Nature in my Neighborhood--Emma
I live in the Sehome neighborhood, across Sehome Hill from WWU. It’s a quaint place, with many older homes and flourishing nature. It’s right on the arboretum’s border, and much of the neighborhood slopes up into the hill. It’s a great place to enjoy a morning stroll, listening to the chittering of songbirds in the early hours, see the dew glistening off the colorful mix of native and non-native flora in the many backyard gardens, or catch a big woodpecker in transit around the edges of the arb.
I often like to walk through the neighborhood, going up into the arb and to the tower. It’s a peaceful way to start the day, moving between the worlds of forest and city and listening to the world around me. I try to think about the birds and the other animals and the native trees and plant life that I see in my target language, Lushootseed (the language of Puget Sound). Knowing their names often gives some insight into their behaviour or appearance. Robin, for example, is sk̓ʷəqiq, called that for the way it sometimes tilts its head up as it sings (k̓ʷəq is to lie on one’s back). I observed this today as I photographed them hopping along the branches of a hawthorn (?), eating up the berries eagerly as they conversed. The backyard or the local neighborhood is a great way to familiarize yourself with local native wildlife, and it flourishes here despite the development of homes.
There is, of course, a lot of non-native flora in the neighborhood. Mostly, they are relegated to gardens or along the roadside. There are many himalayan blackberry bushes growing alongside the roads and alleys, and while they make a great spot for collecting berries in the summer, they often are growing all over the place, choking out native shrubs and plants like the trailing blackberry sometimes found below them. There is still an abundance of native plants and trees scattered among the houses and along the roads, and probably make up the majority of trees in the neighborhood. This is fairly consistent with the other places I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest, and I appreciate being able to see our conifers and deciduous trees thriving in the neighborhood.
As you move closer to the arb, there is almost an invisible wall between the forest and the homes. The trees in the arboretum tower over most of the neighborhood trees, and the wildlife is different too. Songbirds are easily spotted as they fly over houses and between trees, and things like squirrels are easily visible as they dash over fences and scamper up telephone poles. Compared to the manicured lawns just across the street, the trails of the arb are thick with ferns and underbrush for the animals to hide under. For me too, the arboretum can be a place of refuge, a place where the distance between urban and nature becomes even more apparent. I’m really lucky to live in a place where there are both options just a short jaunt away from each other, and the edges of the neighborhood are where the two begin to blend.
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