Other than the flickers drumming on my roof and sending out their rapid-fire high-pitched calls in search of a mate, Spring comes quietly. Waking up to Spring rain on the roof is not so very different from Winter rain. A solid day of sunshine is cheerier with birdsong, but the towhee trilling from atop my neighbor’s tree still sounds like he’s just warming up and hasn’t yet reached his finest pitch. If there is a dawn chorus it is very tentative as yet. It wasn’t so long ago when we woke to snow blanketing the early sprouts and putting early buds on pause. But every day there is more light, signaling: Awake! Awake!

Today, at last, is the official First Day of Spring, the Equinox! My daffodils are opening, crocus buds are pushing through old brown leaves with shots of purple and lemon-yellow. An early rhododendron has two small blooms, and my Indian plum—admittedly one of the earliest to bud—is showing off its new finery.

Hellebores are early bloomers too; their brilliant colors are a spring tonic, and not just for me. On a recent sunny day there was a small swarm of bees intent on visiting every flower. I was surprised to see so many active bees on what was still a not-very-warm day and glad that I had something on offer for them.

The soft rain ignites the moss; the bright greens and feathery growths are a patchwork quilt of shades and textures that delight my eyes. The soft carpet underfoot and the wispy tendrils cloaking my old maple tree are vibrant and nourishing after the browns and grays of Winter.

Moss is silent in its spread, but other creatures announce themselves with wild calls and flapping wings. We’ve been riveted to watch a pair of eagles claim a tall Douglas-fir that towers over a neighbor’s house. We suspect there is a nest, possibly in the tree just under the tip-top branches of the perching giant but it’s impossible to see into the tangle of growth. If the pair maintain their occupation we’ll have a front row seat all summer as they come and go. What a great opening drama for the new season!

Happy Spring! So much to see!

My Audubon calendar tells me it is World Wetlands Day, and also Groundhog Day. Other calendars note that either last night or the night before (timing seems mystically elastic) that the Earth moved into Imbolc, the day halfway between Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox celebrated in the Celtic world. It’s not too late to look to Saint Brigit to bless your home and especially your cows, if you have any, and keep everyone safe and fed through these months until early crops and fresh grazing can restore all living creatures to robust health. Displaying the color yellow, with, say, a bright ribbon or scarf by a window or hanging from your door is said to draw the saint to your home; you can then wear the blessed item for your protection. As for celebration, a dish of steamed potatoes liberally made golden with butter will do nicely. What could be more Irish?

But back to wetlands.  If we are still feeling our Irish, we can celebrate peat bogs as essential places needing protection and our attention for their role in sequestering carbon. They aren’t as well known here as in Ireland and Scotland but we do have some areas here where sphagnum moss thrives and other specialty plants and their insect partners. We have been slow to appreciate peat’s abilities if we just leave it where it is to mitigate climate change and regulate water flow. I still see bales of it for sale in garden stores and wonder how to persuade others not to buy it or stores to carry it. I used to be that gardener myself until I learned about the harm I was causing.

Again, back to wetlands, to recognizing and celebrating the unsung heroes of the natural world. The oft-heard exclamation to “drain the swamp!” is just plain ignorant and dangerous. Swamps, bogs, seeps, sloughs…wetlands are vitally important to the health and well being of the Earth and all its systems and beings. So today in homage I plan to visit one of my favorite local seasonal ponds, now saved as a park and cared for by the nearby community.

I hope to hear frogs. And birds. And admire the bright green pelts of mosses growing on the trees. I hope to see—although it may be too early yet—the fresh emerald green shoots of leaves beginning to unfurl and the tips of shining yellow flowers of skunk cabbage emerging from its hiding places, one of the earliest harbingers of spring. I’ll listen for last year’s bulrushes, brown and rasping in the breeze, waving above the water and providing a reedy forest of safe cover for nesting birds, amphibians and whatever else makes a home there. There might be a few ducks poking about. Sometimes there are owls in the trees rising above the low place where water gathers. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a heron there but who knows!

I know I will feel renewed. I will feel the turning of the Earth toward a new season of life. I will be grateful for the reminder.

