Bird Wreck on the Outer Coast

There are a lot of news stories about our bird wreck.(1)(2). So people who saw us at work out at Rialto on Monday, measuring and photographing dead critters for COASST, thought they knew what we were doing; they approached us to ask if right there we had perhaps just now solved the scientific mystery by examining this very surf scoter. Oh, we'd say, we are just collecting data, the real scientists are hard at work at figuring out what it means. And they would tell us where they had seen other birds, Ruby Beach etc.

In the end JL and I lucked out, rained on for less than an hour of our day, and only 10 dead birds to work up. Five on Ellen Creek beach, five on Rialto Jetty. Seven scoters, one common murre, two gulls. Also in two separate places a live scoter, one a male the other a female, each sitting far up the beach, not moving but aware. Here are JL's photos of bird #756, a surf scoter. And the living distressed male we saw.

Ten was few enough birds to work up that we got both beach segments done even though we didn't arrive on the beach until almost one o'clock. I could not have done my two beaches without JL, especially at the beginning when we had three birds pop pop pop the minute we got down on the beach. In the rain. And just then, though the tide was going out and we were well above, a wave came up high and sloshed over the clipboard and the field book. Very dismaying. But by the end we were quite old pros at recognizing scoter legs and scoter body shape at first glance even from a couple of paces away. Speeds the process a lot if you already know and only need to confirm.

Plus there were lots of occasions for pelican appreciation breaks as they cruised by, especially by the end of the afternoon as flights of them were angling low across the jetty beach to go in and land on the river. Must have been fish around, we also heard a sea lion barking over there on the invisible other side of the jetty. Whatever is happening apparently not causing stressed pelicans.

I told all this to AE, who also surveys the Rialto beaches for COASST. She wrote back, "I had visions of you last night with headlamps on after dark still tagging the pesky critters." Heaven knows we had the same visions, especially after the wave caught our gear, in the rain, on the 3rd bird within a few yards.

Now just have to clean out and reorganize my bird pack. Which seems suddenly to be full of psychic dead-bird-cooties in addition to the more tangible damp gear and sand. I don't even want to touch it.

MS wrote me, "Dead birds not quite my thing." It's not like they're my thing either, they just kind of come with my 'citizen science' backpack. By the end of the day yesterday I had a better separation between datum-for-science and recently-deceased-sentient-being. Ten dead birds will do that for a beginner. Though there was a moment when I was nose to nose with a surf scoter (corpse), so fresh that the brilliant sunset colors of his bill were unfaded, and I had to tell him/it how beautiful it/he was.

Ellen Creek was running.

Pelican Appreciation Break (Click for very-much larger image.)