Chattermarks

This past Earth Day Weekend, the North Cascades Institute hosted the 3^rd Anuual Migratory Bird Festival! The event was sponsored by the U.S. Forest Service and brought people together from across western Washington for a day to explore the natural history of migratory birds and the cultural heritage of Ebey’s Landing National Historic Reserve.

Students and elders from Seattle’s International District, Mt. Vernon’s Kulshan Creek Neighborhood, and North Cascade Institute’s NC Wild 2012 program joined together to celebrate and learn about birds by migrating through four different educational stations.

Participants dined on a multicultural feast featuring Chinese food from Seattle’s International District and homemade Mexican tamales and sopes from Yolanda Zamora of Mt. Vernon. Delicious!

The first station was the Sea Lab, where students and elders could see, touch, and learn about some of the marine invertebrates that help fuel the birds’ migratory journeys along the Pacific flyway. This hands-on lesson covered the basics of the ecology and dynamic interplay between Puget Sound’s marine life and the migratory birds that utilize northwest marine ecosystems in order to complete part of their journey.

Graduate student Jacob Belsher teaches students all about the joys of being a moonsnail.

» Continue reading Bird Migrations at Ebey’s Landing

In 2010, I completed a year-long bicycle tour through many countries famous for their exotic creepy crawlies and, while reading Craig Childs’ book The Animal Dialogues, I couldn’t help reflecting on the experiences I had with some of those creatures throughout that tour. The Animal Dialogues presents an exploration of the author’s uncommon encounters with animals, reptiles, and insects. Childs’ writing style is a blend of naturalist observations and beautifully depicted narratives indicative of a well-seasoned nature writer. He is able to find pause in that moment between life and death and break down the human-animal barrier, capturing in writing the infinite space between one moment and the next.

One such moment was depicted in a chapter on mountain lions where Childs recalls many nearly unbelievable stories. After a recent cougar encounter in Diablo, followed by numerous cougar sightings around the Environmental Learning Center, I found myself paying close attention to how Childs describes his encounters with cougars in the wild. One particular story that Childs writes about centers around a run-in with a cougar near a water source in the Arizona desert. After the mountain lion backs down from the stand-off with Childs, he writes, “I stand there for a few minutes, staring at the forest. […] I have reached the hard, palpable seed of life. The image is now permanently formed in my mind. I can see how the mountain lion will be posed, suddenly in view anywhere around me, its tail weaving an intricate pattern, spelling secret words in the air (66).” We all have moments in life where time seems to stand still and we are truly living moment by moment. Although for most of us this stand still will never occur between man and cougar, what Childs conjures in this chapter and throughout his book is the way in which our primal connection with the earth is realized when we interact with deep wilderness. Whether it’s a cougar in my own neighborhood, a mountain goat on Cascade Pass, or some other surprising encounter, these experiences come in a myriad of forms.

» Continue reading The Animal Dialogues: A Natural History Book Reflection

For field biologists, winter is typically the time of year when we hunker down, pore over data, fix gear, drink lots of coffee, and dream of spring when our field season starts again. This winter is different. This year, the North Cascades Institute has traded excel spreadsheets for snowshoes and hot coffee for THE SMELLIEST SUBSTANCE ON THE PLANET! What? Let me explain:

Graduate students, staff, and volunteers from the North Cascades Institute are working in partnership with the Cascades Carnivore Connectivity Project to evaluate habitat connectivity for carnivores in the North Cascades Ecosystem (NCE). Specifically, we are spending the winter trying to obtain American marten (Martes americana) hair samples as part of a landscape genetic study.

An American marten investigates a hair snare on the flanks of Sourdough Mountain near Diablo Lake.

American martens are members of the weasel family Mustelidae and, despite the fact that they are rarely seen, are common inhabitants of Pacific Northwest alpine ecosystems. By determining the genetic structure of their populations, we can assess the connectivity of marten habitat within their range. In other words: How closely related is Marten A to Marten B? Like the rest of NCE’s native carnivores (wolverines, lynx, wolves, bears, etc.), martens must be able to roam freely through vast landscapes in order to obtain food, mates, and breeding territories. Wide-ranging mobility is also critical to ensure that populations do not become genetically isolated (population bottleneck).

» Continue reading The Sweet Smell of Winter

As much as we love North Cascadian landscapes, we here at the Institute are still called to visit and experience other amazing places on our planet. We publish accounts of the places Institute staff and graduate students visit in our Road Trip series.

