The dogs and I have been exploring the 40-acre wood across the road almost every morning for the past couple of months. The narrow paths cut through the thick understory below second-growth Douglas fir and Western red cedar trees, interspersed with big leaf maples and alders. Head-high huckleberry, salal, and salmonberry crowd the trail, the ferns are thick underfoot, and we have to scramble up and over several deadfalls along the way. Where the brush thins out in heavy shade the forest floor is covered with moss, ferns, woodland wildflowers, and jumbles of fallen trees and branches, some rotting away as “nurse logs” where seedlings take root along their moldering forms.
We have seen scattered starflowers succeed the trilliums at the foot of the alders near the corner where we turn back toward home. We’ve met a family of winter wrens, the parents scolding us as their young took what seemed to me their first forays from the nest. One, a little fellow not three inches long and possessed of more down than feathers, landed in the scrub nearby. The bird and I looked at each other for a minute and then he took wing—and how he managed to fly at all with so few feathers still astounds me.
We have seen scattered starflowers succeed the trilliums at the foot of the alders near the corner where we turn back toward home. We’ve met a family of winter wrens, the parents scolding us as their young took what seemed to me their first forays from the nest. One, a little fellow not three inches long and possessed of more down than feathers, landed in the scrub nearby. The bird and I looked at each other for a minute and then he took wing—and how he managed to fly at all with so few feathers still astounds me.
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