Still on Cloud Nine

Though I could talk about the clouds for days or weeks on end, I had just an hour of pleasant cloud conversation and cloud gazing with Molly Walsh of Thurston Talk last week, in advance of my April 18th talk at the Olympia Country and Gold Club. Read Molly’s article in Thurston Talks here. And then join me on April 18th at 5:30 (socializing) for my presentation (6 p.m.). This event is open to the public! No need to bring your four iron! I’ll have books on hand to sell and sign.

Olympia Country and Golf Club
3636 Country Club Drive NW, Olympia
360-866-7121

Taking the Plunge: Lakes of Washington

The lake above is where I ended my last book, A Sideways Look at Clouds. I was floating on my back contemplating the watery bodies that are the lake, the clouds, the human body. And this is where I am beginning my next writing project (hardly anything I can call a book at this point).

The Washington landscape is a feast of lakes that are scenic, ecologically significant, life-sustaining, and a source of joy for a wild swimmer. “Wild swimming” the name for swimming in natural lakes, ponds, rivers, sounds, bays, and open ocean. It’s a big deal in England. There’s the Outdoor Swimming Society to prove it.

Ever since I moved to Olympia in 2006, I have been swimming in lakes around the state. Though my pursuit of lakes to swim in has been casual, not purposeful, I’m up to about 30 lakes so far and am only just dipping my proverbial toe into the thousands of lakes our state has to offer. So where to begin my research? The usual places for this natural-history writer. In the library and in the field.

Every writing project begins with a gentle plunder of my public library and mining of resources on my own bookshelves. And a map.

The subject of lakes, lake ecology, limnology, lake swimming, and the pleasure of swimming and being in water is not new territory. The research is potentially endless and the physical territory where lakes are found is vast. The same was true with the clouds—only the clouds were more variable and ephemeral and required several (as in eight) years to capture in my book. A writer has to begin somewhere—to get to know the territory, to cast a wide net, to explore, brainstorm, dream. That’s where I am now.

This winter, I have been reading, taking notes, gathering resources, signing up for newsletters and emails from organizations monitoring lake water quality, watching films about people swimming in really cold water, and marking this summer’s swims on a state map. In 2018, I began swimming in late April and continued into early October. The real “wild swimmers” who swim year round would rightly call me a “mild swimmer,” so I hope to develop the skills to extend the swimming season and increase my tolerance and enjoyment of very cold water. I am not sure how to accomplish this. Probably cold showers are a start. I hear they are invigorating.

Brrrr.

Maybe this should be the working title for my book! Brrrrr: A Wild Swimmer’s Plunge Into the Natural History of Lakes in Washington.

Back Issues

It was barely light outside at 8 o’clock this mid-January morning. I was in my bathrobe reading  The Olympian, which used to take me as long to read as it took me to drink a cup of coffee. But it has sadly shriveled, like so many daily papers, and this morning it’s a three-sip paper.  But I am in the mood to read. With no magazines or books within reach, I stare into the room for a while and look out the east-facing window for signs of the sun.  My gaze falls on my tidy stack of Orion magazines, spines facing out, on a shelf across from me. I try to remember what I read in those beautiful, thoughtful, ad-free pages. As a nature writer, I know I found inspiration and camaraderiein every issue, but now the specifics are lost and I just have warm fuzzy feelings about this treasure chest of the finest writing about nature, culture, and place. And about the physical presence of these magazines.

Each issue is squarely and tightly bound so that each one stacks neatly on top of the other without sliding off each other and off the shelf the way issues of the New Yorker do. The issues of Orionseem to cling to each other with magnetic force, which is part of the reason they persist on my shelf—unlike the slip-sliding New Yorkers I recycle or tuck into the magazine rack at my local YMCA. 

The Orions on my shelf are all that’s left from my on-again-off-again subscriptions, plus a few issues I had bought at my local food co-op when I had let my subscription lapse, minus those I had loaned or given away to friends. What was in those particular persistent issues that gave them staying power? What important and urgent ideas had I not taken to heart or acted on? Which writers and stories had I wrongly forgotten? What lovely heart-breaking stories were trapped in those pages that were now reduced to decorative dead weight on my shelf? 