As graduate students immersed in developing a sense of place within the rich, rugged landscapes of the North Cascades, we spend a lot of time attending to, and exploring, the natural world outside our doorsteps. At the Environmental Learning Center, our academic studies of the history, culture, ecology, art, and conservation of this place are integrated with actual feet-on-the-ground learning. This type of naturalizing is a practice that takes patience, and a willingness to move through our surroundings with careful observation as we slowly make sense of its many patterns and intricacies. The deeper we go in this process, the more the meaning and being of the North Cascades opens up to us. We begin to understand the stories written on and of this landscape, and our place in it.

For many of us, this practice of Natural History in all its interdisciplinary forms roots us intimately and specifically to the high mountains and steep river canyons of this region. The nature of this type of learning means that, for many graduate students, we will leave this program knowing the North Cascades better than we know our own, native homelands. How then, do we translate the tools we are learning here to other river drainages, mountains, high deserts, or valley bottoms?

In an effort to explore this question during our month-long respites from the North Cascades, Kiira and I reflected on how the practice of natural history can be used to cultivate awareness and develop a deeper sense of connection to any landscape that we move through. While Kiira’s travels took her home to the rolling hills of southern Vermont, mine took me south into the austral summer of the Patagonian Andes.

» Continue reading Latitudinal and Longitudinal Explorations of Natural History

Practicing natural history requires us to be consciously aware, to be intentional observers of our surroundings. To be a naturalist involves surrendering what we know about a place in order to learn from it. Slowly we will make notes of patterns and similarities, notes of how things are connected and how and when these connections occur. When we become familiar with a place, that familiarity is grounded in our first efforts to identify and name individual pieces of the landscape.

In my dalliances so far into the naturalist world and into the North Cascades, I have made attempts to name what I see, collect these pieces as parts of a whole, and better understand this place as my home. Learning and pulling from the experiences of the naturalists of our community is a special part of the M.Ed. Graduate Residency at North Cascades Institute I have been inspired by words and experiences about what it means to identify something by name, to understand the patterns of place, to see the connection between recognition and reverence, and to cultivate that curiosity that pulls us more deeply into relationships with the places we call home. Here are some thoughts I’ve gleaned and some experiences I’ll share about the art of naming in the practice of natural history.

» Continue reading Naming as Knowing

People experience the seasonal transformations of the natural world in a myriad of ways. Each of us may recognize subtleties taking hold of a landscape in times of change that others will miss completely because they have learned to pay attention to different details. Amidst downpours of rain in the lowlands and dustings of snow in the mountains, it can be easy to settle in to quieter and more thoughtful routines. It can be easy to put our noses in books and our feet in slippers, forgetful that these changes bring new forms of burgeoning and often unnoticed life back into the world.

For some, these changes affect most the olfactory realm, delighting that sense with smells of duff and rich, turning soils. For others, it is the sight of a golden larch contrasted against crystalline snow and mountain peaks, and still others notice most the mosses of the forest floor amplified to new shades of green by the quickening rains. Perhaps for some it is the elongated light and the shadows that persist which give new meaning to the color and character of the trees. Or some may simply feel it as an urgent knowing from deep within, a connection to the undercurrents of a timeless, cyclical change.

By combining our individual morsels of detail and thought about the essential elements of fall, we are able to paint a richer understanding of this place in which we live. We are able collectively to tell a story that captures the beauty of the changing seasons in the North Cascades ecosystem. In the process, we learn to draw on other’s knowledge in order to widen our own, ultimately coming to appreciate a more communal understanding of place. Below, staff and graduate students share their own unique vignettes of fall, offering perspectives of this region that span many seasons to just a few months.

Tigerlily pods ready to sow their seeds on the fecund soils of the Methow Valley. Photo by Jess Newley.

» Continue reading Fall Vignettes from the Institute

Last weekend Cohort 11 graduate students had the chance to step away from our roles as Mountain School Instructors and again return to being students of Natural History during our three day Fall Grad Retreat. After weeks of training and teaching 5th and 6th grade youth about the diverse ecosystems of the North Cascades, the respite from such high activity was much appreciated by all. Our explorations took us by hand and knee through douglas fir forests near home, and by car and foot through the ponderosa pine and fire-scarred forests in the Methow Valley.

