Cougar Mountain hike 4/19/2012 4-7pm
Location: Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park, Bellevue, Washington, USA (Lat: 47.533465, Long: -122.113713)
The weather was very wet, constant rainfall during the three hour hike. The vegetation was of a mature hemlock and western redcedar forest with many ancient stumps, and prevalent woody debris, although it was not to be classified as old growth. It appeared as though the few sitka spruce saplings identified had been planted by humans, as no seed source could be located, and they were near the path, and they were all approximately the same young age. Also, other tree seedlings obviously had deer nets around them, indicating human intervention. The dominant tree was a douglas-fir, with a large amount of western hemlock and western redcedar, and large spatial sections of hardwoods dominated mostly by black cottonwood, and some red alder, and less big leaf maples. The canopy was open in most places, lots of light reached the ground, where most of the regions common shrubs grew in abundance; salmonberry, edlerberry, indian plum, stinging nettle, violets, coltsfoot, pacific trillium, red huckleberry etc. there was a single identified patch of devils club growing together. The ground was very wet in places, where erosion from streams commonly crossed through the walking path, and many ponds and streams were visible. In these shallow ponds were coomon wet species like skunk cabbage, and common mare's tail. the wildlife in the area consisted on this day mostly of birds; robins hunting for worms in open areas, lots of Juncos, a northern flicker in a douglas fir, and many shrub dwelling small birds that i didnt identify, but were likely chickadees.
Notes: Flicker was hard to identify because of the grey background of the sky and my binoculars kept steaming up. But the single loud cheaps of its call helped, and it generally matched the body colour, and its beak was long like a flickers and it was the right size.
Species list:
Douglas-fir
western hemlock
western redcedar
black cottonwood
red alder
big leaf maple
sitka spruce
vine maple
pacific trillium
skunk cabbage
common mare's tail
red huckleberry
herb robert
salal
sword fern
deer fern
sweet coltsfoot
trailing oregon grape
stinging nettle
salmon berry
indian plum
elder berry
devils club
viola
grasses
