Street Smart Naturalist

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 nat...

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...

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...

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...

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 inhabi...

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 notoriou...

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...

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...

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 sac...

The other day at one of my talks for my new book, Wild in Seattle, someone asked me what was the wildest thing I had seen in the city. I thought it was a great question and, prompted by my big brother, I decided to come up with some of my favorite wild sightings in Seattle. Flying Fish - At Alki Point with a pal, we saw an adult herring passing over us in the talons of an Osprey, who disappeared t...

On July 14, 1884, a short article appeared in the Seattle Daily Post-Intelligencer . It noted that artist H. Wellge had just completed “the finest view of Seattle ever taken.” The image was of the bird’s-eye character, measured 14 inches wide and 33 inches long, and would cost $3 apiece, or 12 for 20 bucks. “It will be a splendid thing to send abroad to advertise the town.” Bird’s Eye View of the...

This past weekend, Marjorie and I and friends went walking in a splendid, wooded area, Taylor Mountain. Like other forested spots near Seattle that have been protected by the city, county, state, or federal government, it is haven of beauty. Biggest were the holy trinity trees—Douglas firs, western red cedars, and western hemlocks—many so large I couldn’t wrap my arms around them. We debated if th...

Alas, it’s back to me after last week’s lovely interlude by Marjorie . “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 N...

Hello from Marjorie, the wife often referred to in David’s writing. In honor of David’s birthday week, I offered to write a newsletter and give readers some insight into the man behind the Street Smart Naturalist. Back to normal next week. Someone recently said to me, “Gosh, David must be fun to live with.” This was during a walk when he spotted a hawk perched on a rock cliff 75 feet above us. The...

I am excited to announce that Wild in Seattle: Stories at the Crossroads of People and Nature is now on sale in bookstores. My first thanks goes to Mountaineers Books for all of their hard work in creating this beautiful book. My second goes to Elizabeth Person for her wonderful, whimsical watercolors. The book is worth buying simply for her illustrations. Wild in Seattle is an outgrowth of my fir...

In early January, I wrote about one my favorite images of Seattle, August Koch’s 1891 Bird’s Eye View . I’d now like to return to another similar map: Eli Sheldon Glover’s 1878 Bird’s-Eye View of the City of Seattle . An itinerant artist, Glover produced similar panoramas of Tacoma, Portland, Walla Walla, Olympia, and Port Townsend. Glover’s is the first of this style of illustration done for my h...

We ventured down to Arizona last week to attend the amazing Tucson Book Festival: 130,000 attendees and 320 authors. It’s a book dork’s idea of heaven. While down in the desert, we saw two, curious natural history scenes, both worthy of closer investigation and consideration. Unfortunately, both also centered on dead animals my wife and I found on a morning walk on a road. The first was a tarantul...

Over the weekend, I went out for a quick walk around our neighborhood, which I have done thousands of times. So it was rather exciting to discover something new. In particular, I walked on a path I had never trod, much less seen. It wasn’t terribly long, perhaps 50 feet, or challenging or scenic. Located at the end of a Dead End road, the dirt path simply allowed me to cut easily through blackberr...

Recently on a walk at Dungeness Spit on the Olympic Peninsula, my wife and I saw a curious phenomenon. If you haven’t been out to this five-mile finger of sand and driftwood, you are missing out. It’s pretty darned amazing. That being written, we didn’t actually walk the spit. Unlike we usually did at the beach, we turned left, instead of right, and walked along the bluff that rises out of the wat...

Many, many years ago, I was a national park ranger at Arches National Park and the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site. As a ranger, I led tours, helped people understand what they were seeing, cleaned up trash, removed graffiti, and answered numerous questions. (The most popular was “Where’s the bathroom?” “Out the door and to the left,” was the answer.) I assisted on search and rescue,...

I hope you’ll put up with a bit of self-indulgence and promotion. I am excited to announce that the new, updated edition of Seattle Walks is now available in bookstores. Here’s the skinny on it. In the fall of 2023, Nicole Mitchell, the director of the University of Washington Press, contacted me about updating the original Seattle Walks . We had been talking about it on and off for several years—...

Few natural story tellers are better than snow. Or more ephemeral. I was lucky enough to read some of the stories told by snow in Seattle’s recent snowmageddon. For those not from my fair city, we got about 2 inches of the white stuff or enough to cause general panic and chaos. Steep hills, a lack of equipment to deal with snow, and over confident drivers are not a good recipe for safe travel. One...

Last week I had the privilege of touring Seattle’s new waterfront park with my friend Owen Oliver . A writer and artist, he has been a key consultant to park designers highlighting Coast Salish priorities. We first met several years ago when he reached out to me about my book Homewaters . I was deeply honored when he wrote: “I appreciated everything you did to give justice to the landscape learned...

Since election day, the president has issued a vast and horrible horde of executive orders. Most have been short-sighted and narrow-minded. Many have been racist, mean-spirited, and vindictive. Others have been perplexing and one or two can be classified as mainly the gestures of a megalomaniac. I would like to comment on one of the latter ones, in part because it has a Seattle connection. In 1886...

I like to think I am pretty good at reading maps. I understand topo lines and can tell a valley from a ridge from a summit. I know to look for scale and that sometimes 39-foot cliffs don’t show up on a map with 40-foot contours. I also know that maps can lie and mislead and that people use them for political or other sinister purposes. That being written, I didn’t expect to question my navigationa...