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In 2016 I’m doing a 365 Nature project. Each day of the year I will post something here about nature. It may be any format, a photo, video, audio, sketch or entry from my nature journal. It could be a written piece. Each day I will connect to nature in some way and share it here by the end of that day. You can keep up-to-date by subscribing to the RSS feed or be notified by email. See all the 365 Nature posts.


Today is International Dawn Chorus Day and I woke up around five am to listen to the birds from our house. Right away I heard the American Robins singing, perhaps the same individuals nesting in our front yard. It wasn’t long before I heard a loud song of the Bewick’s Wren, almost certainly the individual nesting in our backyard. Later I heard the whistle of a Black-capped Chickadee and the caw of a passing Crow.

Last year I wrote a post about the Dawn Chorus with information about why they sing this time of the year and who sings. They don’t all sing at the same time. Read more about the Metropolitan Dawn Chorus.

Yesterday afternoon I caught sight of a tiny orange butterfly and by some miracle it not only landed, but let me get close enough to get a photo with my camera. After consulting The Butterflies of Cascadia book by Robert Michael Pyle and confirmation on Twitter, I found it was a Brown Elfin butterfly. Today I saw another one, or perhaps the same one, in our front yard again. Hopefully they’ll be around until I get a photo with my telephoto lens.

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Kelly Brenner

Kelly Brenner

Kelly Brenner is a naturalist, writer and artist based in Seattle. She is the author of THE NATURALIST AT HOME: Projects for Discovering the Hidden World Around Us and NATURE OBSCURA: A City’s Hidden Natural World from Mountaineers Books, a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards and Pacific Northwest Book Awards. She writes articles about natural history and has bylines in Crosscut, Popular Science, National Wildlife Magazine and others. On the side she writes fiction.

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