Arbor Day follows close on the heels of Earth Day, just two days later, as seems only right. But as this year is so off-kilter, let’s give ourselves weeks or even a month if we need it to celebrate the importance of trees in our lives and communities. Traditionally, Arbor Day is marked by planting trees in both public places with ceremony and speeches, as well as privately in our own gardens in remembrance of people and events dear to us, or just because we love trees. It doesn’t need to be complicated.

The first Arbor Day was held April 10, 1872 in Nebraska City, Nebraska, initiated by Julius Sterling Morton who had moved to that nearly treeless state from New York. He and his new wife had taken a homestead and began by planting an orchard and other trees that eventually transformed their land with hundreds of trees. They appropriately named their home Arbor Lodge. Morton took the tree-planting gospel public, giving speeches, writing articles, and encouraging the planting trees wherever he could. He served as acting governor of his state from 1858 to 1861, was a member of the State Horticulture Society, and was appointed US Secretary of Agriculture by President Cleveland, among other offices. Everywhere he served he promoted the planting of trees and more trees. Nebraska made Arbor Day official the year Margaret was born in far-away Washington Territory, in 1885, and Morton continued to spread the word further until most of the country celebrated Arbor Day the last Saturday in April or on a day best suited to the planting of trees. Hawaii and Alaska, when they became states, had very different calendars, for instance, according to their climates. That moveable date gives us license to celebrate whenever we can best do so.

Let’s make a difference! Plant a tree!

We have some records that show Margaret participating in Arbor Day activities. As a member of the Olympia Tree Committee, appointed by Mayor Amanda Smith, Margaret had the honor of helping to officiate at various ceremonial tree-planting occasions. Here we find her with Governor Albert Rosellini planting a Coastal Spruce tree in celebration of Arbor Day in 1961. This tiny tree has a fascinating pedigree. It was said to be a scion of “The Lone Tree, which served as a maritime beacon since it guided Captain Robert Gray into the harbor in 1792.” And if that wasn’t enough to distinguish it, the Governor also designated it as a memorial to Charles Tallmadge Conover, who had coined the moniker “The Evergreen State” for a national campaign advertising Washington as an up-and-coming destination soon after statehood. The legislature adopted it as our official slogan in 1893 and we’ve been proud and green ever since. The tree flourished and still bears its historic association with dignity.

Locally, as the state capital, we have many trees planted to honor individuals who have made their mark in some way. But sometimes it is the tree itself that holds our attention. On one corner of the grounds grows a majestic White Elm that can be said to be a grandchild of the famous Elm under which, legend has it, General George Washington took command of the Continental Army on July 3, 1775 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A visiting University of Washington student was able to send a rooted cutting from the old tree back to Botany Professor Edmund Meany in Seattle who successfully planted it and then had more cuttings made for new trees. This tree was ceremoniously planted by the Bi-Centennial Committee, headed by Supreme Court Justice Walter Beals and the Sacajawea Chapter of the DAR, on February 18, 1932 to mark the 200^th anniversary of George Washington’s birthday. Appropriate orations, prayers and patriotic sentiments celebrated Washington and his glorious legacy but today it is the tree itself that expresses the continuing importance of the founding values we associate with the first president. And for good measure, another cutting was made and planted just to the west of the big tree in 1979 as a promise to the future. Trees are living links to our past and harbingers to a time we hope will be a credit to our best traditions.

Earth Day is Fifty! We could have all used a better splash! Maybe tighten up some pollution regulations, close down the last coal power plant or decide not to keep building that pipeline trenching through the landscape and maybe put up some solar panels instead. A girl can dream.

I lost myself instead reading one powerful online story after another, some uplifting, some hair-raising. Here are links to some of the most inspiring: to introduce the idea of Earth Day, one of my favorite writers, “Chorus at the Dawn of Earth Day” by Gary Paul Nabhan, as featured in Orion Magazine. Another one of their special Earth Day essays was an unexpected delight: I learned something new about Amy Tan: https://orionmagazine.org/cms/assets/uploads/2020/04/tanbanner.jpg 

Emergence magazine, if you haven’t discovered it, offers real sustenance and substance, as well as stunning beauty in their posted essays and artwork: https://emergencemagazine.org/  And the Rachel Carson Council was full of stories and actions backed by research and information, as befits their name: https://rachelcarsoncouncil.org/ But don’t forget sheer joy to keep you putting one foot in front of another; listen to Birdnote for a reset when you most need it: https://www.birdnote.org/blog/2020/04/earth-day-2020-50-years  Puffins!