The urgent last lines from Mary Oliver’s iconic poem “Wild Geese” swell into my mind at the sight of Canada geese high overhead, soaring more like mythic birds than ones you might see sauntering at lakeside in a park:

…the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

A visceral response, unbidden, punched through with memory, longing, wild yearning. My “place in the family of things” scudded and opened to one with a wider sky, a landscape with deeper browns, more subtle greens—a thousand shades. The air was both more ancient and newer as my breathe tasted the wind. In a moment the geese, once penciled across the sky, were gone, who knows where. But the lift in my spirit remained. Wildness can still break into the ordinary day and transform our lives if we let it.

Yesterday a quick message from my neighbor was like that call, like the poem, like the world offering itself to my imagination: “Cooper’s Hawk. Up in our big Japanese maple again.” Whatever I had been doing was abandoned; I grabbed my phone, a coat and jammed on my shoes and slipped out to see what I might see.

The tree is truly one of the wonders of our street, multi-limbed, huge, a presence to behold. It took awhile to find even such a large bird among the branches, but it helped me sight it by shifting from one spot to another. It faced outward, scanning the area but seeming to ignore me. I was neither prey nor an enemy coming to mob it. (So much for my place in the family of things!) I was able to walk about and try to see it from different angles, but mostly I just stood and gazed upwards, emptying my mind to feel the wildness emanating from that branch.

The hawk was silent and very still and yet its presence was marked; nothing else moved or sang or fluttered while it perched there. Finally, I retreated to allow it to “be.” A different kind of wildness, kin to the geese but certainly from a very different place. As I left to go back into the house I saw the intense flash of iridescence of my resident hummingbird. He had his eye fixed on me from a small branch, steely and boundary-obsessive. I checked the feeders to make sure he had his rations and went inside so he too to get on with his day. Another wild heart!

Birds: from geese to hawks to a tiny but fierce hummer, eagles soaring overhead, the juncos, chickadees and nuthatches, finches and white-crowned sparrows coming to my feeder, the shy flicker also fitting itself to the feeder, crows a deep black winging through the neighborhood on business of their own…all reminders of the wild, just outside.

In 2016, E. O. Wilson published his searing analysis on what we must do to save the Earth—the only planet we have; it’s title is his thesis: Half-Earth. He maintained that we need to set aside half of the Earth for all the forms of nonhuman life to thrive, that is, to pull back from our rush to grab every bit for ourselves in our forgetfulness that we are not separate from what we call the natural world, but part of it. That proposition is at the center of what is being argued and fought over in Montreal now as delegates of “COP15” thrash out new goals and guidelines for saving biodiversity. The UN conference attendees, while acknowledging that not a single goal from their last conference was achieved, are trying once again to grapple with the complexities of the crisis that includes the impacts of climate change but so much more. The new slogan 30X30 inches towards Wilson’s recommendation, a 30% set-aside by 2030 but the details are hazy. Thirty percent of the best land or more marginal bits? Paths for migration of both animals and plants or dead ends that don’t take seasonal needs and climate impacts into account? What about water: the lack of it and its floods and droughts? What about the oceans where lines drawn on maps mean even less?

Those are the big questions. It comes down to land, actual places. Locally, here where I live, what would that look like? Recently I’ve had some appointments up on the bluff above Percival Creek, one of the tributaries that joins the Deschutes River that enters the Sound upon which shores this city makes its home. The creek is difficult to trace; it’s path is closed off from public access at the point where I could see it but down below the hill it spreads out into a manmade lake that probably—this I wish I knew—enters the impounded river and lake that erased the natural estuary in the 1950s, by a culvert. This arrangement has generated a great deal of controversy and, finally after decades of discussion, may—in my lifetime—be restored as a naturally flowing river system. The effort to recreate an estuary has been nothing short of gargantuan. (What does that say about what it will take to set aside 30% of the Earth’s surface for nature?)

