

KUOW Blog
News, factoids, and insights from KUOW's newsroom. And maybe some peeks behind the scenes. Check back daily for updates.
Have any leads or feedback for the KUOW Blog? Contact Dyer Oxley at dyer@kuow.org.
Stories
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TikTok: The newest corner of the KUOW community
Hello TikTokers, KUOW is your newest to-the-point pal on TikTok.
For example, KUOW's Joshua McNichols has been reporting on Seattle's housing woes for some time now. But this is an issue with a lot of nuance and moving parts. So perhaps sitting down with Joshua and a glass of lemonade will help.
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If you're going to SeaTac, wear a helmet and wave your hands over your head
If you're walking around a park with a potential risk of encountering any birds, be sure to wave your arms around your head to ward the winged-assailants off. It might be best to wear a helmet while walking, too. That's the advice from SeaTac city officials warning of an aggressive owl in a local park.
Multiple owl interactions have recently been reported at North SeaTac Park. The city says that the problem is likely stemming from a barred or great horned owl, and it's possible it's a young owl "learning the ropes." One park visitor reports seeing a family of barred owls in the area.
Officials have their fingers crossed that the aggressive behavior will go away by winter.
Talons are a major weapon in an owl's hunting arsenal. A great horned owl's talons can provide 500 pounds of pressure and has been likened to the force of a German shepherd's bite. It is known to be a particularly fierce predator. Barred owls are known to be very territorial around their nests, especially if they have eggs or chicks.
If you're planning to visit the park, or any area with owls, there are a few things you can do to prepare.
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Female hummingbirds are mimicking males to avoid aggression
When you think of a hummingbird you probably think of a small sweet bird.
But, hummingbirds are also very aggressive, especially males.
According to a new study, some female hummingbirds are evolving to look like males to avoid aggression.
Male White-necked Jacobin hummingbirds have a flashy bright blue head, iridescent green back, and a white stomach and tail.
In comparison, their female counterparts are muted in color. They have a speckled front and the iridescent olive green back. The drab colors make it easier for the females to hide with their young, from predators or other aggressive hummingbirds.
Jay Falk, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, says females are trying to deceive other aggressive hummingbirds by adopting the bright colors.
“That coloration is a signal to say to other hummingbirds, 'You better watch out. I'm a bully; if you attack me, I'm going to fight back,'" Falk said.
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What music do you recommend to Seattle newcomers?: Today So Far
- What Seattle music would you recommend to newcomers? In this case, Greg Spotts, the new director of the Seattle Department of Transportation.
- 911 calls in parts of King County are being upgraded with mental health professionals.
This post originally appeared in KUOW's Today So Far newsletter for September 15, 2022.
What Seattle music would you recommend to newcomers? In this case, Greg Spotts, the new director of the Seattle Department of Transportation.
The City Council has approved Spotts for the role and Mayor Bruce Harrell still has to make it official. Spotts has already been on the job in an interim capacity. He's currently asking Seattleites to reach out and take him on a tour of their neighborhoods — by foot, bike, bus, or other — to get an idea of challenges they face.
One point I noticed while writing this all up for KUOW's Blog is that Spotts worked in the music industry in a former life, before going into a career working for cities. This was back in the '90s when he owned a "boutique talent management" company that helped produce albums for REM, Jewel, and Alanis Morissette, among others. With music roots in the 1990s, and Seattle being such a big part of that decade, Spotts says he filled his office with "Seattle vibes" when he came to town by playing music by Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Screaming Trees, and others. In an SDOT blog post he stated, "I know there is so much more Seattle music to listen to, but that was an awesome start."
Which brings me back to music recommendations. Now, to be accurate, the "Seattle sound" was actually a Northwest sound. Screaming Trees were from Ellensburg. Nirvana emerged from Aberdeen/Olympia. So I'm opening this up to our PNW region when I ask: What music artists (newer or older) would you recommend as a primer for SDOT's new director Greg Spotts (or any newcomer)?
