The North Umpqua Foundation

JULY

EARLY JULY
Early on a July morning during our fourth season on the pool, Sis and I had a bearded, middle-aged guy come, starting and stopping, down the trail into the viewing area.
“Got any fish?”
“Oh, a few.”
The guy eventually identified himself as a miner from Sharp’s Creek—over the divide in the Willamette River Basin—looking for “rocks . . . formations.”
“A few?”  He looked at me.  “A few?”
“Yeah, there’s a few.”
 “Want to know what the problem is?” he asked looking at the pool and then at me.
 “What’s the problem?”  I wondered which one we were talking about and thought about what a wise man once said about problems.  Paraphrased, it was that problems drew us together, it was their solutions that split us apart.
“Harbor seals.”
Oh, that problem.
“It’s the damn harbor seals.  There’s hundreds of ‘em.  They eat all the fish.
“You wanta see the pool full of fish, swarming with ‘em?  Kill the damn harbor seals.  I’ve seen ‘em.”
He looked at me.
“I’m not an environmentalist . . .”  He paused with a nonplussed look.  “I’m . . . n . . . It’s the damn harbor seals.”
I didn’t mention systems out of balance and adaptations.
He asked me about a road he was looking for then, a road with a B in the name, did I know of such a road?
The single bit locational of information I was able to offer based on this guy’s questions was that the creek road crossed the main creek on a bridge about three-quarters of a mile upstream from the pool.  Twice I had to say that I didn’t know the roads by their numbers.
His buddy came down the trail slowly, hanging onto things.  This person was serious looking and quite overweight, with white hair.  The buddy cooed to Sis and had a nice smile.  He asked, “How many fish you got in here?” nodding to the pool.
“Oh, sixty, eighty.”
“No kidding.”
“Last year and the year before, this time, there was six.”
The buddy gave me a surprised look.
I said, “Three to six.”
The first guy was obviously thinking.  “Then somebody must have been shooting the harbor seals.”
The first one asked again about a road with a B in its name.
“Bohemia?” I ask.
“No, I know Bohemia.  I know this country.  My daddy used to pack me through it when I was too young to walk.  I know every creek, every hill.”  He paused.  He seemed to be pondering what he’d said again.
His buddy looked over at him and said, matter-of-factly, “But you don’t know where we are?”
“Oh, I know where we are.”
The buddy said, “Well, if you know where you are, I should start up this hill again.”  He goes.
The first guy followed.
I said, “Safe journeys.”
In return I got a bright smile from the first guy and a finger pointed at me.
I pointed back.

In the area of the pool, the sun rises and floods through the gap cut by the cooler tributary creek in the fairly steep slopes that form the south side of the valley of the main creek in this area.   Early sunlight illuminates the far bank of the creek just upcreek from the pool.  In the first part of summer, this expanse of hillside has sun on it an hour or two sooner than it shines on an equivalent elevation on the far bank of the pool.  Soaked blue herons and damp turkey vultures now and then take advantage of this earliest sun by perching on a nearly branchless broken-topped snag centered over this steep grassy slope with its thin soils and exposed bedrock, its ceanothus and poison oak.  This slope is criss-crossed with rotted and fragmenting logs many of which are the higher parts of the several large snags now standing in this opening.

The first sunlight of the day that does not slip in through the tributary creek gap, strikes well up the north-west ridge that forms the far side of this valley.  Until this sunlight moves far enough down the ridge to be reflected on the surface of the pool (from the vantage of the viewing area), there is no contrast and all of what is below the surface is visible once enough light builds . . . and if the creek is flowing clear enough. 

When the sunlight has come far enough down on the far slope, the illuminated trees and rocks and vegetation show up as reflections on the shadowed pool and cut off any viewing of what is beneath the surface.  These vibrant opaque reflected images last quite a while—hours—before sunlight actually creeps onto the pool. 

These reflections and all reflections everywhere, whether on a creek or in a mirror, are viewer dependant.  This means that the same tree will be reflected in different places on the pool at the same time to people or creatures occupying different locations in the viewing area.  Contrariwise, different things will be reflected on the same part of the pools surface at the same time to different viewers.  A person can ask, “If a tree fell in a forest, would it make a sound if no one were there to hear it.”  A person can ask anything.  To me it remains interesting that, if there is no viewer, the reflections on the pool do not, in fact, exist.

Formally, summer is now here and has been for a short while according to the calendar, if not according to local weather.  Of course, what is summer?  Is it two check points with a line between them on a calendar, a time when children get sun-melted road tar on their bare hopping feet during the walk to the swimming hole, is summer a time when surely the summer steelhead are in and the time has arrived to cast flies for them with some expectation of success, is it a time young birds are fledged and flying or at least rolling down hillsides in the attempt?

