Two Wetlands

It's been another long, gray PNW winter.  Whenever the sun breaks for a few minutes, everyone in the area dashes outside to enjoy the weak sunshine and soak up Vitamin D.  Our little family took one little hike the last sunny day and enjoyed it so much we immediately drove down the highway to take a second one.  Both were through wetland areas, but very different types of wetlands which made for interesting observations. 

First was West Hylebos Wetlands Park, an inland forest bog (swamp).  The skunk cabbage is just blooming and not too stinky, yet...we learned that another name for skunk cabbage is "swamp lantern" and I much prefer that name for such a luminous plant!

Most of these bogs in the Puget Sound have long since been destroyed by peat mining, but by some accident this one still exists.  It is amazing to see the giant trees, just barely upright on the super soft and saturated ground. In many, many places, the giant trees toppled and their huge root wads are up on display.  When the trees come up they may destroy the walkway.

The kids very much enjoyed the easy hike and loved taking pictures of the interesting surroundings.

We decided to go back and do it again in each season to observe the changes. 

It was such an easy and enjoyable morning hike, that none of us wanted to go home yet and we decided to do a second trail after lunch. 

Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge!  We'd gone here with some homeschool friends during the week, but because we were with a group, we didn't get very far on the trails.  We went much, much farther this time.

Nisqually wetland is a seashore delta, a very different and much larger wetland than the Hylebos Creek area.  Lots of Canada Geese and interesting shorebirds to watch.

As usual I forgot the guidebooks.  (Why can I not ever remember the guidebooks???) And I can't remember what kind of bird is that green-footed one. 

My eagle-eyed kids spotted some amorphous blobs attached to some drowned vegetation, see it?

Frog eggs, we think.  Neato!

We had some good discussions afterward comparing and contrasting the two areas and the different types of life and vegetation.  I asked Big K which one he liked better and he said, "The second one.  Because we went farther."  Methinks he's going to be going through a lot of hiking shoes.