Naturalist’s Notebook: The Year in Unexpected Encounters

There is this formulation I like about the advantage of shopping for books in a real-life bookstore over ordering online. You might be able to get anything you’re looking for online, but only in a bookstore, where you have to comb through the shelves, will you find the thing you didn’t know you needed.

As I think back upon the adventures I have had as a naturalist on the peninsula this year, in the hope of writing some kind of a commentary on the winds that stirred our corner of the world over the last 12 months, or an annotation of the salient points, the forces behind the storms and outbreaks and blooms and fruitings, my journals and photos take me instead back to increasingly specific encounters, moments isolated because they were unexpected. What I want to share here are little natural wonders that do not have enough surrounding story to merit a full article, but in aggregate form, as much of the year’s color as any of the underwater or deep-forest expeditions I launched.

But first, I have to mention a return that needs to be memorialized, though I was not lucky enough to catch it in person. On Sept. 19, members of the J Pod of Southern Resident Orcas swam south through the Narrows for the first time in about 50 years. Not only that, but they also turned west through Hale Passage, came into Carr Inlet, and went as far north as Raft Island.

The last time this family group of orcas is known to have been in our waters was during the capture era of the late 1960s. The original Shamu, a member of J Pod, was netted in Henderson Bay in 1965, while her mother died from a harpoon wound. Hugo, an orca that lived with the infamous Lolita at the Miami Seaquarium until his premature death in 1980, was captured as a 3-year-old in Vaughn Bay in 1968. That these orcas, who teach their young through a strong matriarchal culture, have returned to the waters where their parents and grandparents had such traumatic experiences is a thing worth acknowledging.

Soon after I wrote my series on eelgrass meadows, I was at a beach near Glen Cove to investigate how the nonnative dwarf eelgrass might be interacting with our native eelgrass. It was not the most pleasant day, and I had to grit my teeth a few times before I could plunge my masked face into the water. 

There, inches from my face, barely moving like all the eelgrass blades around it, was a bay pipefish. Its tiny tubular snout pointed up at me. At the end of its thin green body, its translucent circle of a tail vibrated. Up and down its sides were white rectangles, an interesting pattern that made me realize, wow, this thing was fat for a pipefish. Gravid? If so, it would be a male, its pouch stuffed with eggs left there for safekeeping by the female. Pipefish, after all, are in the seahorse family.

Plunging my face in and being greeted at close range by a critter I didn’t know I needed to see — it seems to be a theme for the year. Or maybe it’s just what happens when you live your place and the place still has a wild side. (The writer Gabrielle Zevin said a place isn’t a place until it has a bookstore.)

The bookshelves of our peninsula sag with strange and cryptic beings, like the Johnson’s jumping spider I happened upon when I moved a stack of firewood. In the crack it had chosen for its home, it had stuffed a line of egg chambers made entirely from flower petals, and only pink and purple petals, creating a shockingly bright tube of color. Or like the jackknife clam I got to watch jet-propel itself through the water and pull itself under the sand with a freakishly prehensile foot.

Or, while playing a mermaid house game with my 3-year-old daughter, like the tiny twig that fell from my hair onto the carpet. The twig moved. Together, my daughter and I took a closer look and found a caterpillar. We looked it up and were walking on air when we read its common name: the unicorn caterpillar moth.

I think of the red-legged frogs that were all over the back corner of a pasture at Kaukiki Farm during the Key Peninsula Farm Tour, treating those who came on my nature walks to childlike romps as the frogs hopped about. I think of the osprey nests, one on each gantry of the Herron Island ferry docks, and how the islanders know the precise timing of their arrival and departure each year.

I think of coming back down a forest trail at dusk, bracketed on both sides by tall brush, and suddenly having bats flashing past at head height, and the trust I had to muster in them, that they knew the terrain and moment better than I and would not hit me if I kept walking.

I think of the observations sent to me by friends. Ants farming aphids on elderberry near Dutcher Creek. A mountain quail nest near Lake Holiday, expanding my mental map of where the secretive buggers live on the peninsula. A banana slug rappelling from a porch roof using its own slime. (Some slug species even mate this way. It’s called aerial copulation.) Two stalks of candystripe, which I rushed over to my friend’s driveway to see in person, so that it could join gnome plant and groundcone, and several others on the list of parasitic plants I’ve seen on the Key Peninsula.

I think of getting to spend a day with one of my naturalist heroes in late summer, when the nodding beggarticks at the edges of our once-flooded pasture finally bloom. His endless curiosity kept his eyes roving even as our main quarry, dragonflies, remained hidden, and he was amazed at this cheery yellow flower with devilish seeds. In his six decades of exploring every inch of Washington, he could not recall ever having seen it. I told him this was the best year for it I’d yet seen in our pasture.

It’s been a memorable year for many things, not least of which are the things unexpected. Such encounters are the breadcrumbs that keep me moving, questioning, and speculating.