The Daily Bucket is your repository for nature gossip. Winter ducks arriving? Dragonflies chasing you away from their territorial nurseries? Drunken raccoons in your back yard? Post your sightings here, along with nature questions, answers, and commentary. Everyone is welcome - all we ask is that you let us know where you're located, as close as you're comfortable revealing.
Seattle. October 18, 2013.
The Forest inhales green from the ground up in early spring. In fall it exhales everything but green. My camera cannot find the colors. Not in the half fogged early afternoon when we go out to walk. Not an hour later when the sun breaks through.
We walk in light that seems compressed, packed by cold air into crevices of the Forest that I have never seen.
There: a stand of Western Hazelnuts, their fruit picked clean by Stellars Jays, their last leaves yellow below the place where I found a Townsend's Chipmunk for the first time when Bill-the-Dog could leap over the nurse log that still moulders across the trail.
There: beyond the hollow where the southern Barred Owl fledglings appeared on Mother's Day the first year we found them, a Doug Fir embraced by glaringly red poison oak climbing so high up its trunk that the whole seems to be some weird chimeric tree creature, evergreen and deciduous at the same time.
And there: across the place where an ancient Doug Fir snag came down earlier this year, perhaps the last unharvested meadow of Bracken Fern in the Forest, faded, still shoulder high, tangled with spiderwebs.
I find it difficult to speak about the Forest during summer; to describe the annual arrival of joggers, of day campers, of overly enthusiastic foragers and their companions. I am perhaps too concerned about the health of this tiny fragment of my city's original ecosystem, too compulsive about tending the damaged places, too invested to speak without pain.
But sometimes this time of year when it's just me and Bill-the-Dog wandering in impossible light I have a hard time even walking, because
....when things are beautiful, I just want to fall down.
(Thank you, begone's 4-year old grandson.)
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Your turn now. Gossip away. I'll be out until just after noon PDT, then away shortly afterwards until dinnertime.
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