One day this past week I found myself on top of Mount Howard, just south of Joseph, Oregon. (It’s a popular tourist area, known as the “Alps of Oregon,” and an aerial tramway takes tourists up to the summit of this particular mountain.) To my delight, one of my favorite western birds was making a racket in the fir trees: the Clark’s Nutcracker, a member of the jay family.

Thanks as always for taking photos, Evan.

I’ve written before about how, in some places in the west, it seems almost possible to estimate one’s altitude based on which jay species are present. You have to get up into the mountains before you’ll see any Clark’s Nutcrackers, but once you get into the right habitat, they’re pretty common.

The birds were making quite a racket. Jays often do, but there was something specific going on in this case: as I watched, I realized I was seeing a pair of birds, one quietly going about its business of foraging among the conifer cones and a second one following it around making piteous keening noises. I’m 95% sure it was a recently-fledged bird, following its parent around and begging.

Stumbling across interesting birds is always cool, and it’s even better when you get to see an interesting behavior like this. Part of the fun of living out west is that even some of the fairly common birds of the area (like Black-billed Magpies and Lazuli Buntings and Red-breasted Sapsuckers and what have you) still seem novel. Happy birding!

I recently realized I totally failed to write a blog post about how I spent the week of July 20-25, and I should: I was one of around fifty people from around the country who attended the Children & Nature Network’s Natural Leaders Legacy Camp at the National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. This is a leadership conference and training program for young people (“millennials,” ages 18-29) who are interested in connecting children and nature.

I’ve written before about Richard Louv and his book Last Child in the Woods. The Children & Nature Network is the national non-profit organization he started to continue advancing the mission of that book, and the Natural Leaders program had been on my radar for a couple years now as something I’d like to be a part of. This summer, while between jobs and searching for ways to stay involved with this cause that I’m passionate about, the time was finally right, so I packed up and traveled to the other end of the country for a week to see what the camp had to offer.

I am introvert, and networking with strangers does not come terribly naturally to me. I knew I wasn’t going to “make life-long friends” during a single week at a conference center, despite what all the sunny blurbs describing past years of the program might say. Still, I went into it with an open mind, and it was definitely worthwhile. As I flip back through the notes I took while I was there, here are some of the highlights:

• To get people interested in your cause, tell your personal story. The Children & Nature Network website has a whole section on peer-reviewed research about the benefits of spending time in nature. However, humans are emotional creatures; you aren’t going to win hearts and minds with statistics alone. There was an entire session on effectively telling a story about why you, personally, think spending time in nature is important.
• There are many valid ways of defining and experiencing nature. A small win is still a win. Not everyone has the means to go for a week-long backpacking trip in the wilderness. Not everyone wants to. Flying a kite in a city park or planting cherry tomatoes in a container on your balcony should also be celebrated! Related to this, we talked about the fact that, when working with kids, allowing time for unstructured play in natural surroundings is just as important as teaching specific lessons about natural history.
• You don’t have to have a job or career related to children and nature (or be a parent) to be involved. I’ve avoided writing anything specific here in the last couple months about what’s going on in my life and career (maybe soon), but at this moment, I am no longer employed in the environmental education field. As it turns out, I was far from the only person in the program without a job in environmental education or something related. Regardless, everyone participating in the camp made a commitment to lead four events in the next year related to connecting children in their community with nature, and started generating ideas for what exactly they might do.

The camp was a great opportunity to reconnect and remember why I do what I do, and I’m hoping to stay involved with the Children & Nature Network in the future. Stay tuned for more as I develop my community events here in Walla Walla, and if you have any questions for me about the organization as a whole or the Natural Leaders program, please share in the comments!

We returned to Mount Rainier over Labor Day weekend for a mini-vacation, and while heavy clouds kept us from getting a clear look at the mountain until we were driving out on Monday, we still got some nice hikes in, including a walk through Grove of the Patriarchs. A boardwalk loop takes you through a stand of enormous old-growth cedars and Douglas-firs, some over a thousand years old, protected by their location on an island in the Ohanapecosh River. Walking among really big, really old trees is always a humbling experience, and this was no different.

I feel really fortunate to have such a beautiful national park within weekend getaway distance, and I can’t wait to go back (again)!

There’s another set of photos from our last trip to Mt. Rainier that I keep meaning to share – our hike to Comet Falls. It’s a four-mile round trip trek up the side of a mountain that takes you to the area’s highest waterfall, which drops over three hundred feet (maybe even over four hundred – depends on which source you consult).

After we’d gazed in awe at the falls for a little while, Evan surprised me on the way down by reciting a Hebrew blessing, which he said was meant for times when you’d seen an amazing natural sight like this one. I loved the idea that Judaism has a blessing specifically for beautiful things in nature, but when we looked it up later we discovered he’d slightly misremembered things: Shehecheyanu is actually a blessing for the start of something new.

Barukh Ata Adonai, Eloheynu Melekh ha’Olam,
Shehecheyanu v’key’yemanu, v’hi’gi’anu laz’man ha’zeh.

Blessed are You, Lord our God,
Who has kept us alive, and sustained us, and enabled us to reach this moment.

But, it’s still appropriate. When I left my job in Oregon in June to move to Walla Walla, I was purposefully vague on this blog about the reasons why; this blog is supposed to about natural history and enjoying the outdoors, not my personal life, and the move had nothing to do with my environmental education career. Still, I guess at this point there’s no reason not to give a brief life update. I moved to Walla Walla because Evan is here, and two weeks ago we made our engagement official. Since I couldn’t make an environmental education job magically materialize here, I’m spending the next year as an AmeriCorps member, getting to know my new community while continuing to work with youth.