But even the best stories were other people’s stories, other people’s experiences. I needed to go outside, or at least stand on my front porch and see for myself. I needed to breathe in lilac scented air and breathe out the deep gloom that had settled in my heart. Climate change catastrophe looms like a shadow around the coronavirus upheaval, but that day I had to just open my hands, palms up and try to let some of the pent up fury and sadness go, just for now. There was a steady Northwest-style rain, the kind that washes all the pollen out of the air and soaks down into the tree roots. We badly needed it in this dry spring.

I needed the lilacs, the most we’ve ever had on our bush, are just coming into their own now. And my eyes drank in the blue sweep at its peak in our front garden. It’s my prairie even if it’s not camas. Somewhere out near the Mima Mounds, there is a real glacial prairie ablaze with blue and yellow and pink and every soft and vibrant color even if we can’t visit it this year. The butterflies and birds have it as their domain. It is enough to know it is there. That the Earth will go on, in ways we cannot fathom just now, but that we hope will include us. We must resolve to deserve—and serve—this beauty. Every day is Earth Day, really.

It’s not so bad, staying put, staying still, in this one place during this time of social isolation. We count ourselves lucky to be healthy and “okay” in this dire pandemic time. If I could, blindfolded, put a pin in a world map, I’d want to choose this as my home right now. I try to keep myself occupied with the ever-present nearby. Even though I’ve lived here for decades I am still learning its stories, still finding new things to learn and put in my small pile of wonders. Paying attention to what got Margaret’s attention has brought me to see so much richness right under my feet. Take these pine-cones I habitually pick up on walks….

Just the other day I was reading about Douglas-fir cones in a book so good I can absorb only sips at a time: Tree, A Life Story, by David Suzuki and Wayne Grady.  They are unfathomable complex structures. I will give you one tiny piece of their role in the tree’s reproductive story as told by the authors:

Pollination by wind is a wild but dubious adventure and is considered quite primitive among plants, since there is no control over where the pollen will land. In contrast, pollination carried out by an insect provides a reasonable probability that pollen stuck to the insect will find its way to another flower of the same species. In fact, many species evolve flowers that are attractive to specific insects for just that purpose.

But here is the kicker:

But conifers developed their pollinating techniques before there were flying insects. The flowering plants, or angiosperms, evolved only during the Cretaceous period, which ended 65 million years ago, when gymnosperms—conifers, cycads, and ginkgos—had already been around for at least 300 million years.

A case of evolution not fixing what wasn’t broken? The conifers seemed to double-down on the pollination method of reproduction. The authors go on to describe the incredibly clever series of developments and mechanisms that evolved in the long stretch of time that still bring us Douglas-firs today. Primitive? Ancient, yes. Venerable. Three hundred million years have taught them a few survival tricks, indeed. We can delve more into some of those details at a later time; all I want to say now is my feeling of awe and respect in the presence of one of these giants. This one can be found in one of our city parks. Imagine all it has witnessed! I don’t know but I would guess it is perhaps at least a century old, or much more?

Today on her birthday, April 17, Margaret would have been one hundred and thirty-five years old. As venerable as a Douglas-fir. Her enjoyment of the world, her sense of adventure and curiosity, her knowledge of the natural world, make her seem young though, and very present still today. Let’s celebrate her birthday by watching a bird poke around our garden, or note how the buds have swollen and blossomed into flowers and leaves, how blue the sky is on this spring day. And maybe find some fir cones that have escaped the attentions of local squirrels, part of the circle of life and renewal.

There is something about waking in the dark well before any need to plan the day or check the news. It can be a time of inward receptiveness, a pause, an opening to nothing and everything. And without knowingly listening, a sound arises, here, then there: bird song. But it is still quite dark! The singing is brief and tentative, a kind of trying-out of a trill or warble. A warming up of the vocal chords?