According to the dynamic seasonal change in the amount of daylight responding to the axial tilt of the earth in its orbit of our sun, summer is the time when the sun seems to develop a leftward hitch in its step as it appears to journey west across the sky; each day moving, bit by bit, further south in the sky and dropping over the horizon earlier.  July in the Pacific Northwest is the first of the two hottest months and July is the month when the hottest temperatures are generally measured in the main creek in the late afternoon.  This is when the pool becomes a true and necessary refuge for summer steelhead from stream temperatures lethal to them.  During this time and because of the cold tributary creek entering at its head, the pool becomes the single best piece of holding water in the basin of the main creek.

On normal years, when there is some snow pack and some gradual yielding up of stored winter waters, the water is still relatively high in July, though it is certainly on a falling trend.  The bottom of this trend is usually in late September and early October.  According to a USGS gauge located about half a mile up the main creek from its confluence with the North Umpqua River, over the last forty-six years the main creek commonly begins July at a daily discharge rate of around 130 cubic feet per second (cfs) which is halved by the end the month to 65 cfs.  The average seasonal low flows around the equinox in late September are 45 cfs.  The pool appears to continue to function as a refuge for the local breeding populations that use it until the creek is flowing relatively stably again between 800 and a 1000 cfs at the gauge location.  The creek generally drops below this flow rate first in early or middle May.

The difference between the falling warming flows of July and the lower colder flows of the autumn is that the fish that leave the pool during the rare spates of summer return to it again.  Because of the creek temperatures above the pool, they have to.  Once the temperatures of the main creek have dropped into the comfort zone for steelhead—something that occurs in late September or early October—every spate will send some of the steelhead on about their affairs, many of them for good.  The affairs of the steelhead involve searching out their ultimate natal stream and suitable gravels—and or a refuge from unsuitable stream conditions closer to these gravels.  These fish that leave the pool are also looking for another fish to spawn with, with luck a wild one. 

There is a large and long south-bank (left-bank) slough located upcreek, above the confluence of the main creek with the colder tributary.  By the early part of most Julys, this slough has dried up and all the aquatic creatures that it contained, those not trapped, have become part of the main creek.  The slough is on the inside of a enormous cobble and boulder bar . . . enormous for a creek the size of the main creek in this part of its basin.  The lower end of this upcreek bar is truncated by the higher velocity flows of the cold tributary, creating a short rapid that drops about three feet. 

This bar is thickly overgrown with willows and alder and wild roses and sedges and every other kind of plant that grows in the riparian zone other than conifers.  On the left bank above and inside the slough are the extensive remnants of a long and gigantic driftwood pile, flood debris that is so much higher and so interlaced with living and recently dead alders that it must have been deposited during the most recent giant flood event, that of 1964 when the Umpqua River at its mouth flowed as big or bigger than the Columbia River normally does.

This 1964 flood event, a product of a rain that melted an already substantial deposit of snow in Pacific Northwest Coast creeks and rivers, was probably the last time this several hundred yard long bar was lifted into significant motion.  Now and for the last forty or so winters, the motion of the bar has probably mostly been that of the incremental accretion of boulders, cobbles, and pebbles at its upcreek end, the shifting of the same along its edges, and the yielding up of these sizes of rocks at its lower end.

Because the banks of the pool are bedrock, the channel of the creek itself here was probably minimally affected by this flood, though undoubtedly great numbers of saltating boulders from the movement of the upstream bar bounded through it.  These bounding rocks were the size of hay bales and larger and they were leaping along with pitch-poling trees of old growth-size and smaller, trees with root wads attached.  The far side of the pool is the outside of a bend and the outside of a bend is always a high energy point and carries the deepest water in the course of any creek.

By the time that July has come around, the affects of the stored winter precipitation are waning and local and regional weather patterns dominate the water temperatures in the basin of the main creek.  While 75° may be reached at least once during early July—if it is reached at all—a good rainstorm can lower the late-afternoon high temperature by ten degrees and a few overcast days without rain can lower the creek temperatures just about as much.  Correspondingly, several days of temperatures in the upper nineties or low hundreds can drive the late-day creek temperatures above 75°, often well above it. 

It needs to be pointed out that these summer temperatures in the main creek are probably not pristine temperatures, or temperatures as they were prior to white contact with the First American populations and the environments of the Pacific Northwest.  Particularly, there has been at least fifty years of industrial logging in the basin of the main creek, that is, logging that generally cleared all the trees from a given logging unit, a technique known more familiarly as clear cutting.  More recently and less familiarly, clear cutting a piece of a forest is now called a regeneration harvest.  Certainly, there is a lot of regeneration necessary after such a harvest, and not just regeneration, but sustained growth considering the dominant tree species of Pacific Slope forests live between 500 and 1500 years.

