Author Archives: Brendan McGarry

About Brendan McGarry

I've been birding and exploring the natural world all my life. My education is in biology, but that doesn't stop me from writing about all the spinning facets of ecology, particularly in the city.

Pikes/Pines | The Vancouvers have fallen: Emerald Ash Borers have reached Washington

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(Image: gr.wa.gov)

“We encourage folks to learn how to identify ash trees and learn the signs of EAB. And if you have an ash tree that you’re worried about, contact an arborist to have it assessed.” (Image: @friendsoftrees)

A little over a month ago, the first Emerald Ash Borer, Agrilus planipennis, was found in Washington State. This is devastating news, because this invasive metallic green beetle is essentially a death sentence for the ash trees of the Pacific Northwest. It may have been inevitable, but that doesn’t mean we can’t mourn the future losses and do our best to slow the expansion of this true disaster.

For those not familiar with the story of the Emerald Ash Borer (EAB), there’s a boatload of information about them online (including this, written by yours truly). However, here’s a brief recap. These little beetles were accidentally introduced to North America from Asia and were first noted in Michigan in 2002. For the past two decades they have been tearing through North America’s ash trees, both wild populations and urban street trees are being devastated by the beetle, which has no environmental controls outside its natural range (trials of biological controls like using parasitic wasps have been largely unsuccessful). Thus far, there are no permanent solutions to EAB, even insecticides are only somewhat useful.

When I call Emerald Ash Borers one of the worst invasive species in the United States, I’m not just being dramatic — millions of ash trees have already succumbed to them across the country. This topic deserves an update on Pikes/Pines because we know this will happen in the near future — earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and the climate crisis all will too, but they all feel different. We’ll see ashes decline and disappear from our urban and wild landscapes in the near future. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | The call of the crossbill, munching cones on Capitol Hill

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The top of a Douglas Fir in my yard. It’s covered in cones! (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Have you ever noticed just how many cones large coniferous trees produce? The largest Douglas Fir in my yard dumps cones everywhere most years. It’s no wonder I find baby firs growing everywhere.

Under each scale in a Douglas Fir cone there is room for two seeds and each cone has many scales, close to fifty. Every mature tree produces hundreds if not thousands of cones each year. That’s a lot of seeds and seeds are bundles of energy, the major ingredients for a seedling to sprout, set roots, form relationships with the local soil flora, and with luck, continue to grow.

We animals, both human and more than human, know this and whether or not we want to admit it, we’re just getting led around by plants and their seeds. Relationships, between seed eater and seed creators, have developed countless times, the world over, and Douglas Firs and our other native conifers are no different. Even on the Hill you can find a species whose life history is almost entirely devoted to conifer seeds – the Red Crossbill, Loxia curvirostra. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | Hotlipped Sage, Pearly Everlasting, and more queen Capitol Hill plants that won’t wilt during drought

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On Capitol Hill, across Seattle, and in nearby communities, all our drinking water comes from two watersheds — the Cedar River and the lesser known, South Fork Tolt River. Every sip, shower, and sprinkle is largely at the whim of snowpack, which acts as a slow release into the reservoirs that Seattle Public Utilities manages in these watersheds. We are extremely lucky to have this resource and I’ve always felt a bit ashamed using this water just for my gardening needs.

When the Washington Department of Ecology declared a statewide drought emergency this April, it did nothing to assuage that shame. It fanned them into full-blown panic. Aside from being able to afford to water a garden, how can I ethically do so? To me, it feels imperative to both have a garden that contributes to my local ecosystem in more than paltry ways, and one that uses very little water. That water is needed for salmon and entire food-webs outside our own. And while I don’t intend to shame others for having gardens that take a lot of water and tending, I am thankful there are ways to enjoy garden plants without feeling like I’m just sucking the marrow of our dwindling snowpack. (Note that SPU says we are doing “ok” with our water but even if Cliff Mass says there’s no obvious trend in snowpack, it’s hard to feel optimistic with more frequent drought conditions across Washington.)

Many of the native plants on the Hill are widely distributed and can in theory do well with hotter, drier summers. I purposefully planted snowberry, oceanspray, and Mock Orange around our yard because of this. But not every native plant can handle what an urban summer throws at them, (and not everyone can accommodate shrubs that want to be ten feet tall and just as wide like Oceanspray).

I rep using native plants in gardens because I think they have the potential to make us pay more attention to the plight of their wild cousins. They are also often easier to grow because they are adapted to our soils, climate, require little to no fertilizer, and typically offer more ecological value to boot. But there’s still a need for climate adaptive plants in our human oriented landscapes and a discerning eye for right plant, right place can also lead to a waterwise garden. In fact, two of the plants listed here that are not native to Washington and one is not found on this side of the Cascades in Washington. I listed them because I like them, they are pretty, and they don’t require you to scour nurseries to find them.

