Street Smart Naturalist

With spring in the air and more and more people getting out and enjoying the loveliness, I thought I’d return to a scavenger hunt I put together several years ago. Not surprisingly, it’s a bit dorky but I hope that you will enjoy it and perhaps find some inspiration for further exploration. Although my knowledge is primarily Seattle biased and based, I feel confident that you can find these treasures in any large city and probably many towns.The list is not in any particular order. And, please let me know if you have other suggestions for future scavenger hunts.Fossils - The most commonly used building stone in the country is Indiana’s Salem Limestone. Deposited 330 million years ago in a quiet sea, it is pointillist rock made of fossils instead of dots. Crinoids. Brachiopods. Corals. Bryozoans. Whole and shattered. But the Salem is not the lone building stone with fossils; I have found fossils of all sizes in buildings in most cities I have visited. If you have a magnifying lens, or better yet a Hastings Triplet, you’ll be the envy of all who seek fossils.Lions, Eagles, and Walruses - No matter where you walk in a city, they are watching. They being the carved and terra cotta animals and human faces that adorn buildings. The most common are lions and eagles but you can also encounter ducks, squirrels, fish, and, in Seattle, walruses. If you have binoculars, and can get over the peeping Tom feeling, they are invaluable. (If you want to go the extra mile, at least in Seattle, I know of bronze duck tracks downtown. Perhaps they were made by the terra cotta duck shown below?)Hitching Posts - Back in the era when horsepower actually meant equine energy, people needed a place to hitch their horses. Understandably, most hitching posts have gone the way of, well, the horse and buggy, but a few remain, a reminder of the era when the worst output from your source of transportation was poop.Lichens - Colorful, abundant, persistent, and ubiquitous, lichens are everywhere. Neither plant nor animal—lichens have been described as more like an ecosystem than an individual organism. They grow through a symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae, or cyanobacteria, can be found on wood, rock, cement, automobiles, roof tiles, bird baths, etc. etc., and will be here long after we are. What more could you want in your urban world?Local Geology - Okay, here’s my true dorkdom shining through. A good way to get an insight into your local geology is to look at older buildings because early builders typically used local rock. For example, Seattle’s oldest structures are made of a 50-million-year-old sandstone quarried in Tenino, Wilkeson, and Chuckanut and 32-million-year-old granite from Index; these are the closest sources for good building stone. Early builders also sought out nearby glacially-deposited clay beds to make bricks for structures and streets, as well as limestone for the lime for cement.Native Trees - Seattle’s most abundant trees are probably its native Douglas firs. Two other common natives are bigleaf maple and red alder, both of which pioneer disturbed habitat. I don’t know about other locations but I am sure that wherever you live, you’ll find native trees growing. I suggest seeking them out in parks, cemeteries (great places for lichen lovers), or arboreta. Or, if you can’t find a native tree, then you could consider planting one or more.Ghost Forest - Many years ago I had a floral epiphany. The tree trunks I saw around town were once trees, which probably meant that they were part of a forest of what I assumed was the native ecosystem since many stumps were in parks. In Seattle, I know of about a dozen, most of which are western red cedar. Look for the springboard notches, where loggers inserted planks to allow them get above the “knees” that often made up the bottom of a cedar tree. Also look for nurse logs and nurse stumps, great habitat for new life.Phone Booth - Perhaps the hardest item to find on the list but a few still persist, a reminder of when superheroes and Ma Bell were bedfellows, so to speak.Evidence for Native people - In Seattle, we have Lushootseed (the Native language) place names, such as Licton Springs and Shilshole, as well as more and more interpretive signs that incorporate Native plant names and that tell the story of Indigenous people past and present. We are also fortunate that several recent books help tell those stories, too. If your city and its residents aren’t recognizing and acknowledging the original inhabitants, then it seems some things need to change where you live.Evidence for Historic Water Features - Urban development typically results in the paving over of many hydrologic features, such as creeks, seeps, and springs. But water has a way of bypassing these attempts to hide its story and creates hints for those who seek them out. One simple example in Seattle is Spring Street, named for the springs that provided drinking water to the nascent town. Others clues include water-loving plants (such as horsetails and devil’s club), backyard streams, weeping hillsides, and place names.Ghost Signs - Pentimenti from a bygone era, ghost signs are a reminder of those who came before, or at least those previous hawkers of their wares. Most signs are disappearing because of urban renewal but you can still find them, often on brick buildings, up high, and nearly always fading. Here’s another fun word to describe them, palimpsests.California Coolers - Once upon a time, people used the outside air to keep their food cool. Basically a closet with a screened opening on an exterior wall, the coolers worked well for fruits and vegetables. They were popular in apartments and can still be seen on older apartment buildings around Seattle though sometimes the old openings have been closed.Hatchcover - One of the more mundane places in the city to encounter urban art is your local hatchcover, or what some call manholes (the p.c. term peopleholes just sounds icky). Not only does Seattle have lovely hatchcovers, it also has ones with maps, which I think are pretty darned nifty. Two of the hatchcovers below are in Seattle. (Do you know why they are round?)I wish you a wonderful spring and summer filled with exploration, observation, and inspiration. Please let me know if you have topics you’d like me to pursue. I am always in search of fun ideas.May 14, 2026 - Seattle’s Locks and Ship Canal - 5pm - Barnes and Noble University District (formerly the UBookstore) - My co-author Jennifer Ott and I will be discussing the new edition of our book about the history of the Ship Canal and Locks. Info for registering. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Spring has long been my favorite season, primarily because the weather is so mutable. This week we topped 70 degrees, had fog and rain and a few sunbreaks, and some classic days of gray. Even better was the return of green as plants rioted out their leaves and flowers pushed out their advertisements seeking pollinators. Not to be outdone, birds were trilling and singing and calling and gracing the air with their songs and territorial announcements. Here’s a sampling of what I have been seeing and hearing.A Hearty RhodyDepending on your world view the rhododendron in our front yard is either half dead or half alive. I lean toward the latter. This plant is a survivor. When we moved into our house, we had two healthy, moderately sized rhodies in the front yard. One is now dead and one, the survivor, looks as if we had abused it, with several leafless limbs. I do admit that we subscribe to some tough love—if a plant cannot survive without us watering or attending to it, then it’ll probably be returning to the soil whence it came—but we don’t mistreat them. Over the years this rhody had suffered so we had trimmed it, hoping that it would put its energy into its remaining healthy parts. It has and each year continues to brighten our yard with a vernal burst of hot pink efflorescence.Weed KillerI am not proud to admit to this sign of spring. As gazillions of plants push their way skyward, I change my status from mere mortal to someone deciding the fate of life and death: Which seedling will survive and which will be yanked from the ground, out of its womb, and die in our compost bin? I don’t have exact criteria; I tend to focus on smaller, weedy plants that I think will spread faster and farther if I don’t do something. These “offensive” plants include some small mustards, an aggressive mint, and a grass or two. I have mixed feelings about being a plant killer. I like that we have mostly native plants and these interlopers don’t necessarily benefit native animals. Nor do they benefit native plants, and, in some situations, may prevent natives from growing. But I also know that I should be more tolerant. Instead of killing plants who are simply doing their thing, particularly ones that are able to grow in an urban environment, I should be celebrating them for their tenacity and adaptability. I do like to think that I have become more tolerant and pull up fewer plants than I used to but let’s cut to the chase, when spring arrives, I become a killer. For me, this is one of the great ironies of the season. Bird SoundsI am one of those nutty, annoying morning people who wake up early and pop out of bed ready to go without need of coffee to evolve into a human. (I admit I do need coffee because I am addicted to it but that’s another issue.) Because of this tendency to wake early I have the pleasure of hearing birds singing loudly. As I have written before, I am not good at identifying song so I rely, like many, on the Merlin app to identify who is plying the airways. Below is a list generated at our house, when eight species were chorusing on Tuesday. While this may not be a high tally, it still was joyful that so many birds were singing, even at our house sandwiched between Interstate 5 and Aurora Avenue.Animal EncountersI recently had the pleasure of meeting two babies, surely a sign of spring. My first encounter was sitting at my desk working on my computer. I had reached up to rub my head when I felt something odd and a bit squishy. I grabbed it and flung it on my desk; it was a half inch long slug. I had just returned from a bike ride and suspect that when I put my helmet down in the grass at the end of the ride, the slug had availed themself (slugs are hermaphrodites so they seems appropriate) of the cozy helmet and then found even greater joy latching onto my noggin, most likely not suspecting that they would soon be traveling far from home. After picking up the startled, and I hope, not too injured, mollusc from my desk, I placed them in a more suitable habitat, our yard.Later in the day, we were eating dinner outside with friends when I noticed a string dangling from my ball cap. I was quite delighted to see it, as I have recently started wearing prescription glasses and I probably wouldn’t have noticed it previously. Reaching up to detach the string, I discovered a wee caterpillar dangling from it. I suspect that the little critter had latched on to my hat during a walk we had done at Magnuson Park. Once again, being the gentle soul I am, I returned the caterpillar to the wild, hoping that it makes wiser foraging decisions in the future. Orwell - This is one of my favorite quotes from George Orwell, who was quite the devoted nature guy.“The point is that the pleasures of spring are available to everybody, and cost nothing. Even in the most sordid street the coming of spring will register itself by some sign or other, if it is only a brighter blue between the chimney pots or the vivid green of an elder sprouting on a blitzed site. Indeed, it is remarkable how Nature goes on existing unofficially, as it were, in the very heart of London.”George Orwell - Some Thoughts on the Common Toad - April 1946May 6, 2026 - A Lake with No Limits - 5:30pm - Center for Wooden Boats - As part of an event co-sponsored by the Eastlake Community Council and the Floating Homes Association, I will be discussing the history of the Ship Canal and Locks. I will be joined by Anna Bachman, Clean Water Program Director for the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance. For further information.May 7, 2026 - Seattle’s Locks and Ship Canal - 6pm - Ballard Locks - My co-author Jennifer Ott and I will be discussing the new edition of our book about the history of the Ship Canal and Locks. Some info on Facebook about the event.I’d also like to recommend a podcast produced by my friend Shin Yu Pai: Ten Thousand Things. Shin Yu explores a collection of objects and artifacts that tell us something about Asian American life – from a second-hand novel to a blue suit worn by a congressman on January 6. Her show is informative, thought provoking, and fun. She starts her fifth season on May 5. Here’s a Spotify link to the trailer for the season. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Birds are dinosaurs. “This is one of the greatest achievements in the history of paleontology,” writes Steve Brusatte, in his splendid new book, The Story of Birds: A New History from their Dinosaur Origins to the Present. Tracing the evolution of the idea of the bird-dinosaur connection, as well as the actual evolution of birds, Brusatte reveals a complex, layered story that justifies his statement. But I have to disagree slightly with him. Our understanding that birds are dinosaurs is not just a paleontological achievement. I would argue that it is one of the great achievements of science, illustrating a combination of geology, ecology, physics, and biology. Each of these fields, along with others, has helped provide the details that show the conclusive connection of these iconic animals.As Brusatte writes, the idea goes back to the time of Darwin and Wallace and their fleshing out natural selection. Thomas Henry Huxley, often called Darwin’s bulldog for his defense of Mr. D, was the first (in 1868) to draw the link between our feathered friends and the biggest beasts of the past. Using his knowledge of anatomy, Huxley concluded that “the leg of a barnyard chicken is a miniature version of any T. rex leg you see in a museum,” writes Brusatte. In the middle 1800s few dinosaur fossils had been found so when Huxley made the connection, he was actually referencing a small, two-legged theropod (the group that includes Tyrannosaurus rex) known as Compsognathus. That lack of evidence was problematic because Victorian scientists, like their modern counterparts, couldn’t cotton to the bird/dinosaur connection without the facts. Not until 1964 would the idea be revived, when paleontologist John Ostrom unearthed Deinonychus, a species unlike the prevailing image of dinosaurs. Instead of a lumbering, tail dragging, plodding lummox, Deinonychus were agile, active, fast, and formidable predators, he wrote. Ostrom based his description on the bones he found, which showed a lithe, long-limbed beast with sickle-like claws on each hand. (Deinonychus means terrible claw.) The fossils made him think of Archaeopteryx, a Jurassic Period fossil, long known as the oldest evidence for birds. When Ostrom compared the skeletons of the two species, it was clear, he concluded, that Archaeopteryx, with their classic avian feathers, had evolved from a theropod dinosaur, such as an ancestor of Deinonychus. The dinosaur-bird link was back, writes Brusatte.Ostrom’s linkage of birds and theropods is a key point that Brusatte stresses. The family tree of dinosaurs is a phenomenally diverse group, persisting for hundreds of millions of years and ranging from chicken-sized, feathered, two-legged carnivores (e.g. Tyrannosaurus rex) to school-bus sized, four-legged plant-eaters (e.g. Brontosaurus). Birds are simply one limb of that tree, similar to the many branches of the mammal family tree. Comparing body shapes, one might not link bats, whales, apes, and anteaters, and yet we easily fit them in the same family. “A bird is a dinosaur version of a bat. A dinosaur that got small, evolved wings and developed the ability to fly but retains many hallmarks of its dinosaur relatives,” writes Brusatte. Over more than 300 pages, Brusatte provides the thrilling evidence. For some, the most exciting is feathers. In 1996, exquisite dinosaur fossils with stunningly detailed feathers began to come out of China. As numerous additional species came to light, it confirmed the direct relationship between birds and dinosaurs; so feathered were dinosaurs that Brusatte could write “feathers were to dinosaurs what hair is to mammals: the default condition.” But feathers don’t mean that dinosaurs could fly or that all birds fly. Consider moas, emus, ostriches, and penguins; they gave up flight and kept their feathers, a subject that Brusatte describes in a wonderful chapter on earth-bound birds.But birds are more than light boned (usually), winged, and feathered. They were the “intellectual champions among land-dwelling animals for many millions of years…[until] a few million years ago, perhaps, when some big-brained ape” came along, writes Brusatte. In addition, birds evolved the superbly adaptable beak, or what he describes as “revolutionary new inventions.” Birds are also fast growing; one reason you rarely see baby birds is that they simply mature too quickly. And, of course, birds vocalize, cacophonying the world with harmonies, tweets, chirps, honks, cackles, whistles, squawks, and screeches. Brusatte’s writing is clear, concise, and up to date. Over the past few decades paleontology has become truly multi-disciplinary (as well as adaptive of new technology) and he appears to know everybody who is making it so. I particularly appreciate how generous he is in referring to and praising the stellar work of these other scientists. He also illustrates how paleontology has emerged out of its hidebound, white male, western-based past, with research from around the world and a full diversity of scientists. (One area where this manifests itself is how scientific names of dinosaurs have started to reflect a more encompassing and respectful view of where fossils originate.)For anyone who pays attention to the natural world, birds are ubiquitous. I can’t remember a day without encountering one, no matter where I have been, from the urban chaos of downtown Tokyo to the Douglas firs of my backyard to alpine meadows high in the Cascades. As a geogeek, I have long known that birds are dinosaurs, but Brusatte’s book puts birds in a new and exciting perspective, linking these amazing animals to me, to the ecosystems I love, and deep into the planetary past when dinosaurs ruled the world. Now, they simply rule the sky but what a graceful reign it is. No matter where you look, the connective tissues of life abound, glorious in their complexity and beauty.If you are interested, I’ll be chatting with Steve Brusatte about his new book on Saturday, April 25, at Town Hall at 7:30PM. Here’s how to register. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of launching my newest book, Seattle’s Locks and Ship Canal: A History and Guide. Written with my friend and Executive Director of HistoryLink.org, Jennifer Ott, the book tells the stories of one of the most pivotal landscape changes in Seattle history. It is published by the University of Washington Press and is an edited and updated version of our previous book Waterway: The Story of Seattle’s Locks and Ship Canal, which came out in 2017, to honor the centennial of the opening of the locks.The new edition is smaller, has fewer words, and not as many images. So, what gives. When we first wrote the book, our plan and our mission was to write the definitive history of the Ship Canal and Locks, from geologic time to present. Because of that mission, we dove down many deep history holes to ferret out the details. It was fun and, we like to think, provided the information that would tell a full story that had not been told previously. But we also know that not everyone has the history geek proclivities that Jen and I do. In that light, we teamed up with the UW Press to produce a new edition, still with the key parts of the story but not with all of the details. I just got a box of books in the mail, so if you are interested in purchasing copies of Seattle’s Locks and Ship Canal, you can do so through this link, which takes you to my Square page. Happy to sign and/or inscribe the book. One story that we kept in the book and that I still find to be singularly interesting is what happened to salmon. For thousands of years, they had moved via the lake’s outlet river, the Black, between the salt water of Puget Sound and the fresh water of Lake Washington and the Cedar River. The completion of the Locks and Ship Canal, however, lowered the lake by nine feet and severed its connection to the Black. How then did fish that migrated up the Black River find their way back to Lake Washington after the opening of the locks? Unfortunately, we have no records of how it happened, but we can make some viable suggestions.Historically, salmon would have been able to reach Lake Union by swimming up Ross Creek, which once connected the lake via Salmon Bay to Puget Sound. After 1886, when two, small-scale, human-made channels linked Lake Washington to Lake Union and Lake Union to Salmon Bay, fish would have been able to swim this route to Lake Union. In addition, they could have traveled out from Lake Washington via a lock that linked the two lakes. We can hypothesize they did so because newspaper articles as late as 1911 reported that people regularly caught salmon, weighing up to 28 pounds, at the western base of the dam that formed the outlet of Lake Union.If salmon were already traveling via the pre-1916 canal system, then the post-1916 route might not have been a problem for many returning salmon. Plus, when the locks opened, some recently born salmon must have lived in Lake Washington and made their one and only migration out through the locks. Knowing only this route from their birth waters, they would simply have returned home via the locks. Subsequent generations would have followed their hereditary imperative. Also consider, though, like the previous ideas, completely impossible to prove, is that salmon that initially swam out the Black and Duwamish Rivers on their outward journeys (between about 1908 and 1916) simply returned to Lake Washington via the locks. For fish with an excellent sense of direction and ability to smell their birth stream and regularly migrated hundreds to thousands of miles, locating and traveling up the new canal route, which was less than 10 miles from their old route, might not have presented any problem at all.And, then salmon had to get past the locks. The intended upstream route was a fish ladder. State law from 1890 required a ladder or fishway for “any dam or other obstruction across any stream in the state which any food fish are wont to ascend.” A ten-step concrete ladder with wooden weirs was included in the original design. Poorly built by modern standards, with very little design consideration for how fish actually use fishways, the original ladder was little used by salmon. Going out to sea was more hazardous, as no provisions were made to facilitate the passage of smolts migrating to salt water.One further fish-­related change has occurred at the locks. In the landmark 1974 court case, United States v. State of Washington, Judge George H. Boldt restored the rights of tribal nations guaranteed to them by treaties they signed with the federal govern-ment in 1854 and 1855. Specifically, they had reserved the right to fish in “usual and accustomed” areas and the right to harvest half the fish. At the locks, one result is that anglers from Muckleshoot Indian Tribe (above the locks) or Suquamish Indian Tribe (below the locks) continue to harvest fish seasonally. Although the locks did not exist then, ancestors of the Muckleshoot and Suquamish had long fished in Lake Wash-ington and Lake Union, and the waterways were and are part of their usual and accustomed fishing grounds.As I reflect back on the 110 years since they opened, I would argue that the Lake Washington Ship Canal and Hiram M. Chittenden Locks have transformed the waterways and shorelines of Seattle and its surroundings more than any other event before or since. They opened up miles of waterfront, helped cement the importance of the maritime industry, and fostered a connection between the interior freshwater world and the wider salt water world. In many ways, it’s hard to separate the waterway from the history and character of the city itself.But the ship canal’s environmental and cultural costs have been steep. Marshlands were drained and converted to dumps, lakeside vegetation has died, and salmon have had to find new migration routes. Plus, the death of the Black River and loss of use of wetlands was devastating to the Native people who had relied on them for thousands of years.Despite all of the many changes, the Ship Canal, Locks, and Seattle have long been intertwined: economically, recreationally, industrially, and culturally. Not all of the impacts have been positive and most have been in ways that early canal supporters could not have imagined. But throughout that century-plus of use, the canal has reflected Seattleites’ image of themselves and the city they inhabit and hope to inhabit. Few other places in Seattle are as central to the city’s identity.Jen and I have three talks lined up about Seattle’s Locks and Ship Canal.April 22 – 7pm – Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park. To Register for this event.May 7 – 6pm – Hiram M. Chittenden Locks. More information to come.May 14 – 5pm – Barnes and Noble Books, University District. To Register for this event.If you missed it earlier, or simply desire to purchase another one, here’s a link to buy copies of Seattle’s Locks and Ship Canal. Happy to sign and/or inscribe the book. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Do you know who produces super cute babies? Many animals, of course, but I was completely surprised to learn how über darling coot babies are. Unlike their parents, feathered darkly in gray and black with a white bill, the young sport a plumage of exuberant color. Fluffy black down accented with cadmium yellow highlights covers the back. Collaring the face are orange and flame red feathers. Topping the body is pinkish bald pate and red bill. I had the good fortune to learn this when I saw baby coots for the first time recently. I only knew that they were baby coots because of the company they kept, one of the parents in their classic coloring. I was clearly not the only one attracted to these spring beauties; a whole gaggle of bird photographers (what else would you call such a gathering?) were clicking and clacking away, trying to get the perfect shot of the dozen or so youngsters. Below are my two best photographs.I have long been a fan of coots and appreciate that they spend so much time at Green Lake, about a mile from our house. They make an array of enchanting sounds, most noticeably their warning and alarm calls, a sort of raspy pulque, puhk-cowah, or puhk-uhk. One does not have to spend much time with the coot clan to hear these somewhat aggressive sounds. The species has been described as quarrelsome and belligerent birds, “more than ready, willing, and able to engage in either ritualized or outright physical conflict with [their] own or other avian species.” (Birds of the World, American Coot (Fulica americana))Equally enchanting is their distinctive head-bobbing walk, which for far too long of time distracted me from the birds’ surprisingly large and curious feet and legs. Look closely next time you see coots, and you’ll find yellow-green legs and toes, the latter augmented by flappy lobes. Unlike ducks—which coots are not, they are in the rail family—coots employ their lobes, instead of webbing, to propel themselves. Lobes further provide a bit of balance when a coot is on a walkabout. The feet of the coot also play into that great adaptation of birds, flight. Watch one take to the air with their beating wings and running-on-water legs and you’ll understand two of their old time common names; splatterer and flusterer.Because coots were widely hunted, they have a surplus of additional appellations. (Oddly for him, Audubon does not mention eating coots though he notes that “the poorer classes purchase them to make ‘gombo.’”) Most universal is mud hen, but also water hen, marsh hen, and meadow hen; pulldoo (a term that originated in Louisiana from poule d’eau (water hen)); blue-peter, pelick, and poulet dean; and a host more.No one knows the exact origin of the word coot. The OED dates the first use to 1382 and an early Bible, in a list of birds one should not eat. Some claim coot originated with sounds the birds make. Others point to the Dutch Zeekoet or sea coot, a name for the Common Murre, also known at one time as a guillemot. The latter may also lead to a common usage of the word coot, as in Ya old coot. Early birders referred to the Foolish Guillemot “so called for their fatuity in the breeding season, in allowing themselves sometimes to be seized by the hand, or killed on the spot without flying from their favorite cliffs,” according to Thomas Nuttall in A Manual of Ornithology of the United States and Canada (1834). One of the reasons I both love and shake my head at older texts is descriptions such as Nuttall’s. Unlike so many modern field guides, the language is colorful and evocative, and sometimes amusing. But it is dismaying to read of how people treated animals and plants in the past; we deem the birds foolish because we harassed and killed them and they didn’t do anything about it. The classic and most tragic example of this are dodos. The name comes from the Portuguese doudo, meaning a simpleton or fool. Perhaps we need to turn the mirror around and examine more carefully how we act.As the years climb on my personal calendar, I realize that I am someone for whom the phrase “Ya old coot” is becoming more and more applicable; I am fine with this. In Green’s Dictionary of Slang, old coot is defined as “a foolish or cantankerous old person; also used affectionately.” Certainly sounds like me, a bit goofy and unserious with a curmudgeonly streak but generally a fairly decent chap. I guess if I didn’t like the being called an old coot, I could always dye my hair red with orange streaks; I already have the bald pate so I am half way to looking like a darned cute little coot. April 22, 2026 – Seattle’s Locks and Ship Canal – 7pm – Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park – My co-author Jennifer Ott and I will be discussing the new edition of our book about the history of the Ship Canal and Locks. Here’s some info.April 23, 2026 – History Comes Alive at Harbor Island – 6:30 pm – Harbor Island – I will be participating in a multidisciplinary event of incredible art, sound design, live performances, and projections. Come celebrate the island’s journey from time immemorial to the talent working there today. Here’s some info.April 25, 2026 – The Story of Birds – 7:30pm – Town Hall – I will be interviewing paleontologist Steve Brusatte about his new book, which explores the deep history of birds and dinosaurs. Should be fun and educational. Here’s some info.April 27, 2026 – Secret’s of Seattle Geology – 7pm – Science on Tap, at Third Place Books, Ravenna, Cafe Arta – I will be sharing stories of Seattle geology and how it influences and has influenced Seattle and her citizens. Here’s some info. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Marjorie and I had the opportunity to see a whale again (see Whale Tales for our previous whaling experience) the other day. We weren’t on a boat. In fact, we, weren’t near any water; the closest salt water was the Sea of Cortez, 200 miles west. We were amidst the stark landforms and plants of the Sonoran Desert, and the closest fresh water was our water bottle, which we relied on to combat the stifling heat. (As they say in the desert, it’s a dry heat, but 95 degrees is still way hot and means that you better have some water, or you too will be dry very soon.)Our location was a few miles south of the area where bugs had splattered our windshield a couple days earlier, but this time we were out of the car on a short hike. The trail wound through cacti and agave, crossing sandy, sundried grass meadows, under sycamores, and over lovely granite knolls. At its end, we reached a rock formation known as Whale Rock. As you can see below, it looks rather cetacean with a broad, domed “forehead,” big “mouth,” and long “body” that tapers to a raised “tail.” Unlike the species we had encountered in the Sea of Cortez, which were baleen whales, this one had the shape of a toothed whale, in particular a sperm whale, the species best known for their propensity to stave in ships à la the great and powerful Moby Dick.Our whale in the desert is not the lone cetaceanesque rock to have beached themselves across the planet; there are many big, rounded rocks or monoliths that give the impression of a whale. Interestingly, Herman Melville addresses this issue of rock leviathans. “In the bony, ribby regions of the earth…[and] in mountainous countries…here and there from some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles of whales defined along undulating ridges….but if you wish to return to such a sight again, you must be sure and take the exact intersecting latitude and longitude of your first stand-point, else so chance-like are such observations of the hills, that your precise, previous stand-point would require laborious re-discovery.” (Moby Dick, Chapter 57)Unlike Melville’s petribeasts, the desert bound Whale Rock didn’t require any challenges to find, it was a pretty obvious shape. Nor would several other Whale Rocks I have read about, such as one in Joshua Tree NP, which looks to be breaching. Another in Wilsons Promontory NP, in Australia, appears to be launching out of the hillside with a broad smile of joy.What unites all three lithiwhales is granite. (If you want to get technical, two are actually quartz monzonite, a rock very similar (chemically and lithification-wise), and typically, hard to distinguish from granite.) Each stony Leviathan formed from magma, is rich in the mineral’s quartz, feldspar, and mica, and is well-jointed (imagine a balloon covered in shaving cream, which riffs into channels as you blow up the balloon). What makes granite special (Goethe referred to the “dignity of this rock” and the inspiration generated by granite’s immense masses) is how the grainy rock—hence granite—tends to weather and erode into rounded shapes.As water seeps into the jointed and cracked granite, it works its magic, weakening the rock, often in a layered manner, like an onion. The granite in its diminished state of existence tends to break down further and erodes along edges and corners, which produces curvaceous landforms. Depending upon the size, the rounded rock knobs can be called bornhardts (after German geologist Wilhelm Bornhardt); boulders; woolsacks (a lovely British term that references wool bales); or whalebacks (aka elephant rocks and sheep rocks).Another term, which Puget Sounders might know, is drumlins, the teardrop-shaped hills of Seattle and its surroundings (though they are not made of granite but have the same shape) formed by glaciers and which comprise much of the Puget lowland. Some geologists have suggested that whaleback is a more appropriate term than drumlin, so perhaps we should think of those who live here as whale riders.Sadly, we haven’t a clue about the person who coined the name for Arizona’s Whale Rock. What were they thinking? Was it on a blazingly hot day like the one we were experiencing, a day when you might wish that water was nearby and when you saw this outcrop, your mind would create an image of an animal that exemplified water, and in doing so, might slake your thirst, at least a tiny bit? Or perhaps, like many of us have probably experienced, either in looking at rocks or clouds, the namer simply saw a suggestive shape. In fact, there’s a term for this: pareidolia, or the perception of recognizable patterns or images. Some scientists have written that pareidolia is “a key perceptual mechanism of idea generation—one of the central stages of the creative process.”1 To imagine familiar shapes seems one of the more splendid ways to satisfy our creativity, as well as fun, occasionally amusing, and a great way to pass the time. Finding shapes we know in our surroundings is also about making connections. I think that most of us seek a way to understand what we see. Geology is darned complicated—with its great depth of time and challenging terminology—so converting what we see to something we know helps us process the world around us.Looking back at the photos I took of Whale Rock, the granite appears less like a whale than I remember. I think this illustrates a notable aspect of names in the game of shapes. Once a name has been placed on a feature, such as a rock, it often predisposes the viewer to see that shape and makes it hard to unsee the feature. I know that when I got out to the Whale Rock in the desert, I immediately saw the lithic cetacean; I had been looking forward to doing so since I read about it at the Visitor Center, and I certainly didn’t want to be the doofus who couldn’t see the whale. But sure enough, there it was a felicitous synthesis of geology, naming, and my creative brain.April 22, 2026 – Seattle’s Locks and Ship Canal – 7pm – Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park – My co-author Jennifer Ott and I will be discussing the new edition of our book about the history of the Ship Canal and Locks. Here’s some info.April 23, 2026 – History Comes Alive at Harbor Island – 6:30 pm – Harbor Island – I will be participating in a multidisciplinary event of incredible art, sound design, live performances, and projections. Come celebrate the island’s journey, from time immemorial to the talent working there today. Here’s some info.April 25, 2026 – The Story of Birds – 7:30pm – Town Hall – I will be interviewing paleontologist Steve Brusatte about his new book, which explores the deep history of birds and dinosaurs. Should be fun and educational. Here’s some info.April 27, 2026 – Secret’s of Seattle Geology – 7pm – Science on Tap, at Third Place Books, Ravenna, Cafe Arta – I will be sharing stories of Seattle geology and how it influences and has influenced Seattle and her citizens. Here’s some info.* “Divergent Perception: Framing Creative Cognition Through the Lens of Sensory Flexibility,” Journal of Cognitive Behavior 59, v. 3, e1525 Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

