Hey tweets, you know how oftentimes when habitat is restored, the
animals come back? It's almost as though they are waiting in the cosmic
wings somewhere for suitable conditions, and then they show up again.
Well, given the icy conditions yesterday morning, and for the past
several days, I think it's only a matter of time until we start seeing
mastodons strolling through the Fill. Think about it. Mastodons loved
the scrubby, brushy plants that the CUH staff and students have been so
assiduously replanting. The landscape is looking more and more like the
kind that existed soon after all the ice melted from around here. All
we needed was the temperature of the Ice Age, and we've certainly got
that. Ergo...

While Brett Wolfe was out braving the snow yesterday and seeing his
swan, I sat in my car only 200 yards away, running the heater. Debby
Shearwater always says, "If you snooze, you lose." I could add, "If you
sit, you miss it."

However, there were compensations, as there always are at the Fill. If
you miss one bird, you see another. The best bird of the day for me was
a MERLIN, powering along the lake edge and heading toward Laurelhurst.
The swallows went into a frenzy of warning calls and then disappeared.
They soon returned in vast columns of airborne vacuum cleaners, sucking
up insects invisible to us below. You'd think they use up more energy
flying than they get eating, but I guess bugs are more nutritious than
they look. The sun came out, as did a few intrepid souls wearing
shorts. College students - they think they're invincible and global
warming is real. Altogether, I saw 50 species yesterday, but I had to
work for them. - Connie, Seattle

constancesidles at gmail.com