Tag Archives: pikes pines

Pikes/Pines | The gall of it all — These strange, beautifully weird growths make benign houses for Capitol Hill gallformers

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A previous year’s gall on a Thimbleberry cane. The holes are where the occupants left when the gall matured. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Do you ever go outside to get something from your vegetable garden and stand up a half an hour later in a haze of naturalistic wonder? My partner calls it distracto-boy, and suggests I have ADD — which may be a good moniker and a not impossible diagnosis. Mostly I just think I have (a largely) undivided attention for nature.

My most recent spiral was initiated by several large bumps on the stems of the Thimbleberries, Rubus parviflorus, I planted in our yard a few years ago.

Despite trying to train myself to not lose my mind whenever I see a blemish on anything I’m growing (because mostly this is just a good sign that a plant is being used by other species around it), I couldn’t help but feel an initial bit of horror. I knew these bumps were galls, but I didn’t know if this was a death knell for the Thimbleberries I’d been lovingly watching grow over the past three years. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | The liquefaction zones of Capitol Hill

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An image demonstrating the extent of the last glacial maximum in our region. (Image: Ron Lewis via Ice Age Floods Institute)

Separating the interesting side of geologic hazards from the true, helpless terror they can represent is a difficult task.

This is why, when you read headlines about our region’s volcanoes and earthquakes, they are rarely serene. And rightly so. Swarms of earthquakes at Mt. Rainier and tsunami warnings from Russian tremors are fear inducing, regardless of hyperlocal impact.

However, having our heads in the sand — or the glacial till — isn’t going to help.

Capitol Hill is mostly a pile of sand and rocks deposited during the last glacial maximum around 16,000 years ago. This isn’t particularly unique across the Puget Sound landscape because the entire basin was covered by glaciers, and the deposits left by their expansions and recessions is part of our environmental heritage. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | Capitol Hill’s house sparrows live in apartments

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A male House Sparrow. (Image: Russell Sutherland via Flickr)

I was in a rush to get out of town a few weeks ago and needed a quick meal. A quick detour took me up to Broadway and there I was, waiting in line with a dozen other mostly sober people at Dick’s on a Thursday evening. When I stand in lines these days, I try really hard to not reflexively reach for my phone. Sometimes this means I have awkward conversations or eavesdrop on awkward conversations. Mostly I daydream and consider my surroundings. In this case, I looked down to see several small brown birds, one with a handsome black bib, picking at bits of food and other detritus around our cueing feet.

They were House Sparrows, Passer domesticus, birds so common that like gulls and pigeons, they often get overlooked. As a kid I’d reflexively leave them off my bird lists along with European Starlings and today still occasionally mark them with an “X” rather than counting them on eBird, which purists consider a cardinal sin. They are one of the most widespread wild birds in the world, inhabiting every continent, native or introduced. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines Classic | These Capitol Hill bird moms put all their eggs in one basket

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(Image: annycampbell via iNaturalist)

A ruby-crowned male (Image: City of Seattle)

At this time of year, birds often fly around carrying bits of grass, twigs, cobwebs—and sometimes, here on Capitol Hill, trash—for building nests.

Many birds lay several clutches of eggs every season in an attempt to raise as many chicks as possible.

But one of the Hill’s smallest songbirds, the ruby-crowned kinglet, has a different strategy.

The ruby-crowned kinglet gets its name from a tiny red crest on the male’s head, but this crest only pops up when he is agitated or trying to attract a female. If you see a kinglet, you may not see any red at all. You may only see a tiny gray bird with some yellowish coloration on the underside. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | No, you can’t (entirely) blame your Capitol Hill pollen allergies on botanical sexism

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Sunflowers need insect visitors to move their pollen around and many bees are happy to oblige! (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Dandelions and their relatives are examples of monoecious plants that have both male and female parts contained within a single flower (though their flowerheads are actually made up of many individual flowers). (Image: Brendan McGarry)

I spend a lot of time outside. I tend the garden, I walk the dog, I nerd out on nature, and I even manage to sit still and relax occasionally.

These are all activities I am grateful to be able to enjoy because I know that not everyone has the same opportunities, nor can they enjoy certain seasons with the same zest.

Unlike a few of my close friends, I don’t have seasonal allergies, and have never had to look at pollen counts or use medications to simply struggle through each day. (Though woe is me, I am fairly certain I am allergic to hops.) According to the CDC, around a quarter of the adults in the US have the seasonal allergy rhinitis or hay fever, which is caused by the body’s reaction to plant pollen – so it’s not unreasonable that those of you reading don’t share my joy right now.

