Because I am in the park every day, new growth seems to be emerging in slow motion.  In the past, when I only walked to the beach maybe forty times a year, flowers and new growth seemed to suddenly appear.  Now that I am looking at the same buds every day, they seem to get a little fatter, a little fatter, show a little color, slowly unfold, and eventually bloom.  I saw the white on the Trillium buds about a week ago, but none has opened yet.  I wasn't aware how slowly these things happen.

Perhaps in a few weeks, so many things will be blooming that I will be thankful that they happen slowly.  Certainly, this slowness to open bodes well for longevity of bloom.  Right now, salmonberry is blooming nicely, but I have had a hard time photographing it.  The blooms are often at an awkward height or location, and the slightest bit of wind complicates things.  The trilliums are really the highlight of the year for me, as far as flowers.  They should be opening any day now.  Of course, when the ocean spray blooms, I might say it is the highlight of the year.  And then there's the fireweed.

The skunk cabbage I rescued from the beach is growing nicely, a little later than the other plants that were not disturbed.  My plan is to plant it in the seep just north of the stairs, so everyone can see it from the platform.

In a nutshell, this is the problem we face.  Near Eagle Landing Park is a small post office.  About five hundred mail boxes are in the lobby.  Also in the lobby are two cans: one is a garbage can and one is for recycling.  The recycling can is clearly marked, and it has a slot in the top so you know it is only for recycling.  Right next to it, touching it, is a can that is clearly an ordinary garbage can, an iconic garbage can, and it is labeled, in big, bold letters, Garbage only, No recyclables.  Every day, the garbage can has more recyclable junk mail in it than it has garbage, and there is more recyclable material in the garbage can than in the recycle can.  Every single day of the year.

The people who come to this post office have been coming here for years, sometimes decades.  They are well-educated, on average, and judging from the yard signs in the neighborhood, mostly liberal.  They are middle to upper income.  They are the kind of people that you would expect to recycle.  The neighborhood has a higher than average number of Priuses.  Still, when they have the cloak of anonymity, when it takes no extra effort at all to recycle, a significant number of my neighbors willfully, deliberately choose to throw recyclable material in the trash can right next to the recycle bin.  When saving the earth would take no extra effort, they would still take steps to destroy it.

Eagle Landing Park faces the same problem.  For a significant number of park visitors, the function of nature is to be hunted, harvested, consumed, abused, or polluted.  That is how some people appreciate nature, by ruining it.  Think of the ultimate wilderness outing for a large number of people: fishing or hunting, with beer and a camp fire.  The thing most people appreciate about nature is that it is free for the taking.  Whoever gets there first has the right to despoil something.  The wilderness is where no one can tell you not to do something.

Even if that was the only way you could enjoy nature, by destroying it, it would make sense that you would want to leave a little nature around so you can come back and destroy it later.  Let's say you like beer.  Let's say, just for the sake of argument, there was a finite capacity to produce beer.  If people consume too much too fast, the beer production capacity will be permanently damaged, and eventually all beer production will cease.  You have a choice between drinking an unlimited amount of beer now, and having none later, or drinking a limited amount of beer now and having an assured supply later.  What would you do?  Well, most people would probably drink too much beer now even if it meant having no beer later.  That's just the way people are.  If you ask them to think about it, to plan for the future, they will just laugh at you.

I intend this biography of a park to be a snapshot of how things were at this moment, so that future generations can look back at the state of the park and see how much it has improved.  It is more likely that this is the golden age of Eagle Landing Park, and people will have only these pictures to see how beautiful the park was, before it was ruined. It takes a commitment from everyone to save nature, and it only takes a small minority to destroy it, if they go unchecked.

I lucked out today and caught some Barrow's Goldeneye ducks with my lens.  Their world population is about 200,000.  That seems rare to me, in the entire world, but they are not an endangered species.  I didn't know this until I took the picture, but their heads aren't really black.  They are deep purple, and you can see a flash of purple on the cheek of the lead duck.  They dive down and eat mollusks.  They only come here in the winter, and for the rest of the year they will go to some mountain lake in Canada or Alaska.  The rest of the day's pictures can be seen here.

In the future, people will not need to damage nature.  Perhaps it will be ten years or 100 years, but we will eventually get beyond automobiles and the destruction they cause.  For entertainment and sport, people will have the internet in their heads.  A future visitor will come to Eagle Landing Park, simply look at the plants, and instantly fill in his spottings of species on his Project Noah page.  He will look up and see the eagle soaring overhead, and a memory chip in his head will capture the image he sees.  The internet in his head will provide the species name and as much or as little information as he cares to know.  The collection of 365 species, which is taking me all year, will be accomplished by this future visitor in one afternoon visit.  If he wants a more active sport, he can ride a hovering skate board that skims along above the ground, never touching it.  He can ride his hoverboard down the trail and even down the stairs, without harming a twig, able to stop on a dime if he encounters another park visitor.  For added difficulty, he might try to collect 365 species while riding his hoverboard down the trail.  Of course, he would take his time comming back up the trail, stopping to enjoy and experience each species of native plant.  In the future, people will look back on our generation and view us as barbaric and primitive for the way we wasted nature. 

