SEATTLE — There's something you should know if you're lucky enough to take walk in the woods with Seattle naturalist Kelly Brenner: You won't get anywhere.
"I usually go hiking alone because I'm really slow," Brenner said. "I never get to the destination because there's so much to see along the way."
But you'll see more than you've ever seen before.
"It can take me an hour to go a mile because I stopped look all the lichens and plants and bugs and everything. I can spend an hour on a log," Brenner said.
Armed with a flashlight, and abundant curiosity, she finds living things where where most folks would only register a rotting log.
"There's one," Brenner sad, shining a light on a one-millimeter wide grey orb nestled in a crack on the aforementioned rotting log. "Here is a slime mold. This isn't one of the most glamorous ones, this is called wolf's milk slime mold."
She doesn't go into nature seeking scenery:
"I think it's what Instagram has done to us. We're gonna get the view and the selfie and then ignore all the rest."
But she'll stop dead to save a fallen branch - and the life it supports - from getting trampled on the trail. She appreciates imperfections. Whole alder leaves are just pretty. But ones that are riddled with holes? They inspire curiosity: "What's been eating that?"
The Douglas fir snag that most folks walk right by? She sees entire ecosystems in it.
"That woodpecker that made a hole, now there's a whole spider home in it," Brenner said, pointing out a hole shrouded in spider-web fuzz high up on the dead tree.
"E.O. Wilson once said that you could spend a lifetime on a voyage around a single tree trunk," Brenner said.
To cultivate that kind of curiosity in all of us, Brenner has written and illustrated The Naturalist at Home, a guidebook full of nature projects for grownups, ranging from preserving spiderwebs, to finding all of the critters living in a patch of moss.
"Moss is really cool. In this little tiny clump will probably be tardigrades, rotifers, nematodes, springtails and mites. All kinds of cool things," Brenner said.
And there's one thing she hopes her book inspires people to do:
"To slow down and notice a small things and change your perspective and realize how cool it all is," Brenner said.
Go at a naturalist's pace and you'll see - and hear - nature wherever you are. Even at Seattle's Seward Park, where we heard a series of yips and barks in the distance that didn't sound at all like a dog.
"That is definitely a coyote," Brenner smiled as the howls proved her point.
"You don't have to go to the National Park to be amazed by what's going on," Brenner said. "Right here in the middle of the city, there are so many questions and so much wonder. It's so fascinating. You can't be bored. You can't be bored when you're out here in nature."
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