Nature in my Neighborhood - Kivrin

For me, my neighborhood is the area surrounding the southern campus of WWU. Most of my time outside is spent either walking in the Sehome Hill Arboretum, or laying down listening to music in a hammock in Fairhaven College's Outback Farm. For this photo shoot, I decided to consider the Outback farm and the land immediately surrounding the Fairhaven Dorms where I live to be my neighborhood.

It's hard to define both "nature" and what it means for nature to be "healthy," but I chose to define "nature" as any plant, animal, or fungus I came across, and "healthy" as the density of unique species within the area. To me, life is nature and biodiversity is health. And while I have no scientific reasoning to back up this opinion, it is how I view the world.

Walking through south campus, I decided to count the number of unique plant and
animal species I saw, a task I promptly gave up upon looking at a handful of mush. I started on a specific hill next to the college dorms and was surprised that I could only immediately count two unique species: the Douglas Fir trees, and some sort of ivy that covered the ground. These two species made up the entirety of my view, and it didn't seem like there were any other plants that lived here. I quickly left this area after not finding any good photo material. I'll be back.

Reaching the Outback Farm, I walked along the little paths crossing over streams, counting plants as I walked. Looking at the plots of land where veggies were grown, I find it funny to see the originally planned out garden beds in disarray, the beds damaged as the wildlife leaked in. It got progressively more difficult to count the various species of the farm, requiring me to spend more time checking every square meter of land, trying to remember, "have I already counted this plant before?" Nearly all of the species counted consisted of plants with only the occasional bird adding to the tally. 

Nearing my 50th species, I crouch next to a nurse log. A chunk of rotting wood had been torn from the trunk and now lay freshly exposed. It may not be an exaggeration to say that within its mushy interior, hundreds of distinctly identifiable arthropods, slime molds, and fungi made its home. Logically, I've always known that decaying matter holds many different decomposers. But being here and intentionally distinguishing between all the organisms in front of me, I realized that my goal of counting species was going nowhere.

Giving up on the counting and finishing up the last photos of the area around me, I make my way back to my dorm. Reaching the same hill I started my counting, I take a closer look at the Douglas Fir and ivy around me. Walking up to a small hole in a Douglas Fir, I pear inside. I'm met with the sight of a spider sitting motionless inside a conical web, its legs wrapped
around an unrecognizable mass of bug and webbing. I then spend the next 5-8 minutes trying to get a single good shot of the spider on my fixed length lens (I never got one). But during this time, I rethink what it means for a place to have nature that is "healthy." No matter where I end up looking, there are hundreds of species of creatures that choose this place as their home. Even now, days later, in my day to day life in downtown Bellingham, inside buildings, and along highways, I end up finding small yet diverse critters in every crevice. Does this mean that Bellingham is healthy for nature? Who knows! My original definition has sort of fallen apart and so has this story.