But then, there is more: a sustained series of notes, less interrogative, more of a statement, a declaration. A voice calls from one direction; another perks up and begins to call attention to itself from another place. Soon there is song swelling from every nearby bush or tree. The sky, without making a sound, empties its darkness from black to intense blue, a midnight blue, and then spreads a watery warmth from a far edge upward. The moment before dawn. The birds send up their chorus to greet the day. It never fails to thrill.

I remember such moments as a child, waking early and slipping over to the bedroom window to watch the light spread in the sky and listening to birds singing the new day into existence. And the time I raced the light across town to join friends on a dawn walk through woods to hear the birds. Lucky me to have birding friends who could call the names of the singers by ear and who were attuned to all the songs as we moved quietly along the trails first in the darkness and as the sun brightened the horizon. A great feeling of peace and well-being suffused the moment.

But for the birds, this singing has a different imperative. It is a competition, a challenge, an urgent call of territory and mating siren. It has nothing to do with the ecstasy of sunrise. Except that it does, in a way very different from our human romanticism.

As reported on the Cornell website, a bird researcher, Karl Berg, discovered that that the dawn chorus was a precisely organized orchestration; there was nothing random or spontaneous about the songfest. The research team found that “each species started singing at a specific time relative to first light.” They were able to correlate this sequencing in relation to “each species characteristic foraging height and its eye size. Species that forage higher in the canopy or have larger eyes sang earlier than others.” This is so intriguing!

Further, “this suggests that light levels are responsible for the timing of singing. Leaves and branches shade out lower levels of the forest so that the forest floor takes longer to brighten than the canopy. Birds with different eye sizes perceive light levels differently at the same height, because larger eyes gather more light than smaller ones. At some point around dawn, each species may have enough light to see predators and competitors, before there is sufficient light to effectively forage for food. It may sing at its maximum rate for the day until the point when there is enough light to forage.” And at that point, the singing dies down. It’s breakfast time, a different imperative.

The dawn chorus will still feel magical to the listener lucky enough to awaken in time but now feels like it has gained a level of complexity never guessed at before. I know only a few bird-calls with any certainty. I could hear robins and a cacophony of “probables” as well as a buzzing sound that I attributed to a wren. Later in the day, I did see a wren skittering around in the camellia bush. Aha! But as to eye size and height of foraging…I’ll have to leave that to the ornithologists. Fun to think about, though!

For more on this research, see the Cornell Lab website at: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/who-sings-first-during-the-dawn-chorus-and-why/

Green is the color of spring: fresh, poking out of the ground, drinking in the light, green. Even in the Evergreen State we look for the new tips on the end of trees, the exuberant dandelions dotting our lawns, and the lush growth sprouting on every side. My honeysuckle vines are like thickets reaching for the sun. Buds are opening and spreading their sticky nascent leaves on every bush. We rejoice in the new season.

We have a favorite place to walk that is but a short distance from home. It is a nearby ravine that has been set aside as a park with a simple trail system, one bench for contemplation, and steps leading in and for scrambling out. It has a nice variety of trees and undergrowth, a swampy reed-filled area replete with frogs, and steep sides that volunteers are exhausting themselves to clear of suffocating ivy.

And it is here along the trail that I look, not for more green, but for a very special flash of white. This is where trilliums appear each spring like magic from some other realm. We’ve been going for weeks, looking and looking, and growing anxious by their absence. Has the ivy choked them out of existence? Finally, finally, we found one, then another and another! Oh joy. It was like feeling the Earth turning on its axis as it should be.

We were content. The walk home was a more comfortable one. The sky was a rare blue. And suddenly we saw another flash of white, this one high up in a large fir tree that still shades Margaret’s house as it has for decades, which we pass along our way. No trillium this. This brilliant white was the head of an eagle surveying the neighborhood. It was perched on a protruding branch from where it could launch itself to circle over the houses and do a turn over Capitol Lake.

Eagles have lived on the edge of the lake for years but they are not often seen. Sometimes they appear as shapes seen high in the sky, calling with their eerie cries, but this one posed on that branch for as long as we passed by. Bright white against the dark tree.

Green is the color of spring, but twice that day, white was the color we admired, that brought gasps of delight.

