The Daily Bucket is a place to catch your casual observations of the natural world and turn them into a valuable resource. Whether it's the first flowers of spring or that odd bug in your basement, don't be afraid to toss your thoughts into the bucket. Check here for a more complete description
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Seattle:
We had a couple of days of strong winds this week, along with incessant and sometimes heavy recent rainfall. Combine high winds with water saturated soil on steep hillsides and you have prime conditions for trees just falling over. I'm not that brave, and ventured out after the winds had died down. My thought was to catalog the recent changes in ground hugging plants. Instead, I got happily distracted looking at all of the stuff that had blown down onto the trails. The forest canopy is too high for me to see in detail but the wind brought a bit of it down to my level.
The first thing I noticed was the fragrance: spicy, sweet, resinous. The sap is up in the Black Cottonwoods (Populus trihocarpa) and their discarded leaf bracts are everywhere. They leave perfumed sap all over your hands when you touch them, stick to your shoes, your clothes and your dog. Those of us who walk in the forest say that spring arrives when the parrots return and the fragrance of cottonwood fills the air.
Much of the forest is composed of conifers. At eye level their low branches still appear dormant, but many of the fallen Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) debris was graced with immature flower buds. These will ripen and begin to shed pollen over the next week or so. Last year's fir cones were scattered everywhere.
Along with last season's fir cones were loads of Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata) and Western Hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla) cones. Both species also lost branches, but I found no flower buds on either.
The deciduous trees are still pretty barren looking, but if you squint up at them you can see delicate color - incipient leaf buds and the year's first flowers. Red Alder (Alnus rubra) is particularly handsome right now, with its flower tassels hanging from the high branches.These start out red and gradually change to yellow as they elongate and send out pollen. The wind scattered them over the ground.
Alder flowers and a stinging nettle (Urtica dioica).
A detail of the alder flowers, above.
Big-leaf Maple (Acer macrophyllum) flowers are just beginning to emerge, a lusty chartreuse against grey sky. A few dropped to earth during the storms.
There is one broadleaf evergreen in the forest, Pacific Madrone (Arbutus menziesii). These, too are sending out flowers.
This was a terrible winter for the Madronas. We've been fortunate to have a grove of healthy mature trees growing on the western slope of the forest. Four of these trees came down this year, two during windstorms and two for no apparent reason. The latter two may have succumbed to over-saturated soil and the loss of root support from their fallen neighbors. They simply toppled and now lie with their root systems vertical in the air.
Toppled Madrona trees. (Picture taken the day after they had fallen, Dec 21, 2010.) The root system on the near tree is about 12' high.
One more picture, just because. Note the tiny spider on the underside of the nettle leaf.
Detail from the first picture, above.
What's happening in your place?