June 21, 2023
I came to Spokane Bay on the summer solstice with no intention of writing something new. Paddling up central Montana’s Hauser Lake from my friend Margaret’s house, my idea had been, if anything, to escape my home office and my many writing projects, perhaps to find inspiration for yet another magazine pitch among the wild creatures.
But as my kayak and I reached the bay under an unsettled gray sky, with cliff swallows and white-throated swifts foraging low under the brooding cloud bank, something about the day and the place and its diversity of life made me want to share it.
In part, I was inspired by Chris Helzer’s blog, The Prairie Ecologist. Chris, based in Nebraska, writes with unapologetic curiosity for the life around him, his passion for the myriad creatures and happenings taking him from this plant to that insect in a way that makes me hope I’ll get the chance to wander in the field with him someday. So thanks, Chris, for the inspiration. Enjoy my naturalist musings at one of my special places, Spokane Bay.
Botany on the bay
I had barely entered the bay and already I was distracted from whatever my mission for the day might have been. The breeze, pushing gently from the southeast behind a storm cell, was pushing my kayak up against a steep, rocky east slope, and I took a few minutes to appreciate the plant diversity there.
The slope was an uneasy mix of native and non-native, all of them telling a story of the interplay of moisture and dryness, shifting rock, seed dispersal and improbable growth. Near the water’s edge, the invasive bittersweet nightshade (Solanum dulcamara) was in full bloom, a strikingly beautiful array of deep purple stars. In the fall, they develop into nauseating, juicy red berries that the white-crowned sparrows eat, dispersing new seedlings to form viney tangles that displace native plants from the water’s edge.
Near the nightshade was a native jewelweed (Impatiens sp.). There are two species in Montana, Impatiens ecalcarata and Impatiens aurella, which are distinguishable when in flower. Both are rather uncommon, listed as a Potential Species of Concern and a Species of Concern, respectively, and I’ve seen both in the Helena Valley.
Higher in the rocks was a native blazingstar, probably Mentzelia decapetala, that evening-blooming insect trapper that I got to know last summer. Farther upslope was a band of cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), its seedheads drying out, and a few stems of black henbane (Hyoscyamus niger), a leafy, striking and highly toxic non-native biennial that likes disturbed soil.
Swallows in the rain
My observations were cut short by the first few heavy raindrops from the impending storm. I started paddling hard across the bay towards the boat docks, pointed into the suddenly stronger wind, the waves slapping over the bow of my kayak and spattering lake water onto my glasses.
I reached shore and took shelter under an old crack willow (Salix fragilis) before the rain shower began in earnest, blowing across the bay in soft gray curtains. The swallows stayed active, skimming within a foot of the water, dancing in fluttered stoops and ascending glides among the raindrops. Most of them were cliff swallows, which nest on the rocks a quarter of a mile away; occasionally I saw violet-green, northern rough-winged, and bank swallows. The white-throated swifts, which apparently nest on the higher cliffs farther downstream, had departed.
Soon I found myself squatting at the water’s edge under the crack willow, where the leafy green canopy deflected most of the raindrops, trying with limited success to capture the dance of thirty-plus swallows over the water. It was a dance made even more magical by the knowledge that many of our aerial insect-eaters are declining. In Montana, to the best of my knowledge, we have virtually no quantitative data on any potential long-term declines in the aerial insects that these species depend on for food. I have heard disturbing anecdotes, from several long-time residents, though, that the numbers of windshield-splattered insects have declined very substantially in the last few decades. In any case, the dance of the swallows is a special thing to behold.
Beyond words
How does one capture biodiversity in a story? Half an hour later and the rain had moved on. I spotted a tree swallow, the flat gray light catching its shining blue back as it skimmed over the ripples of the bay. Five species of swallows catching insects here, just on this single afternoon. Hundreds of species of plants, many native and others not, each with a story of its own.
The songs of the western meadowlarks echoed plaintively from across the lake and a sora whinnied invisibly from the cattail marsh at the mouth of the bay. There’s no way I can really capture this place in a story, I decided, nor do I really want to. This place, and others like it, exist and live and breathe outside of these words. That’s part of their beauty. But what I can do is celebrate this living, breathing world. I can thank them with inadequate words, these plants that speak through where they choose to grow, these swallows that dance athletically over the ripples. And perhaps my words will inspire you to seek your own special spots, to learn from the creatures there, and to find ways to give back to them.
