Snowy Webs, Cold Salamanders, Sculpin Fish, and a Bear Turd

 

Jamie and I traveled several hours from our office to one of our most beautiful project sites.  A primordial place, with sandstone cliffs, rhododendron and hemlock forests, and waterfalls and cascades. 

Short lived snow flurries would coat the forest with a fine dusting of snow, but the ground was warm so the snow would last longest on the evergreen leaves and on spider webs.    

We could see thousands of tiny spider webs as we peered into the forests, each holding a fluffy snow ball.  When the clouds would part, and the sun would shine, we could practically see the snow melt before our eyes.  

A frosted forest would melt in minutes only to be frosted again with the next snow shower. 

We spent a day collecting samples of aquatic insects from the streams.  Streams with good water quality and lots of nooks and crannies have a diversity of insects in their aquatic life stages.  We saw the larvae of stonefly, mayfly, caddisfly, blackfly, cranefly, and many others.  I've never sampled streams like these, with so many salamanders that I had to pick them from our insect samples.  The streams were full of these two-lined salamanders (Eurycea bislineata).

Most of the salamanders were tiny, and nearly transparent.  This adult was so cold it moved slow, and let us flip it over so we could see it's yellow underside.  

 

We inadvertently caught a small mottled sculpin (Cottus bairdii).  

 

It was a sort of cute, like an ugly frog.  

We were hiking down the stream valley, on a search for invasive plants, when we came across this bear turd.  It was so fresh it was practically steaming!  It was a size twelve, at least.  If you remember, this is the project site where we found the wounded deer.  I've convinced myself that the deer had claw marks and a neck bite from an unsuccessful bobcat attack, not a bear.    

This is a photo of the bear turd after it was poked apart with a stick.  It's composed mostly of grass, which doesn't appear to be very digestible, since the leaves and stems were still recognizable.  We kept our eyes open hoping to see the bear, not just it's turd, but never did.