Willamette Mission State Park, cottonwoods, flowers and critters

[Don Boucher]

Hello,

Last week (June 6 thru 9) I went bike camping at Willamette Mission State Park. The place is very large, 1,300 acres, with riparian woodland, wetland, rolling meadows, oxbow lakes and working farmland; and miles and miles of trails.

In a previous post I covered the birds but here I talk about plants and other things.

The park is known for the largest Black Cottonwood on record. But there are many other cottonwoods there that approach it in height but aren't as old or wide at their bases. Nevertheless, along the trails, there are cathedral-like stands of cottonwoods and some impressive bigleaf maples too.

The park is a metropolis of California Ground Squirrels. I've never seen so many elsewhere. In the most publicly-used spaces like the large open lawns, the walnut orchard and the disc golf trails, there are always ground squirrels scampering about. I love to watch squirrels and I was duly entertained.

And it was a bit of a cute overload with ground squirrel babies, bird babies and it seems the only rabbits I encountered (except for a feral domestic rabbit at the ferry landing) were cute Brush Rabbits (Sylvilagus bachmani). These rabbits were all small but none had the fluffy, prominent white tails like Eastern Cottontails. Their ears were somewhat uniform in color and the face pattern was mostly even colored, unlike Eastern Cottontails. It's tricky, you can't always ID these without excellent photos of all features, including their feet and legs.

While having lunch in the walnut grove (near one of the Mission Day Use shelters) I watched a Camas Pocket Gopher excavating.

I found some Butter and Eggs, or Common Toadflax (Linaria vulgaris) which isn't a native flower but not very common around Corvallis. Some of the Pacific Ninebark in the area had very red seed capsules, where I've only seen those that are rust-colored. In camp there was a Serviceberry bush with longer leaves than those I've encountered before. I didn't know what it was at first, thinking it might have been a bitter cherry. It turns out our serviceberry, Amelanchier alniflora, is variable. It had an orange rust (fungus) on some of the developing fruits and fuzzy white galls on some of the leaves, both of which I have yet to identify.

I found some Woodland Phacelia (Phacelia nemoralis) which is a genus with species that are more common in the mountains.

The sunsets there were lovely too.

Don Boucher

Corvallis

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[Don A Boucher]

Thanks to Marge Alig for pointing out the serviceberry rust to me. She had the problem with planted serviceberry bushes in her yard. It's a species of Gymonosporangium and here's an OSU College of Ag Science description of it: https://agsci.oregonstate.edu/nurspest/diseases/gymnosporangium-rust-serviceberry

Don Boucher