My guess is that many urban dwellers, particularly in Seattle, have heard the sounds of Northern Flickers. With a rapid, rhythmic banging, the birds pound all sorts of surfaces to produce what one ornithologist described as the sound of a miniature pneumatic drill. In my neighborhood, I have seen flickers drilling trees, utility poles, and everyone’s favorite, some sort of metal surface, which produces a resonant and astoundingly loud sound that can be heard deep inside our house.Studies have found that both sexes drill. What makes them particularly troublesome for some people is that birds establish a favored location, near a breeding territory; the key seems to be resonance. Although it appears that drilling is primarily about territoriality, males in spring—as in right now—drum more when a potential partner is nearby and making her own sounds. Breeding season is also the time for what is known as the long call, a series of repeated modulated pulses often described as swik-wik-wik... or kick, kick, kick..... The other well-known flicker call is swik-a, wik-a, wik-a... Mr. Thoreau described the sound as a cackle. One of the challenges for flickerologists is that the birds, like some members of our species, integrate their concerns about courtship with their focus on territorial defense, at least in regard to the nest. Therefore the bird gang has not been able to tease out the answers to why flickers call and drum when they do. Intriguingly, flickers have not been found to defend their feeding territory.Unlike their fellow members of the woodpecker family, flickers don’t exactly cotton to their name and instead forage on the ground, seeking out insects, particularly ants. In 1911, ornithologist Foster Ellenborough Lascelles Beal reported that he had examined 684 Northern Flicker stomachs from 35 states. He found that ants made up fifty percent of the contents; one stomach contained more than 5,000 ants along with another 100 pupae. (But the most pismire-phillic of the woodpecker gang is the Williamson Sapsucker, found with 86% ant content in their stomachs. (“Food of the Woodpeckers of the United States,” U.S.D.A. Biological Survey, Bull. 37))I have watched flickers many times hopping on the ground seeking ants. With their strong bills they pound and hammer the substrate, breaking up matter and probing for ants with their astonishing tongues. The birds often seek out meals in sidewalk cracks, which is why you might sometimes encounters a crack that looks to have vomited up its sand and soil insides. Like other members of the woodpecker family, flickers possess a food finding probe of epic proportions, often twice the length of the bird’s head. Beal described the tongue as cylindrical with a hard, barbed point; it curled up around the back of the skull and in some species extended around the eye. Now that’s a useful tongue. Flickers also eat fruit, which historically caused issues because people found the birds to be palatable, especially during wild cherry season, and shot and sold them.Flickers have intrigued ornithologists since they first encountered the birds, particularly because of their (the birds not the birders) variation in coloring. Look at older books and you may find three species: gilded, red-shafted, and yellow-shafted, all in reference to their feathers. Newer books tend to marry the yellow and red into a single species, though you can still find splitters who reject the lumpers. The red-shafted variety occupies the PNW and much of the west.In fact, the first west coast specimen of what is now called the Northern Flicker came from Nootka Sound, on Vancouver Island. Collected in 1778 on James Cook’s third expedition, it soon reached ornithologist John Latham, who noted the red feather shafts. He did not name the bird but mistakenly noted that “this bird was brought from the Cape of Good Hope.” It actually came from what Cook called “Hope Bay” leading into Nootka Sound. A few years later, another ornithologist, Johann Friedrich Gmelin, followed Latham’s incorrect geographic reference and coined a scientific name, which referred to the Xhosa people, who lived near the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. Unfortunately, Gmelin used a name—cafer, a variation of a word that “has now become universally regarded as an extreme ethnic slur and the absolute height of offensiveness,” according to a petition to the American Ornithological Society filed in 2019 by Stephfanie M. Aguillon and Irby J. Lovette. The pair proposed to change the name to lathami, to honor the first describer; the AOS rejected the petition, stating that the change was beyond the scope of the committee. The original, offensive scientific name persists, for the subspecies. The modern scientific name for Northern Flicker is Colaptes auratus. Colaptes comes from the Greek kolapto for chisel and auratus from the Latin for golden; perhaps we could rename the bird the golden chiseler. Meanwhile, the authoritative Ernest Choate tells us of the Anglo Saxon word flicerian, or a fluttering of birds, which in turn may have also led to a flickering flame. Other common names for the species include high-holder, yellow-hammer, yarrup, heigh-ho, yawker bird, walk-up, wake up, clape, and hairy-wicket. I’ll let you try and tease out the origins of these names.The many names of the species, which Mr. Choate claims as “numbering in the hundreds,” reflects how widespread and common flickers are. Just in the past week, I have seen them in the over 100 degree weather of the Sonoran desert and in the below 50 degree weather of rainy Seattle. I know that some urban residents find flickers to be annoying due to their staccato headbanging and loud and persistent call, but I always enjoy seeing and hearing them as the birds pursue their lives and remind us that amour is on the wing and in the air and sometimes you just need to let everyone know.Word of the week - Pismire - A word for an ant that dates back to the 1300s. Chaucer wrote wisely: He is as angry as a pissemyre. The word comes from combining piss (in reference to the urine-like aroma of anthills) with mire, an ancient term for ants. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Recently, I experienced a natural history phenomenon I haven’t in many years: Marjorie and I had to stop to wash the bugs off our windshield. We were in the Sonoran Desert driving east from Tucson, Arizona, on Interstate 10. About fifteen miles west of Wilcox, I heard a light thunk on the windshield, simultaneous with the appearance of the classic bug splat. Within another ten minutes, bodies peppered the glass, so many that we needed to pull over at the next gas station and clean them off.About thirty minutes later, we got splatted again. This time it was a swarm. I initially thought it was hailing, the thwacks were so many and so loud, but I quickly realized we were passing through a cloud of bugs, quite a few of which concluded their brief life by colliding with our car and ink blotting the glass with yellowish and whitish viscera. It reminded me of an old joke from my youth. What’s the last thing to go through a bug’s mind when he hits your windshield? His toucas. (What else would you expect from me?)We immediately turned the windshield wipers on to maximum and blasted the cleaning fluid, but to little avail; our efforts were futile against the sticky sea of bug guts. Once again, we had to find the nearest gas station, which was another 10 to 15 minutes down the road. Before cleaning, I tried to figure out who we had hit, but not enough body parts remained on the glass to do so. Being the ecodork I am, I realized that I could peer through the front grill and see a host of insects: it looked to be several species of bees, a butterfly, a green stink bug (?), and a couple of species of flies.I have encountered an abundance of insects such as this only a few times. Two stand out. The first was on a bike ride in eastern Colorado, the one I mentioned in Ode to My Bike. I was riding with two friends when we were met by a Biblical multitude of Mormon crickets (Anabrus simplex). Gazillions covered the road for miles; their flattened, slick orangish bodies made riding dangerous, and we wondered if car drivers would need studded tires to stay safe. (Mormon crickets aren’t true crickets. They look like grasshoppers but cannot fly; they are also cannibalistic, so our ride was a macabre combination of death and feasting. Their name derives from the seething hordes that devastated the crops of Mormon settlers; they were saved by cricket-hungry California gulls.) Although I didn’t enjoy biking through the slick of dead bugs, I remember being amazed at the shear number of insects; it was bounty of life (and death) that gave me a new appreciation for insect adaptation. I also once had the pleasure of seeing a massive migration of painted lady (Vanessa cardui) butterflies. Orange, black, and white but smaller and less well-known than monarch butterflies, painted ladies annually migrate north and south parallel to and on either side of the Sierra Nevada Range. Normally, most people don’t notice this amazing, multi-generation migration but an alignment of weather and flowers occasionally triggers a superswarm, which can total in the billions. I was lucky to see one when visiting a friend at Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park. Everywhere we looked we saw the two- to three-inch wingspan butterflies, streaming across roads and meadows; it felt as if the wind had taken a corporeal form of winged beauty.As I noted, such encounters are rare. In fact, it has seemed to me over the past decade or two that I seldom have the need to clean bugs off my windshield, particularly as compared to driving in my younger days. I am not alone. Many people have a similar perception, a perception often dubbed the windshield phenomenon, a term that developed in part from a 2019 research paper. Ecologist Anders Pape Møller used 1,375 surveys of insects killed over twenty years on car windshields as a measure of insect abundance. He concluded that a direct connection existed—fewer bugs thus fewer windshield bug carcasses—which is why people like me saw fewer dead bugs on our cars. The problem is that Møller’s study is flawed; much of his work is based on assumptions that aren’t realistic. He’s not wrong though that there is a worldwide crisis in insect biodiversity. Scientific studies from the tropics to forests to urban environments show a disconcerting drop in the absolute number of insects, along with a corresponding change in insect community structure. The reasons include the usual array of human caused factors including habitat loss, climate change, and increased pesticide use. Because insects are so important in so many ecosystems, the biodiversity loss is resulting in negative impacts on ecological functions, food production, and human health.I was disappointed when I learned of the issues with Møller’s work and the windshield phenomenon. I had heard of the study since it first appeared and thought that I, too, was proving science right. Not surprisingly, anecdotal evidence is not scientifically valid, and the insect biodiversity story is far more complicated. Fortunately—or unfortunately because the numbers are dire on so many levels—good and accurate science is being done by scientists across the globe, which clearly shows the many ecological challenges that we face. I admit that I am happy not to be debugging my windshield as often as I used to, but I sort of enjoyed doing it again the other day. (I am sorry that our driving killed so many insects.) It was great to experience an abundance of wild things and to know such Biblical swarms were still possible, even in the face of the catastrophic drop in insect biodiversity. Such is what passed through my mind after driving through a bug swarm in southern Arizona. – March 24, 2026 – Book Launch – MOHAI – I am excited to share the stage with my pal Jennifer Ott for the book launch of the new edition of our book Seattle’s Locks and Ship Canal: A History and Guide. Here’s how to register.– March 26, 2026 – Wild in Seattle/Seattle Walks – 7pm – Redmond Senior and Community Center – Eastside Audubon Society – I’ll be talking about my book Wild in Seattle. Here’s some info. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Last week, I had the honor and pleasure to be part of the King County Library System’s annual fundraising event: Literary Lions. The theme of the event was Love Letters to libraries. If it’s okay, I’d like to share my Love Letter.To all the libraries and librarians I have known:Thanks for the memories.To Ms. Bass, who helped me find books at the Henry Branch on Capitol Hill when I was a wee lad. She lived up the block from us, and I thought it was darned cool to have such a luminary in our neighborhood.To my college library, where I found good books to read, assigned books that I could check out instead of purchase, and some preternaturally comfortable chairs for napping. Just to be clear, I have continued to nap in libraries.To Moab Public Library, where I first began to discover that libraries owned amazing troves of research materials that could help inform my writing. It was also where I once saw Edward Abbey, author of one of the more influential books of my youth, Desert Solitaire. I was too shy to go up to him, but wow, real writers use the library! Inspiration indeed.To the Seattle Public Library, particularly the Central Branch, with its deep accumulation of historic documents and its ancient, subject-based card catalog. Back in the day before digitized everything took over, librarians assembled a card catalog that referenced the history of Seattle. You could (and still can!) look up practically anything and find a newspaper or magazine citation, often with the article folded tightly and taped to the back of the card. Such a glorious thing.To the King County Library System, who have generously hosted me at readings across the county from Vashon Island to Carnation to Mercer Island to the Muckleshoot Reservation. Not only do you provide the opportunity for people to check out our books, but you also provide the opportunity for writers to meet readers, further strengthening the book ecosystem.To the University of Washington Libraries, whose extensive collection of archival material, obscure periodicals, and scientific books has been essential to my career. I must admit that I have a few books from the library that I have had checked out for perhaps a decade and probably longer. How great is that?In this age of cybertized resources, it seems that you can find anything you need on the web. But go to a library and dig in the archives and you will unearth of lode of knowledge not available at your digital fingertips. For example, consider Thomas Burke, early Seattle entrepreneur. Based on my reading of secondary materials, he seemed, well, to be honest, a cantankerous, arrogant jerk, but then I came across his letters to his wife in the UW Special Collections’ archives. “My Dear Little Birdie.” “My little darling on the desolate sea.” “My dear Pet, I haven’t been so lonesome in twenty years as I have been today. I can’t get along without you.” This was a man in love and devoted to his wife and the only way I could learn this was in a library.So, to end, I simply steal Mr. Burke’s line but turn it to libraries. “I can’t get along without you.” Sincerely,David B. WilliamsAs several speakers at the event noted, libraries are as critical now as they have ever been. Safe spaces where all are welcome, havens of democracy, and keepers of truth, libraries do all this primarily by preserving stories and narratives and resources that allow people the opportunity to be transported to the past, to the future, to other places, to other worlds, to different ways of thinking and living; in doing so, readers develop empathy, sympathy, respect, and tolerance, ultimately revealing the beauty of the differences and similarities of humanity. How can we not love places such as libraries that help make us better people and better members of our community? P.S. I’d love to hear of your love for libraries. Please share them in the Comments section.Last chance if you want to get your name in my book In the Range of Fire and Ice (Deadline is March 16). A great way to support Mountaineers Books and all they do for writers and those interested in the outdoors. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Twenty five years and five days ago, the earth shook in Seattle. Although the Big One didn’t hit that day, I doubt I will forget the seconds following 10:54 a.m. on that not-so-tranquil Wednesday, February 28, 2001. I had just picked up Audubon magazine at the University Bookstore (sadly no longer in existence) when the shaking began. It started slowly and gently, as if a large truck was passing on University Way. As the seconds seemed to stretch longer and longer, however, the shaking became a rumbling and concrete walls, bookshelves, and windows swayed and rattled.Despite the years of training, I had as a child in Seattle, where we were all taught to crawl under our desks during an earthquake, I didn’t get under a doorway or heavy desk. Instead, I stood still, mesmerized by the undulating, out-of-focus structure. I don’t know why I didn’t move, but I had no fear that anything would collapse. Maybe I was just being naïve. I had been through a few small tremors, and this was certainly the biggest one I had felt, but it just seemed that all would be okay.An employee at a cash register broke my reverie when she yelled and ran and leapt into a co-worker’s arms. As the shaking continued, I noticed that other people were quickly moving toward the doors. I followed, but at a slow pace, more caught up in the realization that I was watching one of the greatest ideas in science, the theory of plate tectonics, come to life, than I was by getting out of what appeared to be a pretty safe building.When I finally made it outside, I discovered that standing still was not an option; either my legs were wobbling or the ground continued to shake. Stillness eventually returned and I began to turn my mind back to geology and wondering where the quake had hit and how big it was. Such is the mind of a geodork.I suspected that I had felt a Benioff zone (deep) quake, which is one of the more common manifestations of plate tectonics, at least in the Pacific Northwest. In the case of the Nisqually, two plates play central roles, the small Juan de Fuca, and the massive continent of North America. During the past 20 to 30 million years, the leading edge of the denser Juan de Fuca has slid under, or subducted, the lighter North American Plate. The Juan de Fuca’s descending tongue now rests between 20 and 50 miles underground, directly beneath Puget Sound.As the plate dives deeper, it slowly bends and becomes much hotter, which creates two problems for us at the surface. The first is that bending stretches the plate. The second problem occurs because heat drives water out of minerals and shrinks the plate. This bending and contraction of the Juan de Fuca deep under Puget Sound is one cause of the earthquakes we feel in Seattle. Along with producing the Nisqually quake, the Benioff zone generated the two other quakes that hit Puget Sound in the 1900s, a 7.1 magnitude event on April 13, 1949, and a 6.5 magnitude tremor on April 29, 1965.When I think back to February 28, one of the aspects of the earthquake that stands out was how slowly time seemed to progress. I did not expect the shaking to both increase in scale and to continue for such a long time. Despite what the reports said, I am sure that I felt vibrations for several minutes and not just 45 seconds, which is how long the geologists say the quake lasted. The intersection between geologic and human time was both exciting and scary.This was most evident to me the week following the Nisqually earthquake, when Marjorie and I traveled to El Salvador to see friends. We had been planning the trip for months and El Salvador’s January 13, 7.6 magnitude and February 13, 6.6 magnitude earthquakes gave us a firsthand chance to see the destruction. While damage, such as cracked walls and rubble piles, was evident across the capital of San Salvador, we did not see true devastation until we went out into the countryside.At San Agostin, a dot of a town in the foothills of one of El Salvador’s many volcanoes, I felt like a voyeur, because only the ground floor remained in most houses. A few had walls standing but even these had wood supports propping them up. Electrical boxes and bare bulbs hung from trees. At what was left of the school, people stood in line, waiting to receive food from aid workers. It appeared that many were living in a tent village, set up in the school grounds.We also saw Santa Tecla, a middle class suburb of San Salvador that was annihilated by a landslide. During the January quake a ridge above town collapsed, sending a wall of soil and rock down and over several blocks of two-story, cinder block houses. The debris path through Santa Tecla was two blocks wide and a half mile long. At least 700 people died in the landslide. The final number will probably never be known because people are still buried in the rubble. No one was allowed to return and live in neighborhood below the landslide; a tent city outside the cordoned-off zone housed over 2,100 people.As I stood below the landslide ridge, I thought about how much we take for granted in Seattle and was struck by how little damage had happened. El Salvador was the first place where I had ever witnessed geology overprinted by such a deadly human face. The death and destruction were sobering, and I am less eager to revel in the process of natural disasters than previously, but still, this is the way I think the world should work.I like that I live in an area of active geology. I like knowing that the potential exists for a natural cataclysm right under my feet. This does not mean that I advocate another quake or that I look forward to the destruction that will follow. As always, Seattle’s active geology starkly reminds us that nature bats last, even in the environment that we think we tamed the most, the urban zone.Word of the Week - Juan de Fuca - In 1596, Greek mariner Apostolos Valerianos told English merchant Michael Lok that he had sailed north from Mexico to a “broad Inlet of Sea” between 47 and 48 degrees latitude. Valerianos, who is better known as Juan de Fuca, sailed east for more than twenty days, finding a productive land and valuable minerals. He thought he had discovered the Straits of Anian, or the legendary Northwest Passage. He didn’t, but his name remains; most historians doubt that Juan de Fuca ever made it to his eponymous strait.March 24, 2026 - MOHAI - Book launch for Seattle’s Lock and Ship Canal: A History and Guide Book - I will be speaking with my co-author and friend Jennifer Ott about our new book. Well, actually it’s an edited reissue—better than ever—of our previous book about the locks. Here’s info on attending.March 26, 2026 - Eastside Audubon Society - Redmond Senior and Community Center - I’ll be talking about my book Wild in Seattle. Here’s some info. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Recently, I had the good fortune to time travel back to when giants ruled the Earth. Well, sort of. I was down in Loreto, Mexico, and got to see the largest animals that have ever lived: blue whales. (By largest, this is in reference to heft and not to length, though there is some dispute about some fossilized beasts that may have outweighed the blue.) Like many northerners, blue whales take advantage of the calm, relatively warm, high diversity, food-abundant water to spend a couple months down in the Sea of Cortez.Our whale watching trip began in the main marina of Loreto, amid a chaos of other whale-gawkers, tourists, and brown pelicans, the latter of whom were the most obnoxious, landing on the other tour boats, rustling through food bags, and pooping a plenty. With their yellowish head, white neck, and bright eyes, they were a curious site and fun to watch as these large, ungainly-on-a-boat birds attempted to find a delectable meal amid human food.We quickly learned that the two best ways to note the location of a whale are blows and a scrum of boats. Unfortunately, neither guarantees success, as a blow (the spouts of warm whale breath that condense into water droplets (think of your breath on a cold day)) tends to indicate a whale that has come up for a breath; the leviathan will most likely dive soon and by the time a whale seeker arrives the whale is gone. The scrum also often signifies where the whale was and not where the whale will be seen. Whale watching is primarily about luck and patience and being in an area with many whales.Fortunately, all three came together for us in the Vermillion Sea, another name for the Sea of Cortez. We saw dozens of blows, letting us know that we were in the presence of blue whales, as well as humpbacks, which also snowbird (snowwhale?) here. A couple of times we had the pleasure of being close enough to smell the humpback blows, a distinctly fishy aroma. Both blues and humpbacks filter feed through their baleen, the blues almost exclusively on krill, the humpbacks on krill, other plankton, and small fish. We also thrilled to hearing many blows. Not surprisingly, they sound like someone exhaling, except really really loud; a blue whale’s lung capacity is about 1,000 times ours. Watching a blue whale blow and dive was astonishing. Play the video above and note how long the whale is arching her back (or is it her top?); it seems to go on forever. That is an incredibly huge animal, far, far beyond any I have ever encountered. The tail alone is between 20 and 25 feet wide, or about the size of the nine-seater boat that we were in. Total length, up to 100 feet. That an animal so big and massive, thrives in elegance is a testimony to the beauty of evolution. I am truly humbled and overjoyed to experience these giant animals, each individual a grace note of life. Another highlight of seeing blue whales was that I have long wondered what it would be like to have lived in the time of dinosaurs and their kin. How would it feel to be on a hike and to come across an animal that could have eaten me in a single gulp or squished me with a single step? In some ways, we live in a pretty tame world of animals, at least on land. Certainly, a handful of large mammals exist that have the ability to dispatch us but the age of behemoths is basically gone. We are not about to become a meal or a splat. Perhaps that’s too bad. I don’t think it would hurt for our species to encounter such animals; perhaps they might help to teach us some humility, something that would go a long way to improving the planet. Floating on the water and watching the numerous blows around us, I also realized that we were not alone. The handful of blue whales, as well as humpback whales—the other great spouter of the Sea of Cortez—who made their presence known to us were the tiniest indication of the life teeming beneath the surface. From the microscopic to the gargantuan, life abounds in the seas. As someone who spends little time on the water, and less time in it, I treasure such encounters. Not only am I in awe of these beautiful and majestic whales but I love being reminded of what they represent, the phenomenal diversity of beings that we are so lucky to share our planet with. And, for that I rejoice.I cannot write about whales without another reference to Herman Melville. Here’s what he wrote about blue whales, or sulphur bottoms, as they were known then. “Another retiring gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings. He is seldom seen; at least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern seas, and then always at too great a distance to study his countenance. He is never chased; he would run away with rope-walks of line. Prodigies are told of him. Adieu, Sulphur Bottom! I can say nothing more that is true of ye, nor can the oldest Nantucketer.”March 7, 2026 – Literary Lions – 5:00 P.M. – I am honored to be at this fine event supporting the King County Public Library System. Here’s some info. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Nearly four years ago I sent a short email to my friend Emily White, Acquisitions Editor at Mountaineers Book: “Might you have 20 to 30 minutes to chat about a book idea in the next week or two?” Thus began a relationship for the book that has become In the Range of Fire and Ice: A Human and Natural History of Washington’s Cascades, which Mountaineers Books will publish in September 2026. I bring this up now because I turned in the page proofs—which is the first time an author sees a book laid out as it will be when published and basically the last time an author can make changes—of the book last week. I thought I’d follow up by giving a bit more of a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the book.Before starting work on this book, I had been planning an on-the-ground look at how climate change was playing out in the Pacific Northwest. I had spent several months interviewing scientists, but could never figure out an angle that worked. Finally, Marjorie and I were on one of our regular evening walks around the neighborhood when the idea of a book about the human and natural history of the Olympic and Cascade Mountains popped into my head. I remember wondering why it took so long to come up with such a simple idea; it would make a fun and logical follow up to Homewaters, my book about Puget Sound. I quickly realized that covering both mountain ranges didn’t make sense so narrowed my focus. I then began another several months interviewing activists, scientists, and historians, to get a better idea of what were key stories of the Cascades. (Writing is a funny thing. I have two writing pals who will not talk about their in-progress books at all, whereas I am to blather away to anyone who’ll listen; I figure it’s a good way to see what excites people, plus friends often ask great questions that lead me to new insights.) During this time, I had my first chat with Emily about the book. She was supportive and encouraging, as well as offering good suggestions for topics. (I want to be clear; this is a privilege of having worked with Emily for more than a decade and having become a good friend and not something I could have done early in my career.)Once I had narrowed down my topics, I spent the next two and a half years doing what I love best: going out in the field, either by myself, with Marjorie and friends, and/or with researchers. I hiked, backpacked, and car camped. I carried baby fish and released them in a high country lake; picked and ate many many huckleberries; tagged along with wolverine researchers as they retrieved and set out remote cameras; hiked to many fire lookouts—abandoned, in good shape, and long gone; found the stomach and viscera of either a mountain goat or deer; hiked into the crater of Mount St. Helens; and got to see NPS rangers deliver clean backcountry toilets!For the most part, I focused my field time on whatever chapter I was writing. My style is akin to my college career. I went to a school where we took one class at a time. Each block lasted 3 1/2 weeks, with a short break between classes. I still write on the block plan, doing all of my research and writing and finishing the chapter before proceeding to the next subject. (I even sort of eat this way, eating all of one item on my plate before moving to something else.) I sent the manuscript to Emily in January 2025. Her response one month later was wonderful. “What a treat to spend this rainy weekend learning about the Cascades. Even though I’ve spent so much time in those mountains, your manuscript makes me realize I hardly know them at all!” Now the fun began. First step was a Developmental Editor, basically someone who would take the big picture view, offering a fresh set of eyes on structure, themes, and voice. The returned manuscript’s markups ranged from simple fixes (inserting a missing word) to kind comments (LOL—love this coinage!) to questions and suggestions about adding more information about myself and the people I ventured out in the field with. Next up was copy editing: punctuation, spelling, consistency, formatting, sentence tightening, questions about specific word usage, fixes of redundancy, etc. Once again, I was pleased with the changes for the most part. As you can see above, in the tally of revisions, these rounds of editing are not for the faint of heart. It’s always a shock when I open the document and see the highlights and red lines and comments. Plus, there’s always some comment or “correction” in copy editing that annoys me and makes me say, “WTF, you have to be insane!” I have learned to pull back at this point and give the document and my nerves a rest. When I return and read through more carefully, I usually see the clarity and concern in what the editor has done. After all, the goal of the developmental and copy editors is to improve my writing, to help me be clearer, and to find mistakes and inconsistencies; they are not ogres plotting my downfall.Despite all of the changes, and the fact that they indicate that what I thought was well done, was in need of some good editing, I like this process. I know that these rounds of editing are the polishing phases, removing the rough edges and honing the book into a shape. I always like to think that the edits help take the book up to another level. I definitely know that they eliminate my errors in punctuation and spelling, though occasionally facts slip by, such as the time I had three different dates for the Denny Party’s arrival in Seattle. I finally caught that error in the final round of proofreading. I can only hope that I/we haven’t missed any similar, egregious errors, but I also know there are mistakes in the book; there always are.Even though I have turned in the page proofs, my work on In the Range of Fire and Ice continues. Captions. Final details on images. Blurbs. Proofreading. And, then another completely different process begins. Marketing, which lasts long after the book is published. As I wrote above, writing a book isn’t for the faint of heart. It is also a privilege; I love doing what I do and feel incredibly fortunate that I get to spend my time researching and writing and sharing stories about the natural world. Ooops. Please note that last week I had the wrong date for my talk at the Royal Room next week with Lynne Peeples. It’s February 26, not February 28, as I wrote.If you are interested in watching/listening to Emily and me chat about In the Range of Fire and Ice, here’s the discussion we had on February 12. I am trying something new below. I admit, I am quite smitten with coffee. If you are interested in supporting my habit, I’d raise a cup in your honor. Thanks. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

On a recent trip down to Tucson, we flew on Alaska Airlines. They were promoting their new mileage plan touting the changes and upgrades and wonderful reasons why one should join. All were, of course, terribly exciting; we couldn’t wait to sign up and be part of such an exclusive and thrilling program. Who wouldn’t want to join with their fellow members of the Titanium Level, especially if you linked it with being part of the oneworld (all lower case though I am not sure why) Emerald category? Life in the air would be pretty darned nifty. I was envisioning the joy of joining when Marjorie brought me back down to earth by asking. “What exactly do those names mean? Is titanium really more prestigious and valuable than platinum? Should I feel better, from a mineralogical point of view, by being branded as sapphire or ruby?” I offered her a few platitudes (after all I was discussing platinum) but quickly realized I had just enough information to offer what I call “male-guy answer syndrome,” or spouting what I had recently learned or barely knew anything about, as if I were an expert. Turns out, those levels are not what they seem to be. Plus, they are an opportunity for me to write about rocks and minerals!Titanium - A relatively new substance, titanium was not discovered until the 1790s. In 1791, a Cornish minerologist/reverend named it menachanite for the Cornish village of Manaccan (from the Cornish word for monk) where he located it. A year later a German chemist with a predilection for Greek mythology also discovered the mineral and gave it the name that stuck; apparently, people preferred ancient gods over those who dedicated their life to contemplation. Wildly plentiful, at least relative to other precious metals, titanium is the 9th must abundant element in the Earth’s crust, and a premier material in hip replacement. Titanium/oz = $45Platinum - Spanish miners of the 16th century considered this unmeltable (at that time) element as useless, a material to discard. They knew it as platina, or little silver, or as Juan Blanco, a generic name for fool’s gold. By the 1800s, after platinum had reached the scientists of the Enlightenment, it became a treasured metal (King Louis XVI of France deemed platinum the only metal fit for Kings), primarily because of its scarcity and how hard it was to work. People still revere platinum for jewelry, but its primary use is for more prosaic items such as catalytic converters, dental fillings, and spark plugs. Platinum/oz = $1766Silver - Often viewed as the ugly little sibling and second best to its superior, silver once again, in the eyes of the Atmos gang, heeds the higher ground to gold. And, yet, this malleable, ductile, highly reflective metal may have shaped the world more than its golden companion. After the Spanish arrived in the Americas, their desire for silver, and success in mining it (via enslavement), rewrote the distribution of power and trade across the globe. The result or so wrote two economic historians (and why would I doubt them?): “The singular product most responsible for the birth of world trade was silver.” Take that gold! Silver/oz = $81Gold - Clearly our species has long coveted metals that we can bang, whack, and hammer, that are shiny and sparkly, that are just so darned pretty, and that can fuel one’s desire for wealth. No material meets these needs like gold, which we humans have coveted for thousands of years. One reason is the element’s malleability; a single ounce of gold can be pounded flat to a sheet covering 100 square feet, hence the wide use of gold leaf to adorn many a-less-than-lovely object. By the way, I was once paid in gold leaf, from the Klondike NHP. (I was also once given a chicken, after I gave a talk at an Audubon Society dinner, but that’s another tale for another time.) Gold/oz = $5055Emerald - I have just a few rocks that I collected in college; one is a hexagonal, greenish blue crystal of beryl, the gem form of which is emerald. I found it on a field trip in Colorado at a place called the Devil’s Hole Pegmatite. (A pegmatite is the final gasp when magma hardens and crystallizes, often producing massive crystals and large walls of less crystalliferous minerals. For example, the DHP’s walls are rosy quartz with ginormous books of mica, some several feet thick.) At the Devil’s Hole Pegmatite, I discovered my one-inch wide crystal in the debris pile. It clearly was not an emerald, but I was still thrilled to find such a beauty.Sapphire and Ruby - These two, glittery gems are far more common than you may realize. In fact, there’s a good chance that you have used them, or their equivalent, in a prosaic purpose far below their mythic status. The grit on sandpaper is often the mineral corundum (Al2O3), better known in its blue gem form of sapphire and red gem form of ruby. Corundum merits this use because it’s one of our planet’s hardest minerals, number 9 on the Mohs hardness scale. Diamond is number 10.It truly is a sad state of affairs that geogeeks such as I are not involved more often in marketing and name development. It’s clear that we bring unique insights and connections that few others would recognize. Oh well. But suffice to say, at least, I can always find a way to turn the conversation to rocks!TONIGHT - February 12, 2026 – Virtual – 6:00 P.M. – I will be chatting with my good pal Emily White, the Acquisitions Editor at Mountaineers Books about In the Range of Fire and Ice, my book (to be published in Sept 2026) about the Cascades. We’ll provide a behind-the-scenes look at the evolution of the book. Register here.February 28, 2026 – Royal Room – Seward Park Audubon Center – 6:00 P.M. – I will be chatting with the wonderful Lynne Peeples about Wild in Seattle as part of the Audubon Center’s Urban Naturalist series. Here’s some info.March 7, 2026 – Literary Lions – 5:00 P.M. – I am honored to be at this fine event supporting the King County Public Library System. Here’s some info.Word of the Week - Corundum - Corundum comes from the Tamil language, kurundam, in reference to rubies. According to one John M. Woodward (1665-1728) in his 1719 catalogue of foreign fossils in his collection, what he called Nella Corvindum “is found in Fields where the Rice grows. It is commonly thrown up by Field Rats, and us’d as we do Emery, to polish Iron.” Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

