Street Smart Naturalist

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,...

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 an...

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 B...

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...

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’cloc...

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...

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 see...

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 th...

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...

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...

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 exper...

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 el...

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, na...

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, dea...

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, Bl...

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....

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...

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...

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 mode...

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 (N...

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 getti...

“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 con...

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 Himalay...

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...

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...