To start off, I'd like to throw out there: Murder City Devils; Beverly Crusher; Sunny Day Real Estate; The Black Tones; and The Hoot Hoots (specifically the "Rainbow Squadron" album). Any music recommendations? Email me at dyer@kuow.org.
Have you heard the term "co-responder"? You're going to hear it a lot more as police in our region begin adding mental health professionals into the mix when they take certain calls.
As KUOW's Amy Radil reports, five cities in North King County (Shoreline, Lake Forest Park, Bothell, Kenmore, and Kirkland) have teamed up to ensure that such mental health resources are available seven days a week. The effort is being ramped up to offer a team that can even respond to some calls without an officer present.
In Seattle, Mayor Bruce Harrell has convened a workgroup to address this same issue — adding more mental health professionals for 911 calls. The Seattle Fire Department has already made moves in this direction, and is currently expanding the effort. Its Health One teams launched in 2019. SFD added a third unit this year. When firefighters and EMTs respond to a call, they may encounter someone who needs specific help beyond their scope. They call the Health One team to follow up.
These efforts are happening as King County faces an ongoing decline in mental health treatment beds. KUOW's Natalie Newcomb reports that the county is slated to purchase a long-term residential mental health treatment center in North Seattle. Here's the thing: This purchase won't add any more beds for mental health treatment for our region. If anything, it will just preserve a few, about 64.
King County Executive Dow Constantine recently noted that the county has lost about a third of such beds over the past four years, during a time when the need for these services has increased. According to one King County Council member, the county had 355 residential treatment beds in 2018; today we have 264. That count is about to go down even further (to 244) after another facility closes down later this year. Read more here.
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'A new dawn' for carefully planned burns in Washington state
As crews continue to fight the Bolt Creek Fire in Snohomish County, and others burning around Washington, the state's land management agency is speaking out about the need for prescribed burns.
"Right now, we're in, really, a new dawn for the nation of recognizing that there's a tradeoff of smoke will happen one way or another, and it's really up to us to decide when we'd like to see that and how we'd like to see that," said Kate Williams, a burn planner with Washington's Department of Natural Resources.
Williams says carefully planned burns remove fuels that could lead to catastrophic wildfires. She also says plants and animals benefit from lower-intensity fires, which return nutrients to the soil and open up vegetation.
Resource department crews conducted prescribed burns this past spring, for the first time in 18 years.
But the practice has risks. Earlier this year, two planned burns in New Mexico got out of control, leading to the largest wildfire in the state's history.
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Why U.S. Sen. Cantwell has her eye on the sky
You wouldn't immediately realize it by looking at the night sky, but there is a lot of "space junk" up there.
That's why U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat, has got her eye on cleaning up a sky-high mess. Cantwell has proposed a bill, called the ORBITS Act, aimed at eventually removing expired satellites and other leftovers in orbit around Earth.
Such space junk, currently in orbit, has the potential to collide with a satellite used for weather monitoring, or communications. Or it could strike a spacecraft. It could also potentially fall to Earth in a fiery crash.
“There are more than 900,000 pieces of space junk passing over our heads every day, including abandoned Government satellites,” Cantwell said in a statement. “This bill will jumpstart the technology development needed to remove the most dangerous junk before it knocks out a satellite, crashes into a NASA mission, or falls to the ground and hurts someone. We must continue to explore space, and we have to do it safely.”
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2022's Northwest harvest is not so cherry
Some not-so-good news for cherry lovers: It looks like this year's Northwest cherry crop is going to be the smallest in 14 years.
The president of the Washington State Fruit Commission and Northwest Cherries says an unusual snow event that happened in April has affected crops in Washington and Oregon, Oregon Public Broadcasting reports.
As KUOW previously reported, growers noticed in June that the cherry crop was different this year, following an extended cold spring. Whereas folks expect April showers to bring May flowers, 2022's April brought snowflakes. About 40% of cherries in Washington state hadn't even bloomed in mid-April when snow began to fall on them.
