Field Trip Report: Free Naturalist-Guided Walk at Meadowbrook Pond

Beaver skull on peltIt's Frugal Week here on the Seattle Event Calendars, with a special focus on inexpensive ways to enjoy our community! Here's a report on a recent free event I attended.

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Meadowbrook Pond is a favorite little spot of mine here in Northeast Seattle. I lived in the general area for four years before I ever realized it was there.

I had gone on a long winter neighborhood walk with a new Xmas gift: a fancy camera. I'd been walking and walking and walking and not finding much of visual interest, so was gratified to find a little surprise when I happened upon the pond.

Frozen bubblesThe water had frozen, and the bubbles beneath it had frozen into beautiful polka dots patterns. (Bubbles possibly caused, my dad hypothesized, by the fact that it was built on a former sewage plant and so there might be a lot of methane in the soil. I decided to not let this tarnish my rather romantic vision of the polka dots.)

That day, I also spotted a bird that I came home and figured out was a Belted Kingfisher, my first sighting of a now favorite bird. Returning to the pond later that spring, as I got more earnestly into birdwatching, it was also the site of some early birding excitement, spotting an unexpected (for me at the time) Hooded Merganser & Blue Heron in the middle of the city.

Beaver peltSo I was excited to see that the city was offering a free naturalist-led walk of the pond last week. I took it and learned from naturalist Brian Gay more about the beavers who make their home there.

For example: that red coloring on the front teeth on the skull up there at the top of the post? It's not discoloration; it's another kind of enamel. The hard red cover wears down more quickly than the softer enamel behind it, and that creates a natural chisel shape.

Beaver pelt close-upBrian also had a pelt to show us, and we could see up close the two kinds of fur the beaver has: a downy fur under a more wiry top layer. The downy fur is what was used in felting.

We took water samples to see what kind of critters live in the pond. Brian explained you can tell a lot about the health of a body of water by what's living in it. Caddis- & mayflies? You have excellent, clean water. Dragonflies mean the water is not quite as clean, and midges and black flies mean the water is not doing so well.

Pond at duskWe didn't see any beavers clearly that night, but one eagle-eyed attendee spotted the ripples one made as it swam across the pond. The walk came to an end just as the moon started to rise over the trees.

The walk was a great opportunity to learn more about this location that I'd visited before – I had never realized there were beavers living there, and certainly wouldn't have had a clue about the story the tiny life in the water tells.

Moonrise

I highly recommend checking out some of our local guided nature walks to get a new perspective on the parks and open spaces you might already enjoy. Now, especially with the proposed cuts to the parks budgets, it's even more important to take advantage of our excellent community resources to make sure we continue to have them in the future (see below).

• For a listing of upcoming free guided nature walks, click here.
• For information on what you can do to help keep programs like these alive, click here.
• For more pictures from this trip to Meadowbrook, please click here.
• For a special Terrible Bird Photo gallery from the pond, click here.