I am an avid hiker now, but I did not come from a family of nature lovers. When I was a teenager, trees were split into two groups — regular trees or Christmas trees — birds were designated as “wild” or “can go on my sandwich”, and though I could tell an ant from a spider, I only ever looked as close as I needed to to squish it or stay out of its way.
But when I joined a hiking club during high school, I fell in love with trekking through the forests and everything inside it.
For the next fifty years I traipsed and paddled all over the woodlands of New York and New England, learning to identify the trees, flowers, birds, insects, and even learned some geology. Old hiking friends still send me pictures of strange animals and odd rock formations and ask, “What’s this?”
It was both frustrating and exciting to start over again here in hikers’ wonderland. Some trees, hemlock and cedar and larch, for example, look enough like their eastern counterparts that I learned their names right away. The well-named Big Leaf Maple was easy to learn, and the less well-named Vine Maple (there are no vines) was pretty easy, too.
Seeing the differences between Douglas Firs and the other firs was a little harder, but I’ve come to be able to recognize most of them.
One of the trees that has become one of my favorites here in the PNW, besides the grand forest giants (we don’t have anything similar to them back east), is the diminutive Western Yew. You can recognize it by its distinctive peeling gray bark that reveals a purplish brown layer below.
It is an understory tree, adapted to growing in the deep shade of the Cascade forests. They grow slowly and don’t get tall easily. The largest ones I have seen along the Skookum Flats trail and the Snoquera Falls trails (both right past Greenwater) have been about 20 feet tall, with trunk diameters of about 8 inches. Various guidebooks and Wikipedia say that the trees can grow more than twice that size.
Another tree that interests me is the Yew, which are unique among the needle-leaved trees in that they do not have woody cones. Instead, their seeds are carried by red, fleshy berries. (Technically, they aren’t berries, but this isn’t supposed to be a botany course.)
As a child, I learned — as seemingly all children did — that the berries were poisonous. Surprisingly, I recently discovered a study published in the National Library of Medicine that states only 4 people out of more than 11,000 who were exposed to yew toxic experienced life threatening effects, and no adverse effects were reported by 92.5% of the people who were exposed.
Still, I’m going to keep thinking of the berries as poisonous.
Because of the slow growth of these trees, the annual growth rings are close together. This makes the wood extra hard and strong. I have never seen any products made from yew wood today, but before Europeans settled (invaded?) this area, the coastal tribes valued the wood for its strength. Bows, clubs, digging tools, and many other items were fashioned from yew wood, and natives used its bark as medicine.
That hasn’t changed. In the 1990s, the Western Yew became a valuable resource once again, as it was discovered a new and effective cancer drug, Taxol, could be manufactured from its bark. This set up a difficult battle in which a valuable product was to be obtained from a limited resource. Fortunately, it was found that Taxol could be made from the needles of a European tree more economically.
On one of my first hikes at Mount Rainier National Park I encountered a few large gray, white and black birds flying around in the meadows. These were very similar to the Gray Jays I had seen in the mountains of northern New England. Guidebooks quickly lead me to identify the new birds as Clark’s Nutcrackers, named for William Clark, of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The birds I was watching that day at Sunrise were very strong flyers, and mostly kept themselves concealed in the subalpine fir trees.
Weeks later, at the Mowich Lake area, I once again encountered the Nutcrackers, but they had completely different attitudes about humans. I was sitting and eating a granola bar, and soon noticed a Nutcracker watching me from a nearby branch. Soon, it was joined by its friends and relatives. They were obviously hoping for a handout, but I knew that feeding any wildlife in an area like Mowich Lake was a bad idea. I packed up and left, and the birds immediately swooped down to search for any crumbs I left behind.
Clark’s Nutcrackers are members of the crow family, and all members are known for their intelligence and adaptable behavior, like being able to recognize easy marks and crunchy human snacks.
These intelligent birds survive in the harsh environment of the mountains by collecting and hiding nuts and seeds during the warmer months and them during the winter when there is no other food available.
They have large territories, and hide their food at multiple sites, which means they have to remember the locations of their numerous caches. In the book “Supernavigators”, David Barrie explains that locating the hidden seeds is done by memorizing landmarks around each cache and using those markers to form maps. This has even been confirmed in experiments with captive birds in enclosures. Their ability to form and use these maps is even more incredible when you consider that each bird has thousands of hiding places.
Once, while hiking along with friends, I noticed what appeared to be a busy highway of medium sized red and black ants. I saw one lane carrying bits of plants, while the ones traveling in the opposite direction carried nothing. I followed the ants with supplies to find their final destination. Several yards away, I was surprised to see a mound of twigs and needles that was nearly a yard across and almost knee high, swarming with countless ants. I had never seen such a thing.
The adolescent in me began to search for a stick to poke at them, but my adult senses advised caution. This was fortunate, because I learned later I had encountered a mound of Western Thatching Ants which, if disturbed, would have swarmed over my legs, biting me with thousands of sharp mandibles while spraying me formic acid, according to the WSU extension service.
For context, a Western Thatching Ant bite may not rate high on the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, but the acid can cause blistering if their mandibles break your skin.
There can easily be 100,000 ants in one of these colonies, according to Wikipedia. They mostly nest underground, and the enormous mound of thatch helps to maintain a good temperature and humidity for the huge numbers of young being raised inside.
I have since encountered the ants in other locations from Olympic National Park to the eastern slopes of the Cascades. Apparently, they are common enough backyard pests that exterminators advertise online to remove them from your property, maybe because they herd aphids (the ants eat the sugars the aphids, um, “expel” when they eat your prized flowers).
Washington is a wonderland of nature, full of new things to see and to learn about. The coming autumn and winter will, no doubt, continue to bring me new reasons to be happy to be here in Enumclaw.