With those thoughts, I once again stopped trying to catalog and describe everything. (Though I did keep a bird list, and by the end of the afternoon it had reached 39 species.) Instead, I wandered, pausing where my curiosity took me, taking time to listen and sniff and feel and appreciate. I highly recommend days like this.
From cedar waxwings to bitterroot
The Russian-olive (Elaeagnus angustifolia) was still flowering, though the rain had washed most of the sickly-sweet smell from its blooms. I noticed a relatively flat nest of sticks at mid-level among the branches and backed off. A pair of cedar waxwings were making buzzy calls nearby, and I suspected that the nest might be theirs. Sure enough, from 30 meters away I was rewarded with a brief view of one of the adults flying to the nest.
I didn’t want to get closer and disturb them, but I was hoping to get a photo of the nest. That led me to the ill-advised move of scrambling up a far-too-steep bank to get a farther-away view from above. The nest obligingly disappeared, well-hidden among the branches.
But the scramble put me at eye level with an American robin, alternately preening and singing from another crack willow. It also gave me a nice view towards the mouth of Spokane Creek, where a small flotilla of mallards and gadwalls were swimming. And it put me in the midst of a high-quality native grassland carpeted with dense spikemoss (Selaginella densa) and lichens, dotted with bluebunch wheatgrass (Agropyron spicatum) and big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata). Here I was excited to see a few bitterroots (Lewisia rediviva) blooming, the leaves already withered away for the season.
Grassland to marsh
I picked my way gingerly along the grassland slope, eyes alert for unusual insects and other creatures. The sun was out now and the swallows were higher, almost equal numbers of cliff and violet-green swallows now, skimming the contours of the hillside as well as the surface of the bay.
I continued to putter here and there, casually looking for interesting insects, but finding little on this relatively cool afternoon. I stopped to photograph the linearleaf phacelia (Phacelia linearis) flowering on the grassland slope and its perennial relative, silverleaf phacelia (Phacelia hastata), in lavender clumps on a loose shaly embankment.
In the cattail marsh, I watched a song sparrow throwing his head back in song against a backdrop of leafy spurge. I checked for flower visitors on the native Wood’s rose (Rosa woodsii) and the gorgeous but emphatically not native nodding thistle (Carduus nutans). Not warm enough, perhaps—nothing was there. I did slip on the rain-damp vegetation while taking photos, though, startling a white-tailed deer, who leapt up from hiding and bounded across the marsh, flushing a pair of blue-winged teal from the backwaters.
The swallows
A couple of orange-banded bumblebees, which I suspected were Hunt’s bumblebees (Bombus huntii), were visiting the silverleaf phacelia. But the swallows were having much better luck finding insects than I was. Flying over the bay and the phacelia slope in an ever-shifting traffic pattern, their numbers kept increasing. From 30 during the rain shower to 50, to 80: 40 violet-green swallows alone, velvety green backs and white rumps on prominent display as they whizzed past. It didn’t take me long to shift my focus almost entirely to swallows.
The swallows were impossibly fast, though, and my camera painfully slow. My lens reduced the smooth aerial dance of the violet-greens to an uninteresting blur. I tried taking cell phone photos of the silverleaf phacelia, lying on my stomach on the sharp rocks, trying to capture the darting specks of the swallows in the background. If you use a lot of imagination, you can see them there.
Then something shifted. For a few brief minutes, and for reasons unknown to me, the violet-green swallows began landing on the exposed soil of the slope, two or three at a time, above the silverleaf phacelia patch. Were they finding minerals? Nesting materials? I don’t know. But at last I was able to get some halfway recognizable photos, some mementoes that still don’t really do justice to the wonder of dancing swallows.
The dance of the swallows
A few minutes later and an early evening swallow aggregation was beginning to form. There were 15, then 30 of them, roosting on the power lines. Out came the camera. On the line, I could see four species: violet-green, northern rough-winged, cliff, and tree swallow.
I did one final count of swallows on the wing before I left that evening. A gust of wind had swept suddenly up the slope and a swirl of swallows dove into it, evidently snatching prey. A quick, rough count by tens: 130 swallows, filling the airspace over the bay.
When I left Spokane Bay that evening, I left enamored by swallows. I left thinking about midges (towards the end, I finally caught a cloud of them with my hat) and the other insects that swallows eat. And I left hoping that, a hundred years from now, there are still this many (if not more) swallows around, filling the sky over Spokane Bay.
Further reading
Spiller, K.J. & Dettmers, R. (2019). Evidence for multiple drivers of aerial insectivore declines across North America. The Condor 121(2). Retrieved from https://academic.oup.com/condor/article/121/2/duz010/5497088