On a brilliant August morning in Seattle, a man peers through a pair of binoculars, fixing his gaze on the shaggy bark of a Douglas Fir. Its impressive column rises alongside the wide, flat trail snaking through this vestige of urban forest, and a small knot of people are gathered beneath it, staring intently at iPads.
“So are you looking at that hole in the bark there?” Krista Hanson asks the man with the binoculars.
“I’m trying to take a picture of it,” Ed Dominguez replies as he fiddles with the heavy binoculars. “It's the Brown Creeper nest.”
Dominguez aims the viewfinders at a flake of bark looping away from the tree, creating a narrow vertical opening now partially stuffed with twigs. In anticipation, Hanson cradles an iPad in front of the delicate frame of her son Lucas, a 13-year-old boy with glasses and tousled blond hair in a wheelchair.
Photo: Lucas Hanson looks at a Brown Creeper nest in a Douglas Fir tree on an iPad held by his mother, Krista Hanson, during a guided trek at Seward Park in Seattle. Seward Park Audubon Center’s Lead Naturalist Ed Dominguez used wifi binoculars during the outing to help Lucas—who has limited mobility and vision because he was born with myotubular myopathy—see trees, birds, and other natural wonders more easily. Photo: Jovelle Tamayo
