Marsh Meander at Magnuson, May 2012

Magnuson Park in Seattle was once a Navy airfield. Today, it's the site of a 350-acre park complete with lakefront beaches, grassy hills, sports fields, and many old buildings currently being used as offices or awaiting reconstruction for new purposes. Thankfully, some areas that were once concrete have been recreated as wild lands, including a beautiful marsh that weaves through areas of brush and woodland.

It's hard to believe that the artificial playing-field surface east of it functions as a forest floor, allowing water to percolate gently down to the marsh, but it does. The piping of the Pacific chorus frogs who've made the marsh their home is a testament to that.

We went for a walk through the marsh on a sunny afternoon recently, on one of the first spring days that even hinted that you could take off your jacket and sling it over your shoulder halfway through the hike. But the birds have been reveling in spring for weeks despite the gray skies, as evidenced by all the busy bug-gathering, stick-collecting, and singing going on.

Male gadwall swimming among reeds

Male flicker hunting for ants and other insects in the grass

Male redwing blackbird keeps an eye on his territory

I'm pretty sure this is a savannah sparrow, based on markings and song, plus they're on record as living here. This would be a first sighting for me...yay!

This crow harassed a red-tailed hawk mercilessly, but interestingly nobody came to his assistance...usually crows pour in to mob a predator. Crows are highly intelligent, so we wondered if perhaps all the other crows were thinking, "Oh, that's just our stupid neighbor yelling his head off about harmless old Harry the Hawk, who never goes after anything but rabbits and voles. Just ignore him." The hawk was certainly unimpressed by his heckler.

Turtle (B)log

The ever-joyful Labrador and I went for a walk around Green Lake yesterday with a friend, and it was nice to see some signs of spring in what is proving to be the coldest April on record in Seattle. (It's officially cold, not just impatient-warm-weather-waiters cold, according to meteorologist Cliff Mass; everything is blooming late, the temperature rarely nudges above 55 degrees.)

Football-shaped coots grazed on the lawn, and a pair of hooded mergansers floated near the lake's shore. Mallards were everywhere, followed by their fluffy, tennis-ball-sized toddlers. The red-winged blackbird males staked claims to the cattail beds, flashing their crimson epaulettes and shouting.

All this activity was for the birds, in the minds of the turtles resting on logs along the west side of the lake. As soon as a cup or two of sunshine spills on our fair city, they're stacked like plates on the logs, furiously basking.

From the shore I couldn't see what kind of turtles they were--I'd always assumed they were a native species--but when I took some pictures and blew them up, I could see they were red-eared sliders, the same species that once was sold for pennies to kids who kept them in tiny plastic lagoons decorated with a pathetic plastic palm tree. The poor creatures always died within weeks of purchase. 

These turtles were clearly dumped into the lake by owners who no longer wanted the responsibility of caring for them, but fortunately their existence in this lake is not, so far as I've heard, considered a problem. (Green Lake is a natural lake, but it's been heavily modified by humans, including being cut off long ago from a creek that once drained it.) There aren't that many of them, and the lake is quite large, and they don't seem to be gobbling up endangered species or posing any of the problems that the poor pet rabbits abandoned in the nearby woods did.

We watched the turtles for a bit (not that they ever moved) and pondered the odd fact that two out of every five humans who happen upon the turtles feel obliged to say, "Mmm, soup!" and grin around at everybody as though this is a tremendously clever and original remark to make.

The dog didn't consider the turtles worth watching at all. Waterfowl were likewise dismissed, despite the fact that she's a retriever. The only wildlife worth watching at Green Lake in her eyes are the squirrels.