Tall alders' bare branches bear empty great blue heron nests, silhouetted against a blue sky.
#BellinghamForests 2025, Day 27.
The herons' nests at #PostPoint are still empty. Check back in three or four weeks!
#BellinghamForests 2025, Day 25. This is really early, reflecting the very warm winter until early January.
#BellinghamForests 2025 Day 24.
Sorry to obsess over #HairIce, but got a better picture showing the delicate ice filaments.
A light-greeen leaf bud at the end of a reddish-brown stem of Oemleria (osoberry).
An Oemleria shrub (osoberry or Indian plum) showing light-green leaf buds about to open.
#BellinghamForests 2025, Day 23.
The #RealPhenology starts. Oemleria cerasiformis, Indian plum or osoberry, is the first shrub to leaf out in spring. Buds are already swelling, waaaay early this warm winter.
Two tall white-trunked, bare-branched cottonwoods against a blue sky background.
#BellinghamForests 2025, day 22
Magnificent cottonwoods, even when dormant, shine against the (lowercase) bluesky:
#BellinghamForests 2025, Day 21.
One thing that becomes very visible in winter forests are #widowmakers. When this baby comes down, it'll come down with a crash.
#BellinghamForests 2025, Day 20.
#HairIce forms on rotting hardwood (in this case, alder) branches that have fallen on the ground when the temperature is slightly below freezing and the humidity is high, through the not-yet-quite understood mechanism of a fungus, Exidiopsis effusa.
#BellinghamForests 2025 Day 19:
What's this guy doing there, just standing on a rock looking bewildered while the stream streams by?
#BellinghamForests 2025, Day 18. Can't improve on @bbharrell.bsky.social's sequence on Whatcom Falls and the WPA stone bridge.
#BellinghamForests 2025, Day 16:
There's something majestic about a winter #snag against a rare background of blue sky (lowercase).
#BellinghamForests 2025 Day 15
Do #LicoriceFerms actually grow out of rocks? Sometimes appears that way.
A downed conifer (probably Douglas-fir) and a broken log above a small stream in a winter forest.
A shallow street with coarse woody debris including logs and pieces of logs, pebbles in the stream bed, mossy small trees overhanging.
#BellinghamForests 2025, Day 14.
One important process that happens in the winter is that stuff comes down; limbs or trunks break of or occasionally whole large trees are uprooted when the wind blows and the soil is saturated. This can puts coarse woody debris in streams, creating fish habitat.
Many varieties of lichens and mosses on a branch. Remaining snowberries dot the lower portion of the photo.
#BellinghamForests 2025, Day 12
It's an amazing year for lichens:
Six white mushrooms with light brown centers against a forest floor of dark brown leaves and bright green moss.
A large, almost perfectly circular white mushroom with light brown center.
#BellinghamForests 2025, Day 11:
In a particularly warm winter, mushrooms thrive in January:
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Dried flower-balls of pearly everlasting, against a background of brown, bare branches of currant and other shrubs.
#BellinghamForests 2025, Day 10:
#PearlyEverlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea)
still lasting in January on Samish Crest.
Dri
Light-green leaves and pink flowers of Herb Robert on a forest floor covered with brown fallen leaves.
#BellinghamForests 2025, Day 9. It's been so warm that #invasive Herb Robert (Geranium robertianum, sometimes known as #StinkyBob) is *flowering* in January. Sorry this isn't a pretty picture.
