Weather: 13º C, very cloudy, chilly wind, small amount of sunlight streaming in through the clouds
Repeat Photographs:
Due to Thanksgiving break, I hadn’t visited my site in a long time and I expected a lot of things to be different. It has been raining a lot for the past 2 to 3 days so there were a lot of large puddles throughout the IMA and the Union Bay Natural Area. My site had also gotten very muddy and the wet mud was sticking to my boots (it took a long time to get them out. It seemed like the rain had also flushed a lot of insects out of the soil because I saw many earthworms. I also saw this dead insect floating in a puddle right next to my site:
I could be wrong but this seems to be the Forest Tent Caterpillar (Malacosoma disstria).
Because of the rain, or perhaps just the passage of time, most of the mushrooms at my site had begun to rot:
However, I noticed some new mushrooms too. Some of them were the False Chanterelles that are dominant at my site but I also saw some new species. These mushrooms had a
The stem of the mushroom was extremely long and delicate. I identified the species to be the Nitrous Bonnet (Mycena leptocephala).
Other changes that I noticed around my site:
1. The Devil’s Beggarticks plants at my site seemed to be drying up and had less seeds. I know this because this time the number of seeds that got stuck on me was only three versus the fifteen-twenty seeds that would get stuck on me earlier in the quarter.
2. The berries on the Nootka Rose (Rosenutkana) seemed to have gotten bigger. Maybe it was just because I was seeing them after a long time?
3. I noticed that the horsetails at my site, the ones I wrote about in my previous journal, had gotten bigger.
BIRDS AT/NEAR MY SITE
1. American Crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos)
These are the birds that I see most often at my site. The crows around my site were very active at the time. I noticed a murder of crows flying from the direction of downtown Seattle over the lake. One of them left the group, but most of them were flying in the direction of the Waterfront Activities Center, where there seemed to be a lot of crow activity and I could hear the sounds of a lot of the cawing coming from that general direction.
sketch 1:
2. Bewick’s wren (Thryomanes bewickii)
Since the weather was quite cloudy and it had started raining it was really hard to find the smaller birds (like wrens, sparrows etc.) that I usually see at UBNA. However, as preparing to leave, I heard the calls of a Bewick’s wren. At first, the bird was perched on the top of a small tree. Then it started making it way down by jumping from branch to branch. It then flew to another tree a few feet away. At this point, I think the wren noticed my presence and flew away. I tried to follow it through the trees but I lost my balance and fell (it was quite embarrassing and I’m glad no one was around to see that) and lost track of the bird.
sketch 2:
3. Song sparrow (Melospiza melodia)
I saw this one just a few minutes after the Bewick’s wren. However, it didn’t stick around long enough for me to take any detailed notes on its behaviour.
Ducks: Since my site is right next to Lake Union, I usually am able to see a few ducks. They usually swim in groups of their own species but I saw a male Bufflehead swimming among a group of female Mallards, which I thought very cute considering the size difference between the two species.They’re pretty far away though so it is hard to take good pictures of them using just my phone.
4. Bufflehead (Bucephala albeola)
5. Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos)
Journal 7: Poetry in Nature
Date: November 15, 2018
TIme: 4:10 pm
Weather: 13º C, cloudy, cool breeze
Repeat photographs:
Again, I visited my site after 2 weeks so a lot had changed. The first (and biggest) change that I noticed was how even though I have visited my site between 3-5 pm many times, it has never been this dark and dusky. This change allowed me to witness the species at my site and the interactions between them in a new light, literally and figuratively.
Since it has been raining consistently for the past few days, the soil at my site was really moist and the ground was covered in even more mushrooms than before. Many of the older mushrooms had started to decompose. I had to tread very carefully to avoid squishing the mushrooms and ruining my shoes.
This is the same species of mushroom that was here two weeks ago, which I identified to be the False Chanterelle (Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca). I also noticed some Deer Mushroom (Pluteus cervinus) but there were only a couple of them versus hundreds of the False Chanterelles. I wonder what adaptations/features allow the latter to be more dominant in this area.
