Tag Archives: pikes pines

Pikes/Pines | Capitol Hill through the eyes of a cat — and a pigeon, and a fly, and a slug, and…

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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 →

Pikes/Pines | The Capitol Hill Superb Owl LVII Spectacular

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A Barred Owl (Image: Brendan McGarry)

If I walked up to a random stranger on the street and said, “Hey, there’s a crow!” I suspect I would either be ignored or looked at with suspicion.

If instead I replaced “crow” with “owl,” I can almost guarantee that I would receive an entirely different reaction. Whether this is because of Harry Potter or because owls look a touch more relatable than other birds (with big heads, large forward facing eyes they might remind us of ourselves), we know and generally like owls. Owls are beautiful, mysterious, and interesting.

Yet, most owls are not very conspicuous and a vast majority of them are nocturnal. A lot of people have never or only rarely seen one in real life. On an average day on the Hill, you are not likely to see an owl. But what if you wanted to? Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | Yes, you can un-chop down a Capitol Hill tree

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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 →

Pikes/Pines | Why ever are all these trees evergreen?

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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 →

Pikes/Pines | A Capitol Hill guest for the holidays, the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug

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(Image: Brendan McGarry)

You share your home with more than pets, partners, roommates, or family. Despite our best efforts to willfully ignore or scour away their presence, there are many other lives in our homes. Many are arthropods that are residents, or nearly so, like Giant House Spiders, and others are only part-time houseguests. I’ll never forget slumbering by the fire one fall only to wake to the stings of the yellowjackets that had nested inside our previously smoke free chimney.

Others are more benign, like stink bugs, which you might have noticed crouched on the edges of your home this fall.

In particular, I have noticed one species a lot more this year: the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug, Halyomorpha halys.

A native of China, Japan, and Korea these insects were first documented in the U.S. in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1998 and had spread across the country to the Pacific Northwest by 2004. I can’t quite remember when I first noticed one of them (sometime post 2017 when they showed up in King County), but it was definitely in the fall when they had started to move indoors. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | That sound you heard over Capitol Hill in the middle of the night might have been a bird

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A bird’s eye view of Capitol Hill at night (Image: CHS)

Despite sirens, airplanes, and the overall hum of the city, it is still possible to hear them traveling overhead at night. Not every bird calls during migration, but I expect to hear the thin “seeps” of sparrows and plaintive whispers of thrushes when I step outside on an ideal night in the spring or fall. The weeks between the end of September and just about now are peak travel times for birds pouring south for their wintering grounds. The night before writing this, around 300,000 birds moved over King County.

On a good night, with a full moon, you might even be able to peer at it with binoculars and catch a few birds passing by. One time I caught a small heron, probably a Green Heron, highlighted by a full moon. But that’s not how an estimate of migrating birds happens. In this case I logged into an incredible new website called BirdCast, which uses weather, radar, and a big ol’ heap of machine learning and big data to both forecast and understand migratory patterns of birds. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | Behold the spectacular Capitol Hill neighborhood jumping spider, man

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The spider in question — likely in the genus Phanias. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

My mind was drifting on a recent September afternoon. I was stationed at a check-in table for a work event, waiting for my next group of attendees, thinking about not much and everything all at once. And I looked down and saw someone staring up at me.

Rarely do I feel as though I am being truly looked at and pondered by any creature other than human. Of course there are deeply varying worldviews and lines of philosophical and scientific inquiry swirling about this notion. But ultimately, I notice a difference between when a robin looks at me and when say, a jumping spider does.

I was looking down at a jumping spider looking up with what seemed just as much intent. Not running away, nor poised to leap away. Whether I am anthropomorphizing or not, it felt as if we were just calmly looking at one another with a bit of curiosity.

I have written about spiders on Pikes/Pines before — mostly in an effort to dispel the myths about their level of threat to humans on the Hill. While I want to say flat out that you don’t need to be overly fearful of any spiders in Seattle, you certainly don’t need to be afraid of jumping spiders. The jumping spiders around Capitol Hill either will not or cannot harm us without significant effort on our part. But that’s not the point of this writing, instead consider how spectacular they are.

The family Salticidae, the jumping spiders, is the most diverse group of spiders in the world.

Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | Learning by hand — Making beautiful things with the bushes and brambles of Capitol Hill

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Before the pandemic I learned to create cordage. I sat and split and peeled and twisted until bits of plant fiber, from dogbane (Apocynum cannabinum), became two-ply cord. So deeply focused that my fingers cramped from this new type of hand movement, I realized that I was doing something simultaneously remarkable and simple. Like the hemp-like strings I was creating, I was being bound tight to a relationship between plants and humans.

This spring I was finally able to take a class that built off this experience. The instructor for the class I took at Wildcraft Studio in Portland, (Seattle, where is our version of this?!) Chloë Hight was in the traditional teacherly way, a wealth of information. But my favorite thing about learning from her was the emphasis on reciprocity, play, and wonder throughout the process.

All the students were there to weave a small basket, but our time was more about the process than the product. And something else caught my attention: we weren’t using plants grown purposefully for production weaving – but species I could find in my yard or in an overgrown patch on Capitol Hill. Continue reading →

CHS Pikes/Pines | A tale of three Capitol Hill wildflowers

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For many decades of my life, when I thought of native wildflowers, I thought of the alpine wonderlands of the Cascades and the Olympics.

We may be able to spy these ecologically important places from our perch on Capitol Hill, but these distant alpine meadows have also become entwined in the zeitgeist of wilderness.

Untangling the concept of wilderness is not my goal here, but to say that I’ve spent far too many summers of my life wishing to frolic through alpine meadows while sitting in Seattle, (I still deeply appreciate being able to visit these places so close to home). This yearning for places exotic and difficult to reach obscured what was around my feet and out my front door. In a very strange way, I diminished my knowledge and in turn, care for the places I actually spent most of my life. I spared no time to consider native perennial wildflowers that might grow in the cracks of the pavement. In doing so, I missed out, and this my dear nature nerds, is my impetus for today’s topic.

While I’ve somewhat beaten the discussion of native vs nonnative plants into the ground, I still appreciate that there are native wildflowers lurking among the wild tangles of the novel ecosystems on Capitol Hill. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | Splendor in the grass: The bees and — the what the heck is that-s! — you’ll find in the lawns of Capitol Hill

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A yet to be identified bee found nesting in my lawn. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

 

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One of the major benefits of paying attention to the natural world is that no matter how long you’ve been doing it, there’s always more to learn. Within the last five years I’ve gone from knowing honey bees, bumblebees, and mason bees to devoting many hours to the breathtakingly nerdy pursuit of studying the wealth of Washington’s native bees.

The best thing about this real life Pokemon pursuit, (I’ll take running around like an idiot staring at zipping dots any day to chasing things that only exist on my phone), is that I don’t actually have to go that far to get stumped. I can just hang out on a lawn and be a lawn-chair melittologist.

With projects like Pollinator Pathways and Capitol Hill Connections it shouldn’t be surprising that you can find interesting insects on the Hill, let alone a bunch of cool bees. The thing about many invertebrate species is that while some require very specific conditions and host plants that are lacking in urban spaces, they also don’t need the same physical space that, say, a wolf does. Some scrubby ground, some flowers with sufficiently tasty nectar, and a dearth of pesticides and a lot of species make it work or even flourish on the Hill even if we don’t get the same diversity a native prairie would have. Continue reading →