Field Trip to the Olympic Peninsula: Lake Crescent and Salt Creek

Date: 4/19-4/20
Weather: Heavy rain on 4/19 at Lake Crescent
Partly cloudy on 4/20 at Salt Creek

What an amazing weekend on the Olympic Peninsula! I went bird-watching for the first time in my life and learned a ton about ecology, geology, and plant/animal identification!

Plant List from Lake Crescent: 

Flowering Plants:
Pacific Bleeding Heart
Fairy Slippers
Colts Foot
White Trillium
False Lily-of-the-Valley
Huckleberry
Red flowering currant
Salmonberry
Baldhip Rose
Indian Plum
Chocolate Lily
Stonecrop

Lichens: 
Witch's Hair
Lungwort (Lobaria pulmonaria)
Freckle Pelt
Antlered Perfume (Evernia)
False Pixie Cup
Coastal Reindeer?
Old man's Beard (Usnea Longissima)
Lipstick Cladonia

Mosses:
Menzie's Neckera
Common Scissor-leaf liverwort (on bigleaf maples)

Ferns:
Licorice Fern
Sword Fern
Lady Fern

Evergreen Shrubs:
Salal
Dull Oregon Grape
Tall Oregon Grape

Birds List from Lake Crescent:
In grasslands:
Violet green swallow

In forest perimeter:
Varied Thrush
Pacific Wren
Chesnut-backed Chickadee
Red Crossbills
In Lake:
Common Merganser (male)

In Old Growth forest: 
Brown Creeper

Red Breasted Nuthatcher

- this bird was expanding her nest in a square hole made in a snag by a pleated woodpecker

Townsend Warbler

Sapsucker

-we only saw the signs of Sapsuckers in the horizontal line of holes on the base of conifers

Winter Wren

White-crowned Sparrow

In higher elevation forest: 

Gray Jay

- on the top of Storm King Mountain, in the lower canopy of a conifer

Salt Creek Intertidal Organisms: 

Giant Green Anenome

Blood Stars

Ochre Seastars

Painted Seastars

Black Leather Chiton

Crenate Barnacles

Goose Barnacles

Purple Sea Urchin

Sculpins

Shield Limpets?

Bay Mussel?

Seaweed

Salt Creek Birds: 

In the Strait:

Pacific Loon

Harlequin duck (male)

Polagic Comorant

Surf Scoter

Marbled Murralet

Horned Grebe

Pigeon Guillemont

On the rocks in tide pools:

Savannah Sparrow

Dunlin

Salt Creek Plants: 

Surfgrass

Sea cabbage?

Searsucker Kelp

Coralline Seaweed

Bull Kelp 

Red Seaweed sps.

Rockweed?

Here are some sketches and photos of various species: 

A giant Ochre Seastar! 

Can you find the hidden Blood star? Also Giant Green Sea Anenomes!

So many species of unidentifiable kelp and red seaweed!

Blood Star up close!

Coastal Reindeer Lichen on conifer on Lake Crescent

Freckle Pelt Lichen!

Beautiful Fairy Slippers from Lake Crescent- our native orchid

Sketches of a family of Black tailed deer, 2 adults and 1 fawn

Old Growth snag and deer sketches

Trying to sketch bird calls...

Sketches from the Tide Pools:

Sketches of a what I identified later as Giant Green Anemone, Purple Urchin, and Carolline Seaweed

Sculpins, Leather Chiton, and Painted Seastar

A Sketch of Lake Crescent

Notes: 

Describing an Old Growth Forest Ecosystem

a. Examples of competition between/ within species:

Fight for sunlight for saplings in understory- Tsuga heterophylla dominates this competition due to high shade tolerance

Successional strategies- quick growing, low-nutrient tolerant trees such as Alnus Rubra will dominate newly disturbed areas 

Thuja Plicata roots seep calcium into forest floor, altering the mineral content so that the soil is inhospitable to other species other than Thuja

Barred owls invasive, moving in and chasing away the Spotted Owls

b. Examples of disturbance:

Fire disturbance evidence on the climb up to the top of Mount Stormking, a copse of Pseudotsuga meneziesiis were burned on the eastern side of their trunks

c. Examples of Predation: 

Black-tailed deers staying within the grasslands to avoid being hunted by cougars (didn't see them but could be in the forest

In Barnes Creek, frogs eating Mayflys

d. Example of an interaction that has a ripple affect through an ecosystem:

I sketched this one out

2.) How the following factors influence the structure and species vegetation along the trail?

a. slope aspect W/E:

dry site vegetation on West facing slopes (Storm King), as these west facing slopes receive warm afternoon sun. Shrubs like Arctostaphylos columbiana only grow on higher elevations of these west facing slopes. 

On East facing slopes (Marymere Falls) are moister and only receive cooler afternoon sun, thus more shade tolerant species such as sword ferns

Slope aspect N/S:

We were primarily on the North facing slopes of Lake Crescent, but on the South facing slopes of Lake Crescent (which receives more sun in winter due to slight tilt of the Earth) you can find species such as Poison Oak and California Newts. 

b. Elevation:

Higher elevations- species such as Manzanitas, Madrones, Stonecrop, Gray Jays, and in general coniferous trees of a smaller diameter. Species that are more drought/sun tolerant and cold tolerant live in these upper elevations. 

Lower elevations- more flowering species, more species diversity- I saw Devil's Club, many ferns, Trillium, Fairy Slippers, etc 

c. Soil type and moisture levels:

Up Mt Stormking, there is mostly a homogenous understory of Gaultheria shallon due to clayey soils with a low levels of nitrogen. At Marymere Falls, there soil was more nutrient rich, as well as moister, thus a greater species diversity.