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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.


Whenever we have a cloudy day after a string of sunny and warm days, everything seems subdued, and not just the people. This morning was a bit cooler than it had been and although I found insects, they were slow moving and there was very little activity compared to Day 123. Tiny donut-shaped ant nests have started to appear on the paths in the arboretum and I found a few groupings of them. There’s been many plants showing insect damage, but until today I haven’t found the culprits – with the exception of the sawfly larvae that had nearly defoliated a gooseberry on Day 116. While I still can’t find whatever is eating the Indian Plums, I did find whats been eating the leaves of what I think are hazelnut trees. They were tiny, green larvae, you can see the photos above. I also found a bright red wasp, centipede and signs of leaf borers in the Fringecup leaves.

As I walked back through the arboretum I heard one angry crow, but it was in the center of a dense cluster of trees and I couldn’t see what it was protesting. I did see it pecking at branches and ripping bark of the tree. An Anna’s Hummingbird investigated as well.

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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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