It was with a little shock that I saw on my calendar that yesterday, March 19, was the first day of Spring. I had missed the moment. No day now, in the midst of the corona virus epidemic, is like any other day used to be. Time is passing in slow motion, or in fits and starts, sometimes even going backwards or sideways. Still, I felt chagrined that I had been unaware of the advent of a more hopeful season: a time of birth, growth and exuberance!

But there have been other moments to lighten the heart worth sharing. Sitting on my front porch, I could hear high scratchy calls. Searching the clear blue sky—itself noteworthy—sure enough, there were two eagles circling and wheeling over my neighborhood, calling and sweeping the sky and then disappearing out of my view.

In other bird news, in a stretch of mid-night insomnia, I could hear an owl hooting, pausing, and then hooting some more. It must have been quite close by. I was thrilled, having never heard hooting before. It was magical. It didn’t help me get back to sleep but I was so glad to have been there for the moment.

A friend and I had been searching for the first trillium, a definite sign of Spring, but had not yet made any discoveries when “social isolation” ended our shared pursuit. But—lucky me—another friend knew of my longing and sent me this wonderful photo of her first sighting. Renewal! Hope!

And another gift: Just drink in this blooming cherry tree gracing the Capitol Campus here in Olympia. We gazed—six feet apart—and felt cheered even in this difficult time. Be well. Don’t miss the season, go outside. We will get back to discussing feeding wild birds soon.

So long as people have been feeding birds there has been a debate whether or not this is an acceptable practice. Or even a moral one. Is your backyard feeder ruining the character of your local birds, encouraging laziness and slothful habits? Are you somehow endangering them by making things too easy for them?

I am enjoying a book that asks these very questions, and searches through the scientific research for pertinent data to lay this issue to rest, for once and all. Darryl Jones trots the globe and scours the ornithological libraries to find out how many people feed birds and what the impact might be—on the humans as well as the birds—in The Birds at My Table: Why We Feed Wild Birds and Why it Matters. He seems to be tipping his hand a little in that subtitle.

Let’s all have a conversation on this surprisingly hot topic. Please use the comment section to weigh in, pro or con, or ambivalent, or “just wondering, too.” All opinions are worthy. As I read, I will report my findings and reflections for you in a kind of serial pondering.

In her 1939 book, Birds in the Garden and How to Attract Them, Margaret begins her chapter on “Feeding Devices”  by coming down unequivocally on the side of feeding birds: “There are people who say that we merely pauperize the birds by feeding them and that it is pure sentimentality  on our part to want to see the birds near us.”

She then relates a story told by E.H. Forbush, State Ornithologist of Massachusetts—Margaret was always happy to have a recognized authority on her side—about how his habit of feeding birds fortuitously drew them to his orchard and thereby saved his apple crop from an insect infiltration. The birds went from feeder to trees and busily gobbled down all the encroaching pests that they might not have noticed if they weren’t already in the neighborhood. He considered that a fair exchange.

She returns to her own argument by defending so-called sentimentality by reminding readers that,“…birds often perish by the thousands during a heavy snowstorm that covers all natural food, or when there is an ice storm and all twigs and branches are sealed with a glittering armor. The bluebirds were almost wiped out a number of years ago in an unseasonal storm.If it is sentimentality to assist birds through such a time of stress, then sentimentality  is a good thing. How much better to feed the birds through the year, getting them accustomed to a secure source of supply, than it would be to go out some subzero morning and find a chickadee frozen in a knothole, or the stiff form of a downy woodpecker or a brown creeper at the foot of a tree.”

Margaret went on to give detailed instructions on how to create a feeding station for birds. She followed a more do-it-yourself mode but did include information on feeders that were available by order from the National Audubon Society. She cautioned her readers to situate the feeder where it would be sheltered from cats and other predators, kept dry to preserve the food, and include fresh water and even a source of digestive grit. And in a place where the human benefactor could see the arrivals and “breakfast with the birds.” She freely acknowledged we feed the birds for our own pleasure as much as for their well-being and the health of our gardens. Is it any more complicated than that?