In the main creek just  above the cooler tributary, I have measured temperatures as high as 81° in July.  How much of these relatively high stream temperatures are due to the cutting in the basin and how much is natural is hard to say, but, without question, much of this rise in temperature is due to the removal of vegetation and, perhaps more importantly, the removal of large trees and their shadows from the basin’s slopes and the basin’s creeks.  
The compaction of the ground by heavy equipment and the loss of broad swaths of trees and other vegetation are to be lamented too.  Forest soils, such as they are, form a permeable epidermis and they are also one of the reservoirs for moisture found in mature healthy forests.  Please note that soils are not just the layer of dirt that covers any ground.  For soils to be soils, they need to have been in place for a while and show characteristic physical, chemical, and biological properties.  Soils have different layers called horizons which differ from each other in color, consistence, soil structure, and texture.  Soils form recognizable regional sequences for given terrain, aspect, elevation, vegetation, moisture, and parent material.  Soils contain rich and complex biological communities and air spaces and different particle sizes, all of which influence a soils ability to hold water or pass it through or to become saturated.

When functioning as healthy reservoirs, soils capture rain or the drippings from the lichen-rich many-branched canopies of larger trees.  The soils of mature uncut forests store moisture not unlike a sponge and gradually yield up this wetness, cool and relatively clean, to fingers of channelized flow that eventually become creeks and rivers.  I cannot help but wonder too whether breezes blowing over shaded moist soil covered with a relatively low and sparse underbrush layer might also help to keep soils and the moisture they contain cooler through evaporation, significantly cooler than they otherwise would be.

The reflections of far bank rocks and vegetation are shown at their colorful best while the pool water is shaded, the sunlit reflections making the surface a nearly perfect opacity that is shifted about by currents.  Once light actually gets to the pool, reflections becomes ghosts of their former selves and the surface is no longer opaque, the fish and other creatures beneath the surface become once more visible.

With the arrival sunlight to the surface of the pool, the actual shadows of the riparian trees form on the surface, replacing the comprehensive shadow of the south-east ridge, which had replaced the shadow of the whole of the planet itself which is called night.  Except for one saw-cut tree stump where the trail begins winding down into the viewing area from the flat above, the near-bank trees that cast their shade onto the pool at this time of year are big trees, uncut when the road went through sometime in the fifties. 

With a creek angled the way the main creek is in the area of the pool—upcreek is northeast and the stream flows southwest—it is only the big trees that cast significant shadows onto the surface during high summer.  July and August are when significant shadows are important because this is when the creeks flow at their warmest.  The patch of sun that gets to the pool from the cutting of the large trail-head tree is an average of forty-feet wide and allows sunlight onto the water about three to five hours sooner than would be true if the tree were still living.  This, of course, depends on the path of the sun through the sky.  Remove all the big streamside trees and you have a significant effect on streams. 

As the sun’s path, bit by bit, slips south and brings shorter days, the smaller riparian vegetation becomes more effective at casting its shadow onto the pool.  By the time of year these younger trees are able to significantly shadow the pool, the temperatures of the main creek are again approaching the comfort zone and are below the critical temperature of 67°.
 
As stated above, it is during the first part of the month of July that the incipient lethal temperature of 75° may first be measured in the main creek in the late afternoon.  This, though, has only happened twice, during 2001 and 2003.  In 1999, the season that water flowed from the third-thickest snow pack within the historical period, the main creek only reached 74°, the highest temperature that season.

Regardless of whether the incipient lethal temperature for steelhead is reached, the main creek is now generally flowing warm enough to cause the steelhead holding to seek the upper part of the pool where tributary creek water is least mixed and therefore coldest.  As the water warms, the steelhead move further up the pool and spend longer periods of time there.  Sometime in latest June or early July, the steelhead will enter the area where the main current of the tributary creek drops into the pool.  Later as the creek continues to warm and drop, the steelhead will leave the pool per se and enter the quite-a-bit-shallower water of the lower riffle where this current wends its way toward the pool.  This movement by the pod up into the riffle above the pool generally occurs about two weeks after the front fish of the steelhead pod nose about at the boundary of the pool and riffle.  The first steelhead that enter the cool water zone at the top left of the pool appear to be quite nervous and they often make splashy rises and enter and leave this area readily, not staying for any length of time . . . to begin with.

Steelhead are slowly and incrementally entering the pool by this time, often three to seven fish every day. 

The manipulable flaps of skin over the nasal pits begin to show white from a buildup of fungus on many of these fish.  This fungus is endemic to most or all streams in the Pacific Northwest, if not elsewhere too.  It develops on damaged areas of skin or exposed flesh or on areas of skin that have had their slime layer interrupted.  On virtually all the steelhead that I see in the pool, easily a total of more than five thousand fish over the last six seasons, gradually over the course of the season, small patches of this white fungus show up consistently in three places:  on the inside of the paired pectoral and ventral fins, on the skin of the back just behind the dorsal fin, and on the nostril flaps. 

The pectoral, ventral, and dorsal fins are all manipulable and thus are capable of creating a variable turbulence around themselves in the flow, interrupting, I imagine, the slime layer.  What is interesting is that the fungus forms on the pectoral and ventral fins themselves, but it is on the skin of the back behind the dorsal fin that the fungus forms, not on this fin, unless this fin is damaged.  The skin flap covering the nostrils is also manipulable, so much so that it can actually be rolled into a tube if a steelhead finds a need to do so.  These nostril skin flaps thus also can create turbulence that will potentially fuss with the integrity of the slime layer.  That these nostril flaps develop fungus first suggests that the steelhead in the pool are constantly manipulating them for some reason.

