(Image: carnivorespotter.org)

Do the people that declare “official” days or months all confer? Is there a shared calendar somewhere that they all use? How do they figure out scheduling conflicts? Surely they couldn’t have made April 1 both National Greeting Card Day, National Sourdough Day, National Love Our Children Day, and well, April Fools Day?

Despite the rather farcical nature of these various days, I still think the symbolic nature of honorific days or months is important. These are opportunities to reflect and consider different facets of cultural heritage that can be quite compelling and draw real connections and action. For example, I love Earth Day, even if it does provide torrential greenwashing from corporations actively depriving us of a healthy planet. (A Bloomberg ad I saw recently was particularly infuriating, consisting of strung together movie clips that encouraged optimism about the environment, which felt like someone standing on high ground, watching a group of people drowning in a river saying “Just come up here, it’s fine. Swim harder, you’ll make it.”

Ramble aside, my point is that these various days and months are what we make of them. As it happens, April is both Earth Month and Citizen Science Month, two things that are actually the focus of this month’s article (not my bad jokes and ranting). Thankfully in this case, these things complement one another.

As a result, I have some opportunities to share to help celebrate. Continue reading →

This is what AI says the CHS crow’s eye looks like

“I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Try telling that to your dog or a fly. See what exactly? That hummingbird visiting flowers sees things quite differently than you or I, even if between individual humans our vision can be quite varied. Understandably, we tend to get a bit caught up in ourselves, because despite good science we still only really know definitively what the world looks like to us (and by that I mean down to each of us individually).

What does the world look like to some of the animals that we share the Hill with?

First, a bit about “eyes.”

Any eye, no matter the structure, detects light and processes it into neurons that help the organism with said eyes “see.” Enough said. But without getting too metaphysical about it, what exactly is seeing? For some organisms, it means merely detecting light and dark. For others it means seeing colors, shapes, and movement. There are simple eyes which consist of a lens or multiple lenses within a single structure (like our eyes or an eagle’s) and compound eyes are arrays of many lenses (think of fly eyes). The arrangement of these lenses and the photoreceptor cells are quite diverse and complex (even in the case of “simple” eyes) and although Darwin famously said that “the eye to this day gives me a cold shudder,” it’s fairly apparent why this is the case: organisms have deeply different needs from their eyes.

To attempt to briefly explain the evolutionary development of eyes, or even try to explain all the details of the different eye structures of even the few creatures below is laughable. So I’ll settle down into my childhood comfort zone and regurgitate some animal facts. I do this for your sake, because while eye evo-devo is a vast and fascinating subject, the real joy is knowing that slugs have no focus, and that birds can see an entire spectrum of light invisible to us.

A cat’s irises are little slits during daylight hours. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Cats — Cats are obviously good at seeing at night. If you’ve ever caught your cat’s eyes in a flashlight, you also know their eyes are not like ours. Cats have a reflective layer called the tapetum lucidum, allowing them to see with much less light than us (around 1/6th the amount we’d need to see well). This is also why they have irises that can go from narrow slits to wide moons; they are extremely sensitive and need to protect themselves as they move between day and night. Continue reading →

A holly stool that has been cut more than once. Whether purposeful or not, the owner of the property where this holly is growing has created a coppice. This will resprout vigorously from buds in the root collar and on the stubs of the previous stems. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Sometimes that tree has to go.

Whoever tended it previously let it get so wild that all its branches, perilously spindly from reaching around a building to sunlight, broke during a snowstorm. It may have also been planted too close to a building. In my case, I personally did not like the English Laurel for various reasons and decided to remove it and replace it with native plants. I cut down the hedge, removed the brush and wood, and felt satisfied with my work. However, I later discovered that new shoots were growing from the stumps I had left behind due to the remaining roots of the hedge.

I knew this was going to happen.

This hedge was on the precipice of an unstable hill and digging out a dozen laurel roots would have created quite the problem. So I left them, knowing I’d have to return and hack back new shoots for years until they either die or the native planting is established enough for me to remove the stumps. As with most things in nature, I am not in as much control as I think and mostly, gardening and working with plants is at best a compromise.  Continue reading →

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Douglas Fir with fresh cones and new growth (Image: Brendan McGarry)

With the holiday season, many people have ventured out to bring a tree into their homes. Not just any tree. In most cases, a coniferous evergreen.

For those of us on the Hill interested in bedazzling a tree corpse, we’re in luck, because the Pacific Northwest is full of native evergreen tree species that are perfect for holiday cheer.

If one were so inclined and had the resources, they could go out into a not so distant National Forest and harvest their own wild tree rather than getting a perfectly trimmed beauty off a lot though not everyone has this option.

But have you ever stopped to consider why we have so many of these trees in the so-called Evergreen State, and why evergreens are, well, evergreen? Continue reading →