That said, it is still, now, as it is, a tranquil place of beauty and life. I know the water quality is not as healthy as it could and should be, but for the moment, gazing at it in the wintery light, listening to the ducks as they dabbled and gabbled amongst themselves, it felt like a place of hope. The trees marched down to the water’s edge; the grasses tangled and provided cover for wading birds. The leaf litter was deep and soft. I remembered that once I saw a kingfisher flashing his blue as he hunted and reigned over his domain there. I resolved to visit this place more often and mark the seasons here.

This place is at the center of a city. Somehow we have managed to set it aside. Much more needs to happen to restore its health but for now, at least it is there. Developers eye its banks as prime real estate for humans. Everywhere, humans want more and more, a nibble here, a grab there, it adds up. We have more than our 70%; we need to give some back. Sounds like a New Year’s resolution!

To learn more about the Montreal conference, see: https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/12/1131422

I had been sweeping my porch and reached for the doorknob to go back inside when I felt it…a squishy, succumbing “something” in my hand. It triggered an instant recoil of dismay and disgust. I just knew it was a stink bug. I had been scooping them up in an effort to keep them from setting up winter quarters inside my house. I didn’t necessarily want to kill them but I definitely wanted them “away.” I had read how they may infest your home in a nightmarish scenario of crawling insects blanketing walls and getting into everything. More “nature” than this nature lover can stand.

Stink bugs have become a season, a brief but harried one as large numbers suddenly congregate and frantically search for safe havens in warmer quarters to survive the coming cold. I had my first meet-up with them in a friend’s garden. They were everywhere, clinging to every surface, zooming around her patio area; one even plopped into my water glass. It was an insect storm. And when I went home I saw that they had arrived there, too. Some hidden signal had been broadcast that set off the tumult, unrecognized by us but apparently unmistakable to the bugs.

I was beginning my education about the unsavory side of stink bugs but realized I knew practically nothing about them other than they can create a disaster in your closets. Their full name is “brown marmorated stink bug” which begins to describe this mottled brown shield-shaped insect, roughly the size of a largish house fly. Their most noted characteristic is their smell, as the name suggests.  They have special glands in the underside of the thorax that can secrete a noxious defensive chemical. Some wasps and birds will eat them but the real problem is that they are an introduced bug, native to Asia—China, Japan and Korea—and that they are not yet a recognized snack for many predators, not to mention their off-putting smell. (Be careful vacuuming them up as the smell may coat your machine for a long time!)

Unfortunately, they haven’t been slow to find food sources in their adopted land. First discovered here in 1998, they have caused millions of dollars in damage to orchard fruits and garden produce. They feed themselves by means of a probing proboscis which they insert in fruit or other delectables and suck out the juices, leaving a “dimpled surface” and possibly also introducing pathogens in the injured fruit: injury and insult! More research is needed, as they say. In this globalized world, they are a very real danger to crops as they spread.

Maybe more birds will develop a taste for these exotics….a late-Fall boost of protein before migration? I’m hoping for a silver lining somehow and not a new blast of chemical warfare. My own positive outcome is realizing how little I know about insects and yet how many and varied they are. I found a great field guide at the library, “Insects of the Pacific Northwest” by Peter and Jane Haggard. It has clear close-up photos of every kind with brief but cogent descriptions alongside, and essays discussing classification issues, life stages, and other information. I discovered that we have our own native stink bugs! This is a much more complex situation. But when I need a break from them, I can turn to the pages of butterflies and other stunningly beautiful creatures. E.O. Wilson was fascinated by this small world for good reason!

Can we call it a rounding error? A calendar mishap? Information overload? I discovered today by mischance that yesterday, October 24, was the International Day of Climate Action. And I was missing in action, chagrined to be part of the problem having driven my old Volvo—a car that predates the EV revolution—up the freeway for a long-sought new doctor’s appointment. There, being a new patient, I filled out a lot of forms, one of them being a questionnaire on my possible level of depression and anxiety.

The questions attempt from different directions to discover, I guess, if the patient has a “problem” that might contribute to their potential health issues. The last one came right out and asked whether I was afraid “bad things might happen.” Why yes! The box to tick had no room for the voluminous answer I wanted to insert, that I spent a lot—a lot—of my time reading about climate change, its impact now and coming in the near future, its politics both local and global, and how “we” are tackling—or not—its effects, its trajectory, and our fate. I wanted to explain that having young grandchildren had profoundly added to my sense of anxiety. And yes, probably all that anxiety did have bodily implications, but somehow framing the issue as a medical one…well, it felt privatized rather than something we are all involved in together. It’s not “all in my head” but very much “out there,” in the public realm.