All this is a lead up to a few choice plants that will shrug off summer droughts and barely need a sip of municipal water. Even if you don’t plant them, keep an eye out for them on your next stroll around the Hill. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | The Bronze Birch Borer Beetle is also leaving its calling card across Capitol Hill

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(Image: US Forest Service)

Dead tops in some streetside birches on E John (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Just like living as a birder and naturalist, being an arborist means that I can’t help but look at trees.

I see poor pruning, beautiful forms, and signs of stress — there’s no way for me to filter them out of my attention span.

Sometimes it gets me in trouble with my partner — like when she’s telling me about her day and I am staring at the tops of a line of birches in a grocery store parking lot.

Recently I’ve been noticing a lot of birches with dead tops. This isn’t necessarily a new thing, but they have been popping up all over the Pacific Northwest with increasing regularity. The culprit isn’t a mystery either. We’ve known why ornamental birches have been dying from the top down, across the United States for over 100 years.

Bronze Birch Borer Beetles, Agrilus anxius, are good at what they do, and that is eating birches.

Unlike so many stories about “killer” insects infesting our trees, this one is a little more nuanced because Bronze Birch Borer Beetles are actually a native insect across North America. In a wild setting they live their lives associated with birch trees that are already stressed, contributing to the natural decline of older trees, and stratifying ecosystems with a beautiful jumble of decay and life and everything in between. In an urban space, with non-native birches, the story changes considerably. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | Myrmecochory — Ants will plant your Capitol Hill garden for you (but only if you let them)

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When I’m on my hands and knees in my garden, I almost always find something interesting. A solitary bee nest, evidence of a towhee scratching for grubs in the leaf litter, a slug trail wending through my seedlings. Recently I was weeding a corner of the house to make room for some native stonecrop I just planted and noticed something peculiar. A native plant, Western Starflower (Lysimachia latifolia), was growing alongside the stonecrop. A bonus, but also a bit of a mystery. The only other starflowers in my yard are at least a hundred yards away and, so far as I know, none are growing anywhere nearby, wild or otherwise. How did they spread to this random corner of my house?

As it turns out, a hint was right next to where I was sitting, in the form of another plant—Pacific Bleeding-Heart (Dicentra formosa). They are well known for a mutualistic relationship that helps them spread their seeds far and wide. I already knew that the bleeding-heart all over the yard didn’t appear by magic; ants were spreading their seeds in a behavior that is so well known that it even has a name: myrmecochory. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | Spring sights around the Hill — Flowering currants, Bigleaf blossoms, and Bushtits (yes, we said Bushtits)

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Spring can be disorientingly distracting. I have a hard time knowing where to look. I get home from work and now that the days are longer, I have time to wander around the garden staring at everything. “What’s newly emerged from their long slumber? Oh, a robin fight! That gnat lek looks gorgeous backlit.” Sometimes it’s hard to narrow down what natural phenomenon to focus Pikes/Pines on each month, so in true spring spirit, here’s some assorted nature observations that I feel like you shouldn’t miss, right now, on the Hill.

Red-flowering Currant

Let me sing my praise for this lovely native shrub. They flower for weeks on end, provide early food for Rufous Hummingbirds and a host of insects, and are easy to grow. I have nearly a dozen of them around my yard, planted bare root from King County Conservation District and a few propagated from clandestine cuttings. I have done nothing but water them a bit during their first summer and now my five year olds are 10 feet tall.

One of the Red-flowering Currants growing in my garden. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Red-flowering Currants, Ribes sanguineum, are one of several native shrubs eyecatching enough to have worked their way into the imagination of many types of gardeners and landscapers – they are all over the Hill in lots of private and public spaces. I’ve seen them in Volunteer Park and the Arboretum, scattered across dozens of parking strips and front yards – they are a native plant that everyone should try growing because of their ecological value as well as their beauty. (On a side note, though a common native plant, I don’t know of any wild growing currants on the Hill – it can be hard to determine if ones in park greenspaces were planted during restoration efforts or are existing wild plants.) Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | Scarred, stunted, smothered, and peed on — Capitol Hill’s street trees are hardcore

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Be nice to trees. Don’t staple stuff to them. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Every once in a while I like to take a whole day and just walk around Seattle. I’ll wander about admiring plantings, architecture, and all the beautiful variety cities have to hold. Usually I find myself being surprised by the birds I find in the busiest blocks and realize I forgot about a specific tree planting. Seattle, and Capitol Hill truly are beautiful places worth admiring in the style of a slow poke, poking about.

This most recent meander, I had trees on my mind. Despite Seattle’s urban canopy loss, (the most recent data shows a loss of about 255 acres of trees between 2016 and 2021) the Hill and Seattle in general are home to some beautiful trees, both planted purposefully or growing wild.

