Last Tuesday {10/23) I was sitting in my portable Toyota office doing some paperwork. It was late afternoon and I was parked at the 10th street boat launch on Everett's waterfront.

The mudflats were underwater, but the parking lot was covered with gulls, as is often the case. Nowadays the lot is a good place to examine immature gulls. Quite a motley crew out there, all some form of White-headed gulls. Many looked like the result of some industrial accident at a tweed factory, while some were very distinct, for example a group of 1st year Ring-billed. A small group of them in particular seemed like they could have been a separate species, with their fleshy colored bills and legs glowing in the warm afternoon light. Quite beautiful. On the other hand, there were a few 2nd winter California Gulls, which were a bit funky, with their blue legs. Didn't quite fit the guidebook picture. One separated itself from the crowd to stand in front of my truck with a pleading look. I imagined it saying " heip me! I'm a beautifull White-headed Gull trapped in a tweed body!", which of course is probablly ridiculous. Most likely it was saying " hey mister, got any bread?"

As I sat there in my truck a brilliant rainbow appeared to the North, developing into a fine double rainbow gradually. Amazing! On the West end of it, it touched the ground near my truck. Rather than a pot of gold ( I really could've used the money) the rainbow end landed on a single big adult Glaucous-winged Gull which was glowing so incandescently in the brilliant low sunlight it seemed particularly huge.

The bay was pretty quiet bird wise (all the loud Caspians, Ospreys, and Martins gone) but the Double-crested Cormorants are flocking up now, which is fun to see in flight. I've been seeing flocks in the evening up the river around Snohomish too.

Quiet birdwise, the spectacular sky show contined. To the South dark tendrils of rain hung down from the bases of tall clouds, moving my way, a phenomenon called "walking rain" in the American Southwest. In the context of Puget Sound I thought they looked like the tentalcles of big Sound jellyfish that had assumed giganitc vaporous dimentions in the sky. They were coming my way all right, a brief splatter of rain stung my windshield , but I was OK and wasn't touching any metal. The tendrils moved North, the Rainbow now dimming and glowing as the Jellyfish moved by. Then the tentacles enveloped the rainbow, and a brilliant band of sunlit cloud to the North backlit them, giving the sky the remarkable apperance of a band of Northern Lights - in slow-mo and all in black-and-white, untill an end of light bit of rainbow colorized it a bit. In such natural moving events, photography of any sort just doesen't quite capture the phenomenon. Of course words don't either.

The sky show wasn't quite over though. Looking South again, the rain tendrils had removed all the aerial plankton; the sky was amazingly clear beneath another cloud creature, a huge dark cloud that was so dense and solid looking, scultpted into warty shapes below, that it looked like the worlds largest Gray Whale, tail somewhere down by Mukilteo. I imagined myself as a Port Gardner ghost shrimp out in the mudflats, watching the whale go over. It didn't dredge the parking lot. I had dodged Vaporous baleen and tentalcles too. There I was, smiling; the luckiest shrimp on the lot.

Jeff Gibson
under the rainbow, in
Everett Wa