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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.


We had a beautiful sunrise this morning in Seattle. These winter sunrises end very quickly, look down for a moment and it’ll be over. Today when I dropped my daughter off I came across a pair of Spotted Towhees right outside her ‘classroom’. It made me happy to see these birds, which can be secretive, foraging right alongside the kids playing in their forest grove.

I returned a little early for a short walk around the arboretum. A few feathers caught my eye and as I stopped to look I found many feathers scattered around the ground. Some bird met an untimely end, likely a meal for a Cooper’s Hawk. I’m guessing the black and white feathers, I didn’t see any other colors, belonged to a Dark-eyed Junco.

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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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