In October of 2023, I published a newsletter about scientists using tree rings to date the Seattle Fault. I wrote: “It is a tour de force and beautiful example of science, taking a unique set of features and combining technology with old school-out-in-the-field, mucky, muddy detective work to answer an essential question.” Two members of the group, Pat Pringle and Bryan Black, along with USGS volcanologist Jim Vallance, have done it again. They have solved an essential question via dendrochronology. They have pinpointed the date of the Electron Mudflow to the year 1507. If you are not familiar with this epic mudflow, it’s one of as many as 50 massive debris floods that have rocketed down the slopes of Mt. Rainier. Also known as lahars—a Javanese word for a hot volcanic mudflow, which was introduced into English in 1922—they are some of the most destructive geologic events in our region. Typically started by an eruption (more on that later), a lahar begins with a massive avalanche/rock fall, when magmatic heat melts glacial ice, which mixes with hydrothermally weakened rocks to form a concrete-like slurry. As the mire and muck descends, it can obtain speeds in excess of 125 mph as it scours valleys, climbs ridges and hills, and assimilates whatever lies in its path, ranging from animals to massive boulders to old growth trees. The debris eventually slows down when it hits the lowlands but can still be traveling at 40 mph, dozens of miles from the mountain’s base, and leave behind hundreds of square miles covered in a blanket of death, desolation, and destruction. Dang!Armed with the knowledge of these potentially deadly natural hazards, emergency preparedness people have been working to aid communities in the path of lahars. For example, several years ago a friend of Marjorie’s bought a house in the small town of Orting on the Puyallup River. On the day they moved in, it was sunny, and they realized they had a wonderful view of Mt. Rainier. The next day, they received a “Welcome to Orting” packet, which contained coupons and other items, including a lahar escape plan. Not a bad idea to have when your town rests atop 20 feet of debris deposited by the Electron Mudflow. Geologist Dwight Crandall first described the Electron in 1963. He wrote that it consisted of an unsorted mix of rock fragments in a matrix of purplish-gray clayey sand with boulders up to two feet wide. The thickest deposits were 26 feet deep and varied considerably depending upon the original surface topography. Within the deposits, he recovered a wood sample, radiocarbon dated to 530±200 years, not really a precise date. Crandall could find neither source nor a trigger, in particular an eruption.Thirty years later, geologist Pat Pringle was driving in Orting when he saw a construction site with buried trees. Most, or at least their stumps, still stood upright. He was able to cut sections out of about a half dozen, long dead Douglas firs, bring them into a lab, and age date them. One of them, ELE001 had a good set of rings showing that it died between 1476 and 1522. The dates confirmed Crandall’s time estimates for the Electron Mudflow but Pat wanted a more precise date. He finally got it, in part because of a new focus on tree ring research.Dendrochronologists such as Bryan Black have benefited in recent years because more raw data has come from low elevation trees. Historically, most tree ring studies focused on high elevation trees because they are better at recording subtle climate change, often the issue that drives research. “Low elevation trees are more complacent, with less variable rings. They just grow no matter what,” says Bryan. That abundant growth has facilitated Bryan’s work on geologic hazards. “The better dating we have allows us not only to figure out the relationships of geologic events but also to exclude potential triggers,” he says.In addition to the trees Pat found in 1993, Bryan worked with trees collected at nearby Lake Kapowsin, known by some as Stump Lake. One of the coolest things I learned from the report is that Kapowsin is just 519 years old; most lakes in the region date from the end of the last Ice Age, ~13,000 years ago. Kapowsin formed when the Electron Mudflow dammed two small creeks and killed a forest, leaving upright trees later cut by loggers. In 2015, scuba divers pulled up cores from two submerged Douglas fir trees. Pat told me though that based on more than 40 years of sampling submerged trees in the Cascades, western red cedars and whitebark pines are generally “the only tree that last for more than a couple centuries after they die.”With the additional trees and Pat’s original trees, Bryan did what he had done previously on his and Pat’s study of the Seattle Fault. He compared them with a master chronological dataset of living trees from Vancouver Island that span the years 715 to 1990. The trees told of dying in the summer of 1507. This was a key discovery, Jim Vallance told me. Now that they knew that the lahar took place in the summer, Jim realized that snow and ice melt could have saturated rocks in the Sunset Amphitheater on the mountain’s summit (previous work had determined that this was the source of the debris) and made a slope failure more likely. Jim also told me that the dating eliminated potential collapse generators such as a heavy, winter snowpack and an atmospheric river event, since those are usually restricted to the late fall or early winter. The new information didn’t clarify what exactly triggered the eruption, but it could help disaster planners; if they know that an eruption is imminent in the summer, the new data helps them be more prepared because they know that rock high on the mountain might be more saturated with water and thus more susceptible to massive collapse, say Jim.Tying into the cultural history of place and people who have lived here for thousands of years, the paper mentions two Indigenous stories that reference the Electron. “The young man’s ascent of Mount Rainier” (from Arthur Ballard’s Mythology of southern Puget Sound) and “The lake on Mount Rainier” (from Ella E. Clark’s Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest) describe flood water and debris that buried the Puyallup River valley near the present town of Orting. As one member of the Puyallup Tribe told me, he has longed used these stories as a way to illustrate the enduring legacy of oral histories and how they often provide details later teased out by more recent science. One aspect of the legacy of lahars is that they devastate whatever and wherever they encounter: loss of life, loss of habitat, destruction of communities, destruction of travel routes. They are not to be trifled with; the great Electron Mudflow will not be the last to cause problems and the more we know through good scientific research, the better. The tree ring work is not only totally cool, but also a key way to further the relationships between people and place, and hopefully, help create more resiliency for future catastrophic events.February 12, 2026 - 6:00 PM - Last week I mentioned that I will be chatting with my good pal Emily White about my upcoming book on the Cascades. It’ll be a sort of behind-the-scenes look at how the book came to be from ideas through research to editing and design. Emily has been involved with the book since the beginning so I think the conversation should be fun and informative. Plus, it’s free. Here’s a link to register.Thanks to Bryan Black, Pat Pringle, and Jim Vallance for help with this newsletter. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Last week, my wife and I and two pals of ours participated in one of the finer known BBB events, driving around the lower Stillaguamish, Skagit, and Samish river valleys looking for birds. We’ve been doing this regularly for the past half dozen plus years. It’s a pretty simple and satisfying day of sitting in a car, driving around, looking at birds, tallying up the numbers of a few choice species, grabbing a good lunch, and enjoying the beauty of the natural world and good friends. This year was no different. We generally focus on counting just a handful of species, primarily Bald Eagles and Red-Tailed Hawks. They are easy to see, identify, and count. More challenging, or at least far more numerous, are the big white birds: Trumpeter Swans, Tundra Swans, and Snow Geese. In a good year, they can total in the thousands and grace the sky and land with their brilliant plumage, constant conversations, and sheer abundance.Our plan was simple, drive along the waterways eight eyes peering intently, fingers pointing, and mouths declaring “Tail” or “Bald.” The birds obliged by sitting high in trees, atop utility poles and driftwood stumps, and on the ground of open fields. We stopped occasionally and got out of the car, but these short interludes didn’t add much except to stretch our glutei maxima and keep them prepped for further sitting and Birding By Butt. Total number of balds was 144 and tails was 18, and I know we missed many.In addition to our two key species, my highlights, and birds I always seek, were the Short-eared Owl and Northern Harrier. They tend to show up in a field near Edison. They did not disappoint. From my well-warmed BBB perch (whoever put butt warmers in the back seat of cars deserves a MacArthur Fellowship), we watched a short-ear float and butterfly over the low grasses and shrubs. Periodically, he’d (I assumed he was a he given his darker, dirty buff facial plumage) twitch a wing, drop to the ground, and land out of sight; I trust that he got his meal of a mouse. Short-eared Owls certainly have one of the most graceful and elegant of flights, as if they hadn’t a care in the world except to revel in the evolution of winged beasts. One year we were lucky to be circled numerous times by these handsome owls. We had walked out one of the many dikes that splayed the flats when the bird rose and began to flow low to the ground about 50 feet from us. As he patrolled the marsh, I glassed him with my binoculars, getting an even better view of his yellow-eyes, dark facial disk, and patterned wings. Every time he passed, he looked directly into my eyes, and I felt so inadequate, grounded to the landscape and reliant for movement on my graceless legs. Northern harriers also tend to flow in the sky though their movement is a bit more tipsy-tilty, as well as seemingly more determined and less floaty. We usually encounter the females of the species, easily identified by their flight pattern and white rump but we also saw the males. We first saw a male several years ago and had no idea who we were watching. The bird had the flight of a harrier but was gray with black wing tips, as opposed to the mottled browns to blacks of females. Finally, we figured out who he was, a bird sometimes described aptly as the gray ghost. Both males and females fly with focused vigilance, coursing low over fields and conducting a thorough survey before a final flip down to surprised meal.I admit that the goal of the day is pretty basic and banal: to see and count Bald Eagles and Red-tailed Hawks. I also know that what we did was not about the total number except in that it reaffirms essential connections. We have the opportunity to see these birds because our predecessors made the decision to try and right the death sentences passed by their predecessors. Through our polluting, poisoned bait traps, overharvesting, and habitat degradation, we nearly extirpated Bald Eagles, and many other species. But then we began to realize what we had done and began to work to recover and restore the land and her inhabitants. Over time we have slowly started to recognize that we have a responsibility to other species, and to our own. If we want to preserve the beauty and diversity of our little planet, we cannot retreat or rest on our laurels; we still have work to do. Seeing more than one hundred Bald Eagles, dozens of other raptors, and thousands of waterfowl, plus a host of smaller birds is a legacy of life affirming legislation such as the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, and Clean Water Act. Sadly, and selfishly, these legacies are threatened by one man and his administration and their venal, short-sighted greed. I can only hope that their misguided ways do not prevail and that future generations will have the delight we had in seeing these magnificent birds. Whether they Bird by Butt is up to them.Word of the Week - Harrier - A word with Germanic roots. The first definition in the OED is one who ravages or lays waste or harries (which is defined as making predatory raids). Northern harriers have been called Marsh Hawk, Mouse Hawk, Snake Hawk, Frog Hawk, and Bogtrotter. Alas, there is no Southern Harrier.February 4, 2026 - 5pm - Friends of Lake Sammamish State Park - I will be giving a talk titled Secrets of Lake Sammamish (and Seattle) Geology. It’s free and should be somewhat interesting.February 12, 2026 - Evening - I am very excited that I will be chatting with my good pal Emily White about my upcoming book on the Cascades, my writing life, and the importance of independent non-profit publishing. I’ll have more information about the event and how to register in next week’s newsletter but wanted to give you a heads up so you can save the date! And, here’s the link to the Name in the Book campaign, which prompted my conversation with Emily, the Acquisitions Editor at Mountaineers Books. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

I hope you’ll indulge me with an off topic newsletter about an important event in my life. Thanks kindly.I recently gave away my old bike. It was the end of an era for me. For more than four decades, the lovely bike had served me well, taking me on trips ranging from short hops to the supermarket to an extended trip that covered more than 2,500 miles. I rode it at college, to many, many jobs, to do research on my books, for pleasure, for exercise. I rode it on 105°F plus days in southern Utah, on booger-freezing-cold days in Colorado, in clothing-permeating rainstorms in Seattle, and through the crazed traffic of Boston. More than any other inanimate object that bike helped define me for much of my life.Growing up I was obsessed with bikes; I didn’t get a driver’s license until I was 21 years old. As I approached my 18th birthday, I decided to upgrade to a brand new bike, my first ever. I researched endlessly, dorking out on Bicycling magazine’s detailed tests on derailleurs, brakes, bike tube valve caps, brake pads, cranks, and hubs, and ultimately decided to buy everything separately. (I was so bike-focused I had planned to get an engineering degree in college and design alternative types of bikes, such as ones for carrying goods. This dream lasted until my physics class, when I got a 16% on a 3-hour quiz.)I purchased a Mercian King of Mercia frame, a model the Derby, England-based company still makes. Although I ordered it through my local bike store, Montlake Bike Shop, I picked it up in England, after I joined my parents on my dad’s sabbatical in London. I remember fretting endlessly over the exact measurements and details, wanting to engineer a perfect touring bike. I finally went with custom braze-ons for extra water bottles, rack mounts, pump, and cantilever brakes, along with a custom paint job of Anquetil Blue Flamboyant and Ruby Flamboyant. It was gorgeous with white piping accenting the lugwork and brilliant dark blue and resplendent red tubes. I assembled the bike in the summer 1983. Most of the parts came from local shops, chosen carefully based on my obsessive research. I even built the wheels by myself, using my favorite bike parts, Campagnolo hubs that I had had the good fortune (and totally cool bragging rights) to buy in Italy. The first time I rode my Mercian was one of the purest moments of joy so far in my young life.In college, I am sure I must have been obnoxious about the bike, my pride in it, and my fixation on keeping it clean and safe. Once, when I was rather smitten with a young woman, I let her ride it and she crashed; fortunately no harm came to the bike. My Mercian was also responsible for where I am today. During my first break in college, when I rode with a group of students for four days to Aspen, Colorado, I ended up chatting with a geology major. He urged me to take Intro to Geology. I did, and when my failure at physics cancelled my bike-building dream, I decided to major in geology. After college, I rode my Mercian from my roommate’s house to my home. He lived in Boulder, Colorado. I lived in Seattle. We spent seven weeks on the road riding across Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, up to Jasper, Canada, and back down to Washington and over the North Cascades. The bike performed ideally, except when a pannier fell off as I was descending Rabbit Ear’s Pass in Colorado at about 40mph causing me to fall. Amazingly, I only had a few scrapes, including one set of striations across my helmet. Several years later, I flew with the bike—packed lovingly—to New Zealand, where I spent 13 weeks riding around the North and South Islands. This time I remained upright the entire time. These two trips still remain as some of my favorite travel adventures.When my wife and I moved back to Seattle, my beautiful, though now slightly dinged and scratched, Mercian remained central to my life. Some acquaintances, in fact, thought that I didn’t even own a car because they saw me only when I was on my trusty stead. My biking-past caused some problems though when we settled back in my hometown. I basically knew how to get around Seattle only by bike and I regularly ended up driving on routes more suited to bikes than to cars, which regularly, and understandably, annoyed my wife. Sadly, that is no longer the case, as I drive far more than I wish.Like many a cyclist, I acquired several more bikes. I have had two mountain bikes, one city bike, one full carbon bike (a gift from a friend), and one non-touring bike. All have served my needs but none have come close to providing the satisfaction, joy, pride, and self-definition of my Mercian. Another reason I liked this bike is that I could repair any aspect of it, something I can no longer do with the more modern bikes I own. I have to admit my relationship with my Mercian waned. Riding in a city of potholes, broken glass, bad drivers, and uneven pavement prompted me to purchase my city bike. I sit upright, which makes me more visible. It has more gearing, wider and beefier tires, and hydraulic brakes, which work far more efficiently though I no longer sport as muscular forearms. My Mercian ended up in the basement, and I realized after it sat there for several years, that I wasn’t going to ride it again. It was time to donate my beloved bike.I have no idea of my Mercian’s fate but am reminded of something a friend told me when she was downsizing and shedding her art collection. She said that she had enjoyed and reveled in the artwork she had owned and now it was time to pass it on to someone new, who she hoped would find a similar joy. I feel the same way about my Mercian; even after 42 years, the Reynolds 531, steel frame is still in good shape, the hubs are Campy, and the rest of the parts fine. I trust that someone will continue to find years of joy and satisfaction in this unique bicycle. Mercian, my Mercian. You treated me well and gave me many years of enjoyment. It is time to move on. I hope that you’ll bring joy to another. Long live my Mercian. Safe riding to all. I am pleased to announce that Mountaineers Books, which will publish my book about the Cascade mountains, In the Range of Fire and Ice, in September 2026, has set up a campaign that supports the press, the book, and PNW writers. If you are interested in donating, and getting your name in the book, here’s a link to how you can do it. I would be honored and humbled if you did. Thanks. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

N.B. - I apologize if you get this twice. When I first sent it, Substack was having an issue and it was unclear if this newsletter was actually sent. Thanks.Walk around Seattle and you will observe what for many is a disturbing sight: green lawns with what looks like mange, or areas of shredded and denuded turf. They look as if the ground has been rototilled by an erratic, perhaps scatterbrained, and clearly inept, grounds maintenance person. The maltreated lawns are enough to drive any lawn lover to despair….or worse, to send them on a war path to annihilate whoever had the audacity and gall to show so little respect for that landscape icon, a green field of trimmed and tidy turf.For those in search of the Destroyer of Lawns, they have several sources to seed their anger. The first is a non-native, nondescript scarab beetle, the European chafer (from the German Käfer, meaning gnawer). As their name indicates, they are native to Europe, having been first named scientifically in 1789 by Count Grigory Razumovsky from specimens in Lausanne. (Razumovsky, also written as Razoumowsky, was a geologist best known for his study of erratics!) You may be happy to know that Europeans have long considered their local beetles to be a pest, too, designating them “ravager of lawns.”Entomologists first reported the European chafer (Amphimallon majale - in Greek, αμφίμαλλον means ‘hairy on both sides;’ majale comes from the Latin maius, meaning May, when the species is active in Europe) in the US from Newark, New York (~220 miles NW of Newark, NJ), in 1940. Reported at densities of 8.8 GSF (or grubs per square foot), the voracious insect had violated lawns in cemeteries, parks, and a golf course. Clearly, these interlopers had to be thwarted in their assault on verdancy. Researchers tried lead arsenate (now banned), micronized sulfur, calcium arsenate (now banned in UK, carcinogenic), various combinations of these three, and that wonderful, oh-this-won’t-be-a-problem insecticide, DDT. (“Applied to the turf as a suspension at the rate of 30 and 50 pounds per acre appears promising for the control of larvae.”)Disregarding our futile attempts at dominance, the little pests began to spread, generally aided, unknowingly, by people. We shipped them via infested nursery stock. We ferried them when we moved grub-rich top soil in our cars, trucks, railroads, and planes. In fact, the first reported sighting of European chafers in Seattle was in 2015 at SeaTac Airport. (Adults can and do fly but neither far nor fast, except in a plane.)Life for a European chafer begins between 2 to 8 inches underground in a small cell of about 20 eggs. About two weeks later the larvae emerge and mature to their plant-killing stage (their third instar for those who need to know) in about nine months. Grubs may move as much as ten inches vertically, typically descending to avoid frost, which allows them to overwinter. This is the stage when most pestiferous, when the white grubs eat plant roots, killing the above ground portion. When densities reach 20 to 30 GSF (they can peak at 62 GSF), turf death will be complete.Adults, in contrast, are dainty eaters, if they eat much at all; they mostly rely on stored fat, aka the digested remains of our lawns. Their focus instead is sex during their short, two-week life as adults, which takes place in the summer.Turning from the little seen to the big bad nemeses, the two other Destroyers of Lawns are crows and raccoons. Both are intelligent, mischievous, opportunistic, and omnivorous, and probably why people get their undies in a twist with this issue. For example, several years ago, I was on a morning run and passed a recently built house with freshly placed turf. Nearly every roll had its corners folded over, as if someone was seeking a hastily hidden prize. They were; raccoons had most likely furled the turf corners in search of European chafers.I have also watched crows snortling and snoozling in search of the yummy white beetle grubs. Their strong muscles and stout bill allow them to penetrate the soil and tear up tufts of grass; unlike most other birds, crows also have the strength to open their bills to grab a meal in such a confined situation. Crows are aided by their intelligence and inquisitiveness. The birds are probably keen observers of signs produced by grubs, such as holes or loose sections of soil; remember where they previously encountered grubs; note where their fellow crows are dining; and cannot pass up an opportunity to satisfy their curiosity. I have also been told that raccoons may have learned their behavior from watching the crows.Now that we are no longer poisoning the ground, and ourselves, with toxins such as DDT, we have taken new, more benign tacts in our battle against the white grubs. We have found a natural nemesis—entomopathogenic nematodes (roundworms)—to do the dirty work. The microscopic beasts penetrate a grub’s body cavity, release a bacterium that kills the grub, and then feast upon the bacterium and liquefying grub. I imagine that this macabre means of death delights those whose lawns have been destroyed. The nematodes appear not to cause damages to other organisms, or to humans.Researchers have also found a sort of boom and bust cycle. Grubs tend to become more abundant two to three years after adults appear and increase their population during the next three to five years, then drop to relatively low levels and remain that way for some time. If history provides any answers to this situation, it’s that we are not stopping the European chafer. They are here to stay.Paraphrasing Mr. Shakespeare: “To lawn or not to lawn, that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the yard to sufferThe slings and arrows of outrageous crows,Or to take arms against a sea of grubs.”As one of my birder friends told me: “Of course the best way to prevent the disturbance is not to have a stupid lawn.”Word of the week - Entomopathogenic - Generally in reference to insect-killers, such as nematodes, viruses, fungi, and bacteria. From the ancient Greek ἔντομον (insect) plus Greek παθο- (of or relating to disease) plus Greek ‑γενής (Forming adjectives with the sense ‘generating, producing (the thing or effect specified by the first element)) Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Walk around Seattle and you will observe what for many is a disturbing sight: green lawns with what looks like mange, or areas of shredded and denuded turf. They look as if the ground has been rototilled by an erratic, perhaps scatterbrained, and clearly inept, grounds maintenance person. The maltreated lawns are enough to drive any lawn lover to despair….or worse, to send them on a war path to annihilate whoever had the audacity and gall to show so little respect for that landscape icon, a green field of trimmed and tidy turf. For those in search of the Destroyer of Lawns, they have several sources to seed their anger. The first is a non-native, nondescript scarab beetle, the European chafer (from the German Käfer, meaning gnawer). As their name indicates, they are native to Europe, having been first named scientifically in 1789 by Count Grigory Razumovsky from specimens in Lausanne. (Razumovsky, also written as Razoumowsky, was a geologist best known for his study of erratics!) You may be happy to know that Europeans have long considered their local beetles to be a pest, too, designating them “ravager of lawns.” Entomologists first reported the European chafer (Amphimallon majale - in Greek, αμφίμαλλον means ‘hairy on both sides;’ majale comes from the Latin maius, meaning May, when the species is active in Europe) in the US from Newark, New York (~220 miles NW of Newark, NJ), in 1940. Reported at densities of 8.8 GSF (or grubs per square foot), the voracious insect had violated lawns in cemeteries, parks, and a golf course. Clearly, these interlopers had to be thwarted in their assault on verdancy. Researchers tried lead arsenate (now banned), micronized sulfur, calcium arsenate (now banned in UK, carcinogenic), various combinations of these three, and that wonderful, oh-this-won’t-be-a-problem insecticide, DDT. (“Applied to the turf as a suspension at the rate of 30 and 50 pounds per acre appears promising for the control of larvae.”) Disregarding our futile attempts at dominance, the little pests began to spread, generally aided, unknowingly, by people. We shipped them via infested nursery stock. We ferried them when we moved grub-rich top soil in our cars, trucks, railroads, and planes. In fact, the first reported sighting of European chafers in Seattle was in 2015 at SeaTac Airport. (Adults can and do fly but neither far nor fast, except in a plane.) Life for a European chafer begins between 2 to 8 inches underground in a small cell of about 20 eggs. About two weeks later the larvae emerge and mature to their plant-killing stage (their third instar for those who need to know) in about nine months. Grubs may move as much as ten inches vertically, typically descending to avoid frost, which allows them to overwinter. This is the stage when most pestiferous, when the white grubs eat plant roots, killing the above ground portion. When densities reach 20 to 30 GSF (they can peak at 62 GSF), turf death will be complete. Adults, in contrast, are dainty eaters, if they eat much at all; they mostly rely on stored fat, aka the digested remains of our lawns. Their focus instead is sex during their short, two-week life as adults, which takes place in the summer.Turning from the little seen to the big bad nemeses, the two other Destroyers of Lawns are crows and raccoons. Both are intelligent, mischievous, opportunistic, and omnivorous, and probably why people get their undies in a twist with this issue. For example, several years ago, I was on a morning run and passed a recently built house with freshly placed turf. Nearly every roll had its corners folded over, as if someone was seeking a hastily hidden prize. They were; raccoons had most likely furled the turf corners in search of European chafers. I have also watched crows snortling and snoozling in search of the yummy white beetle grubs. Their strong muscles and stout bill allow them to penetrate the soil and tear up tufts of grass; unlike most other birds, crows also have the strength to open their bills to grab a meal in such a confined situation. Crows are aided by their intelligence and inquisitiveness. The birds are probably keen observers of signs produced by grubs, such as holes or loose sections of soil; remember where they previously encountered grubs; note where their fellow crows are dining; and cannot pass up an opportunity to satisfy their curiosity. I have also been told that raccoons may have learned their behavior from watching the crows.Now that we are no longer poisoning the ground, and ourselves, with toxins such as DDT, we have taken new, more benign tacts in our battle against the white grubs. We have found a natural nemesis—entomopathogenic nematodes (roundworms)—to do the dirty work. The microscopic beasts penetrate a grub’s body cavity, release a bacterium that kills the grub, and then feast upon the bacterium and liquefying grub. I imagine that this macabre means of death delights those whose lawns have been destroyed. The nematodes appear not to cause damages to other organisms, or to humans. Researchers have also found a sort of boom and bust cycle. Grubs tend to become more abundant two to three years after adults appear and increase their population during the next three to five years, then drop to relatively low levels and remain that way for some time. If history provides any answers to this situation, it’s that we are not stopping the European chafer. They are here to stay. Paraphrasing Mr. Shakespeare: “To lawn or not to lawn, that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the yard to sufferThe slings and arrows of outrageous crows,Or to take arms against a sea of grubs.”As one of my birder friends told me: “Of course the best way to prevent the disturbance is not to have a stupid lawn.” Word of the week - Entomopathogenic - Generally in reference to insect-killers, such as nematodes, viruses, fungi, and bacteria. From the ancient Greek ἔντομον (insect) plus Greek παθο- (of or relating to disease) plus Greek ‑γενής (Forming adjectives with the sense ‘generating, producing (the thing or effect specified by the first element)) Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Thought I’d start my year of newsletters with a sort of summation of why I like to do what I do. And, everyone loves a list!* Birding by butt - Why get up and go out in the field when you can sit in a comfy chair in your backyard and watch? No need to stress about whether the birds you want to see will be there. Wait until they come to you. In my backyard in Seattle, while perfecting the art of BBB I have seen Mallards swimming on our flooded roof, crows harassing Barred Owls, Varied Thrushes poking for food, and Pygmy Nuthatches seeking insects, as well as many others. I know of one expert butt-bound-birder who has seen more than 50 species in his yard.* Don’t like shopping, look up - As you trudge through the urban core with your partner, who’s seeking that perfect je ne sais quoi that only they understand, look up instead of inside. High atop many buildings is a veritable Noah’s Ark load of terra cotta and carved animals. Most common in this urban bestiary will be lions and eagles—who wouldn’t want to work in a building adorned with these symbols of grace, courage, and majesty—but you might encounter ducks and dragons; griffins and hippocamps; horses, walruses, and dolphins. Fabled, fantastic, and fun, this stone menagerie can relieve the ardor of most any shopping trip.* Stuck in traffic - Plagued by packed roads? Instead of complaining, use the time to notice the wildlife exploiting this unique urban niche. Over the years, I have counted dozens of Red-Tailed Hawks and Bald Eagles perched on poles, branches, wires, and, once on a speed limit sign. One of the best ways to find them is to look for crows dive-bombing in their yo-yo like flight pattern. Or take the time to consider why there are so many fewer insects dying on your windshield; how geology affects where you travel; or how additional runoff from impervious roadways creates cattail- and horse-rich micro-wetlands. So much is going on that you might actually seek out traffic jams.* Bad Architecture - Let’s face it, an oft-defining characteristic of city life is the ugly building. Escape this dire situation by focusing not on the whole but on the parts, specifically the building stones. Walk through any large city and you will find a range of rocks equal to the best that plate tectonics has assembled. In Seattle, I have seen limestone (with up to 8-inch wide fossils), granite, gneiss, travertine, marble, slate, and sandstone ranging in age from 80,000 to 3.5 billion years old, and from every continent except Antarctica. Plus, the builders have gone to the effort to clean and polish them for us. * Celebrate the underdog - Who doesn’t feel better when they champion the overlooked or the down-on-their-luck? Cities are rife with such underdogs, most of which should earn our respect instead of scorn. Consider the pigeon, one of the easiest urban birds to observe. They are models of fidelity, learn from each other, and have unparalleled navigational skills. And, if you doubt me, here’s what Charles Darwin wrote to his friend Charles Lyell in November 1855: “I will show you my pigeons! which is the greatest treat, in my opinion, which can be offered to a human being.” So, next time you observe a pigeon, pay attention. Not only are you honoring a deserving animal, but you may be on the road to becoming the next Charles Darwin.* Nature abounds - Nature shows would have us believe that the only places where life truly abounds is way out in some exotic place like the Serengeti. That is so wrong. Consider the fact that two rats are probably having sex fairly close to you right now and in about three weeks, she will give birth to between eight and ten pups. This time next year, your fecund, murine neighbors might have 15,000 descendants. If that’s not the abounding of life, then what is?* Carbon Neutral - Tired of killing the Earth by driving to your favorite wild spot? In the city, nature’s but a walk, bike, or bus ride away, or even closer for BBB practitioners. * Savor the Seasons - Spring. Summer. Autumn. Winter. Each has its fans. In the urban environment, these four are merely the obvious, long acknowledged seasons but why limit yourself. Who wouldn’t rejoice and revel in the surfeit of seasons such as “AAAhhh, yellowjackets! No more BBQ;” “Itchy eyes, runny nose, and pollen;” “Splashed by rain puddle…again;” “Harassed by mother crow;” “Dry grass, why mow?;” and “Wet dog, where’s the towel?”* Coffee - Who goes anywhere in the city without the comfort of coffee? A good coffee shop is rarely more than ten minutes away in the city, at least in Seattle, so you’ll never be at a loss for your caffeine fix.* People are Animals, Too - Look for couples in their breeding plumage, neighbors asserting their territoriality, and children fledging from their homes. We may like to think we are different, but careful observation reveals the deep roots we share with those around us. A shorter version of this appeared in Orion magazine (on their website). Starting the year with a bang. I’ll be speaking with author and historian Judy Bentley tonight as part of the Words, Writers, Southwest Stories, presented online by the Southwest Seattle Historical Society. The talk starts at 6pm and is one of them Zoom talks. Here’s where to register. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

