook reported finding rainbow trout in a quickly drying pool along Fawn Creek.

Fortunately, this sighting was quickly shared and USFS and WDFW biologists caught and moved the fish to the Methow River before the pool dried up.

This matters because Fawn Creek has been listed as a non-fish-bearing stream, but now that fish are known to live in the creek it will change how land around the creek is managed. We can make a difference when we pay attention!

Observation of the Week: Protandry

I keep seeing a flower along the river and forgetting to look it up, so I was thankful when someone posted a photo on the Nature Notes Facebook group and identified it as a common soapwort (Saponaria officinalis), also known as bouncing-bet.

While taking photos of this flower and researching it, I discovered that this species is one of many flowers that use a neat trick called protandry to avoid pollinating themselves.

In the case of soapwort, their flowers first emerge in the evening and then bloom for about three days. On the first day their male anthers grow out and on the second night these anthers release pollen.

These anthers then quickly wither as the female stigma reaches its full length on the flower's third night and opens to receive pollen delivered by pollinators (soapworts are visited by night-flying moths and day-flying bees and flies).

The sequence of leading (pro-) with the male parts (androus) helps prevent self-pollination but is not a fail-safe strategy because soapworts are still prolific self-pollinators. Because many of their seeds are produced by self-pollination it explains why this is such a common weed across Europe, Asia, and North America.