The Daily Bucket is your repository for local nature gossip. Winter ducks arriving? Hummingbirds warring over feeders? Urban coyotes? 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. December 1, 2013
So you go away for a couple of weeks and when you return everything has changed.
The air glowed yellow when we left,
October 30, 2013. View from the Stump.
and had rediscovered its winter monochrome by our return.
November 28, 2013. View from the Stump.
We missed the time when fallen leaves lay so deep that the paths disappear, when even the regular walkers sometimes find themselves just a little bit lost. Now there is a trodden place to follow even on the most seldom used trails, but we can only follow in single file.
In spring I look up, searching the canopy for the source of the new voices, warblers and vireos passing through, branchlet owls hissing for food. In fall I look down. The recent history of the Forest lies there.
November 28, 2013. The Forest floor.
Peeking up from everything in the image above is the first of the Forest mosses I've been able to identify, at least a far as genus:
Kindbergia sp., one of the most common mosses sheltering the Forest floor. It is green again with the return of the rain. The brown braids are spent leaves shed from Western Red Cedar (
Thuja plicata),
plicata from the Greek, "folded in plaits". Western Red Cedar is an evergreen tree, but in late summer every year it lets some of its oldest leaves fall. Douglas Fir (
Pseudotsuga menziesii) follows suit in mid autumn. Their leaves are the needly ones. This year the Douglas Fir needle drop was noticeably copious; I'll be watching next year to see what happens. The big dry brown leaves are those of Big-leaf Maple (
Acer macrophyllum), the predominant deciduous tree in the Forest. I begin to see a few of these on the Forest floor every year in mid-summer, the weakest ones perhaps, or the ones that happened to develop in the most inauspicious places. Late October and early November bring their siblings down en masse. These are the ones that hid the Forest paths while we we gone.
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Your turn now. What's happening in your natural neighborhood? I'll be out for a bit mid-morning and much of the afternoon, but will definitely be back around dinnertime PST to comment. (What's this leisurely retirement thing I hear I keep hearing about? I'm busier now than I was when I was working!)