With the holidays upon us, I thought I’d take a quick and lighter spin to my subject, which happens to be me, in my youth. Plus, as you can tell, I decided to send it out a day early to beat the Christmas rush.One of the great mysteries many of us address in life is how we ended up where we are. What decisions did we make that set us down a certain path? Was it nature or nurture, luck or planning? My path toward my present life focusing on human and natural history in Seattle was one that I started very early in life.A couple of years ago friends hosted a baby shower and requested that we bring our own baby picture. Looking through a scrap book my parents put together, I quickly found the picture I wanted but then got stuck reading through old report cards. I was able to confirm what my mom had told me when I graduated from college: “David, you never shut up in school.” Apparently I disturbed the other children, did not always pay attention, could be a bit too enthusiastic, and didn’t always read tests carefully. Oh well.But then I came to my third grade report card, written by Ms. Bangs, who I remember as a gray haired, elegant older woman. I don’t remember much from the class, though I can still picture the room on the second floor of Isaac I. Stevens Elementary School just a few blocks from where I grew up on Capitol Hill.At the time my father worked at the University of Washington and his boss was Brewster Denny, Arthur Denny’s great grandson. The Denny family is considered to be one of Seattle’s founding families; the Denny party arrived in November 1851. According to Ms. Bangs, Brewster also wrote a letter for, or to, me. Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy. Nor is there a copy of it in his papers in Special Collections at the University of Washington.She also noted that we read Arthur Denny’s Dream, which of course I have no recollection of doing but with the power of the internet, I found a copy and bought it. The book was written in 1953 by Mrs. Marie Hatten, a fourth grade teacher at Fairview School, and illustrated by ten of her students. Using Four Wagon’s West, a book written by Arthur Denny’s granddaughter, Roberta Frye Watt, as a guide, Hatten’s students drew pictures with crayons, which they later modified with colored paper. Hatten then typed a story to go with the pictures.The book tells the story of Arthur, his wife Mary, and their two children, and how they traveled west by wagon. Joined by Arthur’s four bachelor brothers and several other family members, they killed a buffalo, carved their names at Independence Rock, caught fish, and had some issues with the Native inhabitants along the way. As one might imagine for a book of its era, it is racist toward the Indigenous people that the Denny party met enroute and in Seattle. What also stands out is the creative artwork.But back to my report card, where Ms. Bangs added that amazing line. “I’m glad David shows such an interest in Seattle history.” Wow, who knew that the path I now trod started so early in life. Unfortunately, Ms. Bangs died before I wrote my first book about Seattle history but I like to think she would have been proud of what her somewhat rambunctious, often distracted, and distracting, student became.(This newsletter originally appeared nearly four and a half years ago, which means this is its first appearance as a podcast.)I am honored, pleased and surprised that Wild in Seattle was one a top ten checked out book at the Seattle Public Library in 2025. And, don’t forget it’s never too late to buy a copy or two. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

On September 2, 1834, naturalist John Kirk Townsend camped near the Umatilla River in eastern Oregon. Joining him were the fellow members of an exploring expedition lead by Nathaniel Wyeth, including the botanist Thomas Nuttall and Joseph Thing, a Boston sea captain, hired to help navigate. Traveling in the arid landscape had been trying. The previous day the men had had no water until nine o’clock at night and on the second, Townsend’s food consisted of rose buds he had found above their camp. Nuttall and Thing, however, had had a more substantial meal.When Townsend returned from eating the rose buds, he “was surprised to find Mr. N. and Captain T. picking the last bones of a bird which they had cooked,” he wrote in his narrative of the trip. Probing his well-fed companions, Townsend learned that they had just eaten an owl he had killed in the morning. He had planned to preserve it for science but hunger won out and “the bird of wisdom lost the immortality which he might otherwise have acquired,” wrote Townsend. Oops!(Townsend wrote no further about this owl and we have no information about what it was. People speculate that it must have been a big species, such as a Great Horned Owl, but, as we know, in times of desperation, hunger drives people to extremes, thus, maybe the aviphagic fellows consumed a species as small as a Northern Pygmy Owl. In a subsequent report, Townsend wrote that he had found both of these species, as well as Screech, Snowy, Great Gray, Short-eared, Long-eared, Burrowing, and Boreal owls.)Perhaps Townsend shouldn’t have been surprised by Nuttall. Although he was a legendary botanist, Nuttall was also a bit scatterbrained. French trappers dubbed him “le fou” for his single-minded devotion to plant collecting, which tended to result in him getting lost. Nuttall was also forever infamous for his dirt-clogged rifle, which he had used as a digging tool, lending new meaning to the phrase “turn guns into plowshares.” Whether the consumption of Townsend’s owl was accidental or purposeful, we do know that Nuttall shared an affinity with Townsend for rose buds, most likely from Crataegus douglasii. Nuttall wrote in as subsequent paper that “every accession of fruit, however meagre, was hailed with delight by our famished party, and the ripe berries of this fine Hawthorn were collected with avidity.”Nuttall and Thing weren’t the only members of the Wyeth expedition to thwart Townsend’s plans. A couple of weeks later, the expedition’s tailor, Thornburg (no first name exists) had discovered the whiskey that Townsend used to preserve his herpetological specimens. He later wrote in a letter on September 9, 1835: “Almost as bad as ‘tapping the Admiral,’ …the sneaking dogs did not tell me of it for some months afterwards, so that when I looked at the bottles, the lizards, salamanders, and serpents had united into a filthy heap…and I was compelled to toss the whole into the river.” (In this letter, written to Samuel G. Morton and held at the American Philosophical Library, Townsend also refers to stealing sculls and bones from Clickitat and Chinook graves. For more information about Townsend’s racism and grave robbing, here is the story by Matthew Halley.)About eight months prior to Townsend’s loss of his owl specimen, a young and little known naturalist in Patagonia, also took advantage of food in the pot. But this time, he did so to preserve the specimen. Throughout his time on the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin was always on the lookout for interesting plants, animals, and rocks. In particular, he was interested in a bird that writer Lyanda Lynn Haupt characterized as the “largest bird on earth that had not officially been described in the scientific literature.”Now known as the Lesser Rhea (Rhea pennata), the ostrich-like birds had stirred Darwin’s interests in July 1833. His local guides had described a bird they called Avestrus Petise, in reference to them being smaller than the more common, Greater Rhea. Six months later, while sharing a stew with the Beagle’s officers, Darwin realized that he was looking at the bird he sought. He immediately grabbed what he could—”Head neck legs, one wing & many of the larger feathers”—from the soup pot and trash bin. Darwin eventually took the parts to London where they ended up on display at the Museum of the Zoological Society. “Mr. Gould, who in describing this new species, has done me the honor of calling it after my name,” the tickled young naturalist wrote.In contrast to Nuttall’s and Thing’s hunger and Darwin’s quest for a unique specimen, John James Audubon seems to have simply relished eating the birds he shot. Describing what is now known (but not for much longer) as Audubon’s Shearwater, he wrote on July 26, 1826, that after four birds had been shot, he ate one: “on tasting it, as is my practice, I found it to resemble that of the porpoises.” He also ate Ruddy Duck (“good eating”), Surf Scoter (“scarcely fit for food”), American Robin (“fat and juicy”), Belted Kingfisher (“disagreeable”), Pileated Woodpecker (“extremely unpalatable”), and Snowy Owl (“very much resembling that of a chicken and not indelicate eating”), as well as many other species. As one bird historian wrote, Audubon probably ate more bird species than anyone, ever.Finally, there’s the story of Mutton, a dog who, in 1859 ate the head off a mountain goat specimen that had been given to naturalist and ethnographer George Gibbs by another naturalist, Dr. Caleb Kennerly. In response, “Mutton was sheared a short time ago, & as soon as his hair grows out we will make a specimen of him,” wrote Kennerly to the Smithsonian’s Spencer Baird. Kennerly followed through on his promise and Mutton’s remains are now preserved at the Smithsonian. At least he got some immortality, as well as a good meal.Word of the week - “Tapping the Admiral” – The phrase means to take a small quantity of a drink, often on the sly. Legendarily and apocryphally, it comes from soldiers skimming rum or brandy (I have seen both mentioned) from a cask used to preserve Admiral Nelson’s body, after he died in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Often when I am out on a run, I like to go through alleys instead of sticking to streets. Mostly I do so to see new areas, plus, I always hope that I’ll see something fun or interesting in a backyard. I rarely do. But the other day, I had an epiphany about a topographic feature. The alley where I ran had a short rise, whereas the streets to the north and south did not. While I cannot prove this, I think the reason why, is that it probably made sense when the streets were platted to regrade the street and not to alter the alley. Having a level spot in front of a house to park would generally be more important than backyard access, plus, having the house sitting above the street would make the house look more substantial. This seems logical to account for the many situations in Seattle where houses sit high above the street, often fronted by a rockery wall.I think of these hyperlocal topographic changes as a “lower case r regrade (LCRR),” in contrast to an “upper case R Regrade,” such as the Denny, Jackson Street, and Dearborn Street Regrades. For the LCRRs, the original terrain would have roller-coastered along and development would have led to leveling the undulations. Given our glacially influenced landscape of ravines, ridges, hills, and dales, I suspect that developers were often faced with topographic issues that they felt a need to change. I know that that was the case in downtown Seattle where all of the streets are more level and less steep than they were back in the day. (It’s probably the case in many topographically-rich cities but I could be completely wrong so don’t want to make that claim.)In case you wondered, Seattle’s first large scale, lower case r regrade began in July 1876. Contractor George Edwards and his crews used picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows to smooth out Front Street (because it was on the waterfront; it’s now First Avenue) and make it a gentle grade from James Street north to Pike Street. Edwards was awarded the project even though his bid was not the lowest; he bid $9,000 or $1,000 higher than Chinese contractor Quon Coon Lung. The reason was racism. For example, throughout the process, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer regularly printed racist rants, which I won’t repeat, condemning Chinese workers.The city’s work plan required Edwards to create grades ranging from 4 to 7 percent, as Front Street rose from 12 feet to 107 feet above sea level. To keep back Elliott Bay, whose waters washed ashore just below Front, Edwards would have to build log cribbing up to 27 feet high along the western edge of the street. In mid-August, City Surveyor Phillip G. Eastwick estimated that the project would require 26,000 cubic yards of dirt. Excavations along Front Street would provide two thirds of the material, with the rest coming from cutting down, lower case r regrading, the side streets running east from Front.Edwards employed up to 90 men and used 20 mules and horses. They made their deepest cut of 25 feet at Spring Street and their greatest fill, an addition of eight feet, between Marion and Madison. Their extensive cribbing along the shorefront used cedars harvested from the woods behind Belltown, then more or less a suburb of Seattle. They raised many houses on stilts—some up to 12 feet—which would eventually be supported by fill. Others were left high above the road, which required homeowners, such as Arthur Denny, to build what was described as a “prevent wall,” to prevent their houses from sliding.To the editors of the P-I and Seattle’s other newspaper at the time, the Daily Pacific Tribune, street grading was essential to what came to be called the “Seattle Spirit,” the city’s striving, pick-itself-up-by-its-bootstraps, can-do attitude. An editorial in the Pacific Tribune noted that “any one with half an eye can see the good already accomplished ... [it is] stamping the growth and business of the city as the most enduring, desirable character.” Said the P-I, the grading “bespeaks enterprise; shows that we mean business; that we mean to stay here.” Just 25 years after its founding, Seattle was a city to reckon with. Nature be damned, if the topography blocked the pursuit of progress then it would be dealt with accordingly.Once local leaders realized that they could tame the topography, they went at it with a passionate zeal. On Mill Street (now Yesler Way) workers made cuts of up to 20 feet as it climbed east and one block south on Washington Street, the men dug up stumps and burned huge logs to push that road further east. Within a few years, the city council passed ordinances for grading Second, Third, Fourth, Madison, Marion, and Commercial streets. At present, no matter where you are in Seattle, I assume that the majority of streets were lower case r regraded in some way or another. We may think we live in a natural landscape and love our surrounding nature but sometimes we just gotta mess with it. Word of the Week - Seattle Spirit - The earliest appearance in print I can find of this phrase comes from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer from July 23, 1884. It was used in reference (“quiet determination and earnestness…that augurs well for the future of Seattle”) to the need to build a railroad to reach new coal fields. In 1907, the P-I asked its readers to define the Seattle Spirit. The answers were rather spirited. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

We recently watched Guillermo del Toro’s new film of Frankenstein. Many critics have noted that the movie hews more faithfully to Mary Shelley’s novel than most previous films and that del Toro humanizes the monster in a way seldom seen. Unfortunately, del Toro takes the opposite tack with wolves, which are merely a fantasy of the director as wolves do not appear in the book. In fact, del Toro seems to have gone out his way to paint an unfavorable portrait of wolves. In the novel, one of the more beautiful parts is how the monster connects with an elderly blind man. “From your lips first have I heard the voice of kindness directed toward me; I shall forever be grateful; and your present humanity assures me of success with those friends who I am on the path of meeting.” Tragically, soon after the monster says these words to the blind man, his family arrives, sees the monster, attacks him, and drives him, and his faith in humanity, away. In the movie (spoiler alert), we have a similar scene of connection and bonding between the old man and the monster. But del Toro adds an irrelevant and violent scene of wolves (clearly CGI) aggressively attacking the family’s farm and sheep, followed eventually by the wolves attacking the old man. The scenes are gruesome and gratuitous, as well as an unnecessary perpetuation of the long term and false image of wolves as depraved and wanton killers.No other animal stirs the human imagination like wolves, whether anxiety or excitement, love or loathing, respect or revulsion. In the last several decades, though, as researchers have helped clarify past misunderstandings, wolves have generally risen positively in our collective conscious. But, as Adam Weymouth makes clear in his thoughtful new book Lone Wolf: Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wildness, that new image is being tested as wolves have begun to repopulate areas where they had been extirpated. This is especially true where Frankenstein takes place; Weymouth writes that Europe’s present wolf population is “north of 21,500” or more than there are in the United States (including Alaska). While following the footsteps of a lone wolf that walked 1,200 miles from Slovenia to Italy, Weymouth has several encounters with farmers who have no compunction to killing any wolf they see, as well as with people who treasure the wolves’ return.By his ugly portrayal of wolves, del Toro adds nothing to our understanding and sympathy for the monster; it is humanity that is the monster’s judge and jury, and which drives him to his violent actions, not wolves. Surely, del Toro could have taken a more enlightened approach, and simply followed Mary Shelley’s original text. In contrast to del Toro’s depiction, consider what wolves have been accomplishing in Bella Bella, Haíɫzaqv Territory, in present-­day British Columbia. An invasion of European green crabs, which were damaging the coastal ecosystem, led to researchers setting out underwater traps consisting of a rigid frame enclosed by netting and connected to land by a rope. Two years after they placed the traps, researchers noticed that something or someone was damaging the traps. To determine what was happening, the researchers set up cameras in May 2024. Within 24 hours, the camera recorded a female wolf emerging from the water pulling the rope attached to the trap up to the beach. She soon had pulled the trap, rope, and buoy onshore, where she ripped open the net to obtain her lunch. In the article reporting this novel act, ecologists Kyle Artelle and Paul Paquet write “this sequence appears to demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of the multi-­step connection between the floating buoy and the bait within the out-of-sight trap.” Although some scientists question such behavior and whether it indicates intent and/or intelligence, Artelle and Paquet believe that the wolf’s actions suggested intent and understanding of what she was doing and what her reward would be. In other words, the wolf was using a tool to obtain food. In addition, the pair pose a question as to whether a lack of human persecution allowed the wolves to “develop confidence and devote time to exploring novel behaviors.” We know that wolves are problem solvers and that they learn from and teach each other; perhaps, if we meddled less and paid more attention, we’d see similar types of behavior in more situations. They further add that the “cognitive significance seemingly exhibited here” raises “ethical considerations” that can counter the negative perceptions of wolves. It’s too bad that Artelle’s and Paquet’s research won’t get the publicity that del Toro got with Frankenstein. Like Mary Shelley’s monster, particularly the image best known through movies, the wolf is a creature created by humans, more fable than reality, more endowed with our feelings than with our understanding, more a product of what we fear than what we know. Unlike the monster, wolves are real and their persecution through the age has been horrible. Let’s hope that Artelle and Paquet are correct, and that when we see actions like a wolf using tools it’s just one of many many reasons that we should respect and admire these beautiful animals instead of persecute them.Wow, I was rather excited and pleased that librarians at the King County Library System (scroll down to bottom) named Wild in Seattle one of their favorite books of 2025. Here’s the link to “Potential Tool Use by Wolves (Canis lupus): Crab Trap Pulling in Haíɫzaqv Nation Territory,” by Kyle A. Artelle and Paul C. Paquet, in Ecology and Evolution 15, no. 11, November 2025, e72348. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Greetings and Happy Thanksgiving to all. I thought I’d try an acrostic to celebrate the holiday and share a few highlights of my year.Hiking - I was fortunate this year to get out on many wonderful hikes: Yellow Aster Butte, Summerland, and Marmot Pass in the Cascades; Jack’s Peak near Carmel, CA, and the Michinoku Coastal Trail in Japan. I feel blessed and privileged and lucky to have enjoyed these lovely places.Agelaius phoeniceus - In case you wondered, this is the scientific name of the Red-winged Blackbird. Agelaius comes from the Greek for flocking, in reference to large gatherings of this species. We don’t get huge flocks in Seattle but their gregarious and splendid calls make Red-winged Blackbirds a delight to see and to hear. For more info, here’s a link to my Twelve Ways of Seeing Blackbirds newsletter. Peanut Butter - I think that I have eaten peanut butter for well more than half the days of my life. Heck, I might go so far as to write that I am pushing 75% of the days, usually on toast in the morning but also simply by the spoon and on bazillions of PBJs (squished, squashed, fresh, days old, or otherwise).Peace - May peace prevail near and far, within families, between religions, between species, in our hearts and souls, deeply and truly, honestly and thoroughly. Please take some take for yourself, to slow down and reflect. Each of us can make a difference.Yellow - The fall foliage has been wonderful this year, rich in color, dense in abundance, and pleasurable to ride across up on the Centennial Trail. One of the great surprises of autumn is color; I thought it wasn’t going to be good this year and it was….yay.Tides - Few aspects of the natural world are as incredible and dynamic and world changing as tides. As I have written several times, most recently in September, the twice daily pulsing of planetary waters is also one of the easiest natural history events to see (at least for those who live near a coast) and to overlook. I know that I am always happy when I am reminded of that tidal exchange, whether at a beach or on river. So here’s a big thanks to the earth, sun, and moon for conspiring to produce this magical event.Hope – Let’s hope that 2026 brings more compassion, laughter, humility, respect, responsibility, integrity, and honesty to all.Authors - I had the great privilege, honor, and joy to share the stage with two of my favorite authors—Rob McFarlane and John Valliant. Both are thoughtful, generous, and amazing writers, whose books inspire me every time I read them. Plus, they are really nice fellows. If you haven’t read Fire Weather or Underland or Is a River Alive?, now you know what to ask for as a gift this holiday season. Nutcrackers - Smart, resourceful, inquisitive, and good looking, Clark’s Nutcracker star in one of the most enduring and important ecological relationships in the Cascades. Because the birds relish the nuts, or seeds of whitebark pines, every whitebark you encounter owes its origin to Clark’s nutcrackers, which is a pretty darned cool thing to think about.Kennebunkport - In June, we had the pleasure to go to Kennebunkport, Maine, for the wedding of my nephew Charlie and Hannah. I was very honored by being asked to read a poem (not my own, fortunately) during the ceremony. It was a wonderful and joyous celebration, a special moment of which was the torrential downpour during the outside wedding. The bride and groom responded with aplomb and laughter, gracing us with their joy.Shinkansen - On our trip to Japan, I traveled faster on the ground than I think I ever had. Riding a Shinkansen, also known as a Bullet Train, we hit about 200 mph though it didn’t feel like it, the ride was so smooth. In contrast, we were standing in a train station on the platform, chitchatting, when a Shinkansen rocketed through the station. Golly ned, it was stunning; I think my heart finally calmed down about ten minutes later. Geogeek - I am self-avowed geogeek, a rock nerd, a stone rhapsodist. My website: geologywriter.com. I have written two books about rocks: Stories in Stone and Cairns. When I watch movies, I regularly comment on the building stone in the background. In fact, one of my favorite movies is about rocks: Breaking Away. You can send sympathy comments to my wife.Ice and Fire - In October, I turned the final round (post copy-editing) of my book, In the Range of Fire and Ice - Searching for History and Nature in Washington’s Cascade Mountains, into Mountaineers Books. I am rather proud and excited by the manuscript, which weaves interview with experts, deep dives into the history, and personal experiences to tell a biography of place. Publication date will be September 2026Vancouver - Just a few weeks ago, we had the great pleasure and honor to be the witnesses at the wedding of Marjorie’s niece, Anna and Emily. We were down in Vancouver, WA, where once again it rained during the ceremony though this time all of us were inside. Again, it was wonderful and joyous to see the next generation of our families in love and in a beautiful relationship. Indigenous Longhouses - Earlier this year, Seattle had a grand opening for its new waterfront park. Among my favorite parts is a three block long structure consisting of 22 pairs of Douglas fir post-and-beam structures adorned at either end with carvings. Created by Oscar Tuazon, it is an homage to the longhouses that once dotted the waterfront of the whulge, the Lushootseed name for Puget Sound. If you are looking for something to do on this holiday weekend, I highly recommend a trip down to see the new, inspired, and inspiring waterfront. New Books - Certainly two of my year’s highlights centered on new books, specifically the two of mine that came out this year. I am truly grateful for the beautiful design, thoughtful editing, and engaged promotion by my publishers, the University of Washington Press and Mountaineers Books. It has been an honor and pleasure to work with them on Seattle Walks (2nd Edition) and Wild in Seattle. And, one more shoutout to Elizabeth Person for her wonderful and whimsical drawings that grace Wild in Seattle. Gratitude - My wife and I were chatting the other day, discussing how gratitude is about paying attention, noticing and taking pleasure in the world (friends, family, nature) around you, connecting to others, being part of a community, acknowledging what you appreciate and treasure. As I have written before, I am so grateful to be able to write this newsletter and to share my observations, primarily because it has allowed me to be part of a community of readers. So, once again, thank you kindly to all who read the Street Smart Naturalist newsletter and who have helped form and inform this community through your likes and comments. December 4, 2025 – Homewaters – 6:00 P.M. – Port Townsend Public Library – I’ll be in PT talking about my book Homewaters.December 6, 2025 – Wild in Seattle/Seattle Walks – 4:00 P.M. – Port Townsend First Baptist Church -I’ll be talking about my books Wild in Seattle and Seattle Walks for one of my favorite groups, the Quimper Geological Society up in PT.Books for Sale: This will be the last week that I am selling books in 2025, including Wild in Seattle, Seattle Walks, Homewaters, Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales, and Too High and Too Steep, through my website. Otherwise, as it gets closer to the mailing chaos of late December, the lines at the post office get too long. Rumor has it my books make great holiday gifts.By the way, another splendid holiday thought, if you feel so inclined, is a gift subscription to my newsletter.Happy Thanksgiving to all. May your day be filled with family and friends and good food and conversation, and perhaps some explorations of the urban kind. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

