Over the last two weeks I’ve encountered a couple of unusual birds visiting Washington Park Arboretum. Last week as the kids from my daughter’s outdoor forest preschool played in the meadow after school, we noticed some colorful birds flying around in the ash trees. They were Western Tanagers, bright red and yellow birds which are hard to miss. I rarely see them in Seattle and it was lucky they were flying around on a sunny day and I had my camera to take some photos. They never sat perched long, constantly flying away from the tree they were in…

For Mother’s Day I chose to visit Alki Beach at low tide, one of my favorite activities in Seattle. It was busy on the beach and after noticing the many red hats walking around I realized it was one of the Seattle Aquarium’s Beach Naturalist days. The red capped people were volunteers there at low tide to educate visitors about the life on our shorelines. I started wandering and first watched a Great Blue Heron successfully fishing in the outgoing water. My next encounters were with chitons, limpets and sea anemones. Like I saw the…

Over the last two weeks, transient – also known as Bigg’s – Orcas have been seen nearly every day in Puget Sound. For a week they were seen in the south part of Puget Sound, near Olympia and Tacoma but during the last week they were observed regularly around Edmonds and Mukilteo, just north of Seattle. Mid-week I went to Edmonds hoping to catch sight of the Orcas because they had been observed from the ferry between Clinton and Mukilteo in the morning. By the time I arrived there were no sightings of the Orcas, but I did meet…

In the Pacific Northwest we have several dedicated animal mothers. This Mother’s Day, let’s celebrate our wild neighbors. 

Read my article on ParentMap: 5 Northwest Animal Moms Who Can Teach Us About Parenting

I’m thrilled that KCTS also picked up this article celebrating our animal mothers.

In the middle of May I was fortunate enough to sail aboard the Orion, a beautiful sailboat which tours the San Juan Islands in Washington. The tour was offered by the North Cascades Institute as part of their field excursions program. I had never been on a sailboat before so it was a new experience to look forward to and although the weather forecast had the possibility of rain, the entire weekend ended up being sunny and beautiful with calm waters. 

Setting Sail

We left Anacortes, located on Fidalgo Island…

In the afternoon of our second and last full day in San Diego, after we visited Tecolote Canyon we headed towards the Pacific Ocean. I wanted to find tide pools to visit at low tide and read that Cabrillo National Monument had some pretty nice marine fauna. Unfortunately, what I didn’t realize was that it was a free parks day and by afternoon the place was absolutely packed. There was no parking near the tide pools and when we finally arrived, after low tide had already peaked, there were so many people that navigating the rocky…