Our trip began early one sunny Saturday morning. This was my first time traveling to Whidbey Island, so as we drove across the island to Skyroot Farm, I tried to take in my surroundings. One unique thing that I noticed was the trees often were sculpted one direction or another and not as tall as seen in thicker forests, likely because of the strong winds that come off the sound. There was a great example of two Doug Firs on opposite sides of the farm that had been sculpted to almost be leaning in towards each other. As we continued to explore Beth’s farm there were a lot of different small habitats. Walking through the meadow I noticed that the soil underneath the grass in the lower meadows was soft and sometimes a little damp. This was probably due to the river that ran through the farm. As we trekked through the meadow I noticed that it was made up mostly of grass, but also rushes, horse tail, skunk cabbage and other smaller plants like stinging nettles. I saw a lot dragonflies and a white and black striped bee.   After some lunch the group caught a Song Sparrow, which we compared to the chickens roaming around the grounds. The scaly talons make birds one of the closest living reptiles to dinosaurs.

Rushes and Horse Tail

Skunk Cabbage, Rushes, Horse Tail

Grass and Bee

Song Sparrow

The picture below does a good job of showing the different habitats across the farm. The patch of trees in the middle is a grove of alders down by the stream that runs through the farm. I also took a picture of a extremely young alder just sprouting on the top of a smaller hill, which had dryer soil due to the exposure to sun light and distance from the stream. On the top of that hill we also came across a branch on an alder that had round 30 tent caterpillars living on it. For an unknown reason to me, they were very active and moving quickly from side to side. The hill seemed to have slightly poorer quality of soil, which may be why the new alder was one of the few trees or shrubs to be able to sprout there.

Sprouting Alder

 Tent Caterpillars

The next spot we visited was Ebbey’s landing on the north west side of the island. 

This area was a prairie in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains. Here we saw many of the same plants and trees as in the center of the island, but they had adapted to the different climate. Many of the trees were not at tall and would sometimes grow out of the side of the steep bluffs. Many of the shrubs such as the Tall Oregon Grape did not grow as tall, but grew wider, probably due to the frequency of high winds. We also got see some golden paintbrush flowers growing along the grass prairie hillside, an extremely rare and almost extinct species of flower.

Tall Oregon Grape

I was also able to spot a nest of some larger bird, possibly an eagle or hawk because we saw both a bald eagle and red tailed hawk patrolling the coast there. Probably the most amazing part of the trip was when one of the bald eagles we saw started to fly directly at us. It was jaw dropping seeing the massive bird fly directly at us; there might have been a split second of fear.