I have long been pleased in my travels around Seattle to encounter what plant expert Arthur Lee Jacobson called the “ubiquitous exclamation point” of trees—the Lombardy poplar. Tall and narrow, and often in rows, either in a single line or paired to create an allée, Lombardy poplars add an element of arborescent elegance to any street or yard. Or as Scottish botanist John Claudius Loudon opined in his 8-volume Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum (1834-1837), the Lombardy’s perpendicular lines confer “a degree of sublimity…since it is allowed by all writers on the material sublime…that gradually tapering objects of great height create the emotion of sublimity.”Intriguingly, the Lombardy poplar is not a “natural” tree but a cultivar, described as a “fastigiate mutation of a black poplar (Populus nigra).” They appear to have originated between 1700 and 1720, along the Po River in Lombardy, Italy. Fast growing, relatively hardy in and tolerant to many environments, the trees quickly become popular in the horticultural world. In particular, growers used what those in the trade called oblong-headed Lombardys to contrast with round-headed trees: sort of like a Conehead meets Charlie Brown?The narrow finger of a tree found favor as well in the urban setting, particularly along streets. One of the first places this occurred in the United States was in 1803 along Pennsylvania Avenue, which was just beginning its long history as one of the central streets of the nation’s capitol. Hoping to beautify the mostly barren road, President Thomas Jefferson called for planting four rows of Lombardy poplars flanking the new thoroughfare with the tree’s giant feather-like profile. As poplarmania spread, so did the accolades. Lombardy lovers described the trees as having “an irresistible charm” and an “aristocratic gracefulness of proportions.” They provided shelter from storms, an effective means of increasing shade, and could be harvested relatively quickly for firewood. Some people also suggested that the tall tree made a good lightning rod claiming, “the electric fluid attacks in preference such trees as are verging to decay by reason of age or disease.” Others though felt that the tree was “stiff, ugly, graceless, and useless” and “most abominable in its serried stiffness and monotony.” Not surprisingly, politics rooted itself into the arboreal world of supporters and detractors. In the April 1898 Essex Antiquarian, one author wrote: “Political feeling was so strong in the old Jeffersonian days that these poplars were condemned by the Federalists on account of Jefferson having been instrumental in introducing them. Some of the Republicans planted these trees in front of their residences to show their allegiance to Jeffersonian principles, and the enraged Federalists were guilty of injuring and destroying them. This was true in Salem in 1801 in several instances, the mischief being of course done under cover of darkness.” Ah, always good to see that our present horde didn’t invent petty BS politics.It’s not known when Lombardy poplars arrived in Seattle, but they were listed for sale in Olympia newspapers as early as 1858. As happened in many places, the trees appear to have been planted in Seattle to create shade, as a wind break, and to add a bit of elegance. When people did this, it also seems to me that the plantings often designated boundaries or property lines. For instance, I know of a spot around the Lake City neighborhood, where ancient looking Lombardy poplars grow in two intersecting rows. The property is overgrown and unkempt with several of the trees now only a fractured trunk. I wouldn’t have noted the property except for the trees, which led me to track down a 1936 aerial photograph. In it, I can see that the property looks more formally developed and I like to think that I see the young poplars. I also know from local historian Valarie Bunn that this neighborhood was going through a growth spurt in the mid-1920s, so perhaps some enterprising person or family had planted the trees to enhance and protect their nascent property.No matter what actually happened with these rows of Lombardy poplars, I know that the trees’ story cannot be separated from the story of people. Someone had to have planted them and that someone had to have a reason. At least that’s what I think when I see Lombardy poplars in the landscape today; the trees are clues to the past and the long-term relationship between people and place. Word of the Week - Fastigiate - A Latin derivation meaning pointed, which in botany refers to upright branches parallel to the main stem, typically resulting in a narrow tapering form. By the way, no relation to fastidious. Two sources I relied on were for quotes:* Anne Beamish, “A Much-abused Tree: The Rise and Fall of the Lombardy Poplar,” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 42, no. 2, 120-137.* Christina D. Wood, “‘A Most Dangerous Tree’: The Lombardy Poplar in Landscape Gardening,” Arnoldia 54, v. 1, 24-30.A follow up to last week’s newsletter about mining at Mount St. Helens. My friend Nathan Reynolds wrote to me about plans to try and develop the Green River area north of the volcano for copper. If we’ve learned anything from the past, mining in this region is a horrible idea. Not only does it tend to break people’s banks, it is also terrible for the environment. I have been fortunate to hike several times in the area of the proposed mine and it is some of the most beautiful forest anywhere. Here’s what I wrote for my book about the Cascades.“I soon began to feel tiny, dwarfed by huge Douglas-firs and red cedars skyscrapering up to the point that it hurt my neck to look so high. Below them were seventy- to eighty-foot snags, usually riddled with cavities, many of which could have been homes for birds and mammals; groves of young trees thriving in an opening caused by one of their ancestors crashing to the ground; nurse logs galore strewn with rows of western hemlocks; and a dense and diverse understory of mosses, herbs, ferns, and shrubs, all sweetened by the rolling notes of Pacific Wrens and haunting calls of Varied Thrushes.”November 22, 2025 – Holiday Bookfest – 2:00 – 4:00 P.M. – Phinney Neighborhood Center – I’ll be joining a wonderful group of writers selling our books…just in time for the upcoming holidays. Always a fun event. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Mount St. Helens is best known for the epic eruption of 1980 when it spewed its guts 90,000 feet in the air and spread the debris around the globe. Far less known is that 75 years before the eruption, some of Mount St. Helens’ innards made their way to Portland, Oregon, in a much less violent manner. The material though was well-traveled, having gone from the mountain to New York before returning west. And, when it returned, it was in a new form, having been turned into a statue of Sacagawea, which was unveiled on July 6, 1905, at Portland’s Lewis and Clark Exposition.The creation story of the statue begins with two German farmers on a hunting trip around Mount St. Helens in the 1880s. Out in the field, they came across some beautiful boulders rich in sparkly bits. They told others about their pretty rocks, word spread, and within three years 500 men were seeking their fortune. Included in this scrum were the owners of a German language newspaper based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who ponied up $20,000 (about $700,000 in 2025) to find the reported ores rich in gold, silver, and copper. As has happened with many a mineral seeker, their hoped-for boom was a bust, so bad that it shut down the entire district. Of course that didn’t stop anyone. On May 26, 1901, the Oregonian published an article titled “One of Nature’s Greatest Mineral Storehouses.” The unnamed author reported that four railroads were working on lines to reach the St. Helens mines. Despite the previous failures, a new round of prospectors had arrived in 1898 at Mount St. Helens, equipped with more money, drills, and explosives, as well as yet another healthy belief that they would succeed where others had failed.If you spend much time reading about early miners, you cannot help but notice the they failed but I will succeed attitude, often aligned with their excuses for why they didn’t succeed. For example, consider this litany by an anonymous gold seeker in 1860, “Their failure to realize their ‘piles’ was not owing to the scarcity of the precious deposit; but they failed because the season of their arrival was too early or too late; the river was too high or too low; it was too wet or too dry; too much or too little snow; or they could not find the spot after leaving it once; or the men failed from fatigue; their provisions failed because laboring men would eat; or they had no rocker, or tom, or pick, or spade, etc.”Leading the mineral-hungry pack at the end of the 19th century was Dr. Henry Waldo Coe of Portland. A physician who had spent time in North Dakota and Alaska, he was a bank president, besotted with mineral fever at the volcano, and friends with President Teddy Roosevelt. Coe eventually sold $700,000 in shares of the Mount. St. Helens Consolidated Mining Company, including to the President. The company worked several mines with names such as Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. They eventually drilled the longest tunnel in southwest Washington, 2,291 feet into the Swedish mine, and by 1910, prospectors had dug test pits and drilled more than 11,000 feet of tunnels.With the advantages of new technology and the soon-to-arrive rail lines, success was clearly imminent for Dr. Coe and his investors. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t. Coe never came close to recovering his and others investments at Mount St. Helens. A 1977 Washington Department of Natural Resources report listed the total value of the gold, silver, and copper extracted from Mount St. Helens during Coe’s time as $385. Transportation was always an issue. To reach the closet point that railroads ever got to the mines—Castle Rock—ore had to be floated two-plus miles across Spirit Lake and hauled 48 miles by wagon road. It appears that Coe’s company only accomplished this once, when a 20 ton shipment arrived in late 1904. But Dr. Coe appears to be a man who pushed aside his failure and found a way to make lemonade from his lemon. He and his wife decided to donate the pure copper, after smelting, from Mount St. Helens to the Henry Bonnard Bronze Company in New York. At the foundry, the copper would be mixed with tin to make bronze, which would be used for the Sacagawea sculpture for the Lewis and Clark Exposition. Alice Cooper was the sculptor of the monument. Born in Iowa, she attended school in Chicago but spent most of her adult life in Denver. She may have worked on sculptures for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair but not enough is known about her to confirm. Newspaper articles from the era report that various people sent photos/drawings to Cooper to help her imagine Sacagawea. After making the initial model in clay, it was created in bronze at the New York foundry and then shipped back to Portland.For the next 76 years following Coe’s single, sort of successful extraction of ore, numerous groups and individuals alternatively praised (“an extremely valuable mine” valued at more than $2 million ore) and condemned (“disappointing results and general barrenness”) the potential for success. The naysayers were clearly correct. By 1974, just $26,056 of ore had been pulled from the mountain. Six years later, Mount St. Helens crushed all hopes of future mineral riches, when billions of tons of rocks and ash dumped into Spirit Lake, raising its level high enough to cover the old mine adits used by Coe. Now all that remains of the hoped for glories of the mines of Mount St. Helens is the statue to Sacagawea. Certainly a far better tribute than one left by decades of plundering.While researching this newsletter, I couldn’t remember if the L&C Expedition had seen MSH erupt so I did what we all do and typed a few words into Google. Here’s what I typed and the AI response. To paraphrase what I have heard about some people, AI has an acute grasp of the obvious.November 15, 2025 – Wild in Seattle/Seattle Walks – Burien Public Library – 3:00 P.M. – I’ll be talking about my books Wild in Seattle and Seattle Walks.November 22, 2025 – Holiday Bookfest – 2:00 – 4:00 P.M. – Phinney Neighborhood Center – I’ll be joining a wonderful group of writers selling our books…just in time for the upcoming holidays. Always a fun event. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

In the August 24, 1897, Hartford Courant, the editorial contained an infamous line: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Often attributed to Mark Twain, the true author was Charles Dudley Warner, editor, author, and co-collaborator with Twain on The Gilded Age.What was true over 100 years ago is still true today. Everybody talks about the weather. We all experience it. We all have an opinion on it. We all complain about it. (Sadly, few aspects of natural history are daily topics for non-scientists except the weather.) Weather is the liquor of conversation, giving people something to say, a way to relate to the person they are speaking with, whether they know them or not. As early twentieth century Indiana humorist Kin Hubbard once remarked about the weather, “nine-tenths of the people couldn’t start a conversation if it didn’t change once in a while.” Plus, at least around here, in my fair city of Seattle, many people also try to make some excuse about our weather. In a landmark 1974 paper, Phillip Church, former chair of the University of Washington Department of Atmospheric Sciences, made a valiant attempt. Titled Some Precipitation Characteristics of Seattle, the paper could have been subtitled: A noble effort to use numbers to point out to the world that weather here is better than you might think.Numbers were Church’s forte. He looked at annual and monthly amounts, as well as hourly records, which NOAA began to record in October 1948. From the hourly data, Church derived a table of intensity, which he broke into six categories: light, moderate, and heavy drizzle; and light, moderate, and heavy rain. The three drizzle levels accounted for 72.5% of the precipitation with “light” drizzle falling over half that time. Church concluded with a statement that would make any gadfly proud. “Because of the preponderance of ‘drizzle’ intensities one might truthfully say that it rarely ‘rains’ in Seattle.”Although scientists may attempt to debunk our weather, and I, and many other locals, may joke about it, we do not appreciate others denigrating our soggy climate. When pushed, which usually only requires a simple slight, we immediately rattle off the one vital weather statistic taught to every child in Seattle schools, worshiped by members of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, and inscribed on the city seal. “Seattle gets less rain than New York!” End of discussion. What else needs to be said?The comparison became so ingrained in our character that in his 1972 history of Seattle—Seattle—long time resident Nard Jones opened his section on weather with an apocryphal account of how locals earn a few bucks with this statistic. Jones wrote: “Generally the routine works in this way.” Local goes to bar. Man sits next to him. Local, being the typically friendly Seattleite, starts a conversation, slowly turning it toward weather. Local mentions aforementioned statistic. Man guffaws. Local asks if man wants to make a wager. Sucker agrees. Local calls weather bureau. Man asks question and learns the truth. Man shells out for next glass of small batch, locally-distilled whiskey.I don’t know when I first learned this fact, but I do have memories of citing it to friends in college who derided my hometown’s infamous weather. Yes, it rains in Seattle, but you should see New York. Or what about New Orleans or Miami, each with more than 60 inches. These were dens of soggy iniquity compared to our practically arid 39 inches or so. Like many Seattleites, I knew that dripping dreariness was our image, but I wanted to show that it really wasn’t so bad. Hey, we are nice folks up here and people shouldn’t poke fun at us. Being an honest sort, I did not make any bets myself.Even those who admit that Seattle can be wet and cloudy, turn this toward an advantage. Our mild, maritime climate translates to good growing conditions, healthy skin, less mental stress, and one more reason to drink coffee. A 1924 pamphlet distributed by the Chamber of Commerce labeled the weather “filtered sunshine” and described how it is “best for all, and vital to the development of the most energetic peoples.” Others, such as Archibald Menzies, botanist on George Vancouver’s 1792 exploration of Puget Sound, simply summed up the local weather as “salubrious.”Some people might think of Seattleites as weather wimps. Those big meanies laugh when the local National Weather Service office holds a press conference to announce the potential for a storm that may drop an entire inch of snow here. They chide us when the media devotes columns of text and minutes of airtime to a record-breaking heat wave of 90° days. Sure, we may not have temperatures that require an investment in a small farm’s worth of warm clothes or our own ice making machines, but we do have weather that many so-called weather studs cannot handle —monotonous gray, sprinkly, dark, and dank.I would ask these hardy folks: “If we are such wimps, then why do you always paint a picture of how bad our weather is and wonder how anyone can live here?” They think they are tough because they experience the extremes but how many of them have a medical condition—Seasonal Affective Disorder—named for an entire season of gray, overcast, moisture-rich, low light days? I wonder how many of them could survive a winter where it rained 90 out of 120 days or spring temperatures that persist into July? They are merely weather sprinters, having to survive a few days of –30-degree temperatures, storms that drop two feet of snow, or a week of 105-degree-plus weather. We are the marathoners, enduring months of rain and weeks where the sun is only a rumor. So laugh at us if you want. We’ll be out in the rain taking a nice walk.This newsletter is modified from The Weather chapter in my book The Seattle Street-Smart Naturalist. PlanetGeo Podcast - Hey, listen to me and two other geodorks chatting about rocks. Super fun. Honored to be interviewed by them. – November 15, 2025 – Wild in Seattle/Seattle Walks – Burien Public Library – 3:00 P.M. – I’ll be talking about my books Wild in Seattle and Seattle Walks.– November 22, 2025 – Holiday Bookfest – 2:00 – 4:00 P.M. – Phinney Neighborhood Center – I’ll be joining a wonderful group of writers selling our books…just in time for the upcoming holidays. Always a fun event.– December 4, 2025 – Homewaters – 6:00 P.M. – Port Townsend Public Library – I’ll be in PT talking about my book Homewaters.– December 6, 2025 – Wild in Seattle/Seattle Walks – 4:00 P.M. – Port Townsend First Baptist Church - I’ll be talking about my books Wild in Seattle and Seattle Walks for one of my favorite groups, the Quimper Geological Society up in PT. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Spiders rarely get much empathy, in real life or in fiction. Often depicted as scary, evil, repulsive, deadly, malevolent, and horrible, they seem for many, to personify, or arachnify, the worst aspects of the natural world. Consider Shelob, the notorious spider of Lord of the Rings. Tolkien wrote that she was “an evil thing in spider-form…and she served none but herself, drinking the blood of elves and men, bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow.” Now, that is not a beast to trifle with.In a more Charlotte-esque take, for the last month or two, I have been privy to watching a far more benign spider, at least in regard to elves and men. She sits just outside my office window in a handsome web of her own making. As is wont for her species, Araneus diadematus (the cross spider), she rests head down in the center of her web, waiting with one leg attached to a guy wire, or signal line. When a potential meal triggers the line, she takes off to nab the soon to be dead visitor. I have been privileged to watch several times as she immobilizes a house fly with a bite. The toxin she injects paralyzes the victim, which she then swaddles in silk. Each time I see her capture her meal, I am amazed by how quickly she wraps her victim, usually in about minute, rotating the bug, as if it is a rotisserie. When completed she has nice, tidy bundle, ready to be eaten, like a satisfying burrito, rich in nutrition and texture. She then returns to the center of the web, I assume sated until another fly or butterfly inadvertently pops in for a pre-meal stop.Although the web appears to be in the same place, as if she’s set up a long term tenancy, I know that is an illusion. Each web I see is probably new, for she, like most orb weaving spiders regularly eats her web. Webphagia keeps her web in pristine, ready-for-the-next-victim mode and supplies nutrients. One study found that about 25% of a spider’s diet consisted of pollen captured in the sticky spirals of their web and the other 75% consisted of flying insects, mainly small dipterans and hymenopterans.What this study failed to note is that female cross spiders also consume potential mates. Fortunately, other researchers have not overlooked this arachnidian dining delight. Two British researchers found that the much smaller males are eaten up to 25% of the time, typically before copulation, when placed in proximity to a female. Males do not benefit in any way from this behavior (duh!), whereas females clearly do, by bulking up on a food source that was an evolutionary dead end, as well as one with the precise nutritional requirements to produce eggs. Females ate only smaller males; the Brits hypothesized that females perhaps understood that bigger males had a talent to feed themselves, and thus would pass this trait onto their progeny. I know that I don’t have much longer to watch the spider outside my window. With winter coming, she is winding down her desire for food and for life. Hopefully, she hasn’t made a romantic meal out of all her suitors and will soon build a cocoon to house the hundreds of eggs she’ll lay. The next spring, the adorable, half-a-lentil-sized, yellow babies will emerge. En masse. We have been fortunate to encounter this writhing gang of wrigglers several times. Once the spiderlings popped out on the handle part of our backyard gate and once on the door to our backyard cottage. We were slightly inconvenienced but did our best not to wound or kill the babies. They were far too cute, plus, I knew that soon they’d be big enough to head out into our garden and around our house to eat their fair share of bugs, including mosquitoes. Thanks Spiders. Happy Halloween.By the way, spiders are notoriously hard to identify. Typically one needs a microscope to key out the species, often relying on a careful focus on their genitalia. But that’s a discussion for another time. The spider outside my window, however, sports a highly identifiable feature. On her back is a distinct white cross, clearly standing out against her tan body. The many names of this species include cross spider, European garden spider, and crowned orbweaver spider. They are not native to the PNW, having been introduced from Europe. One thing I often consider when I don’t know the identity of an organism; what I see is common, meaning I go with the species most likely to be there, not some seldom seen species. When we were in Japan, we regularly encountered this species, the Joro spider (Trichonephila clavata). Native to east Asia, they have a three inch leg span and can build webs up to ten feet across. We usually saw them on the side of the trail but in one, rarely hiked section, about a mile long, they spanned the trail and we had to walk with a hiking pole held in front of us like a narwhal’s tusk. I am typically pretty chill with spiders but these big ones were a bit much and their webs super sticky. By the way, they have now been found in the US, in the south. Who knows how long before they reach the PNW? Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Probably many of you know of the overlooked little sibling, who loses out in attention to her or his elder. And, yet, that youngster certainly deserves to be noticed for all of their many assets. Such is the case of our local maples and the Vine maple, Acer circinatum, a beautiful shrub, which rarely gets the love of its sister-taxon bigleaf maple, Acer macrophyllum. (We have one other local, native species Acer glabrum, the Rocky Mountain maple.) Taller, bigger-leaved, and more abundant, bigleafs suck the well-deserved attention of most arborphiles.(Then there are all the other maples, at least 79 different species, subspecies, and cultivars listed as Seattle street trees and more than 240 varieties at the Arboretum; many of these, particularly the red maple, our most common street maple, also out vie Vine’s for attention.)Taking a step back, in time and space, the closest relative of vine maples, is not the bigleaf but the Japanese maple (A. japonicum), native to Japan. (Coincidentally, I just realized that we saw this species in many locations on our recent trip to Japan.) Both species evolved in Asia, then our species migrated across a Bering Land Bridge and took up home here, and has remained unchanged, or at least un-evolved into a new species, since that arrival, between about 2.6 and 5.3 million years ago. Vine maples weren’t the lone Acer species to make this adventure; it’s happened six times and researchers are still debating as to whether Acer evolved here and first moved east before coming back “home” or whether they evolved in the east, or the north, and bounced back and forth between east and west over geological time. Such are the conundrums of paleobotanists.Although I do love the bigleafs, with their extraordinary leaves that can be as much as 18 inches wide and green jacket of mosses and ferns, I have a soft spot for Vines, particularly in the autumn. Widespread in the low to mid elevations of our mountains, Vine maples are a dominant understory plant and one of the largest, almost more a small tree than a shrub. We have two in our backyard, exhibiting their brilliant fall foliage that electrifies our yard, as well as PNW landscapes with scarlets, crimsons, tangerines, and vermilions. Their beauty adds a grace note of stunning vibrancy to our verdant forests.The first to make a formal collection of this stunning plant were Mr. Lewis and Mr. Clark on October 30 or 31, 1805. The duo and their expedition cohorts were along the banks of the Columbia River. Other fans of the plant would follow. For example, David Douglas wrote in the 1820s that the plants are “called by the voyageurs Bois de diable from the obstruction it gives them in passing through the woods.” Around the same time, John Scouler wrote that “from the slender branches of this tree, the native tribes make the hoops of their scoop-nets, which are employed for taking salmon at the Rapids.”As I typically do, I want to veer over to language and the name Acer circinatum. It’s a curious combination. Acer is the old Latin name for maples, which at first might not seem terribly unusual but consider that Acer is derived from the Proto-European Ac, meaning sharp or pointed. A clear reference to the pointed leaves of maples, Acer also led to acrid and acerbic. (One early writer also stated that Acer owes its origin to the hard wood of some maples, which was used for lances and pikes.) In contrast, circinatum means round-leaved. So we have the pointed, round-leaved maple. Split into an octopus of slender trunks, our backyard vine maple illustrates another trait of the species. If cut or killed by fire, the stems resprout, with 10 to more than 50 clonal shoots popping up, often within a year. And, if those resprouts get pinned to the forest floor, they will resprout again, producing clones that can sort of crawl across the landscape, helping to flourish the understory. Our backyard vine maples are one the great pleasures of autumn. Each year they tentacle higher and higher into the light, always bursting out of the shadows and blazing into a palette of beauty—the little sibling revealing its secret treasures. Excited once again to participate in the 2025 Holiday Book fest, on November 22, from 2pm to 4pm at the Phinney Neighborhood Center. I’ll be there with 27 other fabulous authors. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

The contrast couldn’t be greater. One moment I am in the Iwate Tsunami Memorial Museum in Rikuzentakada, Japan, watching videos of The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in which towering waves wipe out town after town. I couldn’t help but feeling that the water was a living beast, malevolent and determined as it ripped through buildings, surged up streets, and wreaked unimaginable havoc, death, and destruction. The next moment, I am a five-minute walk from the Museum standing on a 41-foot-high, concrete seawall, watching six-inch waves wash onshore, their susurrating sound calming and benevolent. For the week leading up to this point, Marjorie and I had been hiking the Michinoku Coastal Trail, which runs for 600 miles along the east coast of the northern part of Honshu, Japan’s main island. Our trip, led by WalkJapan, covered parts of the trail from its northern point of Hachinohe to Kesennuma, about 150 highway miles south. It was an amazing adventure along the coast with steep cliffs, ridge walking, rocky beaches, small towns, a blowhole, lush forests, and verdant ravines, as well as good food and revivifying onsens.Part of the reason we chose to walk this trail and a main reason it exists, is that all of it passes through areas devastated by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, which killed more than 20,000 people (more than 2,500 are still missing). One goal of the trail is to help introduce visitors to this region, known as Tohoku, which totals about 18% of the country with about 7% of the population; it is seldom visited by foreigners.The tsunami that hit the coast was generated by a 30-foot rise of the sea floor during the magnitude 9.0 earthquake. That land shift displaced the water that created the tsunami that hit the coast. The same thing occurred in 1700 with the Cascadia Subduction Zone, except this tsunami traveled at 500 mph across the ocean.Some of the most striking aspects of our hike were the extensive seawalls, such as the one in Rikuzentakada, which had been built in response to the destruction. Every town, large and small, and even every little fishing port, that we passed through had a seawall or other similar protective structure. The concrete, which could be 20 to 40 feet tall, stretched for miles in larger bays, wrapping the shoreline in a protective cocoon. Smaller areas might contain only a finger or two of concrete, helping to ameliorate the effects of a wall of water. In these locations, additional protection came from massive (up to 10 feet wide) hollow, concrete tetrahedrons and tetrapods.We also passed through several valleys where the seawall stretched from valley wall to valley wall. At one, we passed through a tunnel in the wall, large enough for a big truck to pass through. A thick steel door blocked the seaward end of the tunnel though there was also a human-sized door that you could pass through to reach the sea. A significant challenge of the seawalls is how these great behemoths of concrete separate the sea from the land. The desire for protection seems to have won over the desire to be connected to the water, often leading to communities with historical maritime livelihoods having to adapt their lifeways, and I would imagine, how they define themselves. And then there are the many animal species, now effectively prisoned on one side or another of the wall. The immense seawalls are not simply the product of the 2011 destruction; they also result from tsunamis that have struck Japan relatively regularly (more than a dozen since 1900). Because such events occur within human memory and in oral and written records, they form a collective consciousness of a community, which guides actions. Despite this information, sadly, people didn’t react by getting to higher ground in 2011, but that quake and subsequent tsunami were also unprecedented as the largest in recorded history. Some people worry, too, that the new higher seawalls are no guaranty of safety and may, in fact, provide a false sense of security.Despite the extensive seawalls, as I walked along the coast, I found it hard to realize the destruction because of the extensive rebuilding. In a way that was a sign, that so many buildings were so new; it was rare to see pre-2011 structures. But the videos and photographs we saw at the museum, which showed many areas we had walked through in the previous week, clearly illustrated the unprecedented and previously-unimaginable power and devastation caused by the tsunami. It was truly sobering and sad to see and imagine. Where this hit me most was at a cemetery near Jodogohama Beach, one of the most beautiful spots on our trip. When the tsunami struck the coast, not only did the water kill the living, but in many places it unearthed the dead, completely washing away cemeteries. In the years since, people have collected many thousands of uprooted tombstones, which have been relocated to the nearest cemetery, where they remain, orphaned from their original location because there is neither time nor money to try and figure out where they came from and to return them. Seeing this small testimonial, I couldn’t help but weep for the dead, for the survivors, for the communities.I feel incredibly fortunate to have spent a week spent hiking the Michinoku Coastal Trail. So many amazing sights, locations, tastes, and new experiences. It was truly humbling to walk by the seawalls and to think about the devastation and tragedy, as well as the unbridled forces of nature of the earthquake and tsunami. On one level it’s hard to walk past the massive encasements of concrete and not wonder about what is being lost as the walls sever the connection between land and sea but watching the videos of the tragedies, it’s easy to understand why the walls have gone up. We all want to protect our homes and businesses and families.I often celebrate geology and the geological links between people and place but I also recognize its potential to change people’s lives. It is important to be reminded of this fact and the awesome power that always lurks below and to not think that we have dominion over the planet. Thinking otherwise is a sure way to disaster; nature always bats last. If you have missed my mellifluous voice, here’s a link to new podcast produced by HistoryLink, which is an interview with me about Douglas firs. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

