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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 dawned cold and foggy, but the sun burned off both before too long. After running some errands, we walked down to Pritchard Beach and found the level of Lake Washington had been raised even higher, the waves broke up high on the beach, leaving almost no sand. Luckily for us, there was a small area of sand to the south end of the beach and it was there I found some interesting tracks. Aside from people and dogs, there were a number of various sizes of three toed tracks, birds I’m guessing. I confess I’m a beginner when it comes to tracks and I can’t quite decide what to make of these. They seem to have three short toes forward, and it must have been fairly heavy because the tracks are relatively deep. But they also have a long mark behind them that I can’t quite understand. There were some other tracks that looked like herons, three long toes forward and one back. But these other ones stumped me. It’s nice to always have so much to learn about nature, even right in the city.

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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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