However, while Seattle aims to increase tree cover by 30% by 2037, I can’t help but wonder what it looks like for the trees once they’ve been planted.

As an arborist and lifelong gardener, I already knew it was hard being a street tree. But I was confronted by some horrible examples on my walk. Once a tree is planted and manages to survive into maturity, it still has to contend with a host of trials. A tree in the wild has to deal with wounds, disease, weather events, and more. But our urban street trees have even more piled on. They are stuck between sidewalks, power lines, and roadbeds. They are mismanaged and mangled. A cherry I saw on Harvard between Pike and Pine had been hit by cars, mangled by bad pruning, tagged, and even lit on fire. Frankly, it’s astonishing that we have any trees alive and lining urban blocks at all.

The cherry tree mentioned, living a particularly bruised life. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Arborists, landscape architects, and other folks in charge of planning and implementation do their best to get trees off to a good start and the very first step is putting the right plant in the right place. Embarrassingly, I once wrote a Pikes/Pines mentioning how I thought we should have more native trees as street trees.

While in an ideal world, I wish this were true, the reality is that urban soils, hydrology, and stresses are too much for many PNW native trees to handle plus many of them just get too big (there are notable exceptions like Cascara and Vine Maple). Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | The real bird that inspired the Seattle Seahawks

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Osprey may like to fish, but like many birds of prey, they are adept at soaring high up and using their keen eyesight to forage. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Football has never been my thing, but that doesn’t mean I lack hometown pride for the Seattle Seahawks winning the Super Bowl. And I also can’t help but enjoy that the team has a unique name that feels deeply rooted in our city and region. I can’t help but think of soaring vistas of water and rising peaks when I hear mention of the Seahawks.

But what exactly is a seahawk, anyway?

Truthfully, there is no specific bird called a seahawk. However, this colloquialism is often applied to a singular native bird that calls the water and skies around the Hill home half the year: The Osprey, Pandion haliaetus. Ospreys are far from rare, but they live a very unique existence. Living almost entirely off live fish, they are deeply tied to water and are rarely seen far from it. While they aren’t exactly a hawk in the strictest sense – Osprey are monotypic and the only representative of their family and genus – the nickname seahawk is totally understandable. It’s not unusual to see them hunting nearshore along the Salish Sea and other bodies of saltwater the world over.

When the NFL franchise that would become the Seahawks put out an open call for name suggestions in 1975, they got a lot of colorful responses. My heart swells at the absurd names that our grungy little city came up with; both those that seem serious and those that mocked the establishment. But one name rose to the top with 153 votes. I wish I could ask those people how they decided on the name. Did they just really like Ospreys? Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | It’s easy to ‘leaf’ space for Capitol Hill bees in winter

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You need a bit of patience to see a Small Carpenter Bee, genus Ceratina, well. I caught this little male, put him in a jar in the freezer, and then took photos as he woke up (yes, this is all quite rude). I let him go right where I found him and will forever cherish these little bees when I catch them zipping around our flowers. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Recently, I was out in my garden pulling up old pieces of bamboo used for fencing around some fragile native plants getting established. I was in the process of making a pile of them to burn, when I noticed several had their hollow ends delicately cemented in. Several years ago I would have thought almost nothing of this, but these little plugs brought me back to spring and the delights of plants and their pollinators. It was a gentle reminder that life is still going, even in the middle of winter.

Until I started learning about bees through the Washington Native Bee Society, joining the Washington Bee Atlas, and studying to become an Apprentice Master Melitologist through Oregon State University (half measures be damned), I probably wouldn’t have had much to say about what bees are doing during the winter. Or rather, I probably wouldn’t have even realized it was a question to ask. Most of us know that insects aren’t out in force during the winter and we generally understand they have to go somewhere during that period of time. But most of us don’t dwell on these ideas and certainly don’t consider them when we go about our annual gardening tasks.

The capped off ends of my bamboo poles were almost certainly created by a Mason Bee. These members of the genus Osmia are well known for their pollination services (they are much more efficient pollinators than European Honeybees), as well as their particular style of nest. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | The State Weed Control Board would like you to not spread more holly on the Hill

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Common Holly, Ilex aquafolium, growing wild in a greenspace. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

I know for certain that at some point in my past, my ancestors revered holly.

Ilex aquafolium, known variously as Common Holly or English Holly, is a plant of significance wherever it grows.

Holly was the plant of the Roman holiday Saturnalia and later picked up by the traditions of Christmas which borrowed from the latter traditions. This plant has variously protected people from evil, represented good fortune, and gave hope for the greener pastures that came with fairer weather on the darkest of solstice days. I am honestly somewhat flabbergasted that this spiky, persistent plant has held on so long in our imaginations.

It must have been powerful stuff in the eyes of my European ancestors.

Today the significance of holly in the Pacific Northwest is largely problematic. Continue reading →