For many years, I have been a fan of Charles Dickens’ novels. In case you didn’t know, he was quite the writer. His books are funny, atmospheric, and rich in detail, both personal and geographic. He also came up with some splendid names, including Mr. Pumblechook, Inspector Bucket, Sargeant Buzfuz, Uriah Heep, and Harold Skimpole. Skimpole, a scheming mooch, comes from one of my favorite books, Bleak House (published serially from 1852-1853), which details the epic case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.Bleak House also contains two splendid references to geology. (If you don’t want to read it, there’s a wonderful 15-part BBC series.) The first is in the book’s amazing opening paragraph.London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.Megalosaurus—the word and name for an extinct animal—had entered the lexicon on February 20, 1824, at a Geological Society of London meeting. William Buckland (also famous for his passionate study of coprolites, or fossil poop) described fossil teeth and bones from a carnivorous reptile at least forty feet long and weighing as much as an elephant. In honor of its larger-than-life size, at least larger than any known, living land animal, Buckland named it Megalosaurus, the Great Lizard. His description was the first ever of the group of extinct animals that would be named and classified as dinosaur. That historic event though wouldn’t take place until 1842, when Richard Owen coined the new word.Few probably truly understood the size or significance of Megalosaurus until the year after the first publication of Bleak House. On June 10, 1854, at the grand reopening of the Crystal Palace, the public got to see the world’s first life-sized models of dinosaurs. Despite the existence of the term in scientific circles, very few people used the word dinosaur; the most common descriptor for the models, which included Megalosaurus, along with Igaunodon, and Hylaeosaurus, was antediluvian beasts or monsters. Made of brick, tiles, cement, and iron, the fantastical creatures had been created by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807-1894).I’ve long been fascinated by Mr. Hawkins, a sort of Zelig for his times. He drew illustrations for Charles Darwin; hosted an infamous New Year’s Eve dinner in a dino, which included Richard Owen; attended the infamous meeting of the first presentation of Darwin’s and Alfred Russel Wallace’s theory of natural selection; worked on the first life-sized dinosaurs in the USA (only to have them destroyed by nefarious means); and still had time to be a bigamist. About a decade ago, I wanted to write a book titled The Man Who Invented Dinosaurs, but no one was interested so I abandoned the project.One can still see Hawkins’ antediluvian beasts at the Crystal Palace in London, as the photograph below shows. Fortunately, most of them have been restored to their former beauty. Anatomically incorrect—primarily because Buckland, Owen, and others in the first generation of paleontologists lacked enough specimens—the Crystal Palace Megalosaurus were scientifically up-to-date and must have been exciting to see for those who had read Bleak House. Even for those who hadn’t, the Crystal Palace dinosaurs were stunning, and the beginning of the world’s long-term love affair with all things dinosaurian. As exciting as is Mr. Dicken’s mention of Megalosaurus, I am a bit more partial to his second reference in Bleak House. It comes about a third of the way into the book when Mr. and Mrs. Bayham Badger visit Esther Summerson, one of the key characters in the novel. Mrs. Bayham Badger had previously been married to the now dead Captain Swosser and Professor Dingo, neither of whom, along with Mrs. Badger, possessed a first name. "People objected to Professor Dingo when we were staying in the north of Devon after our marriage," said Mrs. Badger, "that he disfigured some of the houses and other buildings by chipping off fragments of those edifices with his little geological hammer. But the professor replied that he knew of no building save the Temple of Science. The principle is the same, I think?"I am not recommending that everyone go out and follow in Professor Dingo’s footsteps but it is noble thought and I was glad to learn that my passion for building stone has had a long and illustrious history. I admit that I have joked about whacking off a building chunk or two when leading building stone walks but want to make it clear that I have never done so...yet. I have been known though to peel up layers of weakened sandstone and even splash vinegar on a building or two to test whether it was made of limestone or sandstone.I am certainly not the first to point out Dicken’s fascination with geology. Geologic musings, his and others, regularly showed up his newspaper Household Words, as well as in other publications where he wrote. Here’s one of my favorite observations of his, which is technically about science but clearly an homage to geology: “…in those rocks she [science] has found, and read aloud, the great stone book which is the history of the earth, even when darkness sat upon the face of the deep. Along their craggy sides, she has traced the footprints of birds and beasts, whose shapes were never seen by man. From within them she has brought the bones, and pieced together the skeletons, of monsters that would have crushed the noted dragons of the fables at a blow.” (The Examineer, December 9, 1848, p. 787-788) As Adelene Buckland wrote of this passage in Victorian Literature and Culture in 2007 (v. 35. p. 679-694), “This ideal science is geology.” I can add nothing further to this fine observation.And, a quick note to let you that I will be taking a two-week vacation from my newsletter. I will return on October 16.October 14 - Secret’s of Seattle’s Botany - 6pm (Zoom) - Birds Connect Seattle - If you asked early citizens of Seattle which natural feature best symbolized the region, few would have hesitated in responding “Douglas firs.” These trees were everywhere, but they were not the only plants in the area. In this talk, David describes the presettlement botanical landscape of Seattle by examining modern clues, such as neighborhood names, big stumps, and big trees, that provide hints for telling this story and for showing the complexity and beauty of Seattle 150 years ago. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Several years ago, Marjorie and I and Taylor (our pooch) decided to canoe the Duwamish River in Seattle. Our plan was to put in just above the sort of confluence with the Black River; I use sort of because what’s left of the Black River is the merest remnant of what was the former outlet river of Lake Washington. We would then float about 11 miles down to the mouth of the Duwamish at Elliott Bay. As experienced canoeists from Utah (Taylor included), we thought the trip would take a couple of hours, taking advantage of the gentle current.We were having a dandy time, aided by a downstream wind, until about mile 5, near some Boeing buildings, when paddling became much harder. It felt like we were now going the opposite direction—upstream against the current. Perhaps, we thought, we were bonking, not having eaten much, but then we came to a startling and never-before-encountered canoeing experience. We were paddling upstream, not against the river current but against the Pacific Ocean and the incoming tide, a phenomenon not felt in our Utah-canoeing careers. Who would ever think of tides on a river? Clearly, we hadn’t. Suffice it to say, with our tails between our legs (though Taylor didn’t cotton to such behavior), we abandoned the trip and headed home but not before a wee bit of an epic getting back to the put in. (That’s another story.)I am regularly reminded of this experience, primarily because friends of ours annually put together a river trip on the Skagit River. Each August, when the weather is fine and the timing is right, the trip begins a few miles from the mouth of the river. We paddle down river with the current to a massive sandbar, where we pull the boats up on the sand, establish a base of fun (eating, sitting, strolling, swimming, etc.), and hang out until we get to embody a cliche—a rising tide lifts all boats. (Apparently, this aphorism relates to the economy but being literal and more nature focused, I prefer to stick to its true meaning.)(Above is a 53-second video of the advancing tide.)This is one my favorite times on the sandbar: watching as the tidal advance moves toward us. At first, it seems far away, barely inching forward, but then you look again and you realize, wow, the front is hauling tuchas in our direction. As the tide floods in, everyone gets in their boats, waits patiently until they float (which is not quick with four people and a dog), and heads out into the river. Aided by the incoming Pacific Ocean, we then paddle the couple of miles back to our put in. (This reminds me of the legendary Utah river trip question of “Do we end the trip where we started?” No we don’t…unless you’re on the Skagit!) Truly a delightful day!Our recent adventure got me thinking about tides in Puget Sound and wondering which river has the greatest tidal influence. By this, I mean, on which river do tidal waters travel farthest upriver. Figuring this would be pretty easy to find out, I reached out to several potamologists I know. Reader, I was wrong. No one tracks such fascinating information; it would require setting up numerous gauges along rivers, which costs too much money and doesn’t really aid those who focus on riparian issues. My river-focused colleagues told me that how far a flood tide travels depends primarily on the gradient of the lower stretch of the river. The shallower the gradient the greater the incoming water propagates upriver. Not surprisingly, geology dictates the gradient. In Puget Sound, lower gradient rivers, such as the Snohomish, Snoqualmie, Duwamish, and Sammamish, were carved during the last Ice Age beneath the Puget lobe glacier. In contrast, higher gradient rivers (on average 10x steeper), such as the Stillaguamish, Nisqually, and Deschutes, formed post-glaciation as rivers draining the Cascades cut into the Ice Age sediments. In other words, the tidal influence should tend to be greatest on rivers in the glacial valleys (low gradient) and less in the post-glacial valleys.River gradient is not only the primary factor influencing the tidal/river interface, but also the most fixed, at least relative to the human time scale. Far more mutable are downstream flow, tidal magnitude, wind, and atmospheric pressure. For example, winter tends to have the highest tides, but winter river discharge rates tend to be higher, too, which prevents upstream propagation. In contrast, a lower high tide in summer might travel farther because of less flow in the river. Also on a human time scale is development. Dredging, straightening, and wetland alteration have all altered river discharge and tidal advance, as have dikes, tide gates, and levees. In other words, how tides influence Puget Sound rivers is complicated, incredibly dynamic, and always variable.Consider the river where I first encountered the protean world of tide vs river, the Duwamish. Below are two graphs illustrating the variation caused by tides. Looking at the graph, I realize that Marjorie, Taylor, and I had been on tidally-influence waters the entire time we floated the Duwamish. We had been fortunate to have spent part of our river trip on an ebbing, or slack, tide and not the entire time battling the flood tide.Two things stand out about these graphs. On the upper one, you can see the trouble we faced on our canoe trip—during flood stage the discharge is negative, meaning the entire river is basically defying the most obvious effects of gravity (e.g. water flows downhill) and headed backwards. The second is simply how the river changes so dramatically with the tides; it’s a beautiful manifestation of how water is the life blood of the planet, pulsing rhythmically with the twice-daily interactions of the moon, sun, and Earth. As I have written before (Tethers of Tide and Time and Tide), most of us (and I recognize that I am one of us) overlook or ignore this astounding feat and feature of the natural world. I get this tidal blindness. We don’t have to think about the tide; it has little apparent effect on our daily lives, except perhaps with an unusually high or low one. Yet, tides are arguably one of the planet’s great natural history events, and for those who live in Seattle or near a coast, they are also one of the easiest to see and to experience. So, go on, get outside and watch the wonderful changing of the water but make sure you look at a tide chart ere you do.Word of the Week - Potamologist - One who studies rivers, from Greek potamos (river). A printer named George Smithfield appears to be the person who coined this splendid word in 1829, though potamus has been plying its way through English for centuries. Consider such words as Mesopotamia (between two rivers) and hippopotamus (river horse).Still Time to RegisterSeptember 19, 2025 - HistoryLunch - HistoryLink - I have long been a fan and supporter of this fine organization. If you are not aware of it, the website is the site for history about Washington state, often bringing to light overlooked, under appreciated, and forgotten but vital stories. HistoryLunch is their annual fund raising event and I am honored to be the keynote speaker this year. The event is titled Is the Mountain Out? So if you want to support a worthy cause, come on by. Here’s the registration link. September 20, 2025 - Clima Incognita: Planning For An Unknown Climate – Jaipur Literature Festival: Seattle – Town Hall – 12:00 PM – 12:45 PM – I will be in conversation with author John Vaillant (Fire Weather, a brilliant book) and Brinda Sarathy (professor and Dean of the University of Washington: Bothell School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences). Should be fun and interesting, along with the rest of the festival. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Recently, I had the good fortune to be interviewed by Bellamy Pailthorp, the environmental reporter at KNKX radio. We chatted about my Dead Trees Tell No Lies essay from my book Wild in Seattle. Because of this, I decided to repeat this essay, which originally made it into your mailboxes in October 2023. I’ve made a few updates in the story. Here’s a link to our conversation. And, at the bottom of this newsletter is a coincidental connection about berries (which I wrote about last week) and a Union soldier in the Civil War. Trees die every day of every year but something unique happened late autumn or early spring 1,100 years ago. Numerous Douglas firs perished, not because of disease or fire, the two typical culprits of that era, but because of an earthquake, or quakes, one of the most noteworthy seismic events in recent Pacific Northwest history. Still extant, the dead trees, some more than several hundred years old when they died, occur at six locations across Puget Sound.Price Lake (just east of Lake Cushman on the Olympic Peninsula) - A quake-induced stream-impoundment submerged a forest. Researchers sampled 21 trees, including several that required an underwater chainsaw, which sounds sort of nutty and fascinating.Hamma Hamma (Hood Canal) - A rockslide dammed a creek forming a lake that killed a forest that the geologists found.Dry Bed Lake - Yep, once again the earth shook, rocks trembled and fell, and created a temporary lake. Researchers were only able to collect these trees in a severe drought.Lake Washington - This time an entire grove slid into the lake, off the SE end of Mercer Island. They are still there, standing upright. In 1916, the top of one tree pierced the 78-foot ferry Triton carrying 25 passengers. It sank but no one was hurt.Lake Sammamish - Another grove, another landslide, more dead upright trees. Note two clusters on the map below, which may indicate two slides or a loss of trees. Several of the snags stick above waterline. West Point (Discovery Park, Seattle) - The ground snapped, trees died, and one was carried by a tsunami to a beach. This random event may have been witnessed by people who seasonally camped there to harvest shellfish. Lucky them.In December 1992, geologists published a series of papers with a startling conclusion: around 1,100 years a massive earthquake whacked the Seattle area, causing uplift of 23 feet. The quake occurred on what the scientists dubbed the Seattle Fault, a 25-mile zone of weakness running from Issaquah through downtown Seattle to the eastern edge of Bainbridge Island. (When you ride the Bainbridge Ferry, you pass by Restoration Point, thrust out of the water when the land shattered.) Relatively shallow, the quake measured about magnitude 7, not much stronger than the 2001 Nisqually earthquake but with much more significant ground shaking because it occurred closer to the surface. When (not if) a similar quake hits again, it will cause billions of dollars in damage.One question that has long niggled geologists is the specific date (more exact than “about 1100 years ago”) of the quake, or quakes. The more details, such as timing, magnitude, and extant of damage, researchers have, the better they can model and predict future earthquakes and, they hope, help planners prepare for worst case scenarios. Geologists have known since 1992 that the best evidence for a precise date could be found in the annual growth rings of trees, which respond directly to climatic conditions preserving a detailed record of the history of a tree. They further knew that the quake created numerous geological events that killed or buried trees across the region. All the geologists had to do was locate trees, get samples, and read the evidence.In September 2023, in a research article in Science Advances, an international team reported that they had solved the dating mystery, narrowing the date of the quake(s) to 923 or 924 CE. It is a tour de force and beautiful example of science, taking a unique set of features and combining technology with old school-out-in-the-field, mucky, muddy detective work to answer an essential question.After the researchers gathered the trees, which they did over the past 30 years, often in less-than-ideal situations, they compared ring-width patterns. They also compared the trees with an absolutely dated reference set of 27 cores from Vancouver Island that spanned the years 715 to 1990. And, finally, they independently radiocarbon-dated the samples. Everything pointed to 923/924 but what was surprising is that the researchers found that there may have been two quakes, one on the Seattle Fault and one on the Saddle Mountain Fault (near Lake Cushman and labeled in the map above as SMFZ), that acted as double-blow, rupturing the ground twice within hours to months.This is not good news. We all know that one quake is bad. If a second quake struck shortly after, infrastructure and emergency planning, not to forget the landscape itself, would be vulnerable and prone to more catastrophic issues. But now that these scientists have provided the information on what did happen and what could happen, planners have the opportunity to help build in more resiliency. As my pal Scott says, “Get to work you.”All too often in our modern world (unfortunately, now more than ever) people question science and scientists, claiming that they have agendas or are only interested in making money from their research. Over the past 25 years I have interviewed dozens of scientists—in academia, government, and consulting—and have found all of them to be committed to doing the best work they can without any agenda or financial gain. This study certainly exemplifies the best of what scientists do: solve a mystery to help further our understanding of our world, often with the goal of making a better world.September 19, 2025 - HistoryLunch - HistoryLink - I have long been a fan and supporter of this fine organization. If you are not aware of it, the website is the site for history about Washington state, often bringing to light overlooked, under appreciated, and forgotten-but-vital stories. HistoryLunch is their annual fund raising event and I am honored to be the keynote speaker this year. The event is titled Is the Mountain Out? So if you want to support a worthy cause, come on by. Here’s the registration link. September 20, 2025 - Clima Incognita: Planning For An Unknown Climate – Jaipur Literature Festival: Seattle – Town Hall – 12:00 PM – 12:45 PM – I will be in conversation with author John Vaillant (Fire Weather, a brilliant book) and Brinda Sarathy (professor and Dean of the University of Washington: Bothell School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences). Should be fun and interesting, along with the rest of the festival.October 14 - Secrets of Seattle Botany - 6pm - BirdsConnectSeattle - I will talking about what Seattle looked like botanically when the first white settlers arrive. This is a virtual class. Here’s a link to register.Just after sending out my newsletter on berries last week, Marjorie was helping our friend Andy Nettell of Stellar Books. He had asked her to transcribe a letter he had from June 12, 1864. It had been written by a Union soldier named Laurenz to his mother. He was located in Georgia and his troop had recently gotten a resupply of rations after minimal food for the previous 12 days. Fun to read of the ripe berries (dew, straw, and mul), and other fruit, that he ate. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

This past weekend we hiked up to Marmot Pass. Called by one guide book writer the Champagne Walk of the Olympic Mountains, it is famed for its wildflowers. We were too late for the wildflowers but timed it perfectly for berries. We saw black, red, blue, pruinose, yellow, and orange ones; yummy, mealy, and disappointing varieties; and ground hugging, shrubby, and sky-reaching plants. It was truly a stunning display of fecundity and hope for future success for what is a berry but an investment in the next generation.More prosaically, what is a berry? My botany pals would define a berry as a fruit produced from the ovary of a single flower that has fleshy pulp and multiple seeds. In contrast, a drupe (e.g. avocado and peach) has a stone and pome (e.g. apple and pear) has a core. Then there’s aggregate fruits (not a berry, such as raspberries and blackberries) produced by a single flower that has more than one ovary, and accessory fruits (e.g. the non-berry strawberries), which originate from a developing plant part other than the ovary.Since most of my friends, and I suspect, most of yours are not botanists, or pedants, the more practical definition, and the one that describes what I encountered, is a small, generally edible, pulpy fruit. By the way, can you name the world’s most popular berry? Until recently I did not know the correct answer and was rather surprised by it. Before providing the answer, let me share some of the “berries” we saw on our hike up to Marmot Pass. Devil’s Club - One of the more lovely fruiting plants, but also one of the more scary looking, armed with enough spines galore to keep most beasts away. Bears, though, laugh—why shouldn’t they—at such feeble defenses. They consume gazillions of the red fruit, soon depositing them across the landscape, like an ursine Johnny Appleseed, though in a less hands-on, more behind-the-scenes method. Botanists refer to this fecal-based system of seed dispersal as endozoochory and have found that it is a fundamental way that seeds of a many plants are dispersed. Ecologists also refer to diploendozoochory, in which seeds pass through two or more guts, such as when a cougar eats a mourning dove, and poops the remains of the bird, and the berries the bird consumed. Ain’t life and death and poop fascinating? Technically, devil’s club produces drupes not berries.Serviceberry - Members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition regularly encountered and ate serviceberry, mentioning them 63 times; they could not though agree on spelling the name, which they did 13 different ways, including service, servis, and survice. Most sources claim that the name comes from the shrub’s resemblance to the European service tree (Sorbus sp.). In contrast, William Bryant Logan in his book Oak: The Frame of Civilization, claims the name comes “because its tasty fruits set in spring just about the time that the ground thaws enough to bury the dead.” Serviceberries are actually pomes, like apples. Juniper - At the high point of our hike, we found one of my favorite subalpine plants, the common juniper. Ground hugging and often overlooked, the needley shrub produces small, pruinose bluish berries. Well, actually they are not berries but are fleshy cones, most famous as the flavoring for gin; the word gin comes from genever, the Dutch name for juniper. Perhaps surprisingly, the species we saw, Juniperus communis, is the species first used in flavoring this gift from the gods; the species is circumboreal, including the Netherlands, the original home of gin.Salal - Arguably the quintessential understory plant of the PNW, salal produces a dark blue to black fruit, long relished by Native people. David Douglas noted the name as salal, not shallon (the name used by Meriwether Lewis and which is now the specific epithet), and that it was abundant (“as is very correctly observed by Mr. Menzies.”) Douglas first encountered it on April 8, 1825 and wrote: “On stepping on the shore Gaultheria Shallon was the first plant I took in my hands. So pleased was I that I could scarcely see anything but it.” After tasting the fruit, he added: “by far the best in the country; should the seeds now sent home rise, as I hope they may, I have little doubt but it will ere long find a place in the fruit garden as well as in the ornamental.” Nor are these berries; instead they are the swollen sepals encasing the seeds.Huckleberry - At last, a true berry! In 1859, Henry Custer, a topographer on the Northwest Boundary Survey, summed up many people’s modern experience with this amazing berry. “To withstand the temptation of a large tract literally covered with these delicious berries goes beyond the moral strength…To halt & eat & to eat & halt is all you can do under these circumstances; and if, during an hour or two, you can manage to bring yourself…through one of these belts where these berries grow exclusively, you may say you have done well.” Huckleberry comes from the English whortleberry, also known as bilberry (Nordic origin), blueberry, hurtleberry, and blaeberry (Scottish). Not surprisingly, Lewis and Clark had their usual spelling challenges with the word, going with hucklebury, huckkleberry, and huckleburry. With autumn in the air—at least I have been grasping at any sign of the impending loveliness of fall that I can—hikers in the mountains will see fewer and fewer wildflowers. We may be saddened by the loss of color and aroma and beauty of the mountain ranges’ floral delights but I know that I found equal pleasure in enjoying and celebrating the bounty of berries, be they berry or drupe, pome or swollen sepal, accessory fruit or otherwise. And, I know that next year, these future nuggets of life will continue the great circle of existence, feeding the senses of human and beast alike. Perhaps you thought I’d forgotten my question. I have not. Bananas are the most popular berry in the world. In fact, bananas are by far the most popular fruit in the world. September 6 - Waterfront Park - Opening Day Celebration - I’ll be down at the Waterfront, at the south end (east side of Alaskan Way S, between Yesler Way & S. Washington St.) at 3:00 and 5:00 P.M. giving short talks about the history of this area.September 14 - Green Lake Walk - 11:00AM - Green Lake Library - I will be leading a free, one-hour, walking tour of the Green Lake neighborhood. Here’s the info to register. You need to call the library.October 14 - Secrets of Seattle Botany - 6pm - BirdsConnectSeattle - I will talking about what Seattle looked like botanically when the first white settlers arrive. This is a virtual class. Here’s a link to register. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Last week, I had the privilege of seeing one of the most famous boats to ply the Pacific Ocean: the Western Flyer. Built in Tacoma in 1937 for the sardine fishery in Monterey Bay, California, the 76-foot boat achieved its notoriety through Ed Ricketts’ and John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez. The book details the collecting trip they made in the summer of 1940. Best known as the model for “Doc” in Steinbeck’s novel, Cannery Row, and author of the legendary Between Pacific Tides, Ricketts, and Steinbeck, planned to survey marine life by collecting in the infamous sea. To do so, they chartered the Western Flyer. The boat’s subsequent life was not nearly so celebrated. One Seattle-based owner changed the boat’s name to Gemini and moved it to Alaska to harvest red king crab. Another owner used it to transport salmon; this owner also crashed and sank the boat. By 2012, and additional owners later, the Gemini was in the Swinomish Channel, moored under the Twin Bridges near the Swinomish Casino. Neither seaworthy nor remotely ship shape, it sank again, was refloated, then sank yet again, this time for six months. Refloated for a final time, the derelict, mud strewn, more-or-less wreck was towed to Port Townsend and docked by a new owner. He had plans to refurbish the Western Flyer and use it as a tourist attraction in an artificial moat in Salinas, California, Steinbeck’s hometown.Finally, and fortunately, in February 2015, marine geologist John Gregg bought the battered boat. As a long-time fan of The Log from the Sea of Cortez, Gregg worked with the Western Flyer Foundation and Port Townsend Shipwrights Co-Op to restore the legendary boat with plans to make it available as a research and teaching vessel. They finished the restoration in 2023, and the boat is now meeting their goals with education and scientific programming. (If you are interested in the full life and times of the Western Flyer, check out Kevin Bailey’s fine book The Western Flyer: Steinbeck’s Boat, The Sea of Cortez, and the Saga of Pacific Fisheries.)Fully restored and updated, the Western Flyer now docks at Moss Landing, about 15 miles north of Monterey. I was lucky though to see it at Old Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey. Even better, volunteers for the Western Flyer Foundation were offering tours. We saw what had been the original sardine hold, now converted to an area for teaching and examining specimens; the updated engine (now diesel and electric); the tiny rooms and minimal bunks where the crew and Steinbeck and Ricketts slept; and the slightly larger captains’ quarters, where Steinbeck’s wife slept. We also saw the good luck antlers atop the mast, which the guide told us was a Sicilian tradition.We also saw a shot glass found wedged between the walls of the boat; it (and other glass on the boat) bore the etchings of barnacles. Another highlight was the original toilet, or as the guide said, “the john where John sat.” Although I know basically nothing about boats and ships, I could recognize the beauty and skill of the restoration, and suspected that under the paint and below deck, the work was just as amazing. If you cannot visit the Western Flyer, and even if you can, one great way to experience the boat is to read The Log from the Sea of Cortez. It’s a fun read, with colorful descriptions of people and place, and many, many tales of collecting animals. It’s also surprisingly funny, thought-provoking, and inspiring. Here are some of my favorite lines from the book:* A breakwater is usually a dirty place, as though tampering with the shoreline is obscene and impractical to the cleansing action of the sea.* In a way, ours is the older method, somewhat like Darwin on the Beagle. He was called a “naturalist.” He wanted to see everything, rock and flora and fauna; marine and terrestrial. We came to envy this Darwin on his sailing ship. He had so much room and so much time…This is the proper pace for the naturalist. Faced with all things he cannot hurry. We must have time to think and to look and to consider.* This little stream, coming from so high up in the mountains and falling so far, never had the final dignity of reaching the ocean. The desert sucked it down and the heat dried it up and on the level it disappeared in a light mist of frustration.* We have never understood why men mount the heads of animals and hang them up to look down on their conquerers. Possibly it feels good to these men to be superior to animals, but it does seem that if they were sure of it they would not have to prove it.* A curious sea-lion came out to look us over, a tawny crusty old fellow with rakish mustaches and the scars of battle on his shoulders….Then, satisfied, he snorted and cut for shore and some sea-lion appointment. They always have them, it’s just a matter of getting around to keeping them.* Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing all things—plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.As someone interested in the natural world and history, and long a fan of Steinbeck’s writing, I was thrilled to be aboard such a lovely and lovingly cared for boat. Not only did it feel like an homage to the past, and to deeper connections to Steinbeck and Ricketts, but it also felt like a tribute to the future, to the next generations of scientists who are seeking to better understand the natural world around them. Perhaps their work will be as inspiring as that done by the crew of the Western Flyer in 1940.This is my 40th podcast of this newsletter; I am surprised and honored to note that these podcasts have now been downloaded more than 42,000 times. Golly Ned.Two upcoming eventsSeptember 6 - Waterfront Park - Opening Day Celebration - I’ll be down at the Waterfront, at the south end (east side of Alaskan Way S, between Yesler Way & S. Washington St.) at 3:00 and 5:00 P.M. giving short talks about the history of this area.September 20, 2025 - Clima Incognita: Planning For An Unknown Climate – Jaipur Literature Festival: Seattle – Town Hall – 12:00 PM – 12:45 PM – I will be in conversation with author John Vaillant (Fire Weather, a brilliant book) and Brinda Sarathy (professor and Dean of the University of Washington: Bothell School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences). Our panel should be fun and interesting, along with the rest of the festival. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

On August 20, 1853, future Civil War general George McClellan camped along Wenas (or Wee_Nass, as he wrote it) Creek, about 15 miles northwest of Yakima. It was his 22nd night out as part of a multi-month exploration of the Cascade Range. His task: finding the best route for a train over the mountains. (No secret, he failed.) That day, he and his survey team had crossed Cowiche Creek and Naches (Nah_Chess) Creek and several low ridges before entering the Wenas Creek valley. The land was “extremely barren,” wrote Lt. McClellan, with nothing but sagebrush and “almost literally, no grass.” He did though see a small cactus, apparently his first, but he reserved his main excitement for geology: “the volcanic formation still prevails—lava, lava, lava!”(Because he was not specific, McClellan could have been referring to one of two lavas in the area. The younger is the Tieton Andesite, a circa 1.6-million-year-old volcanic flow that came from the Goat Rocks area. The older lava is the 16-million-year-old Grande Ronde Basalt, one of the many basalt flows that originated on the Columbia Plateau. The two layers look quite similar, dark and cliff forming with hexagonal columns.)This was neither the first nor the last time George would note the geology during his time in the PNW. (If you are interested, I have written about McClellan twice before: McClellan of the Cascades and McClellan in the PNW.) Throughout his writings he peppers his observations with descriptions of a plate tectonic range of rocks: basaltic columns, veins of quartz, milky quartz, transparent quartz, epidote, trachyte, chalcedony, granite, porphyry, syenite, and scoria. He described clay slate “apparently acted upon by heat,” which “bore a close resemblance to mica slate.” He noted a petrified tree and how the stones in one river were more angular than “they were yesterday.” He also saw a small eruption of Mount St. Helens. Lucky fellow!This is not the vocabulary of a someone who failed Rocks for Jocks 101; this is the vocabulary of someone who ranked first in his class for Mineralogy and Geology when he graduated from West Point in 1846. (His classmate, George Pickett, in contrast, graduated 57th out of 59 cadets, which could help explain his later failures in life!) At West Point, McClellan used two classic textbooks: Edward Hitchcock’s Elementary Geology (1844) and James Dwight Dana’s System of Mineralogy (1837). (Still influential a 140-plus years later, Dana’s book was still being referenced—After James D. Dana—in my college mineralogy course book.) Thick, well-illustrated, and detailed, the books would have provided curious George a good introduction to the nascent field of geology, which was still trying to flesh out the differences between what was seen and what was described in the Bible. Part of what fascinates me about McClellan is that in the 1840s, few geologists had been to the western US and seen its complex and dynamic and, often, young geology, which makes his use of the terms he did even more impressive. For instance, Hitchcock wrote that trachyte and young basalt were not known in the US and he had no clue about our region’s volcanoes, such as Mount St. Helens. (Hitchcock also added this lovely phrase that pumice was “light enough to swim on water.”)Geology was not George’s lone field of observation. His plant list is as remarkable as his list of rocks. “Immense quantities of black-berries, raspberries, thimbleberries, red huckleberries, Oregon grape, salal berry,” reads one journal entry. Others mention wild cherry, hazel, oak, large sorrel, cedar, Douglas fir (“these celebrated giants of our western forests” and “still gigantic—about 6 ft diameter and 300 ft. high,”) maple, blue bunch grass, strawberries (“their flavor was excellent,”) various grasses, sunflower, and wild sage. He also noted what many modern travelers observe when crossing the Cascade crest, that “since passing to the E side of the mountains the fir has disappeared and the pine taken its place.” Little Mac had the bad fortune to experience other natural phenomena still common around Mt. Adams in late July and August. Mosquitoes (spelled musquitoes) were “very annoying” and “disposed to be intimate,” he wrote. He and his men also met with yellowjackets, which “give rise to very graceful capers on the part of our animals,” and horseflies, which were “similar to but a great deal larger than the Jersey sandflies.” Even though McClellan didn’t always write sympathetically about Indigenous people, he carefully described how Native fishers had built a fish weir to harvest salmon and trout near Kechelus Lake. “The fish dam we passed this morning is formed by setting up at intervals across the stream tripods of timber, about 20 feet high. One big down stream, and the other two in the direction of the dam. Horizontal logs are tied from one frame to the next and vertical ones (with the slope of a plane of the two upper logs of the tripod) lashed to these. A wattling laid against these closed the passage to the fish: and from stands below the salmon are speared by men standing ready for them.” Unfortunately, for George, he was not successful himself. “Tried fishing but the wretches would not rise to the fly.”Perhaps surprisingly to modern readers, McClellan commented regularly on fire. Of particular interest was smoke, which “interferes greatly with the view, and will be a source of great inconvenience to us in the mountains.” The expedition also passed through great burns with huge, blackened trees and scores of area of downed timber. And, impressively he recorded how the forest changes post fire. “We observed today that in many places when the timber had been destroyed by fire it was replaced by growth of a different kind.” His comments confirm what fire ecologists have begun to understand over the past few decades, that fires, even on the west side of the Cascades burned far more regularly than they do now.I think that I have about tapped out the vein of McClellan’s natural history observations in the PNW. Although his military and surveying careers are suspect and often criticized, I still find him fascinating and someone who might have been fun to travel with. But then again, I am biased toward anyone who takes the time to notice the rocks around them. Perhaps he should have devoted his life to the wonderful field of studying geology and not to the military. Word of the Week - Chalcedony - The broad name for a group of cryptocrystalline forms of quartz, which includes chert, jasper, flint (silex), and agate. In college, I learned that you cannot tell them apart without a microscope. Chalcedony comes from Latin through Greek via the Book of Revelation, which has perhaps the most detailed list of minerals in the New Testament. George would have learned from Dana’s book that rocks, such as chalcedony, “whose structure appears the most purely impalpable, and the most destitute internally of any similarity to crystallization, are probably composed of crystalline grains.” September 6 - Waterfront Park - Opening Day Celebration - I’ll be down at the Waterfront, at the south end (east side of Alaskan Way S, between Yesler Way & S. Washington St.) at 3:00 and 5:00 P.M. giving short talks about the history of this area. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

For many years, I have referred to every rabbit I see as Mr. Bun. I have no idea why but do know that this year I have been seeing more Mr. Buns around my fair city and its surroundings. They are sprinting across roads, hopping through yards (ours included), gallivanting in parks, flitting in fields, and skittering into smeuses. They’re eating garden vegetables, getting squished by cars, and getting eaten by other urban residents of the furred and fowl kind. Curiously, no one has surveyed the population (of Mr. Buns, not us) to see how many little lagomorphs dwell amidst us or why they seem to have proliferated this year, as well as periodically in the past. One researcher I corresponded with told me that he and other local scientists suspect that the burgeoning bunnies have not taken over city wide. Instead, they seem to proliferate in one or a few neighborhoods and then, like any urban hipster, move on to new grounds, after wearing out their welcome.Said researchers and others have proposed various theories for the intermittent population booms. Some blame it on religion: an excess of Easter bunnies, initially given as a gift, which morphs from cute to the gift that keeps on giving, resulting in guerrilla releases of the surfeit Mr. Buns into city greenspaces. Others point to our penchant for converting yards to bunny-feeding salad bars generally lacking in predators. Climate change could also contribute; a mild winter or two might enable more breeding for longer periods of time with the consequent booming bunny population. Then there are coyotes, who are no strangers to eating Mr. Buns; they thrive in Seattle and probably play a role in limiting the rabbit population.Clearly, it’s not clear as to why the population of bunnies in Seattle has exploded this year. Or has it. The perceived increase could merely be that Mr. Bun and their progeny are out and about more or that I live in a neighborhood where religion, habitat alteration, climate change, and predator abundance have combined to boost our bunny numbers.What we do know though is that Seattle’s rabbits are not from around here. Washington has five native species in the Leporidae family. East of the Cascades are Nuttall’s cottontail (Sylvilagus nuttallii), white- and black-tailed jackrabbits (Lepus townsendii and L. californicus), and pygmy rabbits (Brachylagus idahoensis). In the mountains are snowshoe hares (L. americanus). The San Juan islands, in contrast, is home to the other non-native, the European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus). Washington is also home to another member of the order Lagomorpha, the pika (Ochotona princeps), the well-known and well-loved, lithic-living mammal of the high mountains (generally).The Mr. Buns we have in Seattle are eastern cottontails (Sylvilagus floridanus) and they arrived in the Puget lowland in 1927. In that fateful year, Charles D. White, manager of the King County Game Farm in Auburn obtained 24 cottontails from Kansas, which would be raised for future hunting purposes. (As a 1928 Seattle Times article noted, cottontails “furnish targets for the younger generation of sportsmen.” At the time, the paper printed a twice weekly column of sportsman’s gossip. Did sportswoman not gossip?) After 13 of the Kansas bunnies died from eating cabbage, bunnyman White released the remaining 11 to fare as they might and fare thee well they did; by the next summer their progeny had spread to Enunclaw, Kent, and Sumner.If it’s okay, I’d now like to split hares and dive into the language of bunnies, rabbits, coneys, jackrabbits, and such. Turns out that rabbit is one of those words with more questions than answers, primarily as to its origin, which in the words of scholars is uncertain or unknown. Perhaps rabbit comes from the Hebrew for copulate, on account of their fecundity; or maybe from Robert, or from the Walloon, or other northern European. Either way, rabbit has been popular since about 1400.Another idea is that rabbit might have developed simply to refer to the young animal, from the French use of -et or -ot for the diminutive. An adult “rabbit” was once known as a coney. (Young rabbits are called kits and a litter is a kindling.) Etymologists like to point out that coney originally rhymed with honey but now rhymes with bony. The reason is the original coney (rhyming with honey), which even made it into the Bible, developed connotations not used in polite company.Long before the rise of rabbit, hare was the term for such an animal. From a scientific point of view, hare refers only to animals in the genus Lepus, such as our snowshoe hare, and not to other genera, such as Sylvilagus. You’ll note from above that the two Washington state jackrabbits are Lepus; all jackrabbits are hares but not all hares are jackrabbits and, no jackrabbit is a rabbit. According to Dr. Andrew Smith, co-author of an authoritative text on lagomorphs, pikas make up about a third of the total number of species in the order Lagomorpha, hares and jackrabbits are another third, and rabbits, such as cottontails, the final third.The word jackrabbit is a newcomer, originating, most likely, in the nineteenth century American West. Not surprisingly, the word has an auricular origin, from the resemblence of the ears of the hare to the ears of the jackass. Thus, initially jackassrabbit, which shriveled in the arid landscape to jackrabbit. Like all hares, jackrabbits are born precocial, meaning with hair and open-eyed, in contrast to altricial cottontails, born blind and hairless. But what about Mr. Bun, you ask? It’s also newish word. Bun comes from Scottish dialect and originally referred to a squirrel and didn’t become associated with rabbits until the middle 1800s. I am so glad I live in an age when it does.Given the present state things of Mr. Buns and their progeny, I suspect that Seattle will continue to be home to many an eastern cottontail, as well as many other non-native animals and plants. While some may discourage and condemn these newer members of the Seattle community, they do make the city more interesting, provide joy for some, and food for others. Word of the Week - Smeuse - According to Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful book Landmarks, where I learned of smeuse, it is a dialect term from Sussex and refers to a “gap at the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal.” September 20, 2025 - Clima Incognita: Planning For An Unknown Climate – Jaipur Literature Festival: Seattle – Town Hall – 12:00 PM – 12:45 PM – I will be in conversation with author John Vaillant (Fire Season, a brilliant book) and Brinda Sarathy (professor and Dean of the University of Washington: Bothell School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences). Should be fun and interesting, along with the rest of the festival. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

