Author: bwren

BooMan’s story about where you live got me thinking about lightning bugs. I moved around a lot when I was growing up and lightning bugs were a part of the landscape in a number of the places I lived. Especially Pittsburgh, where my grandparents lived.

Now, we don’t have lightning bugs in Seattle. We have sphinx moths and spiders and hornets and honeybees, but no lightning bugs. So my daughter, growing up in Seattle, had to experience lightning bugs through my memories. I told her about sitting on the back porch of my grandpa’s house, listening to the Pittsburgh Pirates’ game on the radio, waiting until the light deepened just enough for that first spark of light back in the deep of the tomato patch. Of how I’d get my gramma to give me a mason jar, and how my grandpa would carefully punch holes in its lid and how I’d stuff it with fresh grass. And then, how I’d trace the bugs’ paths through the garden and catch them and carefully open the jar and slip them in, one at a time, until the jar was full. And then go quietly onto the stairwell leading up to the second floor of the house and pull closed the curtain that in the winter held the heat downstairs until it was time for bed. And in the dark of the stairwell, shake the jar so the bugs glowed, ferociously. And how I could, if I held the jar right next to the book I was reading, read by the light of the fireflies.

When my daughter was 16 she did the obligatory coming of age road trip. She and two friends piled into a 15 year old Oldsmobile and took off, south along the coast to San Francisco then east to through Nevada to the southwest and on to Texas.

She called from east Texas.

“Mom! I see them!”

Them? Huh?

“Lightning bugs! I see them. They’re all over.”

And then the confession:

“Mom, I just played along with you when you told me about lightning bugs. Bugs that light up. Yeah… Right… Sure… Mom.”

I love it here in Seattle, but I miss the lightning bugs.

What did you see this weekend?

High Summer. We are past the Solstice into the time of heat and drought. Leaves fade, the air is tinged with yellow. Large Geum and Tiarella, the last of the wildflowers, are brittle and dry now, curling themselves back into the duff of the forest floor. The woods are oddly quiet in the late afternoon when Bill-the-dog and I take our daily walk. Too hot for the birds to speak. We make our way over familiar paths, crunching underfoot the first fallen leaves; Madrona, Big-leaf Maple, Osoberry.

Still, the forest rewards us with the first of the blackberries, teases us with tiny evergreen huckleberries that will become their sweetest after the first frost. I bring a bucket with me now, dive into the blackberry thickets and pick what I can, return home scratched and happy to make the blackberry jelly that my family calls “Essence of Seattle Summer”.

Essence of Seattle Summer

1 gallon wild blackberries, part of them not quite ripe.
1 apple, cored and chunked, skin and all. (If you’ve got crabapples use 2 cups of them, whole, instead.)
Juice of 1 lemon
1/2 cup water

Dump blackberries, apple chunks and lemon juice into a big pot and add the water. Heat gently until the blackberries begin to juice up, then raise the heat and simmer slowly until the fruit loses its color.

Stretch a piece of clean muslin over a second big pot and fasten with a bungee cord or string. Pour the hot blackberry mush onto the muslin. Then go to bed. Don’t squeeze or otherwise force the juice through the muslin.

The next day remove the muslin containing the blackberry remnants. Don’t squeeze!! Just scrape off the goo and either feed it to the worms or compost it. Wash the muslin in cold water, dry and save.

Now, measure out the juice. You’ll want to cook up the jelly in 4 cup batches.

For each 4 cups of blackberry juice add 3 and a half cups of sugar. Heat gently until the sugar dissolves, then bring everything to a crisp boil. Skim any junk that comes to the surface. When it starts to look dark and shiny test for jell by dripping a little hot juice onto a saucer. The jelly is ready when it jells as it cools on the saucer.

Pack into sterile pint jars.

What did you see this weekend?

I’ve found it hard to settle into nature writing this week. There’s too much news out there – too many bombs, too many dead, too many lies, too many stone walls thrown up to hide atrocities that continue to be carried out in our name. I walked every day and found little comfort in the natural world, returned home sweaty and enraged to pound out invective filled letters that I simply couldn’t send.

