Observations by natalie2

The junco pictured below is a male, with a black head, rusty back, and buffy sides. The female is paler and juvenile have gray heads. They are a common resident at my site and other forests from lowland to subalpine.

The brush rabbit is smaller than many of the other cottontails, and unlike most of them, the underside of its tail is grey rather than white. The upperside of the brush rabbit's fur varies from light brown to gray in color, while the underside is usually always white.

Deciduous broadleaf tree with broad, rounded crown. Leaves opposite, deeply 5-lobed, shiny green above, paler and hairy below, yellow in fall with small lobes and teeth on margins. Flowers yellow, drooping inflor at twig ends. Fruit a brown, double samara, with stiff yellow hairs. Bark dark gray and furrowed. Found in moist places.

The bark on young trees is thin, smooth, gray, and contains numerous resin blisters. On mature trees, it is thick and corky. The shoots are brown to olive-green, turning gray-brown with age, smooth, though not as smooth as fir shoots, and finely pubescent with short dark hairs. The buds are a very distinctive narrow conic shape, 4–8 mm long, with red-brown bud scales. The leaves are spirally arranged but slightly twisted at the base to lie in flattish either side of the shoot, needle-like, 2–3.5 cm long, green above with no stomata, and with two whitish stomatal bands below.

It most commonly grows as a large shrub growing to around 5-8 m tall, but it will occasionally form a small to medium-sized tree, exceptionally to 18 m tall. The shoots are slender and hairless. It typically grows in the understory below much taller forest trees, but can sometimes be found in open ground, and occurs at altitudes from sea level up to 1,500 m.
The leaves are opposite, and palmately lobed with 7-11 lobes, almost circular in outline, 3-14 cm long and broad, and thinly hairy on the underside; the lobes are pointed and with coarsely toothed margins. The leaves turn bright yellow to orange-red in fall. The flowers are small, 6–9 mm diameter, with a dark red calyx and five short greenish-yellow petals; they are produced in open corymbs of 4-20 together in spring. The fruit is a two-seeded samara, each seed 8-10 mm diameter, with a lateral wing 2–4 cm long.
Vine Maple trees can bend over easily. Sometimes, this can cause the top of the tree to grow into the ground and send out a new root system, creating a natural arch.