Now is our wintering time, when the trees in their gloaming drip and glisten with wet. Birds puff their feathers, snugging into their warmth.
At Seward Park, the city’s oldest known Douglas fir is resplendent with an eagle’s nest, awaiting next year’s new life. Right now, the tree is resting, awaiting a new surge of spring light, and the nest is quiet.
This is the time of our winter dreaming, our tread soft in the deep duff of the trails. Here, there is no dead of winter. The dogs strut in their raincoats, the kids puddle stomp, and the feeders at Seward Park Audubon Center are zipping and zooming with Anna’s hummingbirds.
The overwintering waterfowl, stately and serene, cruise Lake Washington. Buffleheads, common goldeneye, American wigeon and grebes dip deep for fishy fare, while mallards work the woodland trail by the lake for snacks. Canada geese stroll the meadows; who could blame them, with all that tasty green grass?
The deeper the walk into the trails, the bigger the trees. Seward Park is home to trees never cut, some of the biggest and oldest in the city, notes Ed Dominguez, naturalist at the center.
The big trees abide in deep forest time, many in their second century and far beyond, their many winters unspooling year by year. Their peace has a way of quieting busy humans, who, looking up to their majesty, reflect and slow down.
With the turn of the winter solstice, daylight at first imperceptibly begins to lengthen for us here in the Northern Hemisphere’s higher latitudes, minute by precious minute.
Right now, in this time ahead until spring, is the time to notice how animals winter.
There are really just three simple strategies, Dominguez notes: Leave, tough it out and go to sleep.
The Swainson’s thrush, the rufous hummingbird and so many more — they have flown south, so we won’t see or hear them again until spring.
So all the sweeter is the soft conversation of the kinglets in the winter boughs, the chickadees’ cheerful call, song sparrows belting it out and the flashing blue strut of the Steller’s jay.
Now is also the time to behold the remarkable coping capacity of the tiny Anna’s hummingbird. To get through our cold snaps, they go into torpor, dropping their resting heartbeat to a near-zombie state. They puff up their bejeweled feathers, trapping air for insulation, and wait out our long, cold winter nights. They can survive even subfreezing temperatures.
And while we think of spring and summer as our time of abundance, winter spreads its own table. Winter rains bring on the Lilliputian wonder of lichen, plumped up with rain, the fruiting mosses studded with seeds raised on delicate stems and mushrooms resplendent in the forest.
The combination of cold and moisture stimulates the fungus in forest soils to fruit, raising mushrooms of many varieties. Look closely in the leaf litter and needle cast to see a wonderland of elfin saddles, the shaggy parasol and coral and button mushrooms, so aptly and fancifully named.
Ancient stories
And the owls are busy in our velvety, chill dark hours. Their breeding time is in January and February, and it won’t be long until owlets arrive.
Owl Prowls led by Seward Park Audubon Center are a featured winter delight to appreciate all that is stirring in the forest, from voles to the great horned owl, swooping on silent wings. “We will hear as many as three species and see their silhouettes against the night sky,” Dominguez said.
Here is a place, too, for contemplation of some of the park’s longest stories, told for instance in the hunk of granite by a trail, sitting there since the glacial ice dropped it thousands of years ago. Now festooned with licorice fern and moss and pixie cup lichen, it offers quiet counsel for cluttered human minds.
“As humans beings, we are so ephemeral on this planet,” Dominguez said. Here is a place to consider time on nature’s cadence. “We have trees that have been here 500 years,” Dominguez said, “and a rock here for more than 10,000.”
There are signatures of just last season too, in the snowberries, holding the last of their gleaming white fruits, aglow in the low light of a late-winter afternoon. Overlooked in spring and summer because of their lower sugar content, the birds come to them now for winter sustenance.
The winter forest is a feast for our senses, too, with the hush punctuated by the gentle percussion of rain, and cedars wearing bright spangles of raindrops at the tips of their branches.
The park is special in winter particularly for its gift of the solace of stillness. “It’s a place where you can be alone, even on the busiest paths,” said Joseph Manson, director of the Seward Park Audubon Center.
“You can listen to birds, get away from it all,” Manson added. “The birds, the quiet — it’s an amazing place, and a little bit different in winter.”