So, Shehecheyanu, here’s to the start of something new.

I don’t know if any of you have heard of the YouTube series MinuteEarth, but I wrote a script for them a while ago and the video was finally posted:

Longtime readers may find this subject familiar, as I’ve written not one but two blog posts on these same two butterflies in the past.

A few other recent links:

• I’ve seen two recent blog posts on the beautiful fall-blooming wildflower Fringed Gentian, one from Julie Zickefoose and one from Jim McCormac. Why did I never run into these when I lived back east?
• There’s a partial solar eclipse tomorrow (Thursday)!
• Cool but eerie – listen as the birds in a forest in California fall silent over a period of several years.

Any other cool nature- or wildlife-related links I should add? Share in the comments!

This week some genuinely cold temperatures are (finally) arriving in Walla Walla, but before they did, we took a walk in the Fort Walla Walla Natural Area, a patch of woods in a park a few miles from our house. What caught my eye was all the berries ripening on the shrubs along the trail, which are excellent fall and winter food for the birds in the area as well as looking pretty. I didn’t have the forethought to bring a nice camera, so all the photos in the post were taken with Evan’s and my iPhones, but they turned out okay enough to show you what we were seeing.

Snowberry – not a highly-preferred food for birds, so these berries will persist long into the winter, but the birds will eat them eventually when they run out of things they like better.

Serviceberry (at least I’m pretty sure that’s what this one is) – see comments, it’s been suggested to me that this is actually Woody Nightshade (an Asian invader), and having looked at some photos I’m inclined to agree. I should probably learn what Serviceberry actually looks like!

Wild rose hips

Pokeweed (I think) – kind of an edgy, weedy species, but native. Again, see comments, it’s been suggested that this looks more like Virginia Creeper. I agree it looks very Virginia Creeper-y, but I’m confused because Virginia Creeper is (theoretically) not found in Washington State.

Tonight we’re under a freeze warning; we ripped out our tomato and pepper plants over the weekend and today will probably be it for the mums still blooming by the side of the house. But I like winter, too, so I’m not complaining.

Much.

Bye bye garden, see you next spring.

We got our first snow of the year yesterday! Sadly it’s not really enough to build forts or go snowshoeing. In the meantime, here are some recent wildlife and conservation tidbits from elsewhere on the internet, two by me and four courtesy of others.

By me:

• Creating a Wildlife-Friendly Yard With Native Plants, my first post as a regular contributor to Living Alongside Wildlife. (Please consider following this excellent website on Twitter or Facebook, or subscribing to new posts via email, which you can do on the homepage.)
• The Inaugural Legacy Awards: Honoring Three Inspiring Young Women, a post I wrote for the Children & Nature Network blog about an event I attended in Kennewick, WA last month. (I’m going to be helping run social media for their Natural Leaders program, so you can further support the stuff I do by following Natural Leaders on Twitter and Facebook as well.)

By other folks:

• Not sure how long this is continuing for, but the Central Puget Sound chapter of the Washington Native Plant Society is currently having a seed sale. If you live in the Northwest and are interested in adding native plants to your yard (and up for the challenge of germinating them yourself), maybe check it out.
• Pregnant Snake Prepares for Motherhood by Eating Toxic Toads, from Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
• Robins, Waxwings, and Honeysuckle, from Jim McCormac of Ohio Birds and Biodiversity.
• Red-tailed Hawk Eating Breakfast, from 10,000 Birds.

Anything else from around the internet lately on wildlife, conservation, or environmental education that should be included here? Share in the comments!

Recently, kind of on a whim, I bought four little packages of wildflower seeds from a mail-order sale that a chapter of the Washington Native Plant Society was having.

When it comes to plants, it doesn’t get much more native than this – these seeds were all collected in the Blue Mountains of eastern Washington. Here we have western columbine (Aquilegia formosa), shooting star (Dodecatheon pulchellum), glacier lily (Erythronium grandiflorum), and red baneberry (Actaea rubra).

I’ve never attempted to start native wildflowers from seed before, so I’m figuring this out as I go along. These are all species that require a period of “cold, moist stratification” before they’ll germinate, meaning in the wild the seeds would sit in the cold soil over the winter before sprouting in the spring. Because I’m a control freak, I opted to do my own cold stratification indoors, rather than just planting the seeds outside and letting nature take its course; I transferred them into little plastic bags with some moist sand and stuck them in the fridge.

In a couple months I’ll take them out and start the seeds in potting soil. (Well, except for the baneberry, which apparently requires two periods of cold stratification – I’ll need to take them out, keep them somewhere warm for a while, and then put them back in the fridge for a couple more months before I try to start the seeds.) Even in the best case scenario, it will be a couple years before any of the plants that grow from these seeds get to the point of blooming… so except this to be the first post of a many-part series.

I know there are a number of people still subscribed to this blog even though I no longer update it regularly, so I thought I’d let you know that there’s now an alternate way to keep up with my writing and whatnot: I’ve started an email newsletter that will go out roughly every three months, and if you’re interested you can sign up to receive it at tinyletter.com/rheisman. Cheers!

I just wanted to post a note for anyone stumbling across this site via the blog that, while the blog section is no longer being updated, the other pages are still being kept up-to-date and I am continuing to use this site as a home base for my freelance writing. So feel free to browse the blog archive, but also check the “Writing” page for a regularly-updated list of links to the pieces I’m publishing elsewhere. Thanks!