PLANTS

"Downstream, across Harkins Slough Road, I wander into a patch of showy pink lady’s thumb flower, which has slowly expanded over the years from a triangle shape into a diamond. The blooming smartweeds are ripe with seed that shower down, rattling on dead cattail stalks as I pass. Flocks of seed-eating house finches and goldfinches flit to and from willows, and everywhere song sparrows flutter up like grasshoppers. A shrike in the alcove of a willow island surrounded by a sea of bur marigolds. Against the backdrop of taller willows and cattails in the distance, the scene looks like the setting of an Audubon painting. I glance away for a moment and the shrike vanishes. "

Excerpted from Jerry Busch’s essays on the Watsonville Slough System, found in the book Watching the Watsonville Wetlands.