NEW LIFE

Issue 27, Spring 2025

Deer fawn playing dead until its mother returns. photo by John F. Williams

NEW LIFE

Issue 27, Spring 2025

Managing Editor: Sara Noland

(Table of Contents is below this intro)

Outside my home office window, a pair of golden-crowned sparrows is plucking the new spring buds from a Japanese maple tree. We’ve had a group of five or six of these gregarious birds in our yard all winter, hunkered in the hedge along the front walk or deep in the thorny fortress of the quince bush. They seem to prefer being low to the ground, hopping around the garden to pick at dead stems, or poking around under the bird feeders where other birds have dropped seed. But now, like the bushtits and the chickadees, the goldens have left their winter flocks to form breeding pairs—and apparently to feast on spring maple buds, a behavior I’ve never seen before despite many years of spying on my feathered visitors through the window.

The theme of this issue of Salish magazine is “new life,” and it is a time for birth, growth, and flowering. It’s a time when the big, invisible cycles and webs of nature are perhaps most apparent. Last year’s blanket of fallen leaves feeds soil, roots, buds, and flowers. Plants feed insects, insects feed birds. Fallen leaves and bird bones enrich the soil.

I like to also think of spring as a time to renew my curiosity about the natural world; a time to ask new questions about old friends, like the golden-crowned sparrows in the maple tree. Do the new buds contain sugars or insects that make them a tasty treat for sparrows? Do other bird species eat tree buds? Are the buds of other plants also devoured by birds? There’s an ecological relationship I’d never thought about.

Bigleaf maple buds. photo by John F. Williams

And don’t even get me started about hummingbirds — my constant winter companions through wind, snow, and rain — buzzing me if I dare approach their feeder or favorite perching branch. I thought I knew them inside and out, but a couple of weeks ago I watched a female Anna’s hummer do something amazing. In mid-flight she gathered a beakful of silky seedpods from last year’s dried fireweed stalks. I planted some fireweed in the front garden a decade ago because I love its purple flowers, a marvelous nectar source for both insects and hummers. In the fall I enjoy the unique spray of feathery seedpods, which presumably help the plant spread its seeds by wind or caught in the fur of a passing mammal. The seed pods becoming nesting material for thumb-sized birds? Another springtime revelation sprouting.

Underlying each writer’s contribution is a unifying theme: connections. These aren’t just isolated glimpses of beauty but interwoven moments that sustain the larger web of life.

Please send us your thoughts. Salish Magazine will continue to evolve and improve with ideas from you. Our SUBSCRIBE page also has a form you can use to contact us.

And if you’d like to submit content to future issues or help us in some other way, the VOLUNTEER page has a form for that.

Happy Spring!

Issue 27: New Life: Table of Contents

You can subscribe using the SUBSCRIBE menu above. It’s free, and we will send you newsletters when new articles and new issues are posted online.