And yet. By the lake one evening I stopped to watch an osprey hover and dive. It came up empty taloned, shook mid air and circled back along the shoreline. As I watched, my attention was drawn to the powerful sweep of an osprey’s wingbeat, and for perhaps a minute I was able to forget the rest.

What did you see this week?

 

I love my field guides. Some were gifts, some I found in used bookstores, garage sales, dumpsters. They speak to me of different times and different places. Places and times where flocks of Passenger Pigeons darkened the air and where a Starling was a wondrous life-bird. They bring me close to landscapes I will never know, because of the distance in miles and the distance in years.

My favorite field guides have a suprising poetry in their descriptions of the natural world. Here is one:

Curly Grass Fern

Minute unfernlike plant
that looks like its name –
curly grass.
Almost imopossible to find
without lying flat
on the ground.

Except in winter.

Broughton Cobb, A Field Guide to the Ferns and their Related Families of Northeastern and Central North America
Houghton Mifflin Company, copyright 1956.

What did you see this week? As before, I’ll download everything and make a hard copy. Someday, maybe, our observations will allow another generation to experience the beauty of the land we now know.

And again, I’ll go first:
In the back yard this week the bushtits began to join their families into the aggregate flocks that grace the feeders during the winter.

And yes, for you non-birdwatchers, there is a bird called “Bushtit”…

People have been documenting the natural word since the first human figured out how make some kind of representative scrawl. Think about the cave painters of Europe, of Aristotle, Galileo, Newton. Of Darwin and Einstein. Of Burroughs and Bewick, of Lewis & Clark. Contemporary writers abound – Kim Stafford, Annie Dillard, Merrill Gilfillan. And then there are those of us who jot down notes on scraps of paper or in notebooks, because we are compelled somehow to make a record of what we’ve seen.

Some of the documents are straightforward:

15 Sept. Pritchard. 65%cloud. 58degrees. 2:15-2:45
Crow 4
Mall 2+2
CoMe 2
GBH 1
Flicker 1
RBNu (H)
BuTi 11+

Others are elegant in their observation and their language:

There is a brief Fall passage, usually in September, like this morning along the Little White River in South Dakota, when the light/temperature combination precisely matches that of early Spring and the willing birds are half-inspired to crank up a ghostly rendition of their breeding music. There is a kind of eerie displacement in hearing a robin caroling this descending time of year. Half a dozen flickers are chasing about in the river bottom, giving their wicka-wickacalls and displacing their bright undertails as they do in mating season. Chickadees whistle their spring songs in the ponderosas and redwings in their marshy spots beside the road are in full song when the sun first strikes.

Merrill Gilfillan, Magpie Rising. Copyright 1988. Pruett Publishing Co.

Some are elegant in their precision:

E=MC2

And some are delightfully over the top:

Winter Wren –
The nest of this brave little bird is snug and warm, made of moss, lines with soft feathers, and lodged “in crevices of dead logs or stumps in thick, coniferous woods.” What a pleasure it would be to follow him north, and study all his pretty ways in the dark forest home, where he furnishes mirth and sunshine all the summer through.

Florence A. Merriam, Birds Through the Looking Glass. Copyright 1889. The Riverside Press.

I think of all of these as part of the Earth’s written record. Documents that we can turn to in an attempt to learn, to understand, to compare. Here in the United States we’re witnessing egregious actions against the environment by our administration. As the new rulings become law our land will change. We are in a place where records matter. So tell us what you see this weekend. I’ll download everything and make a hard copy. Someday, maybe, it’ll be a document that allows another generation to experience the beauty of the land we now know. If there’s enough interest I’ll do it again next week.

So I’ll go first:

Today in the woods I heard an odd sound, midway up in the canopy. A soft hissing whine. Above me, tucked into the crotch of a Douglas Fir tree, a young Barred Owl. I watch for maybe ten minutes as the owlet watches back, bobbing its head from side to side, then sitting perfectly still. Watching. I think this is a recent fledgling. It is still fluffy with down. A branchlet – one that clambers from branch to branch before its wings are strong enough to allow it to fly.

At the end of my walk I pick red huckleberries from a bush heavy with fruit. Sour and sweet at the same time.

What did you see this weekend?