Male steelhead show definite signs of acquiring their sex’s more obvious secondary sexual characteristics.  Snouts are growing and now this growth is becoming pronounced with some males.  Red stripes and red on the lower part of the gill plates of fish are more common too and more fish are showing the small dark conical kype at the tip of their lower jaw.  Even the female steelhead show some of this red, but females never get the pronounced areas of red on their sides that the males do.  At most the females may have a blush of color on their lower gill plates and a thin stripe, more of a line really, and the red of the females is more of a rose hue.  Male steelhead in most cases will eventually show relatively broad stripes that occasionally spread down onto their bellies and this red is more of a rusty crimson than a rose hue.  In some cases, this stripe will extend into the tail itself as a diffuse rusty cloud that is centered just off the end of the stripe.

Both male and female steelhead have mostly lost their marine colors, their solid silver sides and aquamarine backs.  Small black spots located primarily on their backs above the lateral line are showing up more clearly.  Some fish are developing white tips on their ventral and anal fins.  This latter character appears to be a variable feature and in some cases will dramatically mark the fins in question later in the season.  It is probable that these white fin tips make dominance activities more effective since these actions often involve displays with the fins erect.

Juvenile steelhead and dace are now commonly visible over the sand bar substrate at the left of the pool below the Perch.  These young-of-the-year steelhead by now average one-and-a-quarter to one-and-a-half inches long.  Of course, young-of-the-year steelhead continue use the main creek itself above and below the pool and will continue to do so throughout the season.

Now and then, these juvenile steelhead will consort with the crawdads that are crawling along the bottom.  It is likely that these young steelhead are attracted to the organisms contained in the sediments that the usually much more massive crustaceans are stirring up.

Crawdads are beginning to appear in numbers examining the substrate.  They seem to be particularly attracted to the drifts of organic debris that develop in places in the upper left half of the pool.  During the sixth season, crawdads frequented a new pile of sticks and fine sediments that had formed up against the near bank shelf and which spilled out over the sand.  This pile of organic refuse had largely disappeared by the seventh season.  Another place where there is a concentration of organic debris is where the currents of the left-pool eddy and the tributary-creek current nullify each other.  At this place, generally located at the upper end of the left-pool sand bar, there is a pocket of only slightly gyring stillness.  From season to season, the position of this drift of organic debris subtly shifts with the changes in the contour of the creek bed brought about by the higher flows of winter. 
One or two of the more visible orange species of crawdad are often moving about these areas where leaves and sticks and other submerged organic debris drop to the bottom of the pool.  On some mornings this drift has been scattered by otters and on rare occasions an otter is there probing the drift with its nose, its tail waving upright in the water like a dark tendril of kelp. 

It is during early July that cutthroat trout jockey and flank with each other, dominance behaviors and confusing ones since the spawning time of the cutthroat trout is in the spring around the vernal equinox, as is true for the steelhead.  While seeing cutthroat trout attempt to dominate each other is a rare event in the pool, the only time I've seen it is in the early part of July.  During Sis and my second season, the behaviors were so aggressive that the two trout involved ended up locking jaws and drifting, so joined, down and out of the pool.
Flanking is our term for two fish cycling, or turning, on each other, one fish apparently attempting to nose or bite at the vent area of the other.  In the refuge pool anyway, flanking is a relatively rare Pacific salmon behavior, though it makes it into the notes a few times each season with steelhead and spring chinook.  More rarely, cutthroat trout also carry out the behavior.  With the steelhead, sometimes periods of flanking behaviors last several days.  Jockeying is our term for what may be the most common aggressive interaction carried out by the Pacific salmon common to the pool.  Jockeying is a less intense dominance action than flanking and involves two fish moving upcreek, or into the current, and trying to get ahead of each other.  Usually, jockeying fish move upstream almost imperceptibly, but sometimes the behavior is more active and obvious.  The dominance actions Sis and I see and most of the other singular behaviors appear to be more common to the steelhead and spring chinook that use the pool.  All of these behaviors may be shared with the cutthroat trout too, but the most common interactions of these smaller trout seem to be over food or access to food while Sis and I are watching them at the pool.
On the other hand, if there were several hundred cutthroat trout in the pool, dominance behaviors might be just as common with them as with the steelhead.

By this time, if there are to be spring chinook holding in the pool for the season, one or sometimes two or three of these fish have usually taken up residence.  If spring chinook are present, they are more active than the average steelhead holding in the pool is.  The most common spring chinook behavior this early in the season is what is herein called cycling and this involves the chinook in question moving up and down the pool in broad slow oval gyres in proximity to the pod.  Often this grand cycling behavior is counter-clockwise, though not always, and often at this time of year the spring chinook is swimming deeper in the water than the steelhead pod is holding.

