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The Daily Bucket - June at the overlook: breeding birds & bees, lone passers-by (+ loon update) [1]
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Date: 2025-06-30
June 2025
Salish Sea, Pacific Northwest
My local bay has an overlook where I can sit and watch for nature activity. June is a busy time, with flowers and pollinators most easily visible, though much wildlife is less so as I’m only able to see fleeting moments not hidden in the water, underground, within foliage, in the sky or just not within view from my location. Still, sometimes I cross paths with the local inhabitants and visitors. These are a few highlights this month, by date.
June 2: Early June is peak Nootka rose season. Along many roadsides, paths and fields on the island, including at the overlook, these prolific native shrubs are a mass of pink fragrance, starting mid May and mostly done by mid June.
Nootka rose thicket
June 6: This was my sighting of the vagrant Yellow-billed loon. Photo in title image. That day the bird was just paddling around, at times snoozing.
Yellow-billed loons, described by Cornell's All About Birds as a “beautiful behemoth of a loon, the largest and rarest of the world’s five species” are very rare in Washington. I’d never seen one before, not surprisingly since they are northerly birds, and in any case high Arctic breeders at this season. I watched for this lone loon daily and reported to eBird. It became quite famous locally and several serious birders from a neighboring island came over to get a look at it after I’d reported it daily for a week or so.
June 7-10: Loon still just hanging out in fairly shallow water, within 100 yards of the beach. Some of its wing plumage looked a bit askew, so I wasn’t sure what was up with that. Appeared to be in full breeding plumage.
You can see its red eyes, typical for loons in summer
Meanwhile, around my feet, the miner bees who nest on the sandy/clay bank at the overlook were starting to emerge from their tunnels. They were quite sluggish, often just resting on the ground. I’ve been misidentifying these as Sand wasps but after submitting photos to an entomology site I learned they are most likely a species of Cellophane bee (genus Colletes) or Miner Bees (genus Andrena), both of which are solitary, ground nesting, and non-aggressive native bees.
A bee not a wasp
June 11: For the first time I saw the Yellow-billed loon grooming, always a good sign for birds.
YBLOs are bigger than our Common and Pacific loons as you can see by comparison to the Canada Geese.
Grooming while floating
On this same day, the pair of Black oystercatchers, which I last reported nesting on a little island 200 yards from the beach, flew up from the far side with piercing calls. They do that whenever any large bird flies over, aggressively and loudly, whether it’s a real danger like an eagle or raven, or anyone who just looks big, like a vulture or osprey. In this case the oystercatchers chased an osprey clear out of the bay. Osprey are far less common in this particular bay than any of those other big birds, and this is the only one I’ve seen in this bay this year.
Oystercatchers close in on osprey
Screaming and flying straight at it
June 14: One of the oystercatcher parent pair flew over to hunt limpets along the beach below the overlook. Limpets are the mainstay of their diet around here.
The water looks scummy because we had a series of extreme minus tides this month, several feet below mean lower low water. This always happens around the solstice a few days before and after the full and new moons, which were on the 11th and 25th this month respectively. Algae that’s usually covered with water 24/7 dies when uncovered and cooked in the sun, and then washes up on shore with the next high tide.
These daytime minus tides (unlike winter, when they are at night) mean great windows for oystercatchers to hunt for food: much more intertidal real estate to forage in.
June 15:
The lone otter I’ve seen occasionally here was out fishing. No sign of any moms and babies yet for this season.
This was the first day since the 6th I hadn’t seen the Yellow-billed loon. I thought I saw it until I looked at my photos. Turned out it was a Common loon (which are not common at this season).
With a Double-crested cormorant
Breeding plumage. Note the symmetrical upper and lower bills, unlike in YBLOs whose lower bill is curved, giving them an upturned look.
I found out later that the loon had been seen at the entrance of the bay, half a mile away, by a couple of birders from a neighboring island who’d come over in a boat to see and photograph it. Too far for me to see/ID even with bins.
June 16: This was the last day I saw the YBLO. The following day I was off-island, and the day after that the bay was empty. The eBird reviewer who came over to the island specifically in hopes of seeing the loon that day came up empty too. However he stayed over at a friend’s and went out in a boat the following day. After going back and forth all along the coastline at this end of the island he was lucky enough to find it near an offshore rock a mile from the overlook on June 19.
My last view of the YBLO. There have been no reports in the state since the 19th.
June 18: The bees on the sandy/clay bank at the overlook were really getting going by now, buzzing around low over the ground. The female bees had hatched and the males were swarming them as they emerged from their tunnels, hoping to be the one to mate with them. Once that’s complete she digs new tunnels, laying eggs in them and spends the next few weeks provisioning them with pollen. Then her work is done and she dies, as do the male bees.
These bees spend 10½ - 11 months of the year underground as larvae and pupae, emerging briefly as adults to procreate
Two on one
June 27: I saw a kingfisher that might have been a juvenile this day, perhaps fledged after the coaxing earlier in the month. It was flying uncertainly and perched for a long time on a rock below the overlook where kingfishers never stay long once they see me. It was flicking its tail and looking all around. No other kingfishers were nearby, so if it was a juvenile I hope it’s learned some fishing skills in the past few weeks.
Breast plumage has some red in the grey
We had a few rainy days last week but they didn’t make much of a dent in our precipitation deficit. According to CoCoRaHS, my rainfall is currently 80% of normal and the forecast is for dry weather going into July.
View of the headland from the overlook. The grassy covered rock has turned brown, typical for summer.
🐝
Sunny, calm and dry in the PNW islands today. Typical temps, in the high 60s, lows at night in 50s.
What’s up in nature in your neighborhood?
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