Where I live is changing. For one, more people move here which means houses and apartments are popping up like mushrooms and cars crowd the roads, all making less room for wild. Because I am connected to this place, I notice what to many might seem like small changes. Thirty years ago, little herring would school under the Olympia docks at end of the Puget Sound, now named the Salish Sea. I used to catch resident king salmon that were feeding on herring underneath the docks. I don’t see the herring anymore. Instead a more pollution-tolerant fish called Sticklebacks schools in big numbers.
I adapted my art in the piece pictured in the header to this changing scene. The Red-Breasted Merganser, who has wintered here probably from time immemorial, also adapts. I don’t know if they even eat sticklebacks which are, well, stickley, as well as much smaller than the herring and other fish that they are known to eat.
These and other changes have me feeling like sort of an in-place refugee. I wonder if the Red Breasted Mergansers feel the same.