As well as being more active, spring chinook appear to be much more easily spooked than the average steelhead.  There is often a change in their behavior between when the sun is on the pool and the low light of dusk or dawn and the cycling is more common during the times of low light.   Later, closer to the fall spawning time of the spring chinook, when their hormones are probably affecting them more strongly, individual fish may cycle all day long and extend this simple activity to include the riffle upcreek and the top parts of the two channels downcreek.

Another relatively common behavior is for the spring chinook to leap clear of the surface and land on their sides with a resounding splash that sends big waves throughout the pool, for these are big fish as a rule.  The small chinook and the jacks jump too.  The spring chinook—excluding jacks—present in the pool average fifteen to twenty-five pounds compared with the eight-pound average for the steelhead.  Once the number of fish builds up, however, there are always a few twenty-plus pound steelhead in the pool each season and these fish will rival in length, though not weight, all but the largest chinook.  Spring chinook and steelhead are built differently with the chinook being the heavier fish for a given length.

The spring chinook will also flash against the substrate, one of the commonest of steelhead actions.  Flashing generally involves the fish in question swimming slowly down to the bottom, its descent to the substrate often describing a helix.  Once down there, the fish arcs its body against the bottom one or more times in such a way as to capture and reflect available light, usually quite brilliantly.  The flash appears to occur when the body is arced with a concavity toward the sky.

For Sis and I, flashing is the enigmatic action whether by steelhead, spring chinook, or cutthroat trout.  Often flashes occur in series and describe a small-diameter counter-clockwise or clockwise circle against the substrate, though this type of flashing circle may be more common with steelhead.  Other steelhead sometimes appear to ignore a flashing fish and sometimes they respond to it as though it were a warning.  At times, perhaps usually, flashing is the most frequent action carried out by steelhead during a day.

Like the steelhead, the spring chinook may come and go during the early part of their appearance in the pool as though they are not quite sure of where to hold or they are examining local conditions.  One of the differences of the pool environment for spring chinook when compared with the steelhead is that often both sexes of chinook are not present in the pool at the same time.  This may be one of the things that keeps a spring chinook on the move about the basin. 

Early in the season, spring chinook that are resident in the pool appear to be relatively behaviorally integrated with the steelhead pod, except for their hiding, jumping, and the cycling behaviors.  This will change as their spawning time nears, but for now chinook will often hold stationary with the pod and, when the steelhead spook and daisy chain, the chinook will spook and daisy chain with them.

Now the whole gamut of butterflies that use the area are present in the air with the exception of the wood nymph.  Blues, whites, sulphurs, and tortoise shells are not as common, perhaps, as prior to this.  Mourning cloaks are becoming more common and sometimes we see a great spangled fritillary, the first one.  Pale and yellow tiger swallowtails remain the dominant butterfly, particularly on the days that are hot and sunny.  The pale tiger swallowtails fly in numbers equal to their yellow cousins.  Checkerspots are often starting to fade by this time.

The big blue-green darning needle dragonflies are in the air over the pool regularly now.  Damsel flies go about their business too.  While I see hundreds of darners and flying adders and other dragonflies, relatively speaking, very few damsel flies make it into the notes during the course of a season at the pool.  When damsel flies do they are most commonly flying as a united female and male pair, which has been observed as late in the season as the 6th of September during 2004. 

Once, while kneeling on a boulder in the main creek above the confluence taking water temperatures in the late afternoon, I saw a mating pair of damsel flies ovipositing within the reach of my arm.  I didn’t reach, but just watched.  These were an Argia species and they were coupled over the shallow water among a drift of beaver chewed sticks lodged up against the group of boulders I knelt among.  

The bright blue male was upright with the end of its abdomen connected to the rear of the greenish-brown female’s head.  The end of the female’s abdomen was bent down into the water.  Shortly, a second pair of damsel flies landed close by and the two upright males grappled and manipulated each other for a few seconds before quieting down.  After the first pair were done laying eggs, they flew out in a small circle to land behind the second pair.  On landing, the female grabbed hold of the end of the abdomen of the second female and pulled it out of the water.  The original pair paused then and finally flew off. 

My notes on the incident ended there, probably because my knees were twinging and I got up.  It was a hot sunny day in early July.

Sis and I had an interesting encounter with another insect on a hot sunny day, actually the first day of our first full season on the pool.   We were in a tent camp that year and two steelhead had taken up residence in front of the subsurface peninsula that forms the lower end of the pool.  As I was standing in the sun, no doubt wondering what to do next—having little idea what I was getting Sis and I into—a loudly buzzing, weird-looking black creature zoomed in at me headed for my solar plexus and I found myself stepping away and swinging my hand at it with it followed like it was connected to me by a leash.  The creature was an inch or so long and continued to buzz about me and then flew to a rock and landed.  It was a longhorn beetle, also called a longicorn, and I have known them in their various forms for years.  Longicorns are a wood-boring family of beetles with over a thousand North American species.  They are harmless to humans, though occasionally startling because of the sounds they make.  This one was solid black with a single small yellow spot at the junction of the wing cases and the thorax.  The blackness of it and its very long back-sweeping antennae with its wing cases held out and arched away from its body as it buzzed in at me were what had seriously spooked me.  Because of this spooking, I refer to these black longicorns in the notes as Beelzebugs.