Most plants produce pollen and all pollen is produced for one purpose – to transfer male gametes from one reproductive structure to another, receptive one. You might read this as “I’m allergic to plant sperm,” but that’s not quite accurate. Pollen are gametophytes that generate sperm once they come into contact with an embryo sac – be that on the pistil of a flowering plant or the female cone of a gymnosperm (e.g. conifers). Just like the plants that produce them, pollen is extremely varied, the better to be conveyed by a variety of animals, as well as wind, water, or a mixture of all of the above. (If you really want to get into the weeds, both pollen and the embryo sac can be considered separate organisms from their parents but let’s not complicate things.)

A microscopic view of the pollen grains from a diversity of plants reveals a hallucinatory range of shapes, colors, and textures that help transport them between plants and protect them from getting gobbled up or destroyed by the environment. (Pollen can last for days, where raw sperm would not last hours in most conditions.) Animal pollinated plants tend to have larger, stickier, and more protein rich pollen to cling to pollinators and offer them a reward, while wind pollinated plants tend to have lighter, loftable pollen, (some even have air sacs) to balloon them as far as possible.

A couple weeks ago, Justin (our illustrious leader here at CHS), sent me an unreal looking image of a Georgia skyline filled with pollen. Accompanying this (real) image (from six years ago) were comments blaming the highest pollen count in state history on cities planting only male trees. I am often late to the party on social media happenings (Justin once asked me a question on Twitter and I finally responded a year later and didn’t even realize how tardy I was), but apparently a few years ago the idea of botanical sexism hit TikTok by storm after a single video rested the weight of all pollen allergies on the shoulders of city planners, horticulturalists, and arborists “only planting male trees.” The idea is that these male trees spew forth their pollen everywhere, and with nowhere to go, they just go forth to clog up our bodies with histamines.

Botanical sexism is a term coined by a researcher and horticulturalist named Tom Ogren, who theorized that because of a supposed preferential planting of male plants in landscaping, we are having more societal issues with pollen allergies. At surface value, this sounds pretty reasonable, and it’s true that in some cases, tree varieties bred to not produce fruit or seeds (remember the cherries of last month’s Pikes/Pines) or only clones of male trees get planted in urban spaces. Gingko trees are a good example of this, because female gingkos are almost never planted as street trees or in ornamental gardens because their prodigious fruit production is frankly horrendous, generating rotting piles of inedible fruit that can become health hazards. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | Genus Prunus — It is time to enjoy Seattle’s wealth of cherry trees

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March is about one thing for me: anticipating spring. Every day I listen to more and more avian voices, thrilled by the steady increase in volume, stretching my ears to hear the first swallows and warblers. But mostly, I spend the days leading into spring anticipating the breaking of buds to reveal the season’s leaves and flowers.

For many, there is no better embodiment of this anticipation than the members of the genus Prunus, known as cherries.

Unless you live under a rock, you know that cherries are famous for their blossoms. Across the world people flock to bask in their annual profusions of all flavors between white, pink, and purple. The University of Washington Quad is locally famous for their Yoshino cherries (Prunus × yedoensis), which bear brilliant blooms before their leaves even hint at emerging. Of any country in the world, Japan takes cherry worship to unmatched heights with the number of cultivars they claim (several hundred depending on your definition), the tradition of Hanami (gathering to picnic and enjoy the blooms each year), and the use of the sakura (cherry blossom) as an important cultural symbol. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | Hair ice: beautiful proof it is a wonderful chilly day between the 45th and 55th parallel

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Some Washington State hair ice (Image: CHS)

(Image: CHS)

Have you ever encountered something that you have no explanation for? Maybe it’s the way someone is behaving towards you. Possibly, an object out of place that you swear was just here. Or, it’s a nature encounter that leaves you unsure of what you’ve just seen.

That’s how I felt on a morning walk in the forest outside Marblemount, Washington several years ago. The night before had been quite cold, and as I crept through the riverine forest of alder and cottonwood lining the Skagit River, leaves crackled underfoot. Like any forest, dead branches were strewn about, jettisoned by a combination of decay and force. And then something caught my eye: curling out of several branches about me, was something that looked like hair. I stopped and looked closer. I gently touched one of them and it was cold and melted against my warm fingers. Maybe this was just a weird ice formation – but why was it only on these dead branches?

Without sounding conceited, I am very confident in my naturalist abilities. I am good at identifying plants and animals and I can develop a good working theory on most animal behavior I witness. Rarely does an encounter on or near my home ground stump me. But here I was looking at this thing protruding from rotting sticks that I had never seen before. So, like any good naturalist, I took some photos and notes, and trotted off to try to figure out what it was on the internet.

As it turns out, I was not alone in surprise and uncertainty when encountering hair ice.