So, a day late, I wish I had participated in the Day and done something “out there” in some way. But climate change is an every-day opportunity; it’s never too late and today presents itself as a new day. I begin here.

The website that popped up with the information about the Day called it “a worldwide movement initiated by young people concerned about climate change and global injustice” and asked everyone to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve our adaptability—to buy time and save as much as possible, and to create and promote policies to address this complex issue. The photo illustrating the day of action was crowded with young people holding earnest signs like “Science Not Silence” and “It’s Our Future.” Greta Thunberg is acknowledged by a quote. I wholeheartedly agree. But then my eye was drawn further down the page, to other Days listed there.

October 24 is also the International Day of Libraries. Gibbons. Bologna—yes, the bland sandwich “meat” you might remember from your lunchbox days. Disarmament Week. Global Media and Information Literacy Week. And Diwali, the five-day Hindu festival of lights that celebrates good-over-evil, light-over-darkness and new beginnings. Leaving aside bologna—sometimes called mystery meat and a mystery as how it has its own Day—the other Days make great sense as components of addressing climate change. Libraries are the fount of the information eco-system and a good place to begin to sort out both how to inform ourselves and then reach out using media and also how to assess the worth of media messages: some helpful and galvanizing and some toxic and defeatist. If we can begin with an understanding of our true situation we will save a lot of time. If we can put resources into constructive solutions and learn to talk and listen to each other, possibly reducing the levels of fear and division, perhaps thereby we can put down our weapons too? Gibbons, our boreal cousins, we’ll need them too. And a holiday for “new beginnings” sounds hopeful, indeed. 

Indeed, climate change is so big—it’s biggest problem for solving it is its complexity—that it leaves out very little. Practically anything we can choose to work on will be a part of the solution. Personally, I’m very concerned about trees. Plenty to address there. For you it may be birds, or drought mitigation, or food sources. Or gibbons. And every day is a Climate Action day, that’s how dire and gigantic this problem is. We can channel our anxiety and join with others to feel less overwhelmed and lonely, much better for our own health and much more effective. So even though it is October 25, it is still Climate Action Day, as I see it!

As September trails into October we are still waiting for Fall to really kick in. The leaves we long to crunch on crisp morning walks remain green and high on the trees. The few defeated-looking ones, brown and tired, resting on brown and tired dormant grass are there more because of drought than a turning season. And yet…and yet it is Fall, officially, as measured by the tilt of the Earth and the amount of daylight—however bright and warm—steadily diminishing. The sun rose a minute after seven this morning and will slip away just before seven this evening, cutting evening walks short. The school term has begun; ‘tis the season of new notebooks and colored pencil sets, resolutions and new ventures!

In keeping with the celebration of the equinox on the 22^nd, my friend had signed us up for a new project: we are going to restore a plot of land for our local Capitol Land Trust on one of their properties. The trust has mapped out with deer fencing, circles of land like a giant puzzle that need help. Volunteers can sign up for one, or ten, or whatever circles their group can manage, to remove non native species and free newly planted trees from smothering grass and weed growth. We will begin with one and see how we do.

It was a fair-distance walk from the car park to the area of circles, through mixed woods, across a dry stream that will soon enough gurgle back to life, and down toward the shore of Henderson Inlet, but it was full of interest as we felt the peace and beauty of the land sink into our minds. Mature trees: oaks, Doug-firs, an orchard of apples, and others dotted the fields. Above, the sky cleared and became flecked with bits of high clouds, allowing plenty of clear blue shine and warmth to bathe our progress. It was a quiet day, very still with a feeling of waiting, broken only by occasional bird sound: a rising squawk from a heron, low chittering now and then from unseen smaller birds; squirrels—probably—scolding from deep cover.

