Chattermarks

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

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.

About this time last year, summer solstice, with its long days filled with light and birdsong, I left Bellingham and headed out on a pilgrimage to Yellowstone and Grand Tetons national parks. It is a tradition of mine to spend some portion of my summer out there in the glory of western Wyoming. Having lived for a few years as a snowboard bum/river rat in Jackson Hole in the late 1990s, I have tasted the ineffable sweetness of summertime in the Tetons and the surrounding Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Once you sip that nectar, it is impossible not to go back for more whenever possible.

This particular road trip with two good friends, one from Portland, another from San Francisco, started with a visit to Yellowstone’s northeastern Lamar Valley, an area of the park renowned for wildlife viewing opportunities and a more remote feeling than other popular attractions like Old Faithful or the springs at Mammoth. We spent two nights at the lovely Lamar Field Station in the heart of the valley, a rustic outpost that is operated by the Yellowstone Association as accommodations for many of their field excursions.

Approaching the Yellowstone Association’s Lamar Field Station

Out the front door of our cabin was a view across the verdant valley in fresh flush, studded with silhouettes of hundreds of bison grazing with their young. Out the back door, a trail followed a creek back to Druid Peak, the famed mountain where Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt let loose Canadian wolves in 1995 to reintroduce this vital carnivore to the ecosystem. It felt like a holy place, this ground where our culture made an attempt to right a wrong from the past, where the food chain thrives in all of its perfect, intact elegance.

» Continue reading Road Trip: Yellowstone

As students in the Masters of Environmental Education program, naturalizing is at the forefront of our studies. Our curriculum encourages, and requires, us to get outside and document our experiences in nature. We keep journals marked with sketches, notes and questions that record our findings and observations as we explore the North Cascades landscape.

As the spring months of April and May have greeted us, so have the birds. Our winged residents have returned to the North Cascades and many of us have been eagerly watching. A major perk of living in North Cascades National Park for a year is the opportunity to live deep in the mountain landscape under Colonial and Pyramid peaks, and keep close watch of the changing seasons throughout our year-long residency in this place.

With my home at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center in close proximity to the forest, I have found myself in the midst of an ironic naturalist’s moment with birds. For several months, I have closely observed web cams zoomed in on an eagle’s nest located in Iowa, and another located on Hornby Island near Vancouver Island. While immersed in close observations of the intimate lives of eagle parents feeding and caring for their chicks, I noticed a red-breasted sapsucker prospecting a lodgepole pine right out my back door.

» Continue reading Birding Tools of the 21st Century

Spring is near. I can feel it.

Here in the North Cascades, small changes signal the coming season. The surrounding forest echoes with bird song, swarms of robins and dark-eyed juncos flit between branches of deciduous alder, paper birch and vine maple. Within the last month, sounds of varied thrushes, pine siskins, red-breasted sapsuckers and Pacific wrens have again filled the forest. Each day my eyes scout for newcomers, as I learn which birds will return to the North Cascades and when. Although I know most birds were gone all winter, their vocal return reminds me just how silent the forest has been. And I welcome the jubilant sound of their song.

The sun rises much earlier and sets much later. In the forest, spring changes are slowly emerging and apparent in the smaller details of the vegetation. I noticed these changes when I passed by a young red alder that had emerged from its dormancy seemingly overnight. The tree’s maroon bud casings, which have protected the new leaves through winter, have unfurled, revealing new small, bright green leaves. It’s catkins that were so tightly bound over winter have opened. Several feet down the trail I notice small white buds of the vine maple beginning to decorate its long, green branches that stretch through the lower forest canopy.

Along nearby trails, Oregon grape begins to form buds, which will eventually bloom and form sour, purple berries in the summer. Until this winter I had only seen the plant with its berries and am excited to see how the plant will transform from its winter stage, to flowers and finally form its fruit. New blooms of coltsfoot emerge along the Buster Brown trail near Deer Creek. At this early stage, the plants looks like a tightly bound bouquet of small blooms, reminding passersby that spring is near.

Top: Mountain School students and staff awake this spring to a wintry landscape. Above: A new leaf of a red alder begins to grow, showing initial signs of spring.

» Continue reading Awaiting Spring

When I signed up for North Cascades Institute’s M.Ed. Gradute Program, I knew it would be an incredible opportunity, but I did not fully anticipate the diversity of experiences I would have. Based at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center, the winter quarter is a quieter time, primarily focused on group projects for our non-profit and curriculum classes.

These class projects, combined with research on a natural history topic which we are passionate about, comprise the bulk of our academic work. Luckily, our schedules also allow for outdoor learning adventures to explore other places and natural events in our region. Cohort 10 recently returned from our three-day winter naturalist retreat where we experienced some of the incredible assets that western Washington has to offer.

» Continue reading Grad Retreat: Exploring Heather Meadows to Samish Flats

By Molly Hashimoto

Teaching landscape watercolor in summer and autumn at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center on Diablo Lake encompasses everything I love best: peaks, forests, water, wildlife and enthusiastic fellow artists. When I am at home in Seattle, I seek out the quieter parks nearby, especially Union Bay Natural Area, also known as the Montlake Fill, which seems to have a little of all those things I treasure in the North Cascades.