In 1918 a German meteorologist, Alfred Wegener, formally described this enigma, and suggested that it was not just a new ice formation, but that it could be related to fungus undoubtedly lurking in the damp, decaying sticks he found it protruding from. Wegener is now noted for his theory of continental drift, but he was also a polar explorer who knew a thing or two about ice and he was pretty sure he wasn’t looking at only frozen water.

It took almost 100 years for anyone to reveal more of this. Wegener froze to death in an ill-fated expedition to Greenland in 1930 and offered no more on the subject. But researchers blessed with more advanced tools were able to discern and confirm what Wegner had deduced. Fungus was key to the formation of hair ice. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | The Capitol Hill Water Quality Project — and everything else helping to clean our runoff

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The Capitol Hill Water Quality Project bioswale in South Lake Union (Image: PG Psomas)

Even if the weather has been atypically dry lately, we all know this is Rain City. Seattle rain usually comes as a drizzle that we shrug off without an umbrella (actually, I love my umbrella and I’m not ashamed). But that doesn’t mean we don’t have plenty of it and that it needs to go somewhere.

We all know that water travels downhill because of, well, gravity. When it rains in a forest, a prairie, or even a wetland, water tends to move slowly to lower ground and eventually some sort of basin like a creek, wetland, river, or lake. When rain falls on paved city streets, on the roofs of buildings, and on our many parking lots, it has nowhere to go because it can’t penetrate and seep into the soil. Intentional and functioning designs in urban spaces direct water to places where it can drain away instead of sitting in place. The simplest place to send that water in an urban space is into a series of pipes that lead into a nearby waterway. In the case of the Hill that’s through drains that run into Lake Union, Lake Washington, and eventually Puget Sound.

This might seem innocent, but the stormwater that flows off our pavement and makes its way to the saltwater is the source of 75% of the pollution in the Sound. Heavy metals like copper from car breaks, high loads of bacteria and fertilizer from our lawns, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from vehicle combustion, wood stoves, and more, all taking a ride in stormwater. Just one acre of impervious surface like concrete can funnel a million gallons of polluted water into local waterways annually. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | Why mixed-species flocks enjoy communal winter meals on Capitol Hill

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A Ruby-crowned Kinglet (Regulus calendula), a less gregarious winter migrant to the hill. They are often found in mixed-species flocks but are outnumbered, at least 10-1, by Golden-crowned Kinglets. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Everywhere I looked there were birds. Sprites in perpetual motion, determined to find their next meal. Kinglets, chickadees, creepers, nuthatches, and wrens worked through the forest understory as I sat watching. It hardly felt like they noticed me. If I kept still enough, I’d just melt into the background, or at least that’s how it feels when you encounter a winter feeding flock.

Back in October I started noticing mixed-species flocks of chickadees, Golden-crowned Kinglets, and a few Pacific Wrens around my yard. This is my personal cue for the changing of the seasons. When the last of the year’s fledglings are self-sufficient, the winter migrants have arrived, and breeding territories are moot, it’s officially winter. The majority of birds are now much more concerned with surviving the cold, less abundant months, than defending their corners of the forest or your backyard.

Call them mixed-species foraging flocks or winter feeding flocks, every year these groups of birds form during the non-breeding season on Capitol Hill and across our region. They move together, across the landscape, foraging as they go, all day long.

The birds that make up these flocks in our part of the world have a fair amount in common. They are all small, active birds that eat a lot of insects (but also seeds and fruit). Most of them glean their meals from tree bark crevices and the undersides of leaves. Some are faster moving and more balletic, like kinglets, twirling about foliage and eating unseen tiny morsels. And others feel more methodical, like Brown Creepers, who do as they are named and crawl up and down tree trunks in search of sustenance. But they all seem to see the value of keeping close together while foraging this time of year. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | Hey pilgrim, those hardworking earthworms having a feast beneath Capitol Hill are colonizers

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The worms in the bottom of a compost cone (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Amidst the pungent, half decomposed pile at my feet writhed a mass of life. Countless gnats whirled about, a Devil’s Coachman Beetle scurried to cover, and small, indeterminate grubs wriggled through coffee grounds and slimy banana peels.

And there were so many worms.

Staring at them, I realized a few things simultaneously. First, I have no idea what species I was observing. And two that I didn’t know if we have many native worms on the Hill or elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

I’ve been composting since childhood, in charge of emptying our family food waste into a worm bin and later into a lazy pile in our regular compost after my parents decided they couldn’t bother with worm bin upkeep. Memories of rodents scurrying about my feet during nocturnal visits to deposit kitchen scraps encouraged me to start using a plastic cone with a porous basket buried underground for our household waste. It restricts rodent access while allowing other creepy crawlies access to do their job. Continue reading →