I also noticed a lot of new horsetails (genus Equisetum).
Also, I don’t know if this counts as a change but I noticed a lot of cattails. I don’t remember them being here before but I could be wrong.
As the soil was wet, I was able to dig around quite easily and look for inverts. Within 5 minutes of my search, I managed to find what I think is a Red Worm (Eisenia fetida).
I also made a video, in case you like seeing worms move around:
Some other species that I identified were –
1. Chicory (Cicorium intybus)
2. Devil’s beggarticks (Bidens frondosa)- this is the plant whose seeds get stuck on me everytime and get ages to get off, so I think the name is very fitting!
3. Bufflehead- the picture is really bad because the bird was very far away
4. Bewick’s Wren:
5. American Crow- I wasn’t able to get a picture of it
6.Canada Geese- They were flying over me. I wasn’t able to photograph them fast enough.
Poems
#1:
(This poem is about the Red Worm I identifies at my site. It’s about the essential contribution that Red worms and other earthworms make to our ecosystems- decomposition.)
i dug you out of the cold wet earth
where you were making life out of death
doing something so powerful
then why do you look so weak
so weak that your life could end
with a pinch from my fingers.
i came from the earth too
but all I do is make death out of life
your doing is greater
than mine will ever be
you should swallow me whole
and return me to the earth.
#2:
(This poem is about the crows that I see everyday and who have inhabited this land for thousands of years)
dear crow
they say that you’re a lot like us
you’re smart, you make friends, and you mourn.
did you mourn when the white men came for your land?
dear crow,
they say that you’re a lot like us
you remember, you recognize faces, you teach your young what you know.
On November 3, we visited a landscape quite unlike the one I’m used to seeing in and around Seattle- the Shrub-Steppe. This landscape was characterized by shorter shrubbier plants, grasses, and dry and rocky soils. The trees only grew in small patches. Even the weather was quite different. Unlike the wetter climate of the Seattle area, this place was quite dry and windy.
(Image 1: landscape image of shrub-steppe)
(Image 2: landscape sketch of view of hills from the shrub-steppe)
In my opinion, the contrast between the climate here in Seattle and near Yakima canyon can be illustrated quite well by this image I got off of Google Maps:
This sharp contrast can be explained by the fact that the Umtanum Ridge and Yakima are located in the rain shadow region of the Cascades and hence receive less than 20 inches of rain annually.
The extreme dryness and harsh climate (very hot in summer/very cold in winter) mean that the plants in the region have to be quite hardy and drought tolerant. Also, since it is so windy, most of the plants in shrub-steppe invest resources in their root systems and maintain a relatively shorter height (to avoid excessive damage from wind). Investing in root systems probably helps the hold onto the soil better and access the moisture and nutrients available in the deeper soil layers.
Some of the most prominent plants in this area were the different kinds sagebrushes- Stiff sagebrush (Artemisa rigida) and Tall/Big sagebrush (Artemisa tridentata).
The plant pictured above is the Big Sagebrush (Image 3). It’s leaves look like 3 fingers. The peeling bark provides the plant with flexibility and structural support in the strong winds.
Some of the other plants that we saw in the shrub-steppe were:
Bitterbrush (has fuzzy leaves and belongs to the sunflower family; very important in this region as it provides habitat for small mammals, reptiles, birds etc and food for ungulates like elk, mule deer etc.):
(Image 4: bitterbrush)
Cheatgrass (invasive in this region; burns very easily which proves to be a risk to the native plant species; does not let native wildflowers grow)
Bunchgrass
Desert Buckwheat:
One of the favorite parts of this trip for me was all the different kinds of scat we found. I don’t think that scat in itself is very interesting but it was cool to think about the species that left it there.