It is surprising that a place so rich with wildlife is less than a mile from the University Village shopping center, right off Sandpoint Way east of the University of Washington, and adjacent to its enormous parking lots. You can be entirely unaware of all that bustle, although in winter you can see the buildings to the north through a grove of leafless cottonwoods. The Natural Area is on land owned by the University of Washington.

In 1895, Lake Washington was lowered and the University was moved from downtown to its present site, which included the marshy land exposed by the lowering of the lake. At that time no one could think of a way to use this area, so in 1926, when the City of Seattle asked the University if they could pay to use it as a dump and a landfill, the university agreed. In 1971, the Fill finally closed. In 1977, the University’s regents approved a plan that would create an arboretum and keep a natural area for the study of horticulture, as well as a wild area.

Top: First Light, North Cascades, watercolor on paper. Above: Swans, Union Bay, woodblock print. One of the most beautiful sights I’ve seen at the Natural Area were the trumpeter swans in Yesler Cove in late winter of 2009. They are rare visitors, and that year they graced us with their presence for several days—seeing them inspired the design for this woodblock print.

» Continue reading Union Bay Wild: An Artist’s View

When I awoke the other morning to see a forest of snow-covered trees, I felt just as excited when I made the same discovery as a child in the winter season. A fresh layer of snow had fallen overnight, changing the already beautiful landscape of the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center into a wintery scene. It appeared to have only snowed an inch or two at the lower elevation, but I was just as happy as if it had snowed more.

The snow always lifts my spirits and I am compelled to get outside and play in the white stuff. Coincidentally, my fellow graduate students and I had previously arranged to spend the morning searching for animal signs and exploring our backyard near the Learning Center together before we departed for Thanksgiving break. With newly fallen snow, we were not sure if we would find many obvious signs of activity from our wildlife neighbors. We were fortunately proven wrong, and surprised at what we found.

» Continue reading Exploring Winter’s Arrival

Harbinger—a presage, a foreshadow, to announce. Something that precedes and indicates the approach of something.

We all experience the wildness of the North Cascades differently. Each of us, in our own way, notices subtle details of the seasons changing in this ecosystem that others may miss completely. In order to tell a more beautiful story, paint a more vivid portrait, we must combine our individual details to articulate the true forms that nature takes in the beginning of spring.

Perhaps it is the calls and presence of varied thrushes in the neighboring forests. Maybe it is the emerging blossoms on cherry trees amidst farmland. Or perhaps it is a detailing so slight, understated, almost unnoticeable, that its mystery is its draw.

The staff and graduate students of North Cascades Institute’s harbingers below announce the presence of spring in the North Cascades and Skagit Valley in a way that draws upon the communal knowledge of having lived in this place for decades to only several months. Each perspective is important to paint that vivid portrait, articulate that poetic story of spring.

(Title) A rainbow across Ross Dam signals the coming of spring in the mountains (Above) Red alder leaves reach out from beneath bud casings at the Learning Center

» Continue reading An Institute ode to spring

As anyone in the Skagit Valley may recall, this past Saturday wasn’t as bright and dry as some of the days previous. However, as stories like these usually begin, the weather was unsuccessful in deterring a group of enthusiastic kids from the Kulshan Creek Neighborhood Project and some equally enthusiastic adults from the US Forest Service and North Cascades Institute from partaking in a day outside learning about and observing the birds of the Samish Flats.

Our adventure began on Saturday, February 27th in the morning at the Kulshan Creek Community Center in Mount Vernon. As the students trickled in, they were met with hot chocolate—provided by a generous parent—and snacks. Lee Whitford, outreach naturalist for the Forest Service, and Orlando Garcia, of the US Forest Service, and I helped get the students situated and the day rolling.

Before we headed out onto our field trip, Don Gay, a wildlife biologist with the US Forest Service, gave a great presentation about the life history and migrational patterns of the Trumpeter Swans that temporarily inhabit the coastal farmlands of the Skagit River Valley. “Ooohs and ahhhs” were murmured throughout the room when Don explained that if a Trumpeter Swan was turned on its side with its wings out, it would have a wingspan that could reach from the floor past the ceiling of the room we were sitting in.

» Continue reading Winter’s swan song

A flit of gold. A flicker of green. Soft song notes from within a tangle of blackberry vines. A surprising whoosh of hovering wing-sweeps, mere inches above ground.

Birds. They are some of the Skagit Valley’s most compelling and charismatic creatures. In winter, the Skagit farmlands teem with all kinds – song birds, raptors, shorebirds, local and migratory waterfowl. You need not have fancy equipment nor years of experience to be a birder here. What it takes is the curiosity to know more and the patience to practice deep observation.

(Title) Graduate students of Cohort 9 extend their birding eye on the Skagit flats (Above) The Hayton Reserve is one Skagit Valley location to go bird watching

» Continue reading Becoming bird observers