I walked across the room and kneeled down in front of the Orion stack. There were just fourteen issues covering a decade between 2008 and 2018. I picked up the top three from the stack and returned to the sofa and my coffee. It was time to act. Time to move ideas from the page into the world. Time to move back issues forward. 

January/February 2015. Starting in the back of the issue I read reviews of four books I haven’t read. I dog-ear the page to remind myself to put Diane Ackerman’s The Human Ageon hold at my public library. I felt I have done this before. Perhaps not. Perhaps I did and let the hold expire. I hoped that when it arrives at the library I do not hear myself say, “Oh, yeah. I’ve read this.”

I turned to the front of the magazine and read the Preamble (the editor’s letter) and the Lay of the Land (charming short “reports from near and far.” I became transfixed by a black-and-white image of tree stump. The title is Against Forgetting. The caption tells me the artist joined two images—a wax rubbing of a tree stump and a inked human fingerprint. The wax rubbing is reduced in size and the fingerprint enlarged so the tree’s growth rings and the whorls of skin look uncannily similar. It is a breathtaking illustration. I cannot turn the page. I do not want to cover up the image with the next page. Should I order the book? Track down the artist, Nina Montenegro, and inquire about obtaining a print? How big would such a print be? How much would it cost to frame it? Where would I hang it? Once hung, would I love it for a while and then, after so many months, stop noticing it, stop seeing it, and then forget about it altogether. Is getting a framed print a meaningful response to this piece of art? Do I need to be reminded how much I love trees, intricate patterns in nature and how we are similar to trees in so many other ways? I cut the image out of the page for my friend, Anne. 

Anne and I share deep druidical respect and passion for trees and forest conservation. We spend much of our time together walking in the woods, admiring trees, and appreciating everythinng they represent. Anne will love this image for the tree rings and fingerprint equally. One afternoon over tea, I presented her with the cut-out image, she had a good laugh and then recalled the details of the story about her fingerprints.

Anne was born in Canada and has lived in the U.S. for more than thirty years. In 2016, she began her application for U.S. citizenship. She passed all the requirements and tests with flying colors but she failed the fingerprint test. Her fingerprints were too faint to be positively identified as hers. She made three separate trips to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Citizenship and Immigration Services office an hour away to have her fingerprints recorded as part of her background check. After each trip, she was told that either the inking or the electronic scanning failed to yield a set of acceptable prints. Anne was also told that our fingerprints wear off as we get older. Anne did not consider herself “old” or at least not old enough to have worn her fingerprints off. What recourse did she have? She had to make a trip to the local police station to obtain a signed document confirming she had no criminal record. 

Anne became a U.S. citizen shortly afterward. What all her paperwork does not make apparent is her role as an upstanding citizen of the natural world; as an admirer and advocate of the border-crossing ecosystems, the forests, individual trees, and the birds that perch and nest in those trees wherever they are rooted; and her deep and unforgotten connection to the land and landscapes she visits. Anne is also an oral historian, a graceful and careful storyteller, and a popular columnist for the local Audubon chapter newsletter. She has a smooth writing style no whorls or spirals could possibly improve.

It’s Marbled Murrelet Nest Discovery Day!

The first Marbled Murrelet nest known to science was discovered 44 years ago—on August 7, 1974—by an unsuspecting tree trimmer who had never heard of this mysterious seabird.

Hoyt Foster.  Photo courtesy Susan Schwanke.

Forty-four years ago today, tree surgeon named Hoyt Foster arrived in Big Basin Redwoods State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California to do a routine safety trim at a popular campground. 

Hoyt Foster, age 47 at the time, didn’t know much about birds. He didn’t know that a robin-sized seabird called a Marbled Murrelet had been seen flying into the state park where he was working. He didn’t know that the location of the Murrelet’s nest was a mystery that had flummoxed birders and ornithologists for decades. 

Flip-line climbing of an old-growth tree demonstrated here by Tom Hamer (Photo courtesy Hamer Environmental).

What Foster did know was how climb and trim trees—the Big Trees—the old-growth Douglas-firs and Coastal Redwoods that were over 200 feet high and several feet wide. The trees that were too big and too remote to get into by ladder, cherry picker, or hydraulic lift. The 47-year-old Foster knew how to climb such trees with little more than a pair of spurs, a climbing rope, and a flip line.

