Tag Archives: pikes pines

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 →

Pikes/Pines | The first song you hear on a Capitol Hill morning is probably an American Robin

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American Robin eggs (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Do you ever wake up from an unsettling dream and lie awake, praying to fall back asleep? You sit there, trying to tell yourself that checking the time will do nothing for you, while simultaneously hoping that you have many hours before you have to wake up again. And then the robins start singing outside and suddenly you know that you’ve lost. Dawn is near. Until you check your phone and it’s 3:30 AM and now all you can focus on are those damn birds.

An American Robin through the haze of dawn. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

If I am not in the depths of sleep deprivation, I actually quite enjoy the melodious songs of American Robins. With a few exceptions they are the first birds to start singing at the first creeping bit of daylight. You have to appreciate their dedication, telling you that spring is here and that soon it’s time to get up.

You probably recognize American Robins, even if you don’t know their name. They are the birds that dash across the lawn, hunting in mad bursts and sudden stops with a cocked head, which often end in a lunge and a struggle with what looks to be a rubber band. Earthworms are a favorite food, whether or not robins know the idiom. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | Like Broadway botanists with Capitol Hill cuttings, know thy buds and know thyself

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A Red Edler cutting with buds about to burst. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

 

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Anticipation of spring makes life way harder for me than it should. I can’t focus because I am anxiously checking out the window to see if the plants in my garden are growing.

Already, flowers are popping open and leaves are starting to peak out. I am often in awe of the simple reality, borne in the sap of countless generations, that deciduous woody plants are able to withdraw and extend leaves annually. It got me thinking about how amazing, something we take for granted, a bud, demonstrates seasonal change and millions of years of evolution all wrapped up in a neat package.

Part of the reason I am so interested in buds as of late is that I have been propagating native plants and watching to see what cuttings I took this winter will take.

These cuttings, taken from responsible locations, were dipped in a homemade rooting hormone, (tea made from willow cuttings) and planted in individual pots and left to take. This is a time honored skill of humans the world over, a useful way to perpetuate useful plants without needing their seeds. It’s magical sticking a twig in soil and watching it grow. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | Please stop planting these four plants on Capitol Hill — and use these native ones instead

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Sure, you can’t see neighbors with a laurel hedge. But then you have to do this regularly to not have problems with them either. Or in this case pay someone to do it. Credit: Brendan McGarry

For people who regularly read Pike/Pines, you might find yourself experiencing some whiplash.

I regularly comment on how our views of plants as “invasive” or “non-native” are not particularly helpful in our drastically altered spaces.

It’s true we’ll never be rid of blackberries, clematis, holly, english ivy, and so forth. But we can stop planting them.

In his book, Nature’s Best Hope, Douglas W. Tallamy encourages us to use our urban and suburban spaces to create useful habitat for a variety of wild creatures. While I completely agree with his ideas, there are times when the book drifts into what sounds like it’s describing a wonderland of places improved by white saviors. However, the ultimate goal, of increasing habitat and using even miniscule spaces we get to manage ourselves is a worthy one. Plenty of non-native species provide food and shelter to the animals we love on the Hill, but the ones that were here before colonization have deeper, more profound and healthy relationships. Continue reading →

Pikes/Pines | The Seahawks may be done but these Seattle waterfowl are worth watching

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Cackling geese are visitors from the Arctic circle and show up around the Hill every winter (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Some of my most fond memories of birding as a child involve standing along Lake Washington on a frigid day. Out on the water, unnoticed by most who passed by, were rafts of beautiful fowl. They might have appeared to just be floating about, but those cormorants, grebes, coots, and ducks were doing interesting things. They were also beautiful, and much easier to observe (with the help of decent optical equipment) than zipping brown birds in bushes.

Winter may not be a time of year when our minds are trained on the profusion of biodiversity, but if you focused on waterbirds and even just birds that are strictly ducks you will be astonished by the colors and shapes you can find — even in months like January and February. And they aren’t just bobbing feathers, they are active and have very different life histories. This is why some of my earliest memories of birds revolve around those that float on the water. Continue reading →