And then we were there! We found our number and the gate for our piece of the puzzle and entered to take stock. We had several new trees scattered within our area: what we were able to identify as shore pines, Oregon ash, Sitka spruce, some willow and a few bald-hip roses. And grass, long and tangled, undulating and billowing across the field, overwhelming the young trees. The instructions were to pull the grass back and clear a circle of about three feet free around each tree. Using a mix of tools provided, we set to work, but also took time to explore and examine our plot and consult our plant “bible,” Pojar and MacKinnon, to see what we had there. And to gaze at the view, breathe the soft air, and dream a little.

We found ourselves inspired to reclaim this place, restore it to health, and restore ourselves in the process. To connect, to be a part with the land. To make a difference, even if a small one. We felt gifted with the opportunity. Let the new season begin!

These days it is not uncommon to open any kind of public meeting with what’s become known as a land acknowledgment. That is, a reminder that all that these lands were taken from people who lived here for hundreds or thousands of years before settlers from abroad arrived and who, treaty or no treaty, soon dominated local life, marginalizing the original occupants. Among the many injuries suffered, a deep local knowledge of the flora and fauna was largely lost to the new society who did not understand its value.

Lately, there has been an awakening consciousness of that loss and a resurgence of effort to make amends, to humbly try to build new relations and to respect that connection and try to learn from that wisdom still held by native peoples. Recently I was lucky to discover a program at the University of British Columbia—my alma mater in Vancouver—that was taking steps to address some of the impacts of that land taking and the loss of naming wisdom. In large ways—the creation of native studies programs housed in striking traditional style-influenced buildings, the placing of totem poles in strategic viewing locations and the addition of Native language designations on university buildings—the university is taking steps to be more inclusive and instructive about the longer history of the land and its original peoples.

But it was smaller, more tucked away signage that really brought the land issue right down to the land: the attractive plantings and the naming of those plants native to the this area on oval signboards, scattered along walkways and in garden spaces throughout the campus. I was delighted to see the signs wherever I looked and recognize their subtle message: “We are still here!”

Here in Olympia, in December 2021, the Tribal Council of the Squaxin proposed that one of the City’s first parks, 314 acres of upland forest, salmon-bearing creeks, and salt-water beaches, be renamed to honor that tribe’s long association with that place. Priest Point Park, as it was officially designated in 1905 when the town took possession of the land, had been used by Oblate missionaries as a school for Native children and a center for converting tribal members to the Catholic faith, from 1848 to1860. After the mission closed, the land changed hands several times, but by the turn of the century, the latest owners were behind on their property taxes and eventually surrendered the land to the City.

The townspeople organized work parties to create a park, held clambakes and other events to raise funds and enthusiasm, and made the area the pride of the community. Generations enjoyed picnics, games, swimming, and town celebrations there for years. The park at one time sported a small zoo, wandering peacocks, a Swiss-style chalet barged up from the Portland world’s fair of 1905 campsites and other facilities. Less happily, the City built a major road through the middle of the park, dumped silt from port dredging on the beaches from time to time, and sponsored a program to employ law offenders to cut firewood for campers, as a way to work off their fines.

In the 1960s Margaret and friends created an uproar when it was discovered that the City was logging parts of the Park forest to both clear a space and help pay for the building of baseball diamonds for local and visiting teams. Marshaling the community to save the park from commercial exploitation, as they saw it, and keep its acres as a nature preserve and place of quiet appreciation and respite, Margaret called upon all her connections and her own reputation to take a stand for conservation. Her group won the day. The park has remained, for the most part, a forested landscape with streams trickling down to Budd Inlet and the Sound.

Renaming—or returning to a lost name—Squaxin Park for its original inhabitants and knowledge keepers has been welcomed and celebrated as a way to acknowledge the long and mixed history of a beloved place. The proposal was greeted with wide enthusiasm at a public meeting held by the Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee and then passed unanimously by the City Council. The Parks department intends to work closely with the Squaxin to create new signage in Lushootseed, one of the traditional languages of the Coast Salish peoples.

I look forward to visiting the Park to see some similar version of the plant signs I first saw at UBC. And to give a nod to Margaret who, decades ago, roused Olympians to assure there would still be native plants flourishing in the Park for all to enjoy and from which learn a deeper history of place. With her long interest in Native life and stories, I think she too would be delighted with this new chapter.