Small numbers of this large family of beetles fly about the pool during the hot part of the season.  One of the longicorns is powder blue with three to four-millimeter circular black spots and alternating bands of blue and black running out its antennae, antennae at least twice the length of its body. 

Once, when I picked one up, it made a rasping cheeping.  The sound appeared to come from the chitin over its thorax which it was moving backwards and forwards at the time.
A few years later, the pool supplied Sis and me with evidence—perhaps—that the steelhead too can be spooked by this family of beetles.  It was later in the season, but still during the warm part of it.   At dusk, I heard and then saw the steelhead begin to rise vigorously and repeatedly at a particular point in the upper part of the pool.  At least eight steelhead were involved and the rises were noisy with quick surging turns away from the surface.  Using my binoculars, I was able to make out something the size of a Douglas fir cone out there in the water, bobbing in the rise rings.

Eventually, the steelhead stopped rising and, when the object got closer, I saw it to be a large brown beetle which I pulled from the water once it got close to the left ledge.  It was more than two inches long and a red-brown color.  One of its wing cases and the transparent wing it protected were spread out from the body.  A book identified it as a spined-neck longhorn (Ergates spiculatus), also know as a pine sawyer for the projecting teeth on the edge of its pronothum.

I assumed it was dead and set it to the side of the Perch on a shelf.  About an hour later, when its abdomen began to pulse and it began to work its mouth parts, I dropped it into the vegetation below the Perch.

There are two other large beetles that are common in the pool area this time of the season.  Both are buprestid beetles, another wood boring family.  One, the smaller beetle, is a very beautiful emerald color.  The other is slightly larger and a luminous grayish-purple color.  Unlike the longicorns, these beetles come in to a landing like bullets, often unable to keep a grip on what they’ve landed on and bumping and rolling off.  Sometime during the month, the females walk about the viewing area projecting their ovipositors, attempting to lay eggs in anything that at least seems woody and isn’t moving.

By this time of year, when conditions are hot and remain so for a while . . . generally . . . the viewing area receives visits from an insect that amazes me more than any other I’ve seen here.  I don’t know what it is, but it appears to be a slender ant-mimic weevil or another true bug of some kind . . . I think.  I could easily be wrong.  In the natural history notes I write every season, it is called the ant-weevil critter.  This creature is colored red-brown or black and has a body about six to eight millimeters long with three-segmented antennae making up another several millimeters.  The proboscis is quite long and of an almost invisible slenderness at its tip.  This proboscis is generally carried back under this creature’s body where it extends to about mid-thorax.  The antennae come from just above the proboscis on the head.  The creature does not appear to have eyes, or I have not been able to see them at any rate.  I reject the idea of killing one to get a closer look at it with a hand lens.

This creature touches and probes things with the proboscis, which it can extend out in front of it.  It is extremely active and swift and nimble when it wants to be, though its usual motion is slow and halting with long pauses.  There are at least three species of this creature at the pool and they are distinguished by color:  a solid black/brown form, a tiny version that is dark brown with a white posterior rim on its thorax, and a two-tone form which has a dark head and abdomen and an ochre red thorax.  This latter form mimics strongly the commonest of the ants found around the edge of the pool, or the commonest ant visible to me during our stays at any rate.

There are at least half a dozen species of ant in the pool area and, quite likely, there are many more than that.  The inch-long dark flying carpenter ants of the late spring are the most obvious of the ants, at least during the time they are on wing and roving.  As late in the season as early November, I see a slow-moving (due to temperature?), tiny, two to three-millimeter dark brown species.  The commonest of the local ants is approximately five millimeters long and has an average to a small-size head that is dark brown, a thorax of a subdued sienna-color, and a dark brown abdomen with an opalescent sheen to it. 
Early in our first season at the pool, Sis and I gradually became aware of a habit by these latter ants that we termed ant fall.   The initial observation was watching an ant come down from the fir—falling—to a vine maple to a shelf to the butt of the pistol-grip old fir that our perch is situated beside.  This was before I had strung up tarps over the viewing area or even thought of doing so.  I watched six more ants fall to and from the same approximate places in the next thirty minutes.  In each case, the ant wandered around a bit, went to an edge, and appeared to simply let go and drop.  One of these drops was about three feet. 
Over the course of the next weeks, it became clear that this ant species had a daily deciduous habit.  As near as I was able to determine, a certain portion of the local populations of this ant climbed the tree that Sis and I sit next too.  When the sun went behind the far ridge and the shadow of the sun passed above this tree in the late afternoon there was a continuous rain of the ants from the tree for a short time.  I assume that those ants that are carrying something walk down the tree, but I could be wrong in this.  Observations also led to the interesting possibility that on windy days these ants either do not climb this tree or do so and choose not to fall or they get blown away during their falls.  Later in the summer when I described this falling to my friend, the knowledgeable Terry Roelofs, his response was, “There are advantages to an exoskeleton.”

