naturellis's Favorites

I haven't seen a brown creeper since the first time I went birding for a work project with friends. It brought up wonderful memories of a really special time. (The before times!)

I raced around looking for a camera and was very nearly late for work because I was had to take ID photos of it.

Found this bird stunned in the middle of the road. Let me pick them up and move them to a safe tree on the side. They were bleeding slightly from the head, but flew a few feet away. Hopefully they make a full recovery ❤️‍🩹

Hard to pinpoint whether this was a western tiger or Canadian tiger swallowtail because unfortunately it was pretty injured when I found them, missing significant parts of the lower wings and sporting a pretty injured left one. Hopefully someone with more expertise will spot identifying marks I couldn’t. I moved them from a more populated walkway to a bush where they will hopefully be left unbothered and can pass in a beautiful location. It’s always heart wrenching to find injured butterflies because I know they won’t recover. But I try to move them to a safe, flowered location and send them off with love.

This group of Manroots - Marah oregana, is one of my earlier, and greater, successes in what I have dubbed "guerrilla plantings" in the battle to re-cover the surface of the land with indigenous vegetation, and help the spread of locally rarer native species. The plant featured in the first 3 photos is self seeded, so fits the iNaturalist definition of "wild", but it, and a few siblings, came from the mother plant in the rear of the 4th photo, and feaured in the 5th, and 6th photos that I planted. A bank nominally "owns" the land with a juniper hedge of maybe 14' X 120' between the sidewalk and a parking lot.

Without asking the bank, about 20 years ago I planted a chunk of Manroot root / tuber that I dug up from a plant somewhere in my King-Pierce-Thurston County area, to help the spread in Seattle of this species that had become relatively rare in the metropolitan area. This, and other plantings I have done, largely along my local bike routes, without asking nominal land "owners", are what I call "guerilla plantings".

The Manroot has done great ever since, growing over the juniper hedge, covering, and killing more, and more of it, with ever more help from its offspring! This has been in spite of occasional setbacks such as when someone "cleaned" off much of the late season growth of the Manroot over the juniper hedge, leaving the tuber below without a great setback. The Manroot family now covers more than half of the juniper hedge! The Manroot also largely grows over the Himalayan Blackberries that also started covering the juniper hedge since I planted the mother Manroot!

Manroot may be our Puget Trough perrenial herb that can put out the greatest mass of herbage each year from its enormous "man"-like tuber, with arms and legs as thick as a man's, only to die back to that tuber at the end of the growing season. The vines can grow 40' out from a mature tuber each year. Calystegia sylvatica - Giant Morning-glory might send out longer vines from their roots each year, but not more massive herbage.