“Morning walk with binoculars” is what I call my weekly trek from the Elisabeth Miller Library across the Union Bay Natural Area to the bus. I look for birds along the way. That pattern echoes the suggestion of David B. Williams’s book to spend some time noticing nature while walking in Seattle.

Wild in Seattle is a collection of the Street Smart Naturalist newsletters Williams writes weekly, each two or three pages long. Its three sections – “Geology,” “Fauna,” and “Flora and Habitat” – lay out various discoveries Williams has made patrolling the city on foot. He emphasizes that one need not be a professional scientist to enjoy these encounters.

In “The Giddiness of Time” he writes about the rock used to build the Exchange Building at Second Avenue and Marion Street. It is Morton Gneiss, which formed 3,524,000,000 years ago, the oldest rock most of us will ever see. He combines that information with description of the rock’s appearance: “[It] resembles what would happen if you took a series of photos while stirring together cans of pink and black paint.” The entry is typical of the content of most entries, description plus a little background information.

In “Tails of the City: Cattails,” Williams cites the cattails’ many uses by Indigenous people: stalks for weaving material and down for pillows, mattresses, and even for burial rituals. He lists several of the wetlands cattails call home that have been lost to development but names as a bright spot the restored wetland at the Center for Urban Horticulture I cross every week. It’s a great spot for birds. 

She has worked as an archivist for the Washington State Historical Society, a Public Services technician for the UW Libraries Special Collections, and is currently also working as Archives Assistant for the Museum of Flight. Before that, she worked in the nursery at Oxbow Farm & Conservation Center in Carnation, WA and at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY.

Carly works Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Stop by and say hello!

Micheal Moshier’s family donated his original artwork for LeRoy Davidson’s 2000 monograph Lewisias to the Miller Library, and we are so excited to feature these plant portraits in the library this month. In the words of donor Jeff Uebel:

My uncle, Micheal Moshier, was a talented, prolific landscape and plant artist and a skilled, dedicated landscape designer and craftsman. He traveled and worked all along the West Coast and Hawaii, but his home base was the Puget Sound, especially right here in and around Seattle’s Washington Park Arboretum. He is probably best known for his incredibly detailed pen, ink and graphite depictions of sun and cloud-drenched Cascade and Olympic peaks and waterfalls, rocky outcrops and islands in the Puget Sound, and placid scenes along Lake Washington. He was equally fascinated by and recorded the tiny components of these areas: mushrooms, flowers, leaves, kelp and stones.

He was particularly proud of his work with LeRoy Davidson to create the monograph Lewisias and asked that his illustrations for that work be kept together, to be shared and enjoyed by as many people as possible. We hope that you do enjoy them.

The exhibit is open during library hours.