The most damning judgment of our generation will be that we had the tools and the ability to change, to become symbiotic with our biosphere, and we chose to procrastinate, to leave it for the next generation to set things right. 

A sunny Saturday brought lots of visitors to the park.  A man and a woman were stopping to look at the new growth on many plants beside the trail.  I couldn't hear what they were saying, but it seemed they were identifying species and discussing their properties.  As a member of the Washington Native Plant Society, that sort of attention to plants seems so familiar to me, but it is rare enough in my park that it is notable, and refreshing.  I don't know why that couldn't be the norm, for people to observe and appreciate all the native plants growing beside the trail. 

Stone 63 is pictured above, which means I should have 63 species in the bag.  I have seen many more than 63 species, but it is not so easy to photograph and identify them.  Birds are much harder to photograph than Trillium.  I have photographed many lichens and mosses that are hard to identify.  Today, there was a green bug on Komu's snout.  The velvety brown background was perfect for a picture of this bug, but it flew away by the time I got the camera ready and the dog still.  If I'm going to hit 365 species, I will need more books, more time in the park, and more patience.  Seeing a bird is hard enough, but snapping a picture before it moves seems nearly impossible. 

Photography done well is really an extreme sport.  (Which is not to say that I'm doing it well.)  It requires the skills and abilities of hunting, patience, stamina, broad knowledge, and moderately expensive equipment.  I could easily spend $20,000 for my ideal camera toolkit.  And then I would need to go to school to learn to use that equipment.  My low-end-but-still-costly equipment does take excellent pictures.  You have to be there at the right time and place.  You also need to take twenty pictures for every good one.  Looking at all the amazing pictures of incredible species pouring in to Project Noah, it is easy to see that one could do nothing but take pictures of nature for the rest of one's life. 

A rainy afternoon means I got the park all to myself.  I like to imagine that the entire Earth has been eradicated of all Homo sapiens and all the structures they have built.  While walking through Eagle Landing Park, if you ignore the occasional bench or sign, you can get the feeling of what it might have been like before the ice age.  Before this land was reshaped by a glacier half a mile thick, many of the same plant and animal species lived here.  The glacier pushed them away, and they returned as the glacier receded.  For millions of years, Eagle Landing Park did not know what a human was.  I would like to go back in time and carefully take pictures of that era, without disturbing anything.  There are certain people that I like, and I believe humans in general have the capacity for enormous benefit to the biosphere someday.  Still, the world before humans must have been gloriously beautiful, almost unimaginable.  I hope the world after our extinction will regain some of its past glory.

A new species of lichen blew down out of the canopy.  I think it might have been growing in a cherry tree.  I never see this species anywhere near eye level.  I've only seen it once before, and that was another twig blown down by the wind.  It turns out to be ragged lichen, Platismatia glauca.  Thanks to Richard Droker for providing the identity.  He is an amazing photographer, and I aspire to improve my photography to his level.  Before asking Richard for the identity of this lichen, I tried to look it up myself in my gigantic book of lichens.  My hand gets tired holding this book while I try find the species.  I would like to find the species the correct way, by using the key, but the key in this book asks for the results of chemical tests I don't yet know how to perform.  Lichens of North America is a beautiful book.

Lichens are symbiotic even more so than most plants and animals.  Humans are symbiotic in many senses.  We have hundreds of species of bacteria in and on our bodies, keeping our systems in balance, and the loss of those bacterial species can lead to poor health.  Lichens are more thoroughly symbiotic in that they are composed of two species, a fungal host and an algae growing inside.  The algae growing in these lichens can exist outside their hosts, but they look and act very different.  There are about 18,000 known species of lichen, combining different fungal bodies with different algae inside.  The fungus provides a home for the alga, keeping it moist and providing certain minerals.  The photosynthesis taking place in the algae provides energy for growth in the fungal body.  It is similar in a way to the mitochondria in the human body that provide the energy we need to live.  Mitochondria have their own genomes, separate from the DNA that defines a person.  We would die with mitochondria. 

In fact, humans are ecosystems in and of themselves.  Over 200 species of bacteria live on the skin of the average human.  If I counted those bacteria, and I was able to photograph and document them, they would get me most of the way to my goal of 365 species for the year.  You have more cells in and on your body of a different species than you have cells with your own DNA.  Your personal cells with your DNA are typically larger, and most of your body mass is made up of your cells.  Still, if you took away all the other species from your own little ecosystem, you would die instantly.  Much of the diversity of species has been removed from Eagle Landing Park and may never come back.  My goal in improving the health of ELP is to get ride of the invasive, cancerous species of plants, and increase the diversity of native plants.  I can't bring back grizzly bears and elk, unfortunately.  The one invasive species that will never go away is humans, but hopefully they can be converted from parasitic to symbiotic in nature.