“We’re not doing that climate change, you know, crud, anymore.” Brooke Rollins, Secretary of Agriculture - 5/8/2025‘Do you believe in climate change?’ is not really a meaningful question, because climate change has existed as long as the Earth has existed. Vivek Ramaswamy, self-described conservative American nationalist - 9/19/2023“That’s why climate change is the perfect enemy. They get to control your life to deal with it, no matter what’s happening.” Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense - 8/13/2019“By overhauling massive rules on the endangerment finding, the social cost of carbon and similar issues, we are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion.” Lee Zeldin, EPA Administrator, 3/12/2025FYI - This newsletter is a screed, toned down from what I planned, but still not my normal newsletter. It was prompted by yet another horrible proposal from the present administration. “Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said on Tuesday the Trump administration would revoke the scientific determination that underpins the government’s legal authority to combat climate change,” wrote Maxine Joselow and Lisa Friedman in the NYTimes.When I read comments such as Mr. Ramaswamy’s, I see a perfect example of illogic used as a talking point. By making a patently false equivalent, he’s trying to sow distrust of modern science, which clearly shows that we are on a dangerous path and that we need to change our actions. And, when I read Hegseth’s, Rollins’, and Zeldin’s comments, I feel I am encountering people who themselves have succumbed to exactly what they condemn, that they are spreading crud and are kowtowing to a zealot.As a thought experiment, let’s change the topic from climate change to cancer: Why should I worry about cancer, since the cells within my body have always been growing and multiplying? Of course, no one says anything like this when they have cancer. When people get a diagnosis, they don’t take the fact lightly. They recognize that normal no longer applies, that cancer has so altered their body’s long-term life processes that they must respond. If not, they will die. In response, most people choose to attack cancer with vigilance, which typically involves extreme measures such as chemotherapy or radiation. With human-caused climate change, planet Earth basically has cancer: the normal ways that the planet’s climate changes over time are completely out of whack and sped up. There is no doubt in the scientific community that the modern warming of the planet caused by human action, along with our failure to act to counter the change, is unprecedented. If we don’t address this issue, the planet won’t die, as with cancer, but Earth’s human and more-than-human inhabitants surely will suffer, as we have been witnessing over the past couple of decades. I have to think that those who doubt this statement are not paying attention, are getting their information from a dubious source, or choose to ignore the facts. No matter why people such as the president and his minions reject the peer-reviewed science about human-caused global warming, the consequences will affect every being on the planet, mostly in negative ways.In the PNW, here’s a very short list of some of the ways the warming climate has been playing out:* Instead of snow, we get rain more often in the winter. The warmth and moisture cause plants to grow off-cycle from when animals are looking for food. Also, without a slow-melting snowpack, there is less water in rivers in the summer, which is bad for fish, hydropower, and irrigation.* A combination of drier conditions and heat waves leads to more frequent and more severe fires on both sides of the Cascades. The forests that could buffer climate change and provide a refuge for plants and animals are being lost. Smoke releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and damages the health of anyone who breathes.* Warmer water in Puget Sound has led to the arrival of unusual fish such as salmon shark and mola mola; increased populations of jellyfish; fewer nutrient-rich and more nutrient-poor marine invertebrates; and more toxic algae blooms, all of which contribute to worsening conditions for the plants and animals that have long resided in our inland sea.As with cancer and our bodies, we know what we need to do (such as reducing carbon output), and we have been doing some of it but clearly not enough. And the list above illustrates the negative, compounding effects of our lethargic response. Fortunately, the way to help the Earth is not nearly as bad as radiation or chemotherapy are for our bodies. In fact, we have far better science that informs us about how to address climate change than we have about our own bodies. What we need are politicians and governments willing to act, willing to listen to scientists, willing to show humility, willing to take responsibility, willing to act like climate change is the single most important threat to the health of Earth and all of her residents. As a person who would like to live with a healthy planet now and into the future, I am saddened and outraged that people in power are undoing the regulations, policies, and ongoing science that are in place. Their actions are short-sighted, scientifically-bankrupt, morally indefensible, and destined to cause lasting damages to humans, more-than-humans, and the planet itself. It is inane and insane to think that we can deregulate ourselves into a better future. The worst policy adjustments to choose are the ones that undo the many, and often bipartisan, measures that protect clean air and clean water, prevent toxic emissions, and decrease our carbon footprints. Any one who has been reading my newsletters knows that I try to take a hopeful approach. I wish that was the case with climate change and the present administration but clearly their world view does not align with hope. All I can do is to continue to live in a manner that I think is in accord with my values…and perhaps periodically let my anger burst forth. Next week, I will focus on bunnies.On a much lighter note: Tuesday, August 12 - 6:00 P.M. - There are still a few spaces in my Stories in Stone walking tour for Birds Connect Seattle. The 1.5-mile-long walk looks at building stone ranging in age from 80,000 to 3.5 billion years old and from across the globe. Word of the Week - Screed - A speech or piece of writing characterized by vehement or protracted criticism or complaint; a rant, a tirade. In the OED, the first definition of screed is a narrow strip of fabric and my usage of the terms appears to come from the idea of lengthy speech, as in reading a long list, or long strip. Screed, in fact, is a variation of shred, as in a shred of cloth. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

I went for a run the other day and nearly got thwacked to bits. Nothing terribly serious, mind you, but a good reminder of the exuberant abundance of one of the region’s, and, in fact, the northern hemisphere’s most prolific plants: fireweed (Chamaenerion angustifolium). They grow widely in our front yard, throughout the Cascades, circumboreally, and up to 16,000 feet in elevation in the Himalayas. Fireweed also thrives in disturbed habitat, such as adjacent to trails in lesser visited Seattle parks, which is where I encountered my floral attackers. And, of course, as the name implies, they quickly move into fire-burned areas.Fortunately, few of the thwacker plants had ripe seeds. Otherwise, I would have looked as if I had just escaped a pillow fight with pillows stuffed with dog hair from my pal Scott’s Great Pyrenees dogs. Each fireweed plant can produce 80,000 tufted seeds. All it takes to crack open the several-inch long, spaghetti-esque seed pods is a light thump. I know this from the dozens of fireweed plants covering our front yard. I regularly pull up the mature stalks at the end of summer, carry them to our backyard, and drop them en masse on the ground. When I do so, the pods burst open and let loose the tightly packed, lanuginous seeds, which take to the wind and waft into the world, and into the world quite a distance, or so say researchers.In a thrilling and exacting study, two Swedish botanists married advanced mathematics with a complex meteorological analysis to determine how far a typical fireweed seed might fly. Shockingly, no one had ever studied this facet of the life of fireweed until the 1987 study. The scientists obtained their raw data from suction traps (normally used for insects but also adaptable, when the need is great enough, for seeds) attached to a several-hundred-foot tall TV tower. The Scandinavian duo found that fireweed seeds regularly reach altitudes of more than 320 feet above the ground when dispersing. Those airy seeds, because of their fibrous nature, will then take 25 minutes to fall to the ground in still air. Assuming a light wind (9 mph), one seed can travel nine miles in an hour! The pair then calculated, and here’s where it gets rather exciting, that since it was not “uncommon for seeds to be aloft for 10 hours during a summer day,” seeds could disperse nearly 200 miles. (I like to think that the gazillions of seeds that have dispersed from our backyard have found nice homes somewhere, perhaps as far north as Canada.) This superpower of riding the open skies has resulted in fireweed colonizing two notable areas. During World War II, fireweed, or as the British call the plant rosebay willow herb, was the “pioneer colonist of the bombed sites” wrote R.S.R. Fitter in London’s Natural History. He estimated that the plants grew in 90% of London’s WWII ruins, which resulted in another common name: bombweed. Closer to home, fireweed was one of the first plants to return to Mount St. Helens after the 1980 eruption. Botanists described them as parachutists, and observed how fireweed was always one of the top five species collected at sites around the mountain in the first few post-eruption years. After settling onto areas such as the Pumice Plain, fireweeds turned on their other superpower, vegetative reproduction by rhizomes. (Ecologists call this type of plant a geophyte, or a plant that has an underground storage organ, such as a potato.) Spreading widely and quickly in such a manner allowed fireweed to form beautiful stands of tall, green-stemmed, linear-leaved, purple-flowered plants. Plants such as fireweed play a critical ecosystem role. By colonizing disturbed habitat, they help create the conditions for other life and lives to move in, repopulate, and reinvigorate, ultimately leading to a complex community of plants and animals. But as fireweed did in London, such plants can also do the same with our spirit, as they brighten landscapes that appear beaten and defeated. Perhaps we should relabel the plants Purple Flowers of Hope! Word of the Week - Lanuginous - The OED defines this fine word as covered with soft or downy hair, an apt description of fireweed seeds. Its use in English comes from the Latin lānuginōsus, which derives from the root word lana, or wool, as in lanolin. Word of the Week 2 - Chamaenerion - Depending upon the botany guide you read, you may see fireweed listed in one of three genera: Chamaenerion, Epilobium, or Chamerion. The variety of names has to do, in part, with egos, and first usage; in scientific naming, the first name used rules all others. For many decades and in many many publications, Epilobium merited more use but recently Chamaenerion has come back into preference. Chamerion, meanwhile, is an upstart, a name first proposed in 1817 by the supremely arrogant botanist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque. “I can boast at least of some accuracy and taste in Nomenclature: I frame none but good or meaning Names, none of mine are bad…” His main reason for his new name was that the previous one had too many syllables so he shortened it. Unfortunately, the genus I like did not prevail; in 1916, botanist Joel Lunell proposed Pyrogennema, from the Greek for “fire that which is begotten.”August 12, 2025 – Stories in Stone – 6:00 P.M. – I’ll be leading a walk for Birds Connect Seattle looking at the geology of downtown buildings. Registration. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

One of life’s simple pleasure is bumping along. I was able to do this the other day, on an unusual road, bumping over brick on my bike. About 200 yards long and located just off SR-522 in Bothell, near the notorious Wayne curve, the red road is the lone remaining section of the Bothell Boulevard. When it opened in 1914, the Seattle P-I described the boulevard’s “scenic beauty…[as] the equal of any in or near this city.” By 1934, though the brick had been replaced with asphalt, except for this short section, which preservationists had to save again in the 1990s.The Red Brick Road, as locals call it, is one of the few remaining sections of brick road in Seattle and environs. The longest is a bit over a mile; most are one block long or shorter. Back in the day, when hard surfaced roads began (~1895) to replace dirt, mud, and planking, brick was the most common “pavement” in the city. In fact, in 1917, the Denny-Renton Clay and Coal Company produced more paving bricks—58 million—than anyplace else in the known universe. DRCC bricks paved streets in Portland, San Francisco, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Chile, Argentina, and India.DRCC was not the lone brick producer. A 1941, Washington State Department of Geology report noted: “Nearly every town in the Sound country at some time has had a brick yard.” They produced flower pots, terra cotta, and flue lining; drain pipe, plain pipe, and sewer pipe, common brick, face brick, fire brick, paving brick…you get the picture.Not surprisingly, given my proclivities, geology is the reason for the brick, primarily because thick and wide-spread clay deposits abound. Local manufacturers quarried two clay layers: one about 40 to 45 million years old (quarries near Auburn and Taylor) and one deposited during the last Ice Age (quarries along the Duwamish River and near Renton). The Ice Age clays make up the base of most hills in Seattle and were as simple to mine as scooping out hillsides. I was told by a modern brick producer that as many as 300 quarry sites dotted the Seattle area. “The lore that is passed down in our circles is that at nearly every early 20th century Seattle job-site (which used brick), a little brick company (however temporary) popped up.”Here’s a link to a map I made with some of the brick remnants. Please let me know of others. I will add them to my map.North Trunk Road - In October 1912, workers completed the North Trunk Road, which ran from about Green Lake to the Snohomish County line. Dirt at first, it was paved with brick in 1913, and in 1927, became part of the Seattle-Everett Highway and eventually part of the Pacific Highway. Like many brick roads, the final remnant (just east of Aurora Ave. N. and north and south of N. 175th St.) has survived because of preservationists, who recognized the history embedded in brick. Yellowstone Trail - Begun in 1912 and completed by 1916, the Yellowstone Trail was the first transcontinental road. (They had a splendid motto—A Good Road from Plymouth Rock to Puget Sound—though organizers failed to note the glacial links between the end points.) To reach Seattle over the final miles from Snoqualmie Pass, the trail originally ended at Kirkland, where a Mosquito Fleet ferry transported cars to the east end of Madison Street. This remaining section of brick, about 1.3 miles long and running down 196th Ave. NE from NE Union Hill Road to SR-520 in Redmond, is listed as a King County Landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places.Pike Place - The brick roadway in the Pike Place Market is easily the most encountered section of brick in the region. Sadly, the bricks are not historic; they were placed in 1979, as part of major renovations of the market. Ballard - At the intersections of Ballard Ave. NW and 22nd Ave. NW and 20th Ave. NW. are two other, well-trod brick sections of road. But, alas, these are not historic either.Alleys - When I was a child, we had a brick alley behind our house on 22nd Ave. E. between E. Highland Dr. and E. Galer St. Not surprisingly, I didn’t think much about this road surface. (My inner dorkdom didn’t develop until many years later.) One block west is another alley with brick. There’s also a brick alley (Post Alley) between S. Main St and S. Jackson St between 1st Ave. S and Alaskan Way S.Gutters - Quite a few older streets in Seattle, ones covered in asphalt and setts (or cobblestones), have brick gutters about a foot wide. I suspect that many of these have survived because water and other debris flow more easily over the brick than over other, less smooth surfaces.Two for one - I know of only one section of brick that has the additional historic element of rail. The brick runs along Terry Ave N. where it intersects with John Street. The rail was part of a Northern Pacific freight line (opened between 1905 and 1917) that accessed the warehouses and businesses that formerly dotted this formerly working class neighborhood. And, many decades ago, two blocks north was a freight yard; sadly nothing indicates this history. Windows - These are the numerous locations where brick peeks through a newer road surface. Many such windows into the past have persisted for decades but many also pop up for the short time when roads are being repaired and/or repaved. Finding these little encounters with the past please me immensely. Brick remnants such as these peek-a-boo windows, as well as the larger stretches of brick, are part of what makes a place more interesting and more complex; they are reminders that cities and their residents constantly change and reimagine themselves. Urban history is regularly wiped clean by what we call progress; we would be wise to not forget where we come from. A very nice review of Wild in Seattle from Cascadia Daily News. A complement to today’s brick newsletter is a story about Seattle’s cobblestones from the Seattle Times. A fun story about a geyser messing with New York City’s subway system. “ It turns out that even though we have built all these big buildings and built roads everywhere, that topography is still there, and water, just as it always has done, runs downhill,” said Eric Sanderson, the vice president for Urban Conservation Center for Conservation and Restoration Ecology at the New York Botanic Garden.And, finally, Seattle’s not alone in reimagining its waterfront. Yay Toronto. I apologize that the link may not work but at least you can try, if you desire.Thanks for Heather Phil, John Cox, Austin Watson, Valarie Bunn, and Tom Fucoloro for information used in this newsletter. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Apparently not all pinnipeds read guide books. At least that’s my conclusion after seeing a harbor seal on Saturday on my weekly ride with my pal Scott on the Centennial Trail. The spotted, gray seal was almost 18 miles away from the nearest harbor, up the Stillaguamish River. As we usually do, we stopped on the old railroad bridge over the Stilly, near Arlington. Below, the water was clear and as low as we have seen it: 560 CFS compared to the maximum we have seen of more than 60,000 CFS. The harbor seal was at the surface in the middle of the river. I could see her spots as she bobbed and swam along for a few seconds before diving and swimming toward the shore. When I reached out to Pete Verhey, a fish biologist for the Department of Fish and Wildlife, he told me that harbor seals that head up river are a “good sign that Chinook [salmon] are pressing into the rivers. Chinooks or pinks.” He also noted that the estuary, aka the harbor, of the Stilly is home for a harbor seal colony nearly year round. It consists of “mostly females [who] likely rear their pups there in relative safety.”Seeing the seal was yet another reason I enjoy riding along the trail weekly. I have noted in a previous newsletter that the trail is nothing special—along roads, through fields, and mostly flat. Instead, it is the cumulative sightings of wildlife and weather over more than seven years of riding that have given me a deep appreciation for the area, its diversity and its dynamic. Harbor seals are arguably one of the most beloved and endearing animals in Puget Sound. Go to the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks, ride a ferry, or walk along the waterfront, and you’ll probably hear someone cooing and oohing over a harbor seal. With their large eyes, canine-esque appearance, gregariousness, and what seems to be a curiosity in people, harbor seals appeal to us on many levels. At least they do now. Such was not always the case for harbor seals and sea lions. Historically, Puget Sound’s commercial fishers scapegoated the big piscivores, claiming that they ate too many salmon. This led to the Washington State legislature passing legislation offering a bounty in 1903: $1 for a seal and $2.50 for a sea lion. In 1947, legislators raised the bounties to between $3 and $10 for both seals and sea lions.Three years before the bounty rate increase, biologists Victor Scheffer and John Slipp wrote that between 1922 and 1926, 3,200 harbor seals had been bountied. They also wrote that another 40 percent should added to the total because of seals killed but not recovered. Describing the “constant persecution” of seals by sportsmen and others, they wrote: “Blame for the decline in a local fishery is often directed at the harbor seal, whereas it rightfully belongs to selfish or thoughtless practices of man, such as overfishing, the damming of streams, pollution by industrial wastes, and so on.” Sixteen years previously, in 1928, Victor’s dad Theophilus, expressed the same sentiments. Sadly, neither of their wise words took. Pinnipeds continued to be hunted toward extirpation until 1972 and the signing of the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), which prohibited the taking of all marine mammals in US waters. Since then, Washington’s seal population has ballooned from around 5,000 to almost 44,000: Hood Canal = 2,832; South Puget Sound = 2,529; Northern Inland = 15,796; Coast = 22,451. We humans may like to see an increase in harbor seals but our joy pales to the benefit provided to Bigg’s killer whales. These are the mammal-eating group of orca that inhabit the Salish Sea, whose numbers have steadily climbed in the past few decades. Their population increase corresponds well with the rise of the harbor seals. Speaking of orcas, one infamous individual swam into Lake Union in February 1938. Nicknamed Nosey Joe, the orca (historically known as blackfish) initially swam into the larger locks at Ballard, moved in and out of it for about an hour, and then entered fresh water, making it all the way to Lake Union. In pursuit was Edward Sierer, a Seattleite who hoped to harpoon the orca. Fortunately, Nosey Joe returned to the locks and headed back out into the relative safety of Puget Sound before the Queeqeeg of Seattle could kill the unsuspecting orca. Scott and I continued to look for the harbor heal after she swam toward shore but she didn’t reappear. We also looked again on our return part of the ride. Again, no luck. But that’s okay. Simply knowing that harbor seals venture so far inland, knowledge gained only after seven years of riding, has now opened us to the possibility of seeing them again. That’s half the fun of paying attention; I generally look for what or who I hope to be there, as well as remaining open to unexpected discoveries. Either way, I have fun. July 22 - 6pm - Who’s Watching You - Birds Connect Seattle - Still a few spaces open for my walk with BCS looking at human and terra cotta carved people and animals (including a few birds) on downtown buildings. Registration. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

As I have been regularly writing, nature is all around us. All one has to do is slow down and pay attention, and the natural world will show her beauty. During our trip to Boston last week, I had the pleasure of seeking out plants and animals and rocks in one of my favorite environments: museums. Whenever I visit one, I like to see how artists incorporate something that means so much to me—the natural world—into their art, whether as the subject or as the medium. In Boston, we spent about four hours in the Museum of Fine Arts. My first impulse was to notice the building stone, a muted gray granite quarried from Deer Isle in Maine. It’s a 300 million year old rock, widely used on the east coast. This was the mere tip of the geological wonders within the granite edifice. Walking the halls, I passed by a greywacke sarcophagus lid, a basalt lamp, sandstone walls from an Egyptian burial chamber, many limestone heads, countless marble heads, and a pair of travertine legs. And, then there were the totally cool, and clear, mica windows on model ships. The first painting that drew my attention was of a Dutch landscape (~1655) by Aert Van der Neer. Gray and stormy, it depicts people in a snowstorm (with individual flakes, apparently a rarity in paintings) on a river surrounded by buildings. Snow covers the roofs, trees are barren and windblown, the river is frozen solid, and most of the well-clad people seem hunched with cold. It was quite the contrast to the weather in Boston; part of the reason we spent so much time in the MFA was the wicked-ugly heat and humidity outside.Not simply a chilly scene, the painting depicts the Little Ice Age, a period (~1300 to 1850) of global cooling that hit northern Europe particularly hard. (In the Cascades, the LIA led to glaciers extending more than a mile further down valley than they do at present.) Over the past few decades researchers have used paintings such as Van der Neer’s to provide a more nuanced understanding of the LIA and how it impacted the landscape, people, and art. For example, a meteorologist who examined more than 12,000 landscape paintings completed between 1400 and 1967 found that artists working between 1550 and 1849 preferentially produced the most dark and stormy skies. Researchers also got a better picture as to how people adapted, such as frost fairs and skating on frozen rivers.Soon after my trip to the Little Ice Age, Marjorie and I took a docent-lead tour. One of the images our guide took us to was a stained glass by Louis Comfort Tiffany. He, the guide not Louis, told us that some art historians consider stained glass to be the first truly American art form, led in part by Tiffany. I was certainly overjoyed to learn this but what excited me was how Tiffany incorporated Carolina parakeets (Conuropsis carolinensis) into his art.The only parakeet native to what is now the United States, they were on the verge of extinction when Tiffany illustrated them, due to deforestation, habitat destruction, and the obscene desire for feathered garments. According to a booklet by museum curator Nonie Gadsden, Tiffany made the image based on Audubon’s Birds of America, which Tiffany owned. He could have highlighted the parakeet to draw attention to an American species that might soon not exist, hypothesized Gadsden. Sadly, this is not the lone example of art that depicts species that our species has driven to extinction.And, finally, not far away, I found an old friend. There in living color was Peter Rainier, painted a few years before George Vancouver bestowed his friend’s name on Tahoma (or Takoma). It was quite a shock, and clearly inspiring, to run into the painting of Peter, especially in a room with no other connection to the PNW. Over the years, I have learned that museums such as the MFA are excellent locations to nourish my naturalist needs. I always find some interesting tidbit of nature to spark my curiosity, no matter the style, the artist, or the medium. To paraphrase what I’ve long said about architecture, there’s a lot of bad art out there (or at least art that I don’t like or understand) but if I take the time to focus on what interests me (and make funny faces) I come away happy and fulfilled, and generally in appreciation of what the artist was trying to do. Word of the Week - Greywacke - An Anglicization of an old German mining term—grauwacke—meaning “grey earthy rock.” British geologists used the term in the middle 1800s as a “a sort of limbo for the reception of every thing that was ancient or obscure in the geology of England,” wrote amateur geologist William Fitton in 1841. Greywacke now generally refers to a dark, coarse-grained sandstone with more than a 15% clay matrix. Me on TV. I was interviewed for King 5 Evening News and it aired the other day. Here’s my favorite quote: “So if you see a guy patting a building in downtown Seattle…Now you know, it’s just David B. Williams appreciating his wild urban home.”July 22 - Birds Connect Seattle - 6:00 P.M. - Who’s Watching You? - I’ll be leading my downtown walk exploring carved and terra cotta figures.August 12 - Birds Connect Seattle - 6:00 P.M. - Stories in Stone - I’ll be leading my downtown walk exploring building stone ranging in age from 120,000 to 3.5 billion years old. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

We recently spent some time in Boston, where Marjorie and I lived between 1996 and 1998. It was a trying time then. We had moved from Moab, Utah, a geological paradise, to a place where the sum total of my geological knowledge was Plymouth Rock. For the first many months I had no connections to the place, to the natural world that inspired and grounded me, as it had done in Utah. But then one day I was on the Harvard campus looking at Harvard Hall, built in 1766. At its base was a rock that Bostonians and New Yorkers call brownstone, oddly in reference to its color, which seemed more reddish than brown to me. Not having a rock hammer with me, and figuring that those august Harvardians might not appreciate that I was simply doing what geologists do, that is whack rocks off bigger rocks to make smaller ones to inspect, I simply rubbed my hand on the sandstone. In my half-gowpen, grains of red sand accumulated.It was then that I realized that an easterner’s brownstone was a westerner’s red rock. Both are sandstone with small amounts of iron that has oxidized, or rusted, bestowing a reddish hue. Basically, the grains of sand are like red apples with a red rind around a whitish interior. This epiphany finally gave me a connection to east coast geology. Most of the brownstone used across New England came from quarries in Connecticut composed of a 200-million-year old sandstone that formed during the last significant geological event in the east, the rupture of the supercontinent of Pangea and the opening of the Atlantic Ocean.Transformed by this knowledge, I began my long love affair with building stone and the geological and cultural stories told by examining the geology of rock used in the urban environment. It is a path I continue to follow, value, and appreciate, which allows me to draw connections between two major aspects of my life, the urban and geologic realms.Walking around Boston recently reminded me of two other aspects of the town of beans that fascinated me when we live here (pronounced he-ah). The first is the lack of a centering high point, such as Mount Rainier is in Seattle. When we lived in Boston, this was the first time in my adult life I lived somewhere that wasn’t next to a mountain range. I was “nestled at the foot of Pikes Peak,” in college, followed by my nine years in Moab, at the base of the La Sal Mountains, and my on-going, 28-plus years in Seattle. In Boston, the high points were two buildings near each other, the Pru and the John Hancock towers, the latter which topped out at 790 feet.Tall shafts they are and observable from many places in the relatively flat landscape, the two towers would barely register against the 14,410 foot Mount Rainier, the nearly 13,000 foot La Sals, or 14,115 foot Pikes Peak. Plus, because they were in the middle of city, the towers seemed to move, never anchoring me to direction. That was not an issue for the mountains; visible for hundreds of square miles, they may have popped up at unexpected viewpoints but they were fixed in place, always providing a reference point. I think that part of my unease in Boston centered on my lack of centering; I never felt like I had my bearings. I was also searching for a way to connect to the city; building stone did provide some of that grounding but never truly enough to satisfy my needs.Winter brought the other never-before-encountered phenomenon: snow line based on the Interstate and not on elevation. For instance, weather reports regularly described the I-95 and I-495 snow lines. Both roads ring Boston, with I-495 further inland (about 25 to 30 miles versus 10 to 15 miles).This was nutty and novel to me. What ghost of Robert Moses it be that allowed interstates to control the weather? In Seattle, and much of the west, snow line depends on elevation: the higher the land, the colder the temperature, and thus the snow line. Boston, and many parts of the east, in contrast, follow a different principle. Distance from the coast and the ameliorating influence of the ocean, as well as topography, drives temperature, and thus snow fall. This connection between land and water and snow makes perfect sense (and is partially coincidental with the location of the roads, which tend to follow topography) but still seems odd to my Cascadian soul.Although I never cottoned to Boston as a home, I am glad that I spent enough time there to begin to appreciate its rhythms of place and some of the natural history that help define The Hub. For me, and I think for many people, connections such as these are essential to their happiness and how they relate to their home place. I am glad that I have now had more than 40 years to learn about and from the amazing and wonderful landscape of Seattle. The stories continue to bring me joy and strengthen my ties to my home place. I hope they do with you as well. Word of the week - Gowpen - The space formed when you cup your two hands together. The word is of Scottish origin. I learned this term recently in Elif Shafak’s wonderful newsletter, so wanted to try and use it. She writes: “A gowpen of space for independence, freedom, creativity, connectivity, both individuality and humanity… that is where words come from and that is where literature lives, thrives, and works its magic.”Seattle: A History in Short Stories - This new documentary tells the history of Seattle in short stories, 1 to 3 minutes per subject and will be used primarily in the Washington State History classroom grades 4 and 7. I helped write one of the episodes. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