There are many websites and guides available to learn about Land Acknowledgments. Here is one I have found helpful: https://www.neefusa.org/guide-to-indigenous-land-acknowledgment#Identify

Time in mid-August seems to stand still. The dawn chorus has sung itself out as nesting territorial battles fade and the new generation fledge and leave home. The dry heat of late summer crisps the grass and seems to exhaust the trees. Everything looks brown and a little shriveled. A long quiet pause has settled over my garden.

Even the normally raucous jays are subdued. I caught a glimpse of one the other day and I could see why he was laying low! He looked like he had been pulled backwards out of a tight sock. I wasn’t quick enough to capture a photo of his bedraggled appearance but I knew what his trouble was: he was well into his molting process. He had bald spots and some places where new feathers were emerging while in some other parts it looked to be the last days for the old ragged ones still clinging. He looked very disheveled and quite vulnerable.

It’s that time of year. After the bustle of raising the young, the next agenda for birds is to refresh their feathers in preparation for the long flights of migration or for growing an undercoat, so to speak, of downy feathers for winter warmth. Some lose all their flight feathers at once and hide as best they can while new ones come in. A friend asked where all the robins had gone. They may be around but not in sight as they prepare for the next season. Flocking—the gathering on telephone wires and noisy chattering that build up to migration “take-off”—has not yet begun; watch for it.

The hot dry weather has driven worms far underground and wizened the berry crop in places but hey, this is the northwest…rain has got to come soon! Enjoy the fulfillment of summer, the stillness and peace of the moment. Put out some shallow dishes of fresh water for the birds and see who comes for a drink and a cooling dip.

Picture a lipstick colored flash of a bird high up in the canopy or sailing from tree to tree. But long before you finally catch a good look at this marvel, you’ll hear it calling, whistling, chuckling and tikking. At first I assumed these sounds were several different birds, so varied were the calls. Possibly a jay in the mix? Something loud, confident, not shy and yet hard to see….the trees were in full-summer leaf, lofty and massive, capable of hiding an aviary of any number of noisy creatures.

I was visiting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a world away from Douglas firs and other northwest standards; these majestic street and garden trees were new to me and endlessly fascinating. I never did identify a single one, yet their towering branches and globes of leaves against the sky entranced me on every walk. (Next time I’ll bring a guidebook.) And they were full of life. Exciting vibrant calls that finally, after a lot of neck-craning, resolved into cardinals, males and females, lots of cardinals.

This is a bird common in the mid-west and east but never seen in the northwest. I had been anxious to see this bird that decorated Christmas wrapping paper and cards but seemed mythical otherwise. I had glimpsed one on an earlier trip east but it was backlit and quickly disappeared into tree foliage. There was the cocky-feathered head crest and thick beak but it was all too fleeting. Now, the more I traced those wild calls, I could find a spot of red and finally, on a bare branch in full view, a splendid male cardinal, beak wide, whistling and trilling, unmistakable. It was thrilling!

Later I saw both male and female birds zipping through the trees. The males sport black masks that add to their strikingly handsome look, while the females are characteristically less flashy. Their bodies were a softer, light brown color with more subtle touches of red on wings and long tails, and with smaller patches on their crests. They too, however, have distinctive chunky red beaks.

I think—but am still checking—that it is the male birds whose calls so grabbed my attention. I cannot adequately describe that “song.” No human words can really capture the wild spirit of this remarkable bird. But you can listen to a variety of recordings on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website by searching for “Northern Cardinal” and exploring the pages dedicated to this species. Also, notable is a discussion explaining just how the cardinal can produce such a variety of sounds. Their “voicebox,” properly called the syrinx, has an entirely different structure than our human one, allowing them to sing two notes at once and to rapidly trill notes in ways we can only marvel. See: https://academy.allaboutbirds.org/built-to-sing-the-syrinx-of-the-northern-cardinal/

Seeing these birds and hearing them in full throat was an achievement. I’m not a “lister” of life birds but this was one I was excited to experience. Hope you get to see some for yourself, too!