Another interesting part of this landscape was all the rocks and the lichen that covered them:
Since crust lichen (the kind pictured here) grows very slowly, it is an indicator of the fact that the rock that it’s growing on hasn’t been moved in hundreds of years. The lichen on the rocks is also significant because lichen is usually the first organism to colonize a barren landscape and later facilitates the growth of plants. Other kinds of lichen that we saw were Wolf lichen and Orange pincushion lichen.
As I was overturning different rocks (in the hopes of finding some cool creatures like scorpions) I ended up finding a lot of silverfish (Lepisma saccharina) taking shelter beneath them.
(Image 5: individual species sketch of silverfish)
Later in the field trip, we began our hike to a small waterfall. As we got closer to it, the vegetation changed dramatically because the soil got moister. Along the trail, I was able to notice some plants that were familiar to me- black cottonwood, Douglas fir, Tall Oregon grape, Alder etc. We also saw/heard calls of birds like the Northern Harrier, the Dark-eyed Junco, nuthatches etc.
The waterfall itself was also pretty amazing.
The air here felt so different due to the moisture.
Some of the species we saw in/around here were the Ponderosa pine, the American Dipper (a very cool bird with transparent eyelids that can swim underwater) and mayflies.
(Image 6: individual species sketch of mayfly)
Looking back at this field trip, it was a really good learning experience because I got to experience the rain shadow we learned about in class and see a climate and species that were very different from what I normally get to observe in the Puget Trough. Even the species that were familiar to me were different in some ways due to the change in the environment (for example, the Douglas firs in this region were more shade tolerant and were mostly growing under the Ponderosa pines vs the Douglas firs in the Puget Trough that are quite shade intolerant).
Weather: 11º C, chilly and wet, cloudy with a very small amount of sunlight streaming in through the clouds, not raining
I visited my site at the UBNA after 2 weeks and as expected a lot had changed. Just approaching the UBNA I noticed that autumn was in full swing from how many more trees looked yellower and redder.
Another thing that I noticed was the cawing of lots of crows and I even heard (and saw many gulls). While the cries of the gulls faded as I approached my site, the crows could still be heard loud and clear.
I know that crows are common birds in cities but I did hear them a lot more than usual. This could maybe have something to do with the fact that for the first time, I visited my site in the morning (versus late afternoon/early evening).
As it has been raining and has been consistently wet over the past few days, there were many small puddles of water in the gravel path leading up to my site. I decided to begin my search for inverts in these pools only. While I did not find notice anything in a lot of the pool, in one pool (which was much closer to my site) I noticed a worm “swimming” in the puddle. I took a short video of it as it was very hard to make out in the picture that I took.
I observed it for a few minutes until it eventually crawled into a hole and was visible no longer. ( I tried searching through our field guide, iNaturalist, and Google Search as to what this species might be but I could not find an answer.)
When I was finally at my site, I noticed that along with the calls of the crows, I could also hear the faint calls of some other bird which sounded like a screech. I couldn’t locate the source of the calls, however.
As I mentioned before, it has been wet and rainy for the past few days which means that when I finally looked towards the ground, I saw more mushrooms in one place than I had ever seen in my life.
I was able to upload some of the images on iNaturalist and identify the species. For example, I identified the Deer mushroom (Pluteus cervinus) pictured here:
and the False Chanterelle (Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca):
The effects of autumn were quite visible on my site, many of the trees had lost most, if not all, of their leaves. I identified one of the plants to be the Red Osier Dogwood (Cornus sericea).
However, many of the plants had also retained their leaves, such as those belonging to the genus Rosa and grasses along lake.
(This plant’s fruits look like tiny pomegranates, in my opinion)
As I was hanging around this plant I noticed my first insect- a bee! It was flying near the plant and then after that, It flew close to some wildflowers. It would pause around one flower and then move on to next. I observed the bee till there was a sudden change in the lighting around me and I looked up at the sky. When I looked down again, I couldn’t find the bee anymore. I drew a sketch from memory when I got back to my dorm.
Later I identified this bee to be the Western Honeybee (Apis mellifera) and learned that it is actually not native to North America.