“The bees only work, they only come out of their hives when it's 55 degrees and higher," B.J. Thurlby, president of the Washington State Fruit Commission, told KUOW in June. "And we went through a lot of bloom where the bees just didn't get out and work.”
That has led to the low-yield situation the Northwest is in now. The 2022 Northwest cherry crop is about 80,000 tons less than usual, OPB reports.
Thurlby told OPB that about 130,000 tons of Northwest cherries will go to market this year.
The Northwest is one of the largest cherry exporters in the United States. No word yet on how the smaller yield will affect market prices.
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King County to buy treatment center as mental health beds are on the decline
King County is in the final stages of purchasing a long term residential mental health treatment center in North Seattle.
Cascade Hall, a 64-bed facility, holds about a quarter of the county’s residential treatment beds. This purchase will not increase the county's bed capacity, however, it will preserve the current count which has been declining in recent years.
At a press conference Wednesday at Cascade Hall, King County Executive Dow Constantine said the county decided to buy the facility to make up for the loss of mental health treatment.
“Over the last four years, through a combination of funding and workforce challenges, our community has lost nearly a third of our residential treatment capacity," Constantine said. "Due to the loss of beds, we've had the time that it takes to get into treatment growing and growing.”
Right now, it takes 44 days for someone to ask for help, then get them treatment.
King County Councilmember Sarah Perry also attended the press conference. According to Perry, the county had 355 residential treatment beds in 2018. Currently, there are 264 beds.
Another facility is expected to close later this year. That would drop the number of treatment beds to 244.
"We are losing beds every day," Perry said. "While at the same time we're watching the actual need increase, exponentially, in these last three years with Covid."
Executive Constantine says losing Cascade Hall would place a huge strain on the system.
“Can you imagine reaching out because you urgently need behavioral health care and being told to wait a month and a half," Constantine said. "Clearly, that's not acceptable.”
Therefore, buying Cascade Hall will ensure wait times will not increase further.
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Lawsuit aims to protect a rare West Coast carnivore, the fisher
You can tell that the fisher is a tough customer by its diet. The furry forest carnivore with a long bushy tail is known for its rare ability to eat porcupines.
“The fisher's ability to descend trees head-first, aided by its retractable claws, helps it to approach the porcupine stealthily, attacking the only quill-free spot on its body — the face,” according to Nature Conservancy Canada.
But the fisher has been no match for another dangerous species: Homo sapiens.
Trapping, logging, rat poison, and, most recently, human-caused climate change have pushed the fisher to the brink of extinction in the United States.
The Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the federal government to protect the fisher under the Endangered Species Act more than 20 years ago.
A fisher pauses before disappearing into the wilds of Mount Rainier National Park in 2018 in this clip from a National Park Service video. The bushy-tailed carnivores are considered an endangered species in Washington state but have been denied federal endangered-species protections in most of their range on the U.S. West Coast.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed the fisher deserved endangered-species protection but said other species’ recovery efforts – many of them court-ordered – were higher priorities for the agency’s limited funding.
Eventually, the Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to protect fishers, but only in Southern California.
Now the activist group is suing to give the fisher endangered-species protections up and down the West Coast.
Here in Washington, wildlife officials have released 279 fishers from Canada in the Cascades and Olympics over the past 15 years in hopes of reestablishing the forest dwellers locally.
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Booster shots and Covid 'normalcy': Today So Far
- The West Seattle Bridge reopens this weekend.
- Seattle students went back to class today.
- We're not there yet, but with updated Covid booster shots, Covid "normalcy" could be around the corner.
This post originally appeared in KUOW's Today So Far newsletter for September 14, 2022.
What a difference a few hours can make! After this newsletter was sent out yesterday, Seattle's teachers union ended its strike after educators reached a tentative agreement with Seattle Public Schools. That means the first day of class is ... this morning. Kids are already back in school.
The teachers agreed to halt their strike, but still have to vote on the tentative agreement. That should be interesting to watch. The move to end the strike only passed by a narrow margin — 57% (78% of union members showed up to vote). Some teachers are skeptical of the proposed agreement, saying pay raises don't keep up with inflation. The exact details of the agreement have not been released. What is known is that it is a three-year contract with a pay bump. Special education student/teacher ratios will either be improved or maintained. Mental health staffing is to be added to every school. KUOW's Ann Dornfeld has more details here.