It’s no wonder the mystery of the Murrelet’s nest wasn’t solved until 1974, well after the nests of all other North American breeding birds had been discovered. Few if any birders or ornithologists were also skilled tree climbers and, even if they were, none of them had thought to look high in the trees for a murrelet nest. 

Two Marbled Murrelets painted (not from life) by John James Audubon. 

While Hoyt Foster was trimming trees in California’s Big Basin Redwoods State Park on August 5 and 6, plenty of people were thinking about murrelets and searching for their mysterious nest sites. The problem was that birders were looking in the wrong places. The Marbled Murrelet is an alcid, (a web-footed seabird family that includes puffins and auklets) and most birds in this family nest on the ground along the rocky cliffs and outcrops of the Pacific Coast. That is where birders, egg collectors, ornithologists had been looking for the murrelet.

The color plate (above) depicts two Marbled Murrelets by John James Audubon from 1838. The bird at left is in summer “bark-brown” breeding plumage, the bird at right in winter plumage. This is likely the only image of murrelets available at the time, but is misleading. The penguin-like murrelets are shown sitting on the ground (which they never do) at the edge of the coastal bluff (where they do not nest).

Hoyt Foster probably didn’t know about the nesting mystery of the murrelet while he was working in Big Basin Redwoods State Park. He was simply doing his job as a tree surgeon, wielding his 24-inch pruning saw in 200-foot-high redwoods and Douglas-firs to remove potentially hazardous branches overhanging the park campsites. By the end of August 6--his second full day of work--Foster had trimmed five big trees. He was relieved to have gotten this far without injury or incident.

Around 2:30 p.m. on August 7, 1974, Hoyt Foster was perched 148 feet up in a 228-foot-high Douglas-fir. He had just eaten his lunch and was about to continue his climb when he came face-to-face with a creature hunkered on the wide mossy branch. The bird was covered with beige and brown downy feathers, and was later described by Foster as “a porcupine with a beak sticking out.” When he noticed the feet of the little bird, he knew he was looking at an unusual creature. The feet were webbed, but the bird was six miles from the nearest point on the Pacific Ocean.  

The bird was captured and taken to park headquarters where park naturalists identified it as the only known downy chick of the Marbled Murrelet. The mossy branch where it was sitting was its nest—not a built nest, but simply a place in the naturally occurring moss and duff.  

The very downy Marbled Murrelet chick discovered on its nest in 1974   Photo courtesy Bruce Elliott (California Dept. Fish & Game)

The discovery ended the search for the nesting site of this small seabird whose secretive breeding habitats had eluded scientists for decades and brought to a conclusion the “last great ornithological mystery in North America.” This one nest proved to be the critical evidence that lead to subsequent scientific discoveries: that the Marbled Murrelet depends on old-growth coastal forests for nesting, that the logging of these forests along the Pacific Northwest coast is the primary cause the bird’s declining population, and that saving the murrelet from extinction requires protecting the murrelet’s nesting habitat. 

The Marbled Murrelet is the size of a robin, its egg the size of chicken egg.   (Photo by Nick Hatch, USDA Forest Service)

Thanks to years of scientific research and public support, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the Marbled Murrelet as a threatened species in Washington, Oregon, and California under the Endangered Species Act in 1992. Despite these protections, Marbled Murrelet populations have been declining rapidly. In Washington state, the murrelet population declined a heartbreaking 44% between 2001 and 2016.

This fall, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) plans to release a set of conservation strategies for the Marbled Murrelets nesting on our state-managed public lands. We’ll need your help during the following 60-day public comment period to ensure that Marbled Murrelets have a chance to recover and thrive in our state forests.

A coalition of Marbled Murrelet advocates—the Washington Environmental Council, Washington Forest Law Center, Olympic Forest Coalition, Conservation Northwest, Defenders of Wildlife, Seattle Audubon—will be analyzing the strategies and sharing their recommendation and information on how you can support the conservation strategy that will best help the Marbled Murrelet.

For the most up-to-date information, check here or the Murrelet Survival Project on Facebook. 

A Marbled Murrelet in breeding plumage taking off from the water. Photo courtesy Dan Cushing and S. Kim Nelson

And now  a short light-hearted video to celebrate Discovery Day. Click here and enjoy!