I decided to head closer to the lake to find more insects. In the process, the seeds of a plant got stuck on my shirt. I wouldn’t have minded them if they weren’t so prickly. For the rest of the day, I was pulling out the seeds from my shirt and pants.
They came from this plant (I still haven’t identified it ):
On the big dead tree on my site, I was able to find many small spider webs but no spiders. In many of the webs I spotted old decaying dead insects.
I noticed a tiny black insect (smaller than a fruit fly) in abundance around the area. As I set my notebook down to look for more of them, one came and sat on my notebook for quite a long time.
There were many of its kind around me but they wouldn’t stay still for anything over 5 seconds so it was really hard to keep track of them. Since I found them where the land meets water and there’s a lot of wet mud and decaying plants, I think they might prefer moist habitats. They kept jumping around so I couldn’t really find any patterns in their behavior.
I decided to come back out and look for more insects. As I was just standing and observing the area around me, I noticed very small translucent white insects flying around. They were very hard to make out in the absence of proper sunlight but I could notice them around me. I don’t even know what their actual shape was like because they mostly just appeared as a blur but using Google and iNaturalist, I was able to figure out that they might be Whiteflies (Family Aleyrodidae).
The next place where I looked for insects was around the mushrooms. In the past, I’ve seen many insects crawling around/over them. I managed to find a fly on the mushroom. Throughout the time I spent observing it, it did not move anything more than a few millimeters. Even when I was right over it with my phone it did not move! This surprised me a lit because in my experience, flies are quite vigilant and are able to escape danger quite easily. Maybe this fly was injured and unable to move?
Here’s my sketch of it. It might belong to the genus Calliphora.
After that, I decided to look more through the ground. Using a stick, I dug through the mulch, which was quite wet. I found a layer of white colored fungus spread throughout the ground below the top layer of mulch which makes sense as the mulch hold a lot of moisture and makes it an ideal habitat for fungus. I also found very tiny yellow spider-like inverts moving below the top layer of mulch. They were moving really fast and it was really hard to get them to be still. As I kept digging and finding more of them they kept moving deeper into the ground. It was hard to keep track of them because they were moving really fast but I was able to take a video of one that I found. You’ll have to look very closely and concentrate on the invert otherwise you’ll lose sight of it.
I was able to sketch it but I doubt that the sketch is very accurate since these creatures were moving so fast. I was able to recognize the invert as being an arachnid. More specifically, it might be a clover mite (Bryobia praetiosa).
I found another invert while digging through the mulch- a worm! Its body was only half visible. I watch it wiggle around for a while and then I thought that maybe I should dig around it to see if I can figure out what the rest of its body looks like. This was a bad idea. In the process of digging, I lost the worm and could not find it again.
After looking at a lot of pictures of worms online, and based on the worm’s really dark color and prominent segments, I think this might be a Red Worm (Eisenia fetida). It could be a common earthworm but to me, its color seems too dark reddish-brown for that.
Finally, here are pictures of my site at 2 spatial scales.
And another picture of my site (just because I think it’s very pretty)
As I was leaving I could hear the quacking sounds of the mallards and I saw a lot of them on the lake. They were really far away from me hence the picture quality is bad (also I’m just a bad photographer)
Just a few seconds after I took this picture something disturbed them and most of them flew away.
October 20, 2018 Nisqually Wildlife Refuge We reached the Nisqually Wildlife Refuge at around 10 am. The air at the Refuge felt quite moist and cold and within a few minutes of being outside the car, it felt as if a chill had penetrated through the four layers I was wearing and settled into my bones. I don’t think I had felt this cold in a long time.
The first thing we noticed as we started walking out of the parking lot was a coyote hunting in the meadow right next to the lot. We knew it was hunting as it would crouch and then pounce at something in the grass and it did this repeatedly. The coyote was quite far away but I was able to make a quick sketch of it:
As we started walking on the trail going through the refuge we heard the calls of many birds including the Northern Flicker, which is a kind of woodpecker. It was hard to see the bird as it was sitting on a very tall branch and was at quite a distance away from us. We also saw a red-tailed hawk. It had a reddish/orangeish-brown tail and kind of chunky body. Here’s my rough sketch of what it looked like:
We also heard a chattering sound which, according to our professor, was the call of a belted kingfisher flying over us.