I’m not ready for it. I don’t know if I will ever be ready. Oh, I greatly admire, and hold in awe, those with the knowledge and confidence and better eyesight than I have who can say, yes, that is an Anna’s Hummingbird. And not a Rufous Hummingbird. As it moves and the light flashes on this or that side, it changes color and is at once very dark looking and then…not. I can’t seem to see it whole. It seems to be a male; it’s so brilliantly colored. The Rufous in the guidebook is quite red, as would befit its name, with a light colored belly, so maybe then this bird is an Anna’s. Am I sure? If I were a real birder, wouldn’t I know this by now?

And then there are the sparrows. Males and females who are so variable in streaks, blotches and head stripes, all shades of “brown” or grayish-brown, yellowish-brown, reddish-brown, more or less all the same size, certainly all eating seeds and scratching around in the same manner. I saw three, pretty sure, white crowned sparrows but whose white stripes were kind of dirty looking, not yet committed to real white; perhaps its too early in the season and the males have no need yet to be showing off their crowns for the ladies. Fun to watch though, when I let go of the idea that I should know one bird from another.

And that bird on the telephone wire with its back to me. It looks like a big ball of feathers! I can see that it is all puffed up and grooming itself with its beak but I can’t make it out at all. It looks so much bigger than all the juncos and other little brown birds. But not as big as a crow, not black, but blackish. How mysterious. Maybe something really different and unusual! Until it turned around and even I could see it was a robin. A case of wishful thinking?

What brought on all this angst? I had a garden teeming with birds, all I could want. I had already seen a flicker, a Downy woodpecker, more Bushtits than I could count.  Plus my usual chickadees and dainty juncos, a flock of robins, and several Western Scrub Jays. If I waited awhile, I would see nuthatches, towhees, crows flapping by, and maybe even an eagle. Once—a lucky moment—I  saw a hummingbird and an eagle in the same glance! (It made me think of Great Danes and St. Bernards and Shih Tzus and Chihuahuas …can they really all be the same species?) I should just be enjoying the show.

I was so challenged because this President’s Day weekend, from Friday to Monday, is the annual Great Backyard Bird Count, sponsored by the Audubon Society and the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. The idea is to engage ordinary people—well, ordinary people who know their birds—to identify and count them and then report their results to a designated website. The aggregate results would be tabulated and from this massive input of information, this cumulative snapshot of birds seen all over the country over the course of the same days, scientists would be able to gain a big-picture count of the birds, where they are, how many there are, and how they are. It’s another version of the Christmas Bird Count run by Audubon since the earliest years of the last century, one of the biggest and longest-running citizen science projects that gathers information in an organized way using the extraordinary powers of observation by ordinary citizens. The results are a deep dive into the state of birds and can be used to shape policy and wake up the world to the plight faced by these creatures that we love. It is a very worthy endeavor and something, though seemingly small, that has a big impact. I applaud such efforts with my whole heart.

Which is why I am not signing up for it. Not yet. The dry run I gave myself today was so inconclusive, so tentative and with so many caveats in my attempts to nail down just what I was seeing in my own garden that I decided, no, not yet, my results are too shaky to be of scientific use to anyone. But I could have it as my goal that by next year, say, I could really learn to identify one sparrow from another, to know what is a finch, male and female, and not just see a small grayish, vaguely striped—or not—bird poking about in the bushes. At any rate, it will be fun trying. Bird by bird, here and there. I’ve already learned so much in the short while I’ve been trying.

But if you feel ready for a lively challenge, check out the Great Backyard Bird Count, by all means! They ask that you watch birds for “at least fifteen minutes.” You probably do that every day. And they tell you how to submit your report. They make it easy! And so worthwhile. I’ll join you some day.

Here is a link to the Cornell website:

https://gbbc.birdcount.org/?utm_source=Cornell+Lab+eNews&utm_campaign=e8e2128268-ebird+enews+feb+2020&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_47588b5758-e8e2128268-303045489

It’s February, sodden and cold. I spend a lot of time gazing out my kitchen window into a tangle of bushes, a lichen splotched wooden fence, and, most entertaining, my bird feeder. It’s a hybrid contraption of a tube sunflower seed dispenser with a suet block attached with a wire holder, all connected to a pulley system carefully calibrated—most of the time—to keep it out of reach of squirrels and tree rats.

