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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.


As I’ve already learned with this 365 Nature project, whenever I set out to record something for that specific day, it never turns out as I planned. Originally, I had planned to go take sunny photos of our blooming Forsythia today and write about how it’s like our yard is always sunny. In reality when I finally went outside, the sun had slipped behind the clouds and an unexpected rainstorm had materialized. The other thing I’ve learned with this 365 Nature project is to just go with it – whatever it is. The Forsythia wasn’t bathed in a golden glow, but it was bathed in beautiful droplets of water. It was still a sunny beacon in our backyard, shiny and golden even though the sun had been kidnapped by the clouds, albeit temporarily. By the time I sat down to write, the sun had escaped and was shining on the yellow flowers once more.

The other thing I discovered once I got outside and started taking photos of the long branches of yellow flowers, were the petals of many, if not most, of the flowers were covered in tiny flies. Whether they were hiding from the short rainstorm or finding some nectar in there, I don’t know. It was a spectacle I have not noticed before and didn’t expect to see when I go out there. It just goes to show life is full of little surprises if you just go stick your nose into flowers in a rainstorm.

And really, a Forsythia is much more interesting with bugs in the flowers.

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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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