Day one of the retreat was spent near the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center campus with M.Ed. graduate alumna and mycologist Lee Whitford discussing the amazing yet unfamiliar world of fungi and their fruiting mushroom bodies. After learning some basic facts and characteristics about our earthy friends, we set out to do some local harvesting of our own (on Forest Service land, of course!). It took some time to adjust our eyes and hone our observational skills to the often unnoticed specimens hidden between leaf, detritus, and tree trunk, but half an hour and handfuls of mushrooms later our forage had yielded an impressive and diverse variety of them.

» Continue reading From Teacher to Student and Back Again

Lately, on these cool autumn mornings at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center, I’ve taken to gazing south from my porch as the first, angled rays of sun illuminate the buttress of Pyramid Peak across Diablo Lake. Since our first torrential weather event passed through a few weeks ago, the steep walls of Pyramid have glistened with snow dustings in the early light, giving relief and texture to the bare, sculptured rock. I breathe deeply, savoring my gratitude for these moments to welcome the day.

Sometimes I wonder at how lucky I am to be living in the presence of such rugged giants as Pyramid, Colonial and Sourdough peaks in the heart of the North Cascades. In my first month of being here as part of the M.Ed.Graduate Program, I have sought to learn the names and scale the slopes of these and other mountains in my new backyard as a way to understand, and become attentive to, the stories written on this landscape. Some peaks — Desolation, Logan, Hozomeen, the McMillan Spires — appear as glimpses on clear days if you stand in the right drainage, at the right angle and distance. I still shout and point when I see them, for their glaciated summits rise as silent, colossal forms into the sky.

» Continue reading Peaks in Place

By Hank Leftner — Join us at the Learning Center on October 22-23, 2011 for a Sourdough Speaker Series presentation by Hank as he introduces us to his acclaimed new memoir Faith of Cranes: Finding Hope and Family in Alaska. Details at www.ncascades.org/speakerseries of by calling (360) 854-2599.

Beneath moon or sun, storm or calm, in every moment of every day for over ten million years the voice of a sandhill crane has called out somewhere on the planet in a seamless lineage of sound.  There is cohesion in the chaotic calls of cranes; an invisible thread binding living beads, stitching the flocks, tying each generation to the next.

Cranes talk to their egg-bound chicks with murmurs and clicks.  The chicks imprint on the sound; they yearn to follow that voice even before breaking free of the shell.  The birds grow, add their high peeps to the throaty calls of the larger flock and are soon clucking to their own offspring. Our lives too are embedded in a rich sea of sounds.  While still in the womb a fetus listens and responds to the muted tones of the world it will soon enter.

The rich diversity of sound, music and wind, laughter and bird song, sobs and sea surf, poems and snow fall, stories and crane calls, – guides us through our lives and hold us in place as surely as gravity keeps our feet pinned to the spinning earth.  In the absence of sound and story prisoners, locked in solitary confinement, lose all orientation and quickly tumble toward insanity.  The lineage of voices that hold us in place come from near and far, the furred and feathered, the newly born and the long dead.

» Continue reading The call of the sandhill crane

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I was leading a hike on the Diablo Lake Trail during our August Family Getaway, when one of the participants noticed something odd on the ground at the side of the path. We all stopped and got down on our hands and knees to see what he had found.

At first, it looked like a really big feather. It was about five inches long, an inch-and-a-half wide, and furry, in short, a tail that was detached from some sort of small-ish mammal. I picked it up, deciding to bring it back to the Learning Center with me to see if I could figure out what it came from and why it was laying next to the trail.

A quarter-mile farther up the trail we found a banana slug, and when we got down to look at it, we realized that it was on top of another tail. Where are these detached tails coming from?

After puzzling about it for a while with some of my coworkers, I decided to ask our Science Coordinator, Jeff Anderson, to see if he had any ideas. And he did! The conclusion? A flying squirrel. The anatomy index at flyingsquirrels.com has this to say:

Flying squirrels have “break-away” tails. Should a predator attack and grab a flyer’s tail, escape is possible, if only at the cost of part of its tail, not its life. The sight of a wild flying squirrel with half a tail is not an uncommon sight. The affected squirrel makes adjustments to this loss and can live a normal life afterwards.

Mystery solved.

To learn more about flying squirrels, visit www.flyingsquirrels.com