As I came to understand this process, I found myself wondering whether, now and then, the strange strong bumps and thumps I feel and hear might be the impact of thousands of ants that have serendipitously chosen to let go so as to hit the ground at the same time in the area of the pool, metric tons of them.

This commonest of pool ants also hunts a small honey-colored click beetle.  My attention is regularly drawn to this click beetle predation once the season has warmed up because of the small sharp “clicks” that the beetles make when they flip themselves into the air as they are approached and touched by an ant.  These encounters occur a few feet overhead on the upper surface of the viewing area tarps and they are often projected as shadows onto these tarps by the sun.  Beetles manage with their flips to travel as much as four to five inches away from an ant, a distance about thirty times the length of the three to four-millimeter beetles.  The ants appear to be definitely hunting the beetles.

The field guide to insects and arachnids I use, mentions the “clicks” of this beetle only as a means of righting itself when overturned.  From what I see, the clicks are carried out both right-side-up and up-side-down and the flip is as likely to wrong the beetle as to have it land on its legs.  Watching these shadow pursuits and escapes makes it clear that the click mechanism has probably evolved as a way to quite suddenly escape from its predators.  At times the shadow beetles may click five or six times in a row.  Once a tapping drew my attention to the tarp to see a click beetle caught and held in an ant’s jaws and fruitlessly clicking away.

The ants themselves, of course, are hunted by lizards, birds, and other insects, and rodents.  Once I saw two white-faced hornets returning to group of ants that were swarming over a melon rind.  The hornets would take two or three in each visit before flying off.  After a few minutes of this, the hornets themselves got into a wrestling match and then there was only a single hornet resorting to the ants.

On several occasions, I have found butterflies weakly struggling on the ground and, looking carefully, have made out ants attached to the undersides of their thoraxes.   These ants have been quite tenacious about hanging on as I attempted to dislodge them with the tip of my mechanical pencil.  In each of these cases, the butterflies were tattered and were apparently at the ends of their adult lives.
 
There appear to be several species of click beetle about the pool.  One is dark and almost an inch long and there are smaller honey-colored versions that may be different growth phases of the same species or different species.  These honey-colored click beetles are quite common and range from a few millimeters to around a centimeter long.  Earlier in the season, I often see a dark click beetle with an orange band across—I think—the upper portion of its thorax.  This latter beetle is between a half and three-quarters-of-an-inch long.
Click beetles become quite evident when the chinkapins bloom, one of which is growing at the base and on the creek side of the giant fir at the edge of camp.  The flowers are tiny and white but grow in two to three-inch-long spikes that project upright from the ends of twigs.  The flowers of this evergreen member of the oak family are quite pleasantly pungent and attract a multitude of insects.  A note taken on one flower over the course of a minute showed that it held two different species of click beetles, as well as a pallid small inchworm, small flies, an unknown short-winged butterfly, and ants.

While there seem to be seasons when this giant chinkapin does not carry many of its edible nuts, on most years there is a crop of them clothed in their quite spiny green cases.  A book here says these nuts take two years to mature.  This tree is also resorted to by a wasp? because most seasons it also produces a crop of spherical shiny peach-colored galls that are about the size of my thumbnail.

Most of the flowers of spring are faded by early July, but the daisies are still blooming, though they too are now in the process of fading.  Boykinia begin to show their white blooms nestled in the sedge plants along the streamside.  Here and there along the creek, the tall and erect-standing fireweed sends out its fuchsia-colored flowers in a spike at its tip.  I know of a blue elderberry by a small rill up on the ridge behind the pool that blooms now too.  By this time, the commonest of the under story plants, the evergreen salal, is showing both its waxy white bell-shaped flowers and green berries hanging in a line from the same branch.  Under the trees away from the creek, salal is the primary ground cover where there isn’t moss and where there is enough light getting to the ground.

A small wild rose that grows in a crack of the far-bank bedrock chooses this time to bloom prolifically.  During the 2003 season, this rose was seriously trimmed back by a beaver, but the following season, it produced a large number of flowers again.

The first of the wild blackberries and thimbleberries are ripe, though most remain inedible as yet.

Night singers are singing morning and evening now, as are those other quintessential summer-dusk singers, the robins.  Twice juvenile robins have been flying and calling in early July at the pool.  The first was a momentary sighting at the mossy apex of a far bank rock where I was looking because there had been a different sounding robin-like call coming from that area for a bit.  I don’t know whether the new call was from the juvenile robin.  
Kingfishers are sometimes absent from the pool until around this time and this is, perhaps coincidentally, when the first juvenile kingfishers begin to become active around the pool.  Spotted sandpipers remain the most common of the creek-side birds though.  With spotted sandpipers, it is the male bird that rears the young and there generally appear to be two male birds raising broods in the area of the pool each season.  This corresponds with the three mature sandpipers I have been seeing about the pool for the last several seasons and it probably means that one of these birds is a female.

