Nature Noticings

Summer is drawing to a close. We've had some delightful, unseasonably cool weather this week, and even rain, which is definitely making the world feel more like fall. The katsura trees in the neighborhood are just starting to turn gold and smell like burnt sugar. I've been seeing fewer swallows - I think they've started heading south. As we swing into autumn, we have fewer really good low tides, and as we move into winter the best low tides are in the middle of the night. I was happy, therefore, to get out this week at the full moon for the last really good low tide of the summer. I went to a new location for me, Seahurst Park in Burien on Puget Sound. I had read a blurb online somewhere saying that there could be nudibranchs, also known as sea slugs, in the eelgrass beds, but that was all I knew.  Seahurst has a broad beach, part sand and part cobble, with only a few rocks. I started wading around the edges of a bed of eelgrass and sea lettuce, and immediately spotted weir...

It appears to be the Time of the Parasitic Plants right now (cue ominous music!).  Recently I wrote about ghost pipe at Tiger Mountain . On a foggy morning a few days later we hiked up the Denny Creek Trail (in the Cascades east of Seattle) and had the good luck of encountering perhaps the rarest mycoheterotroph (a plant that parasitizes fungus). Gnome plant ( Hemitomes congestum ) barely pushes its cluster of adorable flowers above the ground. Sometimes the flower cluster is elevated a little on a thick, pillar-like stem. Like ghost pipe, gnome plant taps into fungal mycelium underground and steals nutrients, instead of photosynthesizing like an honest plant. Gnome plant does have the advantage of being pretty darn cute, though. Gnome Plant Thinking about parasitic plants led me down a bit of an internet rabbit hole about whether plants can ever parasitize animals (or people!). I can certainly imagine it: a tiny moss, perhaps, growing deep within an animal's fur, sending little r...

People think that it rains all the time in Seattle, but it's not true. Our summers can be hot and dry. So the tiny bit of rain earlier this week made many of us ecstatic - including, it seems, some of the plants, fungi and slime molds. We went for a hike on Tiger Mountain the other day, and in many places, the soil still seemed a little moist, and mushrooms had popped up here and there - far more than I expected to see in early August.  Amanita mushroom We also saw a beautiful pink pearl necklace of wolf's milk slime mold. Wolf's milk slime mold The coolest thing we saw by far, though were not mushrooms but the ghosts of the forest - ghost pipe or ghost plant ( Monotropa uniflora ). At first, we just found one lone flower. Ghost pipe Alert now, we kept looking and started seeing more and more clumps, which is how they usually grow. Ghost pipe is a plant, but without a bit of green. It has lost the ability to manufacture chlorophyll and so can't photosynthesize. Instead,...