The bushes are a mixed row of unruly camellias and ancient rhododendrons, a perfect tunnel of safe perches and launching pads for small birds. Chestnut-backed and Black-capped Chickadees, Nuthatches, flocks of Bush-tits, sparrows of several kinds, and my pride and joy, a family of Downie woodpeckers. The feeder often sports a flicker contorting itself to reach the suet while pretending to be a small bird. Starlings sometimes blow in and hog the feeder while quarreling among themselves, forcing the less aggressive birds to wait. A curious wren occasionally flits in and out of my view and towhees and juncos forage for dropped seeds on the ground. I also leave seed on the fence railing for them and any others who aren’t built to comfortably cling to a feeder. I never tire of watching the parade.

A while ago our neighbor reluctantly came to the decision that the centerpiece of my view and a favored perch for the birds, a fast-growing cherry tree that had seeded itself many years ago and was aiming to claim all the sky it could reach, was a likely menace to our respective house foundations and underground gas lines. I had to agree. From a slender stick of a tree that we had barely noticed, it had shouldered its way through the rhodies and was adding girth every year. I worried that the Downies who seemed most to rely on its rough bark for clinging purposes would desert my feeder if the tree was removed,  that my small grove of bushes wouldn’t accommodate their needs. But the tree was impossible in that location and the arborist duly came and carefully removed it from its spot.

I waited and watched. Well, the birds seem to barely register the change, the gap in their repertoire of perches! They came and went as if the cherry tree had never been there. The Downies adjusted and focused their attention on the suet feeder as before, I was relieved to note. And one day I noticed a red House finch, a bird we hadn’t seen at the feeder in years….perhaps ever since the cherry tree had crowded into the space? Maybe they preferred a bit more room to maneuver? And the most exciting of all, a Townsend warbler flashed its bright yellow as it nipped in and out for several weeks. We hadn’t seen warblers for a long time either.

So, lesson of the day? Birds have different needs for cover, some more, some less. Experiment by hanging your feeders in different locations. Try out different seed mixes. Think about which birds can cling to a feeder or prefer ground feeding and will need cover to scratch and poke about. But mostly, find a spot where you can observe the action and be surprised by who turns up. That quick vision of yellow or red will make your day!

We can thank Christy Hargrove of the North Carolina Nature Center for helping designate January 21^st as Squirrel Appreciation Day. Suggestions for celebration include putting out extra food—every squirrel’s idea of a party—to learning more about this lively and ubiquitous creature. Did you know there are over 200 species of squirrels, which come in three types: ground squirrels, tree squirrels, and perhaps the most exciting, flying squirrels? This last kind would be accurately called floating squirrels as they rely on flaps of skin stretching from top to bottom of their legs that they spread out when leaping from tree to tree. But still, great fun to watch as they glide through the branches!

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife discuss native tree squirrels and introduced squirrels (See here: https://wdfw.wa.gov/species-habitats/living/species-facts/tree-squirrels# ) and relate that squirrels of both varieties are rated as “first as problem makers” among of urban wildlife as well as “first among preferred urban species.” It sounds like we can’t make up our minds how we feel about them. Maybe it’s their crazy antics as they high-wire across telephone lines or zip up and down trees and busy themselves planting peanuts in our flower pots—an activity I could do without, but otherwise find them entertaining. There is something about having wild creatures living so closely with us that touches the imagination.

Margaret wrote chiefly about our native Douglas squirrels. In one of her Nature Notes, she tells a story about “when early explorers traveled through the great forests of our northwest country, they were puzzled at the sound of a strange trill. They thought for a long time that it was the call of a shy woodland bird. But after a while they found it was the trilling call of a little red squirrel. Because of this trilling call the western red squirrel was called chickaree.” Now they are named for David Douglas, an early explorer and naturalist for whom is also named the Douglas fir.

It is clear from her comments about “these lively little fellows” that she is very familiar with their ways. “If you disturb one of them in his chosen territory as you walk through the woods, he will scold furiously and seem to swear at you in squirrel language. But often when you are camping he becomes very friendly. He is always on hand at meal times and will even walk across your bed if you are late in getting up in the morning.” (This description tells us as much about Margaret as the creatures she found so amusing.)

However you encounter squirrels, take a moment and appreciate one of our most accessible “nearby” wildlife, whether it’s their Day or any day.

SQUIRREL APPRECIATION DAY – January 21