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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.



This morning I took a solo adventure to Alki Beach and walked from the lighthouse south and I was lucky enough to unintentionally time my visit when it wasn’t high tide. It was typical Pacific Northwest spring weather on the beach, cool, wet and very windy. I wandered the beach for an hour and touched the sea anemones, found plenty of tiny, dead crabs and slid over the seaweed. Crows were all over the beach foraging and as I watched one, it flipped over rocks looking underneath. I followed suit and found under most rocks, and especially the big ones, dozens of small crabs. If I found a particularly suitable rock and flipped it, there would be a dozen crabs of different shapes and colors quickly scuttling for cover.

Later I watched a crow with a shell fly up about 10 feet into the air and drop it on the rocks below. It repeated this process five or six times before it broke open the shell and got the contents out.

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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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