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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.

June is also 30 Days Wild and I’m participating again this year.


Today I tried to find our front walkway that has slowly been getting buried under the overflowing flower beds of prickly squash vines and borage. While outside trimming and weeding I heard crows cawing and gathering and I went around our tree to get a view of what they were upset about. I saw a Bald Eagle in the lead, flying quickly north with a band of crows and an Osprey tailing after it. The Osprey gained on the eagle and dove at it while the crows keeping up the chase. Unfortunately they all flew out of sight before I could watch more, and at first I suspected the Bald Eagle had made an attempt on the Osprey’s nest. I know they have a nest very close to our house and the Bald Eagle was flying directly away from that direction, towards it’s own nest location to the north.

However, when I looked at the photos, the bird that I thought was an Osprey really baffled me. From a distance it looked very much like an Osprey, but when I zoomed in on my photo, the head looks all white. Osprey have a brown band across their eyes and even fledglings have some amount of brown. It could be that it was a fledgling Osprey that didn’t have much brown yet, but I’d be surprised if a fledgling Osprey would and could pursue an adult Bald Eagle. Curious.

There’s so much going on in our front flower meadow now and there are beetles and bees and flies and spiders all over the place.

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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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