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Experience summer

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A naturalist's guide to summer in the region

By Metro naturalist James Davis

Looking for signs of summer? Metro naturalist James Davis offers up buckets of blackberries, mysterious bird songs, meteor showers, bug pee (really) and baby birds learning to fly. You can experience these seasonal highlights for yourself at nearby parks, trails and greenspaces, and often in your own backyard.

June

Celebrate Portland's official city bird during Great Blue Heron Week, the first week in June. Heron rookeries are full of action as the young herons start leaving their nests and climbing through the trees. Despite all the leaves, you might see some action in the big heron rookery (communal nesting area) on Ross Island, which can be viewed from the recently opened Springwater on the Willamette Trail. There are lots of other good places to see herons around the region, including Jackson Bottom Wetlands Preserve in Hillsboro and Metro's Smith and Bybee Wetlands Natural Area in North Portland.

In early June, you can find lots of spittlebugs in grassy fields. Look in the blobs of spittle and you will find small green insects. The spittle is not really spit but urine that the insects whip into foam with their abdomen and legs. Apparently birds and other animals are not much more interested in poking through the "pee foam" than we are and this gives the little bugs protection. Spittlebugs actually are the immature stage or nymph of an insect called the froghopper, one of the many little sucking bugs that go boinging away from you as you walk through grass in July.

Young birds are fledging everywhere during June. "Fledging" means leaving the nest, and many baby birds leave their nest before they can fly well. People frequently find these fledgling birds on the ground and think their parents have abandoned them. Well-meaning folks believe they are rescuing them when they pick them up and take them to Audubon's Wildlife Care Center. In reality, they are kidnapping the young animals. The parents are nearby, and most birds care for their young for a longer period out of the nest than in the nest. So the best policy is to leave baby birds (and other baby animals) alone.

June is Swainson's thrush month. Lots of people ask me about a beautiful, flutey, liquid song they hear on summer evenings coming from a mysterious bird they can never see. I always know it is the "phantom of the forest" – the Swainson's thrush. No other bird has such a distinctive and unforgettable song, yet is so hard to see. Small and brown, it spends its time skulking in the shadows of low plants in forests. Listen for this amazing songster in alder and other deciduous woodlands with lots of understory plants on June evenings.

Listen for the very high-pitched "chittering" noises of the tiny Vaux's swifts as they fly high overhead on June evenings, usually near water. You can tell them from similar swallows by their longer, narrower, curved and pointed wings. They flutter their wings in a rapid, stiff motion that makes them seem to be flickering. They also have started to nest in chimneys by building a tiny shelf of small sticks held together with their dried spit. Don't worry if you hear them in your chimney in summer, they will leave as soon as the young fledge.

The longest day of the year is on Saturday, June 21, the summer solstice and the traditional first day of summer in our modern calendar. In the ancient Celtic calendar, however, the longest day of the year was thought of as the middle of summer, an idea that makes sense to many modern naturalists. The long days of summer are great for getting out and looking for mammals around sunset. Since the night is so short, many nocturnal mammals seem to get an early start and become active when there is still some light by which to see them. However, you must know where to look and be the sneakiest animal tracker you can. A good time to practice is at a Twilight Tuesday walk at Smith and Bybee Wetlands Natural Area.

July

On any sunny day, you'll find Western painted turtles at Smith and Bybee Wetlands Natural Area basking on the logs, right near the parking area. As the summer wears on, it starts getting too hot for the turtles to be out in the sun all day, so sunny July mornings are best for seeing dozens at a time. You will need binoculars to see that the bumps on the logs are indeed turtles, or come on one of the many Saturday turtle walks and check them out in our small telescopes.

Plant life is lush in July and many of our later-blooming flowers are getting very conspicuous. Look for the beautiful blue flowers of chicory, the coffee substitute introduced from Europe. Often growing with them will be the flat-topped flower clusters of wild carrot or Queen Anne's lace. Pick some of these introduced weeds, put them in water with food coloring and watch the flowers take up the color. You can make flowers any color you want! Another introduced European flower that has become widespread and is quite spectacular is foxglove. All these plants do well in disturbed soil along roads, along with our native fireweed. Look for them in your local vacant lot.

Leave your windows open on July nights and you are likely to be visited by crane flies. Although these big skinny flies look like giant mosquitoes, they are completely harmless to humans. In fact, they are harmless to mosquitoes despite one common name for them, "mosquito hawk." They are mainly vegetarians, decomposers and fungus-eaters. Be careful as you put them back outside; their legs break off easily.

In July, cottonwood fluff fills the air. The black cottonwood is the largest deciduous tree in the Northwest and grows almost anywhere there is enough water. Its seeds get everywhere, floating through the air in the fluff that gives the tree its name. These tall trees, which line the rivers throughout the West, were an important sign of water to the settlers heading for Oregon.

Bugs, bugs, bugs. Insects and their relatives just keep cranking out the babies and growing, reaching astonishing numbers by July. Walk through a grassy field and try to count all the grasshoppers that rise up before you. Dragonflies and damselflies are abundant and fun to watch zipping over grasslands or water. Butterflies will be out in the sun feeding on flowers. Pick any area with lots of plants, start looking closely and you are bound to find many different kinds of insects, spiders and other arthropods. Look carefully under logs and rocks for cool beetles, millipedes, centipedes, and those "land shrimp" called pillbugs, sowbugs, potato bugs or roly-polies.

August

Where have all the songbirds gone? It is just amazing how all those noisy, colorful songbirds, so conspicuous back in early June, seem to have disappeared. Most of them didn't go anywhere. They are still here, but after the breeding season young and old alike are basically just eating, molting and hiding. Molting, or changing into new feathers, is very dangerous for birds so they really lay low. And if they can successfully hide from hawks, bobcats, coyotes and foxes, it's no surprise that we can't see them.

One of the biggest meteor showers of the year occurs during the second week of August. Check local newspapers or OMSI's web site for accurate information on the Perseid meteor shower. You will want to get out of town a bit to the darkest sky you can find, and hope that there are no clouds. Every year, the Rose City Astronomers have a star party on the predicted biggest night of the shower at Rooster Rock State Park in the Columbia River Gorge.

Grasshoppers are becoming very abundant, and grassy fields are literally hopping with them. It isn't until August that we can be sure of hearing their cousins, our local crickets, singing at night. If you are lucky and near the right habitat, you might also hear some cicadas and katydids buzzing away. All this insect noise is made by the males trying to attract the females. After successful mating, the females will lay eggs that will survive the winter. Then all the adults die. Next spring the eggs hatch and it all starts over again.

Yum, yum, it's berry time. August is when blackberries become ripe, both wild ones and some of the cultivated varieties. Keep your eyes open for sunny areas with big blackberry brambles in full bloom during the earlier part of the summer, then return to feast like a bear in August. The exact time of peak ripeness will vary from place to place and year to year. If you get to know a particular patch well, you can hit it at the peak time each year. Be sure to get permission to pick on private property. Happy picking.

See for yourself

For more information about visiting Metro parks and natural areas with a naturalist, check out the Metro GreenScene... More