During the 2002 season, a brood of young, tremendously fluffy, sandpiper chicks appeared in early July on the central bar just downstream from the pool.  They were virtually invisible unless moving and even then binoculars were usually needed to be sure I was seeing them.  Their dad would return to them regularly over the course of the day and gather them with a distinctive two-note piping call.  This brought the chicks to him from all over the long bouldery bar.  These may have been somewhat late chicks because juvenile sandpipers from another brood were flying about a week sooner than the chicks on the central bar were.  On the other hand, any clutch of eggs that were intended for the bar would be at the mercy of creek rises, so if it is a wet spring, central bar sandpipers might be late in being laid as eggs.

I wonder whether it is the male or the female spotted sandpiper that determines where the eggs are laid?

During the fifth season, 2003, perhaps because it was such a low water year, the lowest so far experienced by Sis and I, the local beavers took up the use of the den located under several very large boulders tumbled into place against the bedrock on the far bank at the head of the pool.  In early July of that season, there was the first in a series of encounters between the otters and the beavers that looked surprisingly like altercations over use of the pool or, perhaps, the use of the den.  The main rock in the area of the pool used by otters for pissing and defecating is one of the bedrock formations across from the Perch.  This formation rock is located about twenty-five feet down along the bank from the den.  The otters appear to be marking their territory there because virtually all the otters on their way through the pool visit this mossy area, most of them adding their own marks by at least pissing. 

The rock that is the highest of the boulders in the den tumble is also used as a marking station for otters, though much less often than the bedrock formation.  On a July evening during the fifth season, an otter foraged through the pool and, after looking over the area of the boulder tumble, it pissed and defecated on this den rock.  Finally, the otter scraped up some pissed-on moss from the den rock and this went into the pool.  Before entering the water itself, the otter pissed on that spot again.  Shortly, an adult beaver swimming up through the pool diverted over to the moss and sniffed it.  This beaver then made a wide circle into the riffle and finally swam into the gap between the two upper boulders.
This gap is the way most beavers and otters enter this den.  During that season, adult beavers towing leafy branches had been regularly resorting to the den since early June.  The early part of July is when young-of-the-year beavers generally appear, and, during this fifth season, the first young beaver appeared in the pool five days after the interaction documented above.

While I was aware that beavers, along with the otters, regularly used the pool and the den under the rocks at its head, it was when I saw the young beaver that I became aware that they were being raised by their parents here.  This sighting and following sightings may represent the local beavers getting used to Sis and I, which undoubtedly was happening, but it may also have been due to the low flows of that season. 

During previous seasons, I often saw adult and juvenile beavers together in a pool located about a quarter mile upcreek from the refuge pool.  In 2003, beavers constructed a dam at the bottom of the upcreek pool.  This was the first dam that I saw on the main creek, though it wasn’t very effective at holding back the water.  I couldn’t help wondering if the lower flow of the main creek had, in the minds of the parent beavers, unduly exposed this upcreek den during the time when their young were vulnerable.  I also wondered if this was the reason for that dam—such as it was—to be built in the first place.

During the sixth season, 2004, a relatively wetter and cooler one, no young beavers were raised from the den at the head of the pool nor anywhere else that Sis and I saw during that season.

During the fifth season, I met a couple of guys on the afternoon of a hot day.   Sis and I were at the end of a walk and coming back downcreek past the next pump chance about half a mile up from the pool when I heard a vehicle starting, a crunching of gravel as it pulled up onto the road, and eventually it came up behind me. 

I changed where I was walking to the side of the road away from the creek, and, checking that Sis was at heel and continuing to walk down the road, I raised my hand.
The vehicle was not moving fast and I heard, “You need a lift?”

I looked around and saw two middle-aged loggers or people dressed like working loggers.  They were in an older-yet-well-taken-care-of white Dodge pickup.  Both wore suspenders, one over a white t-shirt with a logo on it and the other over a bluish twill work shirt.  The person in the work shirt was the driver and talker.  He was a wizened black-haired black-bearded fellow.
“No.  Just going to my camp up here.”  I motioned down the creek road.
“You count the fish?”
“Yup.”  Wondering for the millionth time what made people think my purpose at the pool could be characterized as counting fish.
The driver smiled and reached out his hand.  We shook.
“We just been swimming and having a meal.” 
On the walk upcreek it had sounded like several members of a family carrying on. 
The other fellow motions with his hand and smiles.  “ . . . swimming up the creek.”
I leaned in and smiled.  “That’s what the creek’s for.”
I stood back.
The driver looked past me.  “Wow.”  He was looking at Sis who was looking back.  “You’ve got a good partner.”
“Yup.”  Immediately, I thought about a meeting I had had with a bum walking toward me late one night, one foot on the curb, one foot on the street below the curb.  This was in Oakland, California, where I was living back in 1973 during my final year undergraduate schooling.  I regularly went out for a late-night walk with my good dog, Mam.  It was a street light-lit street.  As we came close to each other, the bum had said, “At least you have a companier,” motioning to Mam. 

As these two guys were driving away, the driver raised his hand and I heard, “Thank the Lord.”