The road into Seattle is either about to get more congested, or a bit better...I'm actually not quite sure. But what I do know is that the West Seattle Bridge is coming back online after a two-year hiatus for repairs. This means tens of thousands (or about 100,000) drivers who have been stuck in West Seattle this whole time are about to be unleashed onto the commute.
Sunday is the big opening day. Seattle leaders are holding a press conference on Friday to highlight the occasion. That's more of a moment to pat themselves on the back. I think the general attitude for the rest of Seattle is, "Yeah, yeah, just open the #&$% bridge!" In the meantime, and more importantly, the city is running a few final tests to make sure the bridge is ready — crews are basically running extremely heavy loads over the bridge to see if it holds up. The bridge is also getting a bit of a facelift in these few remaining days. More details here.
I think we've all been expecting something like this to be said eventually: With the new omicron-updated booster shot, we are heading into a new era, one with annual updated shots similar to how we treat the flu.
That was the message that UW Medicine's Dr. Shireesha Dhanireddy recently delivered to Seattle Now. Dr. Dhanireddy notes that the previous Covid boosters were simply the same shots as the initial vaccines. The idea was to just keep immunity up. But the new boosters, available now, have been updated to account for mutations like the omicron variant. This is what we've been doing for the flu for years — we update the vaccine each year to keep the flu down as much as possible while helping ourselves overcome the illness should we be infected. That's essentially the annual scenario we are looking at with Covid.
"We are not quite there in terms of yearly vaccines for Covid, but we are edging toward that kind of normalcy with Covid, and thinking of this first round of reworked vaccines in that way," Dr. Dhanireddy said.
Officials are encouraging those most at risk to get their boosters as soon as possible, but they are open to all at this point. I already checked with my local pharmacy and they have them ready to go. Read more here.
AS SEEN ON KUOW
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Seattle kids head back to school as educators ponder contract vote
Seattle public school kids headed back to class Wednesday morning.
The start of school is a week later than expected and comes after educators suspended their strike Tuesday afternoon.
They still have to vote on whether to accept the new contract with the district. A tentative agreement was reached late on Monday.
If educators vote to reject the agreement, it’s possible the strike could resume.
Spokesperson Julie Popper said via email that the teacher’s union takes the process of ratifying the tentative agreement very seriously and wants to be sure every member has a chance to review it and cast a vote.
“We haven’t yet scheduled the vote but anticipate the weekend would be the soonest possible given our union bylaws,” Popper said.
At Broadview-Thomson K-8 in north Seattle, students seemed happy to be back in school.
They arrived with backpacks, anticipation, and some mixed feelings.
"This is my first day at school and I'm so excited,” said 5-year-old Nico Coronado. “I'm feeling a little bit nervous but it's still going to be fun for my first day.”
Nico’s mom, Juanita Coronado, said she supported the teachers’ strike and wanted them to get the resources they were asking for.
“When teachers are supported, kids are supported more,” she said.
But Coronado recognizes that strikes can be hard on people.
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Covid boosters safe during pregnancy, UW Medicine study concludes
Researchers at the University of Washington say that Covid-19 booster shots appear to be effective and safe during pregnancy.
"When you vaccinate a pregnant individual, she makes protection and passes it to her baby via cord blood and then breast milk in the postpartum period, so you're getting two protections for one shot," said Dr. Linda Eckert, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UW.
UW Medicine conducted a study that included more than 17,000 people. The results of the study were recently published. Read more about the study here.
Boosters that target the omicron strains became available last week.
Dr. Eckert says that pregnant people, and anyone who's gone at least two months since their last booster, should get the updated shots. She says the accumulation of data since the beginning of the pandemic points to the safety of the vaccines.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has issued a new advisory encouraging pregnant people to get vaccinated against Covid.
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