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Street Smart Naturalist

David B. Williams

A free newsletter oriented toward building stronger connections to place through stories of human and natural history in the Pacific Northwest streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com

society & culture personal journals

All Episodes

7:15

Weather Marathoners

Street Smart Naturalist ·

2025/11/06

In the August 24, 1897, Hartford Courant, the editorial contained an infamous line: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Often attributed to Mark Twain, the true author was Charles Dudley Warner, editor, author, and co-collaborator with Twain on The Gilded Age.What was true over 100 years ago is still true today. Everybody talks about the weather. We all experience it. We all have an opinion on it. We all complain about it. (Sadly, few aspects of natural history

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5:52

Spider friends

Street Smart Naturalist ·

2025/10/30

Spiders rarely get much empathy, in real life or in fiction. Often depicted as scary, evil, repulsive, deadly, malevolent, and horrible, they seem for many, to personify, or arachnify, the worst aspects of the natural world. Consider Shelob, the notorious spider of Lord of the Rings. Tolkien wrote that she was “an evil thing in spider-form…and she served none but herself, drinking the blood of elves and men, bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow.” Now,

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6:30

Overlooked and Underloved

Street Smart Naturalist ·

2025/10/23

Probably many of you know of the overlooked little sibling, who loses out in attention to her or his elder. And, yet, that youngster certainly deserves to be noticed for all of their many assets. Such is the case of our local maples and the Vine maple, Acer circinatum, a beautiful shrub, which rarely gets the love of its sister-taxon bigleaf maple, Acer macrophyllum. (We have one other local, native species Acer glabrum, the Rocky Mountain maple.) Taller, bigger-leaved, and more abundant, bigleafs

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7:31

The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami

Street Smart Naturalist ·

2025/10/16

The contrast couldn’t be greater. One moment I am in the Iwate Tsunami Memorial Museum in Rikuzentakada, Japan, watching videos of The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in which towering waves wipe out town after town. I couldn’t help but feeling that the water was a living beast, malevolent and determined as it ripped through buildings, surged up streets, and wreaked unimaginable havoc, death, and destruction. The next moment, I am a five-minute walk from the Museum standing on a

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7:57

What the Dickens

Street Smart Naturalist ·

2025/09/25

For many years, I have been a fan of Charles Dickens’ novels. In case you didn’t know, he was quite the writer. His books are funny, atmospheric, and rich in detail, both personal and geographic. He also came up with some splendid names, including Mr. Pumblechook, Inspector Bucket, Sargeant Buzfuz, Uriah Heep, and Harold Skimpole. Skimpole, a scheming mooch, comes from one of my favorite books, Bleak House (published serially from 1852-1853), which details the epic case of Jarndyce and

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8:06

The Tides They are A-Changin'

Street Smart Naturalist ·

2025/09/18

Several years ago, Marjorie and I and Taylor (our pooch) decided to canoe the Duwamish River in Seattle. Our plan was to put in just above the sort of confluence with the Black River; I use sort of because what’s left of the Black River is the merest remnant of what was the former outlet river of Lake Washington. We would then float about 11 miles down to the mouth of the Duwamish at Elliott Bay. As experienced canoeists from Utah (Taylor included), we thought the trip would take a couple of hours,

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7:40

Dead Trees Still Tell No Lies

Street Smart Naturalist ·

2025/09/11

Recently, I had the good fortune to be interviewed by Bellamy Pailthorp, the environmental reporter at KNKX radio. We chatted about my Dead Trees Tell No Lies essay from my book Wild in Seattle. Because of this, I decided to repeat this essay, which originally made it into your mailboxes in October 2023. I’ve made a few updates in the story. Here’s a link to our conversation. And, at the bottom of this newsletter is a coincidental connection about berries (which I wrote about last week) and a Union

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7:57

A Bounty of Berries

Street Smart Naturalist ·

2025/09/04

This past weekend we hiked up to Marmot Pass. Called by one guide book writer the Champagne Walk of the Olympic Mountains, it is famed for its wildflowers. We were too late for the wildflowers but timed it perfectly for berries. We saw black, red, blue, pruinose, yellow, and orange ones; yummy, mealy, and disappointing varieties; and ground hugging, shrubby, and sky-reaching plants. It was truly a stunning display of fecundity and hope for future success for what is a berry but an investment in the

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7:19

From Tide Pools to the Stars and Back

Street Smart Naturalist ·

2025/08/28

Last week, I had the privilege of seeing one of the most famous boats to ply the Pacific Ocean: the Western Flyer. Built in Tacoma in 1937 for the sardine fishery in Monterey Bay, California, the 76-foot boat achieved its notoriety through Ed Ricketts’ and John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez. The book details the collecting trip they made in the summer of 1940. Best known as the model for “Doc” in Steinbeck’s novel, Cannery Row, and author of the legendary Between Pacific Tides,

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8:13

Lava. Lava. Lava!

