Its always important to use your favorite nature spot for a photoshoot as well:)
Today was my last day visiting my spot, and it made me sad, but I felt like I had accomplished something. I really made an effort every week to visit my spot as well as Ravena Park. I sat near my favorite spot because my spot has become so wet that it is just filled with mud. I feel some regret picking a location that so many people travel to close. I think that has taken away my ability to see birds especially. Today when I was being one with nature I saw a Pacific Wren, and I watched it for multiple minutes, it soared through the air and dodged branches while swooping at a fast pace around trees and branches. It was as if it was dancing to a very fast melody and following the movements through the forest. It was hard to keep up with, it was as if my new friend was trying to escape a unseen predator. Its backside from a different also appeared to look like a stick coming from a branch, it was vertical and stiff.
Organism
Leaves are levered up high
dangling in the motion of the winds choices
flying like kites in the sky
while the beetle
crawls as if its climbing over mountains
at a speed as if its being followed
it attempts to blend in
as it scurries
it becomes a blur into the camouflage of leafs itself
nature you can and will never be replaced
Where are we going
will we ever know
but where can we always return
who will always be our rock to stand on
who can always find a way to protect us from the strong wind
what will protect us from the rain,
what will bring happiness to us on bad days
nature,
nature will,
this world is a beautiful place.
we should give what mother earth gives us.
Life.
This green prickly organism seems to be slowly making its way around this entire branch and is slowly progressing up this large wood father of the forest. It seems as if it is feeding of the organism it is living on. It seems uneasy in which way it wants to grow and where it wants to go, why does it make such shape and form of confusing. what is it attacking and withholding from its partner in nature.
Part 2: Final reflection (to be finished at your site, or at home):
1) How has your perception of your observation site changed through the quarter? I have live in Washington my entire life. I grew up going on hikes and being outside and have always enjoyed the outdoor. I never really wondered what the names of plants, birds or fungi were. Of course I had a environmentalists as a father and he always named off all the plants and birds to me wherever we went. So I grew up aware of what was around me but in a sense that I had seen it before not that I knew anything else about it. I have learned a lot about what plants, birds, and fungus I am surrounded by. I think that this knowledge has really increased my awareness. Especially on campus I find myself looking and listening for birds. I never would have done that before, I would have heard them but I never would have gone looking for them! So it has really changed my appreciation of how different and diverse species can be and are in this region.
2) How has your sense of the Puget Sound Region changed through the quarter? To be honest being from Spokane I did not know this area very well. I was even unsure of the exact dynamic shape of the Puget Sound. I had been to the Olympics and gone hiking but I had no idea how diverse and different this area was, and how many different niches there were. For example the rain forest in the Olympic Mountains, I knew it rained a lot over there but I had no idea it was enough to be a considered a rainforest. I also had no idea how little rain Seattle received for being called the rainy city. I also found it very interesting to learn about the effects of the glaciation, and how it created this area. I had never even considered the possibility that a glacier created the drumlins that really form Seatle.
3) What does it mean to intimately know a natural place? (Think about this question in terms of the process and the outcome. Also think about it in terms of scale—you have done close observation of one site, as well as developed broader appreciation on field trips around the Puget Sound). I think it creates a broad sense of curiosity to learn more about the region and area one lives in. It has made me more curious about this area as well as when I travel what those regions have to offer. Learning about a natural space on a intimate level has given me a change to experience the change of seasons and how to listen and watch closely. I have become much more aware of my surroundings and have started appreciating nature in a way I never thought I would. I think having a basis of knowledge on different areas of Natural History has created this appreciation. I was able to learn about multiple different aspects of nature and it has enhanced my awareness.