Next, we walked towards an old barn. In the grass surrounding the barn, there were a lot of Pacific tree frogs. They had surprisingly loud croaks. Despite being tree frogs, they were in the grass because in wet weather they come down to the ground to lay eggs. I was lucky enough to catch one of the tree frogs and get a video of it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xdFSjCuYmg)
As you can see, it’s skin is quite bumpy and slimy. Pacific tree frogs have really sticky toe pads which they use to climb trees and I could feel that stickiness as the frog moved over my hand.
In that same patch of grass, one of the students found this mushroom. I don’t know what the species is but it had a very pretty shiny golden-grey appearance.
The Nisqually Wildlife Refuge is home to an estuary- an environment that is a mix of freshwater and saltwater marshes. Because of this, the refuge has great biodiversity of species adapted to saltwater, freshwater or even both.
A dike had been built through the Nisqually River’s floodplain as park managers wanted to restrict the rivers flooding. It was amazing walking on the dike because on one side there was dense vegetation adapted to freshwater and on the other side was very sparse shrubby vegetation due to the high salt contents of the soil and water.
On the dike, we spotted what was the caterpillar stage of the Isabella tiger moth. As you can see, it was covered in dark “fur”.
We spotted many birds while walking on the dike too, including the American kestrel, the Northern harrier, the Short-eared owl, the Peregrine falcon (the fastest bird in the world!!) and the Great Blue Heron. The heron was moving its neck in quite a funny manner and was stationary long enough for me to sketch it.
My handwriting is quite illegible here as my hands were very numb from the cold. The really blurry text on the sketch reads “orange beak” as the heron did have a very distinctive orange beak. I also got the opportunity to taste pickle weed which grew near the saltwater marsh. It was pink and green in color and quite short. The crystals on the plant seem to be salt crystals. It tasted very salty (like pickles) and was kind of crunchy.
While returning back to the parking lot we took a different route which went along an oxbow lake. The lake was surrounded by a lot of vegetation (including cottonwood and bigleaf maple trees). There were many mallards and a pair of gadwalls in the lake. At the edge of the lake, hidden among the dense weeds, we spotted the Virginia rail, a bird looks like a very small kiwi. The only other feature I could make out was it’s orange-brown belly as it was very well camouflaged.
Mima Mounds Natural Area Preserve Our next destination that day was the Mima Mounds. The Mima Mounds were fascinating and I love that experts are still arguing over how they formed. I think that the mystery further added to their appeal, at least for me. The landscape is technically a savanna and looks very much like one, as it mostly has grasses and small shrubs growing on it apart from the occasional oak tree save for one big difference- it is covered in these strange mounds.
As soon as we entered the area, someone from our group (I think it was one of our teaching assistants) caught a garter snake.
I also got the opportunity to hold the snake. It was an amazing feeling holding this tiny snake in my hand, especially as it coiled itself around my wrist. The garter snake was brown in color and had the long lines running through its skin which were lighter or darker shades of brown. Since we were there in the afternoon, the weather was much less cool and I was able to seat myself on top of one of the mounds and sketch the landscape in peace.
The trees growing at the edge of the grassland were mostly Douglas firs while the trees growing in the grassland were mostly oaks. The oaks were quite short.
Next, we traveled an area where a mound had been sliced through and we had the chance to at what these mounds were made of and come up with hypotheses of how they might have formed.
This particular mound was covered in a lot of coastal reindeer lichen.
The soil showed some stratification and was divided into layers of small rocks, big rocks and small sediments. The soil wasn’t very stable, as it was really easy to pull out the rocks and big chunks of soil just using my bare hands. I think that the only reason the mounds were able to maintain their structure through the thousands of years that they have existed is because of the plants that grow on them. Touching the gravelly soil, it seemed quite obvious to me that the only thing holding it together was the roots of all the vegetation on top of it. Also, the gravelly texture of the soil seemed to suggest that it might have been glacial outwash.