What is it with birders and birding in fictional TV and movies? They seem to go out of their way to make poor observations and incorrect identifications. I know you might be shocked but there’s an infamous ornithological blunder in the 2000 remake of “Charlie’s Angels.” The angel played by Cameron Diaz ferrets out the evil villain’s lair by a bird she hears in a recording. Ms. Diaz claims the bird, supposedly a Pygmy Nuthatch, “only lives in one place—Carmel, California.” Tell that that to the nuthatches who inhabit the ponderosa pine forests of eastern Washington. The movie eventually shows the “nuthatch,” which turns out to be a Venezuelan Troupial, a bird that lives in…Venezuela. Plus, the bird song comes from a Thick-Billed Fox Sparrow. Despite the preposterous inaccuracy, Ms. Diaz and her pals find the villain and save the day. The movie is equally as bad as its birding.Much more common in the error department are the overused bird tropes: the calls of Red-Tailed Hawks and Common Loons. Both are “indicators” of wild places, no matter where, the time of day, the season, and often the bird on the screen. For example, with their screeching cry, red-tails are regular voice-ins for the whiney, less-than-wild, less-than-noble Bald Eagles, such as in the Lord of the Rings films. The haunting, wailing sound of the loons pops up around the cinematic world from 1917 to Harry Potter to Godzilla.My most recent encounter with a fictional birder is Cordelia Cupp. She’s the star of “The Residence” (Netflix). A consulting detective, like Sherlock Holmes, she’s called in to solve a murder in the White House. She’s a wonderful character, full of verve, quick wit, and practical smarts. She makes the show a joy to watch. Like many mystery personalities—Hercule Poirot and his fastidious mustache, Endeavour Morse and crossword puzzles, and Sherlock Holmes and his uncountable obsessions—Cordelia has an idiosyncrasy that helps define her character. Throughout the series, she regularly disappears to go birding and stops in the middle of a scene to notice a bird, after which she offers an explanation of the bird and how they help her be a better observer. In one scene, her sort-of-partner, FBI agent Edwin Park (who is also a wonderful role) says: “She told me earlier in the day that this sometimes happened in the field when she was out looking for birds. ‘She said that the only thing you can do is wait and that it would come.’” In regard to seeing a falcon, she says: “It’s the way that they can identify even the most imperceptible of weakness in their prey.”Woven through the show is Cordelia’s goal of ticking off all the birds (hence the term tickers for birders) on a list made by Theodore Roosevelt when he lived in the White House. He had been prompted to compile it by birder Lucy W. Maynard. “I explained that I wanted it for a new edition of the local bird book Birds of Washington and Vicinity [which Maynard wrote]. ‘Why yes,’ he answered cordially. ‘But I’ll do better for you than that. I’ll make you a list of all the birds I can remember having seen since I have been here.’” The list appeared in the 1909 edition of Ms. Maynard’s book. Roosevelt’s list is impressive. Clearly he knew his birds and he also paid attention and noticed what was going on around the grounds of the White House. (I cannot imagine the present resident noticing anything wild or natural on the grounds.) Note the number of species that he saw nesting on the White House grounds, as well as the three birds of prey—Screech Owl, Saw-whet Owl, and Sparrow Hawk (now called American Kestrel) that resided or spent several weeks there. I am further charmed by Teddy’s observation about the Sparrow Hawk. “A pair spent the last two winters…feeding on the Sparrows—largely, thank Heaven, on the English sparrows.” (English Sparrows are a non-native bird, long disliked by many but that’s a story for another time.) In order to make the show and Cordelia bird-friendly and not bird-inane (as in Chuck’s Angels), the producers hired legendary birder Kenn Kaufman as a consultant. Kaufman later wrote about his experience and referenced a part that I found slightly annoying: a falcon flying at night around the White House. Cordelia makes the point that she desired to see a falcon (based on the list) and even shows us (the viewers) the name on the list. Unfortunately, no falcon is listed though the American Kestrel is a falcon and the one shown on screen is “generic large falcon,” according to Kaufman. It’s “a metaphor, a symbol,” he added. I get it but couldn’t they have “made up” an owl instead; they are night flying birds. Oh well. More importantly, and to the producer’s and writer’s credits, having Cordelia be a birder is a wonderful way to introduce people to birding. They show that birds are all around us, even in the most urban of settings; that birding gets people to pay attention and to think about and notice the natural world around them; and that we can learn about ourselves and our place in the world by being more observant and more centered. Plus, if the situation arises, and I hope it doesn’t for any of you, birding may help solve a murder mystery. Word of the Week - Kestrel - In 1573, in the Thesaurus linguæ Romanæ and Britannica, Thomas Cooper wrote of what he called the tinnunculus: “a kinde of haukes; a kistrell or kastrell; a steyngall. They use to set them in pigeon houses, to make doves love the place, because they fear away other haukes with their ringing voice.” Thus, according to Ernest Choate’s The Dictionary of American Bird Names, kestrel, which was first used to describe the European Kestrel, “may come from its call.”— Wow, a splendid review of Wild in Seattle. Here’s a little excerpt and full review. “Exceptionally well written, illustrated, organized and presented, Wild in Seattle: Stories at the Crossroads of People and Nature by author David Williams and artist/illustrator Elizabeth Person features more than 40 essays that dive into the geology, animals, plants, and architecture that shape Seattle. Of special note are the many fun and fascinating sidebars exploring regional vocabulary, scientific terms, and Indigenous language phrases.” Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

The narrow band between high and low tide is Puget Sound’s most protean ecosystem, where the rhythms of existence fluctuate with the twice-daily expansion and contraction of our inland sea. For thousands of years, those pulses of water dictated life for the Sound’s human inhabitants. Where people lived, how they traveled, and when they could find food all depended on knowing the tides and how they affected the movement and location of water, plants, and animals.Today, understanding the tidal cycle of the Sound has little relevance to most residents’ lives. We no longer worry much about the phase of the moon or how the tide might affect our next meal. This lack of awareness of the tidal rhythms is neither good nor bad: it’s simply the reality of our lives and a reflection of our overall disconnect from the natural world around us.Hoping to remedy my disconnect, at least in a minimal way, I decided to watch a tidal exchange at Seattle’s Discovery Park. On August 10, 2017, I reached the beach at 6:30 a.m., when the tide had been ebbing for three hours. I established my base for the day at a driftwood tree trunk perfect for leaning against. A dozen feet away, beyond a sloped cobble and sand beach, waves approached the shore so gradually and quietly that they seemed reluctant to arrive. Beyond, no feature broke the smooth surface.The water continued to recede from the sloped beach out onto a terrace. By 7:00 a.m., the top of a boulder poked above the surface about sixty-five yards offshore. Closer in, three ends of a stump had breached, and within another hour, the water had retreated enough to expose more than a dozen boulders the size of a doghouse or larger, as well as seaweed-strewn fingers of cobbles and expanses of rippled sand. Farther out in the water, a steady stream of kelp moved north, carried by the ebbing current.As the water retreated, I periodically abandoned my tree trunk to explore the world so recently revealed: barnacle-covered boulders and worm-covered barnacles; horse clam siphons and moon snail casings; crabs and crab tracks; anemones, logs, eelgrass, and kelp; ripple marks, pools, and channels; red algae and white bird poop; abandoned pier pilings and critter-filled tires; tube-worm towers and squiggly worm castings; Great Blue Herons with fish in their bills and gulls with clams in their bills; squadrons of black-capped Caspian Terns and a lone Bald Eagle harassed by gulls; and a variety of holes in the sand that hinted at another hidden world below.At the bottom of the tide, at 10:34 a.m., the beach was more than a third of a mile wide. I observed only minimal change over the next hour, during what is known as slack water. Then the water began to advance at increasing speed, moving fastest between 1:30 and 2:00. During this period, I walked out to the waterline, stopped, and watched as the water swelled toward shore. Twenty minutes later, the water was close to my knees, and the waterline had advanced more than one hundred feet. After another thirty minutes or so, the waterline was almost where it had been when I arrived eight hours earlier.Watching that surge was humbling and exciting, fully revealing the tidal pulses that most Puget Sound residents, me included, fail to notice every day. Every twelve hours the Sound inhales and exhales, covering and uncovering a beautiful, evanescent world at the intersection of land and water.This newsletter originally appeared in March 2021 and comes from Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound.Word of the week - Protean - Variable in form, changing or unpredictable. Protean comes from Proteus, a sea-god, the son of Oceanus and Tethys, who could assume various shapes at will. Apparently he did this because he had the gift and prophecy and shape-shifted to avoid all those who sought him out. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Seeps. Springs. Rills. Brooks. Creeks. Streams. Rivers. A web of water tendrils entwines the landscape and provides habitat, transfers nutrients and sediments, creates travel corridors, and bestows beauty. Veins. Arteries. Neural Networks. Life blood. Life. What are rivers but breathing, living centers essential to the health of the environment for the more-than-human and human world we all inhabit.I was prompted to write this newsletter by reading Robert Macfarlane’s new book Is a River Alive? Not surprisingly, considering his previous books, such as Landmarks and Underland, it’s provocative, filled with elegant and moving prose, and offers a profound way to consider one’s relationship to place and the world. I hope to write about Is A River Alive? later but wanted to home in on a specific observation he makes. “Everyone lives in a watershed.” It’s an obvious and true statement but I hadn’t considered it before.For Macfarlane, he writes in regard to his watershed: “My waters are the River Dee, who rises in the Cairngorm plateau, bubbling out of the plateau granite…and [a] nameless stream” near his home in Cambridge, England.For me, I’ll start with an historic perspective. My waters are a small creek who flows south from liq’ted (Lushootseed for place for red paint), or Licton Springs, small springs rich in iron oxides. liq’ted enters dxʷƛ’əš (unknown translation), or Green Lake, with an outflow to the east down Ravenna Creek (no known Native name), who flows into xačuʔ, or Lake Washington. The big lake outflowed south out through Mox la Push (a Chinook jargon term meaning two heads, in reference to when the river flowed in two directions with high water in the Cedar River), or the Black River. Next came the dxʷdəwʔabš (Lushootseed for people of the inside), or the Duwamish River, with a final connection into a bay of Whulge (Lushootseed for the salt), or Puget Sound. Total length ~ 34 miles (After 1916, and the completion of the Lake Washington Ship Canal and Locks, this route has been abbreviated to the unnamed creek to Green Lake down Ravenna Creek to Lake Washington and out the Ship Canal to Puget Sound – Total distance ~ 11 miles)My modern watershed is more prosaic. Water and sewage from our house and nearby impervious surfaces (street, driveway, sidewalk, etc.) enter a pipe that extends south to Green Lake and the North Trunk Sewer line, which runs under the old route of Ravenna Creek, down toward Lake Washington, along the north side of the Ship Canal, cuts across the Fremont Cut, and ends at the West Point Treatment Plant at Discovery Park. Total distance also ~ 11 milesMy modern watershed reflects what many people in cities experience. Most, if not all, of the many small waterways who formerly threaded the landscape have been buried, captured, or graded out of sight. They have, as I have written previously, become Ghost Creeks, no longer seen but sometimes rising up and reminding residents of the past and how the landscape used to function. Another important aspect of rivers to urban residents is how they often dictated where cities and towns located. People needed the waterways for navigation and the water for drinking; by losing these connections we lose deep links to the stories that define a place.Freshwater generally has a single goal, to return to the sea, or, in other words, to follow the gravitational pull to the lowest point of topography. (I am, of course, excluding all of the water that seeps into the ground.) A watershed is simply the area of land that collects and feeds a single waterway, from the smallest creek to the biggest river. (Other terms are drainage basin or catchment basin.) Living here on the coast, my watershed is quite small and my water travels not far, from my home to Puget Sound. But consider my good friend Jeff, who lives in Louisville, Colorado: his water ultimately travels nearly 2,400 miles to reach the sea at the Gulf of Mexico.By inextricably linking water to the land that surrounds and feeds the riparian systems, what a watershed makes clear is that what we do on the land is as important as what we do in the water. Consider the watershed of Puget Sound. Whether it’s farmers using pesticides, residents dumping pharmaceuticals down their toilets, industries washing toxic substances into creeks, or hatcheries treating fish with antibiotics—each impacts the health of this watershed home of several million people. Restoring, maintaining, and sustaining functioning watersheds requires not only clean, healthy water but also clean, healthy land that drains into the water.Ultimately, a watershed is a community, a community of people, plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria, each interacting with the landscape and the waterways who flow across the land. As with any good and strong community, the health of the whole is directly tied to the health of individuals. Even in a modern watershed, such as most of us inhabit in our urban lives, we are part of this community, responsible to others with whom we share this space, this place, these waters.In case you are interested in determining your own watershed (at least in the Puget Sound region), here’s the best source I know of: the Washington Department of Ecology’s Puget Sound Watershed Characterization Project. What I found that works best is to do the following: Click on “Reference Layers” on the left-hand side, and then check the box for “Watershed Management Units.” The new map will show the boundaries of localized watersheds.Another fun and helpful watershed website to use is this one produced by journalist Sam Learner. With it you can pick any spot and see the route water travels from land to the sea. The site will even “fly” you down the path. It’s quite a fun way to waste time and to see who you share your waterway with.Thanks to Patrick Trotter and Jason King for sharing some of their amazing work detailing the watersheds and creeks of Seattle. It is opening a new way of seeing Seattle and the interconnectedness of the landscape, people, flora, and fauna. Here’s part of one of the maps they have compiled, which shows the watersheds near my home in north central Seattle. Thornton Creek (on the upper right side of the map) has the city’s largest watershed. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Tis that time of year when cotton starts to snow the landscape. I always enjoy this annual falling of little white clusters out of the sky, particularly since we see so little real snow falling in Seattle. Neither cotton nor snow, the white “flakes” come from our local cottonwood, the black cottonwood, Populus trichocarpa. The specific epithet provides a hint to the plant’s legendary, or notorious for some, feature, as trichocarpa means “hairy seed,” from the Greek thrix, a hair, and karpos, fruit.The female plants generate the snowstorms, from their seedpods, about the size of a pea and clustered like grapes. When ripe, the pods release gazillions of minute seeds with their silky tufts. (One time while riding with my friend Scott, the cotton was so dense on the trail that it felt like we had magically time traveled to winter and riding on fresh snow.) Providing buoyancy, the hairs allow the seeds to sail the wind, for miles in the right conditions. With a viability of just days to weeks, few germinate and even fewer survive to reproduce themselves, which is why the plants have evolved to produce their seed blizzards. Not everyone cottons on to these cottonwood seed storms. They dislike how the seeds clog filters, get in their hair or in their throat, and stick to screens. I get these concerns but still am glad that cottonwoods grace our environment and would rather celebrate than bemoan.When the seeds do succeed, they produce a stately, magnificent tree, the biggest of which can shoot straight up for 200 feet, though 100 to 125 feet is more common. Such monster trees have six- to ten-foot-wide bases that are truly spectacular. The furrowed bark, and tendency of the trees to lose limbs easily, creates splendid habitat for a variety of birds, mammals, insects, and arachnids. Studies have found dozens of animals that exploit the many cavities that riddle cottonwoods ranging from bats to woodpeckers to black bears. Ospreys and Bald Eagles further exploit the platforms that form from broken limbs. Cottonwoods are also well-known for their predilection for reproducing from their stumps, which is particularly effective for a tree that often topples in wind and flood events. But they can generate new plants, too, when shedding, or abscissioning, twigs with leaves. Botanists refer to this process of abscission as cladoptosis (from the Greek for young branch and ptosis, or falling) and have found that it may enable cottonwoods to quickly colonize and stabilize sandbars. All members of the gang of poplars (another name for these trees) are trees of the riparian environment. Because of their aqua-phillic ways, cottonwoods were long seen as a reliable indicator of water. This asset was especially important for travelers heading west in the middle 1800s, who often were in search of water. With their wonderful and wide and leafy overstory, cottonwoods also provided a lovely, shady location to avail oneself of. Here in the land of big conifers that dwarf even the tallest black cottonwood, the snow producers have long been overlooked. I know that I didn’t even realize they grew here until many years ago when I was working on a book chapter about what Seattle looked like botanically in 1850. As I was reading the notes of the region’s first land and plant surveyors, who worked for the General Land Office’s cadastral survey between 1855 and 1862, I kept coming across the name of a plant I had never encountered: Balm of Gilead. (The “original” Balm of Gilead originally referred to a Biblical medicinal unguent and now refers to any “universal cure.”)For example, on August 25, 1855, along the shore of Lake Washington, at Fosters Island, surveyors David Phillips and Willam A. Stricker noted two Balm of Gilead (they were inconsistent in their spelling; here they wrote Balm Gilian). Six days later they noted more “Balm Gileads” along Lake Washington, near present day Denny Blaine Park. In Raymond Larson’s master’s thesis, The Flora of Seattle in 1850, he wrote that Populus trichocarpa was of moderate abundance along riparian areas and that evidence for the trees could be found, in addition to the GLO notes, in settler’s accounts and herbarium records.Probably the most famous regional Balm of Gilead was located in Vancouver, Washington. Legend holds that Lewis and Clark tied their canoe to it in 1805; that nineteen years later, the Hudson’s Bay Company established their first trading post under the shadow of the tree; that an HBC employee drove a copper railroad spike into the tree, which served as the zero point for all subsequent surveys; and that one Amos Short established the town of Vancouver, with a layout “Beginning at an old Balm of Gilead tree on the bank of the Columbia River.” That witness tree passed into true infamy when, at 3:45 pm on a Sunday afternoon, it “toppled into the Columbia River, where it now lies, all hope of ever preserving it having vanished the moment that it fell,” according to The Columbian of June 28, 1909.We may no longer refer to these stately trees as Balm of Gilead but I still think of them as bestowing universal cure. With Seattle’s weather heating up again—we’re supposed to reach the upper 70s today….heavens to Betsy!—I am looking forward to the continued rain of cottonwood’s snowy seeds. They at least give me the impression of coolness amid the stifling heat we have to endure. Special deal on Wild in Seattle - If you buy one from me, I will include a lovely set of stickers by Elizabeth Person of animals from the book. Here’s a link to purchase the book.If you happen to be in Winthrop on June 14, I will be there, in conversation with the esteemed naturalist and Methow Naturalist editor, Dana Visali, at the Winthrop LitFest.Thursday, June 12, Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park - I am truly honored and humbled to be interviewing Robert Macfarlane about his newest book Is a River Alive? It’s quite stunning, revelatory, and provocative. I am very much looking forward to the opportunity to chat with him. Reservation required.And, again, here’s a link to my Wednesday show on Space 101.5 FM. This one is about the perennial whole in the ground building site across the street from City Hall in downtown Seattle and lovely life that has found purchase there. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Yesterday the temperature peaked at 82 degrees in Seattle. That ain’t right. Our normal high for May 28 is 68 degrees. So, like any good Seattleite in such a dire situation, I panicked and sought out whatever cooling I could find: cold drinks, our basement, and stories of cold, such as people freezing to death and resorting to cannibalism on mid-19th century Arctic expeditions. Being the kind and kind of writer I am, I’ll spare you the details of the Arctic diet and instead relate another story of cold, which I hope helps my fellow Seattleites, and others who dwell in heat, to cool down.Few animals better exemplify the cold than mountain goats. Indeed, one might even call them relicts of the last Ice Age, that is animals best attuned to a world of ice and snow. In other words, they are chionophiles, or snow lovers. As such, they inhabit the high country of the Cascades, with superb adaptations to the challenging terrain and inclement weather.In order to navigate their rocky, icy world, mountain goats rely on their unusual hooves, each of which has two, pointed toes made of hard keratin wrapped at the base in a pliant, coarse pad that extends beyond the keratin. This combination of pointed, hard, and textured acts like Velcro, providing traction on a variety of surfaces. Mountain goats can also spread their toes and grip uneven terrain, sort of like a wrench. It’s a bit of a stretch but mountain goats could be called a well-muscled mountain octopus equipped with eight clinging devices, a superb sense of balance, and low center of gravity.In order to survive the cold of the high country, mountain goats rely on their dense fur. One study found that as winter approaches, they increase their insulation to more than eight times greater than in summer. They accomplish this cold protection by growing guard hairs up to eight inches long and a dense undercoat of twisted, interwoven, one- to two-inch-long hairs, sometimes called wool. Then, as the weather warms, they shed their fur, often in sizable tufts. Despite this, mountain goats still often have to bed down, or seek out shade or snow patches, to avoid overheating, in the summer.Several years ago, I watched a band of mountain goats on Mount St. Helens. Many of the adults were shedding, the shimmering white swaths reminding me of calving glaciers. This yearly shedding of wool has long been important to Native people of the region, who collected the fur and wove it into blankets, robes, and other clothing. Valued for their beauty, durability, lightness, and warmth, such garments were often limited to wealthier people or those of higher standing. When I found some of the wool at Mount St. Helens, it was dense and soft and dotted with needles and small sticks. It didn’t feel oily or have any aroma.The insulation properties of mountain goats has also attracted those less interested in aesthetics and more attuned to keeping people warm. Such researchers focus on the ability of a coat of hair to trap air and resist heat transfer between one’s body and one’s environment. For instance, a 1968 study that included some rather fancy mathematical equations described three classes of hair coats. 1. Dense and matted coats of crimpled hairs, as exemplified by domestic sheep. 2. Dense coats, on the order of 4,000 hairs per square centimeter, as in small mammals and Arctic species. 3. Coats of long strong hairs, which have densities of just a few hundred hairs per square centimeter. The last is the category of mountain goats.In another study, published in 1964, Arthur Goldman of the US. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine sought out solutions for keeping an inactive person warm for eight hours at minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit in a three MPH wind. Unfortunately, the complete Army Quartermaster, cold-dry standard clothing ensemble, which totaled 35 pounds, was not up to the task. The problem was matching the needs of the torso and the extremities; the only way around this was supplemental batteries that provided auxiliary heat, or some darned huge mittens. In the study, Goldman referred to the “unit of thermal insulation,” which is known as a clo. One clo of insulation is defined as “‘everyday clothing,’ roughly that of a man’s business suit plus vest, pants, shirt, socks, and shoes.” He noted that the Army’s top line, but inadequate, insulation suit had a rating of 4.3 clo. Not until several decades later, was the clo determined for mountain goats. Their dense coat provides about 5 clo. Clearly, these beasts of the mountains are well adapted for the cold and would have been even more grumpy than any Seattleite was yesterday.With the temperature heading back to normal in my fair city, I rejoice, and celebrate. I am glad that I am neither clad in a fur suit I could wear in the Arctic nor wearing gloves as big as my body. Of course, if I did don the latter, I like to think that it could be the start of new fashion trend. Stay cool everyone.Thursday, June 12, Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park - I am truly honored and humbled to be interviewing Robert Macfarlane about his newest book Is a River Alive? It’s quite stunning, revelatory, and provocative. I am very much looking forward to the opportunity to chat with him. Reservation required. And, again, here’s a link to my Wednesday show on Space 101.5 FM. This one is about the Seattle Fault Zone and the researchers who used trees to date when the fault hit.Info on three types of animal coats: K. Cena and J. A. Clark, “Thermal Insulation of Animal Coats and Human Clothing,” Physics in Medicine and Biology, v. 23, n. 4, 565-591, 1978.Illustration of gloved guy: Ralph F. Goldman, “The Arctic Soldier: Possible Research for Solutions for His Protection.” US Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, Natick, MA 1964. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

Today, I’d like to highlight a local favorite of mine: the Red-winged Blackbird - Agelaius phoeniceus. * First Name: Red-winged would be a wonderful description, if it were correct. The problem, at least in regard to reality, is that red only applies to the bird’s shoulder patches. An older, first name used to be red-shouldered but apparently those who name birds eschewed the logic and decided to exaggerate the spread of red.* Surname: Blackbird is also apt, as the birds are all black. At least the males are. Recently, bird names have become controversial because of the use of people’s names, some of whom are less than savory or deserved of honor. Bird names have another odd aspect; they often derive from the males of the species. Female blackbirds are neither black nor have any red on their wings or any other body part. Similar plumage-based names that favor the guys include Mountain Bluebird, Cinnamon Teal, and Scarlet Tanager. Perhaps we need to reconsider some of those names, too.* Genus: Agelaius comes from the Greek for flocking, in reference to large gatherings of this species. In the winter, Red-Winged Blackbirds may form flocks totaling millions of birds, including other blackbirds and starlings. Ornithologist Elliott Coues penned a fine observation about them in 1876: “Often as I sat in my quarters on a bright sunny day, the light would be suddenly obscured, just as by a quickly passing cloud, and a rushing noise ensued as the compact flock swirled past my window.”* Specific Epithet: Phoeniceus alludes to the color red and originated from the Phoenicians and their city of Tyre, where a red/purple dye began to be produced around 1200 BCE. Known as Tyrian purple, because the color hues more purple than red, the dye came from predatory sea snails. Back in the day, around 300 BCE, the dye was the most valuable commodity of its time—three times more expensive than gold. To produce a single tablespoon of dye took 250,000 shells. Nutty what people do for fashion.* Epaulets: As noted above, Red-winged Blackbirds sport red on their shoulders, better known as epaulets. They are particularly vibrant during breeding season, when males erect or flare them, providing a brilliant explosion of color. Epaulet comes originally from the Latin spatula, or flat piece of wood, with a stopover in French, which led to epaulette, another common spelling of the term. Not surprisingly, our modern, cooking-turning spatula comes from spatula. Gotta love language.* Singing and Chatting: They say conk-la-ree or oak-a-lee. You say: “Hey, I can identify that.” It’s always a pleasure (meaning I can actually ID the singer) to hear these birds’ rolling songs, often produced by the perched males, high atop a cattail or reed. One study in south-central Washington found that males also produce seven alert calls: Peet, Check, Chuck, Chick, Chonk, Chink, and Cheer. A male blackbird in the study, apparently, like me, rather talkative, switched from check to chuck to cheer to chink to cheer to chuck to chick in 15 minutes without ever leaving his perch. He then went and ate.* Dinner: Four and twenty blackbirds were baked in a pie, or so says the English poem Sing a Song of Sixpence. These birds, though, were not our Red-winged Blackbirds. Instead, they were the European variety, actually in the thrush family, whereas ours are in the Icteridae family, which includes grackles and orioles. I have nary a clue as to how many of our blackbirds would fill a pie, or why one would do so. * Habitat: Red-wings are birds of the marsh and wetland, as well as crop lands and fields. Down at Green Lake, near our house, I can reliably count on finding Red-winged Blackbirds on the water edges, particularly in an area of cattails and reeds along the west side. There, the males make their presence felt flitting and calling, and letting everyone—bird, dog, and human—know who rules the roost.* Gaping: In contrast to many bird species, who possess powerful muscles for crushing or snapping, the muscles of red-wings are better adapted for prying. Known as gaping, this feature allows the birds to expose bugs under rocks or sticks or hiding in gaps in vegetation. Retired University of Washington ecologist Gordon Orians, who studied this adaptation extensively, noted that gaping is particularly effective at unveiling insects under rocks in streams. * Territoriality: Studies have shown that if the male red-wings intend to fight and protect their turf, they will display their badge of red but if they are merely “visiting” or “testing” a new territory, they may not display, and wait to see what the present owner does. Perhaps we could take a lesson. Be patient and sport red epaulets but only flare them when necessary. Otherwise, chill out.* Birds a Plenty But not What They Used to Be: One study estimated that 150,000,007 Red-winged Blackbirds inhabit Canada and the United States. That may seem to be a lot, and it is, but it also represents a population drop of 36 percent between 1970 and 2014. The reason is stark: a human-driven loss of wetland habitat has drastically reduced the birds’ breeding grounds. * Poetry: Wallace Stevens’s poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird first appeared in print in 1917, in Others: An Anthology of the New Verse (1917), edited by Alfred Kreymborg. I didn’t go all the way to thirteen, not wanting to compete with Mr. Stevens.My final bookstore talk of the season about Wild in Seattle will be on May 27, at Eagle Harbor Books, on Bainbridge Island at 6:30PM. I’ll be chatting with the splendid and hilarious Lynn Brunelle. If you are interested in Episode Three of the my podcast from Wild in Seattle, it aired at noon on Wednesday on Space 101.1 FM. Here’s a link to it. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe

My story last week about the herring caught by the Osprey reminded me of another flying fish tale. This one is even nuttier, with longer lasting consequences.If you were standing on the shore of Lake Washington on September 15, 1938, you could have seen 2,000 flying trout. They came from a low flying plane, which dropped the fish fingerlings in a rectangular metal can attached to an old gunny sack fashioned into a parachute. The fish bombers experimented during several flights, varying the size of the can and the parachute. They then recovered the cans and discovered that the several-inch long fish were “not dead, injured nor apparently even excited over this experience,” according to a Seattle Times reporter in an article two months later. The aerial ichthyologists also figured out that they had to starve the fish for two days prior to the flight or the airplane trip made them sick. (Nothing’s worse than an airsick fish!)The final challenge was getting the fish out of the “floating prison” of the can after it landed on the water and had its opening on its top. The solution was to attach a block of wood to the bottom of the can so it would flip over after it landed and dump the fish in the water.A man named Alvin Carlson had suggested this method of lake stocking to the Washington Game Department (now Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife). He was a member of the Trail Blazers a group formed in 1934 “to help make this wonderful State of Washington a fisherman’s…paradise.” They still exist and are still helping to stock lakes. Carlson was searching for more efficient ways to spread fish to high country, hard-to-reach lakes. He had initially suggested pouring out the fish from a plane flying just over the water but this was deemed too dangerous. Thus the idea of flying high and parachuting the fingerlings. On the day following the Lake Washington flights, Game Department personnel proceeded to the high country. They flew in a single-engine float plane up to the mile-long Otter Lake at 4,400 feet, about 12 miles northeast of Snoqualmie Pass. The men carried ten cans with a total of 12,000, inch-and-a-half fry on the plane and dropped them from one thousand feet above the lake. About a third of the cans missed the lake or overturned in flight. Two years later, a group of Trail Blazers hiked the nine miles up to Otter Lake and found that those Adam and Eve rainbow trout fry had grown into thousands of ten- to thirteen-inch fish. They were “fighting fools…well distributed all over the lake,” said Carlson, to a Seattle Times reporter in July 1940.The Washington Game people weren’t the only state employees to rain fish into lakes. In California they took a different approach when, in 1949, former barnstormer pilot Al Reese froze fish into blocks and parachuted them into lakes in ice cream buckets. It was not a success. Next, he let a five-gallon can free fall from 350 feet above the lake but it hit rock instead of water. Surprisingly, a few fish survived in the remaining water, which prompted Reese to eventually let the fish free fall by themselves into a lake. Within a few years, several states had turned to stocking by air but it’s unclear how long Washington state employees continued the can-based method of stocking fish into high lakes. (One unanswerable question is how many metal cans are resting and rusting on the bottom of lakes across the Cascades.) By at least the late 1950s, parachuting fish into lakes was no longer the preferred method for plane stocking the Cascades. Instead, WDFW had decided that it was better to go with Alvin Carlson’s original idea of simply flying low and letting fish free fall into the water. This practice continued until the late 1990s, despite what falling into lakes did to fish. One biologist who witnessed the showers of rainbow trout said, “many of the fish were ripped apart on impact…and many others were so stunned they immediately sank to the bottom, never to recover.” WDFW continues to stock fish in the high lakes of the Cascades. Now, though, the most common way to do so is for people to carry fingerlings on their backs up to the lakes. It’s certainly a much less spectacular method but the fish are much happier. (This newsletter is based on a much more detailed account of stocking alpine lakes that will be in my next book, which focuses on the human and natural history of the Cascades. It will be published in 2026.)If you want to read about a few walks I suggested to writer Terry Woods for an article in the Seattle Times, here’s a link.May 22 - Edmonds Waterfront Center - Edmonds - 6:30 - I’ll be in conversation about Wild in Seattle with the wonderful Tony Angell. Hope to see you there. Co-sponsored by Edmonds Bookshop.And, don’t forget to listen to Space 101.1 FM, with me reading my essays from Wild in Seattle. If you listen, you’ll hear about 20 seconds of singing about whiskey, not by me, just the end of the previous show. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe