Discovering Wildlife in the Busy City

As August begins and I celebrate my 2 month anniversary as the Forest Restoration Director at Nature Consortium, I am taking time to reflect on what I’ve experienced here.

I have had the pleasure of working with over 200 volunteers thus far, including Boeing employees, French software developers, local high school students, a church group, exchange students from Mexico, Nature Consortium Summer Camp students, and some of Nature Consortium’s most dedicated long-term volunteers.

In addition to the great people I’ve met and the work we’ve accomplished, I’ve also enjoyed witnessing the West Duwamish Greenbelt’s vibrant ecosystem. We have seen American goldfinches landing on thistle plants, a barred owls feeding its young in a tree directly above one of our work party sites, and a red-breasted sapsucker perched on a snag in another work party site. We’ve found owl pellets, observed garter snakes, tasted ripe and not-so-ripe blackberries, seen a brown creeper, walked through way too many spider webs, gotten (temporarily) lost on the trails at Soundway, heard Caspian terns flying over Pigeon Point, marveled at the size of black berry roots, listened to variety of fine musicians, and discovered two different bushtit nests—one in a big Pacific madrone, and another in a tall Oregon grape shrub that had been planted by a volunteer a few years ago. All of these observations and experiences occurred during the 55-ish hours of volunteer work parties that I have had the opportunity to attend or lead in my two months here.

I am truly in awe of what I have already experienced and what our volunteers have observed during a very short period of time in this big, very urban forest. These past two months at Nature Consortium have inspired me to commit to recording our natural history observations during work parties, and I intend to fill this blog in the coming months with some of the highlights.