October 21, 2018 Mount Rainier National Park This was the part of the trip I was most excited for as I have seen Mount Rainier so many times from the UW campus on clear days and I finally got to actually see it close up!
One of our first destinations in the National Park was an old growth forest. Here is what I wrote in my field journal while sitting at the base of a giant Douglas fir:
The Western Redcedar whose roots I have drawn here lay across the forest floor and was covered in moss. It was large and sturdy enough for me to walk on it and I clicked pictures of surrounding areas.
The forest floor was covered in mushroom, especially mycorrhizal ones. The mycorrhizal fungi form mutualistic relationships with the trees, especially the Douglas firs.
As can be seen, the old growth forest had quite a lot of diversity of habitat due to the variety of structures the combination of old trees, young trees, snags, nurse logs etcetera provides. For this reason, old-growth forest is quite valuable especially when it comes to the conservation of species like the spotted owl.
Most of the really large trees in the forest were Douglas firs, while the ones in the understory were mostly Western Hemlocks. Some of the other species we found in the forest were the rattlesnake orchid, the twin flower, bunchberry, and Loberia pulmonaria (lungwort). The lungwort is an important species of lichen as it fixes nitrogen into forms that can be utilized by the plants in the forest. Unlike the rough gravelly soil of the Mima Mounds, the soil in this forest was much deeper and spongy and it was obvious that is had a lot of organic matter in it.
Next, we got to see what was the beginning of the Nisqually River.
The river was coming through between the mountains. However, the glacier it originates from was not in sight as it had retreated to behind the mountains, away from our view (possibly due to climate change). The retreating of the glacier has, over time, has made the landscape unstable and caused the glacial till and rocks to tumble down towards the river. Due to this, the height of the Nisqually riverbed has risen considerably and a lot of the vegetation along the banks of the river has been destroyed.
Our final destination of the day was Mount Rainier. By the time we reached the base of the mountain, the sun was high up, the sky had cleared and it had actually become pretty warm. This was going to prove to be a problem later, as the warm temperature plus the physical effort of hiking up a mountain made us quite sweaty, tired and dehydrated. (Making this experience worse was the fact that i had forgotten to bring my inhaler and as our altitude increased it got harder for me to breathe normally and I was coughing a lot).
Here’s a picture of the mountain from the starting point of our trail:
Since we had entered the subalpine vegetation zone now, most of the trees surrounding us were Mountain Hemlocks and Sub-alpine firs. These trees have shorter branches that are arranged in such a manner that allows snow to easily fall off during the winter thus saving the trees from damage.
The rocks in the above two pictures have originated from volcanic eruptions thousands of years ago as this is a very geologically active area.
If you look carefully at the glaciers, you will notice dark striations running through the glaciers horizontally. These are basically layers of snow from each winter separated by layers of dust that accumulate over the glacier in the summer.
Our trail was quite rocky and in some places has very tiny streams of water flowing through the sand and gravel. After hiking the trail, we reached a lateral moraine near the mountainside where we spent a considerable amount of time observing the landscape.
Here is the moraine and the view from it:
These are the notes I took here:
Something that stuck out to me about the heather is that the soil up there was very dry and very little organic matter and exposed to strong winds so obviously the plant would have to be quite hardy and resilient but our professor told us that the plant was very susceptible to trampling and kind of delicate so we had to be careful not to step on it.
I also had the chance to sit and sketch for a bit:
While being up on that moraine and having such a great view of the mountain was quite amazing we were also very aware of how much climate change is altering this landscape. The glaciers on Rainier are receding at very fast rates and in just a few decades all that will remain is the ice near the peak of the mountain unless strict action is taken to mitigate climate change.
Our trip ended with us hiking back down the mountain and starting our drive back to Seattle.
