Seattle Naturalist
Your guide to the living world of the Pacific Northwest
About Us
Seattle Naturalist started as something simple: a calendar. Not a calendar of meetings or appointments, but of the natural world itself. A guide to to the tides, the skies, the animals, plants, and fungi.
The idea was rooted in a concept naturalists have long used: the phenology calendar. Phenology is the study of cyclic and seasonal natural events. When the blue herons return to their rookeries to court, when the first skunk cabbage through the soil in February, when the Vaux swifts spiral into the chimney of Chapman Elementary, or when the salmon start running the Cedar River, rather than dates set by humans, this is time kept by the world around us.
Our Seattle Naturalists Calendar became a way for us to tune back in and notice what has been unfolding around us, season by season, year after year.
Growing Into Something More
As the calendar found its audience, something else became clear: we wanted to know what events were happy from all the Seattle and neighboring non-profits, tribes, and clubs. Whether you’re looking for a guided nature walk, a citizen science project, a restoration volunteer day, or an education program, this is a good starting place.
Seattle Naturalist is also a growing repository of knowledge. Here you’ll find neighborhood nature profiles, species guides, Indigenous ecological knowledge (shared with the permission and partnerships of local tribes), maps, and more.
We acknowledge that Seattle sits on the ancestral lands of the Duwamish People, past and present, and we honor their ongoing relationship to this land and to the waters of Elliot Bay. For thousands of years, since time immemorial, Indigenous knowledge have been reading this land's calendar — its tides, its salmon runs, its flowering and fruiting, its bird arrivals and departures — for thousands of years, long before the word 'phenology' existed. That knowledge is not background; it is the foundation.