Street Smart Naturalist ·

2025/08/21

On August 20, 1853, future Civil War general George McClellan camped along Wenas (or Wee_Nass, as he wrote it) Creek, about 15 miles northwest of Yakima. It was his 22nd night out as part of a multi-month exploration of the Cascade Range. His task: finding the best route for a train over the mountains. (No secret, he failed.) That day, he and his survey team had crossed Cowiche Creek and Naches (Nah_Chess) Creek and several low ridges before entering the Wenas Creek valley. The land was “extremely

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8:19

Mr. Bun in Seattle

Street Smart Naturalist ·

2025/08/14

For many years, I have referred to every rabbit I see as Mr. Bun. I have no idea why but do know that this year I have been seeing more Mr. Buns around my fair city and its surroundings. They are sprinting across roads, hopping through yards (ours included), gallivanting in parks, flitting in fields, and skittering into smeuses. They’re eating garden vegetables, getting squished by cars, and getting eaten by other urban residents of the furred and fowl kind. Curiously, no one has surveyed the

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7:52

Global Warming: A Screed

Street Smart Naturalist ·

2025/08/07

“We’re not doing that climate change, you know, crud, anymore.” Brooke Rollins, Secretary of Agriculture - 5/8/2025‘Do you believe in climate change?’ is not really a meaningful question, because climate change has existed as long as the Earth has existed. Vivek Ramaswamy, self-described conservative American nationalist - 9/19/2023“That’s why climate change is the perfect enemy. They get to control your life to deal with it, no matter what’s happening.” Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense -

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6:11

Purple Flowers of Hope

Street Smart Naturalist ·

2025/07/31

I went for a run the other day and nearly got thwacked to bits. Nothing terribly serious, mind you, but a good reminder of the exuberant abundance of one of the region’s, and, in fact, the northern hemisphere’s most prolific plants: fireweed (Chamaenerion angustifolium). They grow widely in our front yard, throughout the Cascades, circumboreally, and up to 16,000 feet in elevation in the Himalayas. Fireweed also thrives in disturbed habitat, such as adjacent to trails in lesser visited Seattle

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7:47

Follow the Red Brick Road

Street Smart Naturalist ·

2025/07/24

One of life’s simple pleasure is bumping along. I was able to do this the other day, on an unusual road, bumping over brick on my bike. About 200 yards long and located just off SR-522 in Bothell, near the notorious Wayne curve, the red road is the lone remaining section of the Bothell Boulevard. When it opened in 1914, the Seattle P-I described the boulevard’s “scenic beauty…[as] the equal of any in or near this city.” By 1934, though the brick had been replaced with asphalt, except for this short

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6:28

Lost Seal? No, Just Hungry.

Street Smart Naturalist ·

2025/07/17

Apparently not all pinnipeds read guide books. At least that’s my conclusion after seeing a harbor seal on Saturday on my weekly ride with my pal Scott on the Centennial Trail. The spotted, gray seal was almost 18 miles away from the nearest harbor, up the Stillaguamish River. As we usually do, we stopped on the old railroad bridge over the Stilly, near Arlington. Below, the water was clear and as low as we have seen it: 560 CFS compared to the maximum we have seen of more than 60,000 CFS. The

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5:47

A Naturalist at a Museum

Street Smart Naturalist ·

2025/07/10

As I have been regularly writing, nature is all around us. All one has to do is slow down and pay attention, and the natural world will show her beauty. During our trip to Boston last week, I had the pleasure of seeking out plants and animals and rocks in one of my favorite environments: museums. Whenever I visit one, I like to see how artists incorporate something that means so much to me—the natural world—into their art, whether as the subject or as the medium. In Boston, we spent about four hours

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6:37

Memory Lane

Street Smart Naturalist ·

2025/07/03

We recently spent some time in Boston, where Marjorie and I lived between 1996 and 1998. It was a trying time then. We had moved from Moab, Utah, a geological paradise, to a place where the sum total of my geological knowledge was Plymouth Rock. For the first many months I had no connections to the place, to the natural world that inspired and grounded me, as it had done in Utah. But then one day I was on the Harvard campus looking at Harvard Hall, built in 1766. At its base was a rock that

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6:34

Birders Gone Bad

Street Smart Naturalist ·

2025/06/26

What is it with birders and birding in fictional TV and movies? They seem to go out of their way to make poor observations and incorrect identifications. I know you might be shocked but there’s an infamous ornithological blunder in the 2000 remake of “Charlie’s Angels.” The angel played by Cameron Diaz ferrets out the evil villain’s lair by a bird she hears in a recording. Ms. Diaz claims the bird, supposedly a Pygmy Nuthatch, “only lives in one place—Carmel, California.” Tell that that to the

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4:39

Time and Tide Waits for No One

Street Smart Naturalist ·

2025/06/19

The narrow band between high and low tide is Puget Sound’s most protean ecosystem, where the rhythms of existence fluctuate with the twice-daily expansion and contraction of our inland sea. For thousands of years, those pulses of water dictated life for the Sound’s human inhabitants. Where people lived, how they traveled, and when they could find food all depended on knowing the tides and how they affected the movement and location of water, plants, and animals.Today, understanding the tidal cycle

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6:27

We All Live in a Watershed

Street Smart Naturalist ·

2025/06/12

Seeps. Springs. Rills. Brooks. Creeks. Streams. Rivers. A web of water tendrils entwines the landscape and provides habitat, transfers nutrients and sediments, creates travel corridors, and bestows beauty. Veins. Arteries. Neural Networks. Life blood. Life. What are rivers but breathing, living centers essential to the health of the environment for the more-than-human and human world we all inhabit.I was prompted to write this newsletter by reading Robert Macfarlane’s new book Is a River Alive? Not

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