"Botany Washington"...

is an annual event organized by the Washington Native Plant Society, and this year it convenes this weekend in eastern Washington.  I'm heading out shortly to meet a group led by EWU botanist RO'Q at Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge, in the middle of the Cheney-Palouse Scabland Tract.  I'll speak about the catastrophic Pleistocene flood origin of the gravelly soils, and crawl around the ponderosa pine forest with the group for a while to see what's in bloom.

UPDATE:  Some of the showier plants included western serviceberry (Amelanchier alnifolia)(click to enlarge):

Common camas (Camassia quamash):

Arrowleaf balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata):

And while the biologists crawled around on their hands and knees, keying out various mini-floras, one of the native fauna caught my attention: