Welcome! This website has been created to offer the novice to intermediate student of nature an online field guide for the most common species of plants and animals found in the lowlands of the Pacific Northwest. It is regularly updated on an ongoing basis. Click one of the links above in the gray boxes to begin exploring.
The species included here were chosen because they are common, and have reasonably obvious field marks to help identify them. The photographs and brief written descriptions will in most cases be sufficient for identification, and I hope the life history information is both engaging and useful. Similar and confusing species may by generalized, lumped together, and rare or difficult to ID species have been left out. In the references link above you can find lists of more specialized resources.
I am indebted to a growing network of naturalists, scientists, nature enthusiasts and photographers who have generously shared their time, work, and encouragement. I have tried my best to protect the photographs from outright being copied off the pages and all the photographers are listed in the credits link above. Ask them if you want to use their work.
Any and all errors are entirely mine and I always appreciate hearing about them. You can contact me at: Floriferous_@msn.com (Remove the _)
Status update: February Working on snails and slug pages.
Geography
The Pacific Northwest is a stunning landscape of mountains, forested valleys and oceans. The Lowland Northwest is defined here as the lands lower than 2000 feet in elevation that stretch from the Fraser River Delta of British Columbia down through the Puget Sound and Chehalis valleys to the Willamette Valley of Corvallis Oregon. There are three National Parks, numerous state, provincial and county parks, and national and provincial forests that preserve the finest examples of the natural world. Thousands of miles of hiking trails are available for all levels of explorations, from an hours jaunt, to weeks of wilderness adventuring. Even within or close to the largest cities in the region there are large city parks that maintain most of their natural setting. For detailed information about places to go, click the Places link at the top of the page.
Much of the lowlands are formed of outwash and erosion materials from centuries of water, wearing, breaking, moving material from the mountains to the lowlands. There are more than 40 rivers which cross the lowlands on their way to the ocean, including the mother of the them all, the mighty Columbia.
Geology
The Puget sound lowlands are bordered by spectacular mountainous rises in elevation to the west and east. Prior to the rise of the Cascades, some 55 million years ago, the lowlands were a coastal swampland. Large amounts of sediments washed down from rivers and created the sandstones and siltstones of the Chuckanut formation in Bellingham, the Renton and Tukwilla formations around Seattle. It was a much warmer climate then because a common fossil from this period are leaves from palm trees. Over the next 20 million years, The Cascade range reared up and formed a snow covered wall of mountains which run roughly parallel and about 120-140 miles east of the Pacific ocean. The lowland basin was probably a river system, full of deltas and swampland. During the Pleistocene era, starting 2 million years ago, large continental glaciers formed, in some cases, thousands of feet thick, carving the landscape in at least 6 separate episodes. The resulting geology today is from the last glacial episode which melted out about 13,000 years ago. This glacier moved from North to South as it advanced, and it blocked the river waters that flowed west, forming a series of large glacial lake basins, some over 400 feet deep. Some of this water broke free and flowed south through the Chehalis valleys, forming a wide and broad outwash plain., glacial outwash and moraine deposits with a few areas of sedimentary bedrock exposed. A few basalt outcropping are also found, in many cases shaped as long, narrow dikes.
To the west a variety of smaller coast ranges rose up between the Cascades and Ocean, the largest being the Olympic Range. In the northern reaches of the lowlands, from the Fraser River, BC south to about Olympia, WA., the dominant geological forms are piles of debris and outwash left behind by large continental glaciers. The few outcropping of native rock are mostly Sandstones and siltstones, although some basaltic ridges and dikes are found. South of Olympia the exposed rocks become increasingly volcanic in origin and small weathered basaltic plugs, dikes and cliffs can be found.