Pikes/Pines | Spring sights around the Hill — Flowering currants, Bigleaf blossoms, and Bushtits (yes, we said Bushtits)

Spring can be disorientingly distracting. I have a hard time knowing where to look. I get home from work and now that the days are longer, I have time to wander around the garden staring at everything. “What’s newly emerged from their long slumber? Oh, a robin fight! That gnat lek looks gorgeous backlit.” Sometimes it’s hard to narrow down what natural phenomenon to focus Pikes/Pines on each month, so in true spring spirit, here’s some assorted nature observations that I feel like you shouldn’t miss, right now, on the Hill.

Red-flowering Currant

Let me sing my praise for this lovely native shrub. They flower for weeks on end, provide early food for Rufous Hummingbirds and a host of insects, and are easy to grow. I have nearly a dozen of them around my yard, planted bare root from King County Conservation District and a few propagated from clandestine cuttings. I have done nothing but water them a bit during their first summer and now my five year olds are 10 feet tall.

One of the Red-flowering Currants growing in my garden. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Red-flowering Currants, Ribes sanguineum, are one of several native shrubs eyecatching enough to have worked their way into the imagination of many types of gardeners and landscapers – they are all over the Hill in lots of private and public spaces. I’ve seen them in Volunteer Park and the Arboretum, scattered across dozens of parking strips and front yards – they are a native plant that everyone should try growing because of their ecological value as well as their beauty. (On a side note, though a common native plant, I don’t know of any wild growing currants on the Hill – it can be hard to determine if ones in park greenspaces were planted during restoration efforts or are existing wild plants.)

This spring I’ve been enjoying not just their blooms but what they attract. Pacific Digger Bees, Anthophora pacifica, a native species that resembles a bumble bee on speed, love currant blooms. The zippy male bees speed about my currants checking for rivals and female bees to mate with, the latter who actually take a moment to stop and collect nectar and pollen. Over the past week they’ve been joined by a handful of other native bees, both Anna’s and Rufous Hummingbirds, and even an Orange-crowned Warbler gleaning unsuspecting pollinators for lunch.

Eventually these flowers develop into fruit, which is not particularly tasty but is edible. I leave them for my wild neighbors. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

The bushtit nest in the lilac outside our kitchen window. It’s now a fully formed sock structure and the builders are focused on interior design now. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Bushtit Nests

I wrote about Bushtits, Psaltriparus minimus on Pikes/Pines twelve years ago, and I still remember watching a bushtit nest slowly grow over the course of weeks in the plum tree in my childhood backyard. For being very unremarkably plumaged birds, cute but still mostly just gray, Bushtits really manage to hold my attention. Seeing dozens of these tiny grayish fluffballs swarm a suet feeder in winter is extremely entertaining. But watching them build their socklike nests of moss, lichen, and spiderwebs is one the best things I can imagine.

Aside from making coffee, my first morning activity since late March is to wonder how the bushtit nest is doing. A pair of these diminutive birds are probably about halfway through construction of this season’s nest in the lilac outside our kitchen window. They are all over the yard – grabbing bits and bobs from everything – spider webs around our deck, lichen off neighboring trees, and even the fraying fibers on the end of a rope dangling under the eves of my shed. It’s hard to miss them because they never stop twittering and trilling while they work.

These birds aren’t shy about their nest building, though they will get a lot more secretive when the nest has eggs and young. Because they are vocal, slow moving birds, I highly recommend paying attention to any pairs you see or hear. There’s a strong chance they are constructing a nest nearby and you can likely follow them to it. This week I had to escort the pair out of my chicken coop because they got trapped trying to procure feathers for the nest – I managed a close enough look to see the only easy tell between males and females – females have yellow sclera (the areas around the pupil), while male eyes are entirely dark.

The female Bushtit about to bring more materials into the nest. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

A Bigleaf Maple in full spring splendor. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Bigleaf Maple Blossoms

By the time you read this, I will have already had at least a dozen fritters. Specifically, they’ll be fritters made with Bigleaf Maple blossoms. It might feel like an excuse to eat fried batter (and it is), but I think that celebrating spring with these treats is a reminder that wild food exists, even in urban spaces. I find it a good way to stay present and feel connected to the plants around me. You have to catch the maples at just the right moment – starting to open, not fully unfurled. These fritters aren’t going to blow you away with flavor – but they are just a fun seasonal tradition in our house.

Because Bigleaf Maples, Acer macrophyllum, are both large and ubiquitous, their flowers bring out the masses. I associate them with the incoming waves of migrating warblers, filling up on a bit of nectar and a lot of insects on their back to their breeding territories. Bees, flies, moths, beetles, and thrips are among the many insects I’ve found enjoying their flower pendants each year. A favorite memory from my early days of learning to climb trees as an arborist was taking my lunch in the middle of a large flowering bigleaf maple and seeing all the life move around me.

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