Journal 3
Writing today was extremely hard because it was extremely hot and sunny and I was sweating. The harsh sun was also giving me a headache and I got quite dehydrated. So today, instead of just standing and clicking pictures I decided to explore around my field site. This was useful as it also helped me look for the fungi/lichen needed for today’s assignment. I decided to go behind the big tree at my site.
I had never explored that area before due to the fact that the shrubs surrounding this tree make the area behind it quite inaccessible but today I decided to brave it. The seeds from a plant in front of the tree got stuck on my clothes. They were quite pointy and later that afternoon I had to spend 15minutes getting them all out. The area behind the tree was quite different. the soil here was wetter as it was bordering the lake. There were many pieces of rotting wood. The big tree itself had no leaves but it did have a variety of organisms growing on it.
I identified this lichen with the help of iNaturalist and found it to be Xanthoria parietina (Maritime Sunburst Lichen). The lichen is yellowish-green in color and appears to look “leafy” or foliose.
As you can see, there are two different colors of lichen growing here.I do not know if these are the same species or not since there appears to be small variation in appearance.
I also saw this mushroom:
So far, I have not been able to identify this species.
By this time my shoes started sinking into the wet mud so I decided to come back into the open and looked around for more mushrooms. I saw the ones I saw last week again except some of them looked like they were close to dying.
This is the picture of them from last time:
The cap is a dull yellow/white darkening towards the center. The cap it pretty large and shaped like a small plate. As can be seen it doesn’t have a uniform shape though it mostly is round.
I found two other fungi that I could not identify:
and
(I went through iNaturalist and I think this could be a meadow mushroom)
After all of this though, I would like to add that fungi and lichen are really hard to identify. When I was going through my field guide, the internet and iNaturalist, most species looked very similar to me and even within a species there was a lot of diversity in shape, color and size so it is very likely that my identifications of these species could be wrong.
Journal 2
(This time I tried something different by writing everything in my field journal itself. I have alternated between the text and the required sketches)
Journal 1
Growing up, I did not have much experience with natural history at all. I grew up in Noida, India- a small industrial city in the suburbs of New Delhi and the closest things I had to nature were our neighborhood parks and the stray donkeys, cows and dogs that roam our streets. Even then, I had an interest in natural history right from the beginning. I would spend hours at end watching nature documentaries on National Geographic and Animal Planet, especially when I was three or four years old and wasn’t really allowed to go outside and explore. As I grew older, so did my desire to interact with nature. Finally, when I was seven years old, my family took us to Kashmir during the summer. The beauty of the Himalayas, the white glaciers, the meadows that stretched for more kilometers than I could count at the time- all made me realize how much I love the natural world and all that it has to offer. While such trips to places with lots of natural history were short and infrequent, they helped me foster an appreciation and a concern for nature.
Another formative experience (and perhaps the most important one) was my trip to Bandhavgarh National Park in Madhya Pradesh, India with my family. Bandhavgarh is famous for having the largest number of royal Bengal tigers in the country and I was brimming with excitement to see one. We went right after monsoon when the foliage in the forest was thick and the only color you could see was green. Unfortunately, this meant that we could see no tigers since they are so skilled at camouflaging themselves. I did see a variety of other animals- wild boars, barking deer, nilgai. I saw more insects and lizards than I had ever encountered previously. I also saw many birds and the trip led to me developing an interest in them. In fact, Bandhavgarh was where I purchased my first bird guide. But the trip did so much more than just helping me learn about the rich natural history of my country. It helped me learn patience and being observant- skills that are going to be essential in my life and especially as a student of the environmental sciences.
Part of why I took ENVIR 280 was because I wanted to be outdoors and experience Seattle’s natural beauty but another aspect of it was also me wanting to polish those skills and feel that connectedness to nature that I felt during the aforementioned trips. And so far, this class is giving me just that.
Pictured below are the first pages of the field journal I’m maintainng for this class. The site I have been and will be observing this quarter is small area next to Lake Washington in Union Bay Natural Area, Seattle.
Field Journal 