Friday, October 09, 2009

(Saturday, Monday, Tuesday) Yes, Still Here

Did went to the ocean on Tuesday. Lots and lots of pelicans, and a porpoise, who porpoised on by showing his sweet little dorsal fin, and then again back in the other direction. Almost no surf, the tide just rose in a quiet way and started going back down again, with quiet waves.

Pelicans are normal year-round neighbors for Californians. But not up here. Each separate string of passing pelicans makes me happy. All my pelican photos were out of focus. Eeee-too-bad, some of them would have been really grand. So I have to show a quiet-surf picture instead.

Quiet Waves, Rialto Beach, October 6, 2009 (Click for larger image.)

I didn't see any dead birds, but would only have seen them if they were in the surf line. I was definitely not looking. Haven't heard from my COASST mentors lately about how the scoter wreck is proceeding. My blog post about surveying the dead birds on Third Beach was cited by the Peninsula Daily News (note link on top), and one of those photos was used in the COASST news section. It seems odd to me that apparently nobody else was making a record of the context, at least not publicly. Lord knows there were COASST surveyors out there taking formal ID photos of dead birds the whole time.

Oh and yes, went with WC on Saturday out to Salt Creek. While we waited for the Audubon people and the vulture lady, we wandered around the park,

Salt Creek Flows Into the Strait, Early Morning, October 3, 2009 (Click for larger image.)

beautiful warm morning, surely the vultures will move across the strait. And so they did, but crossed the shoreline way to the east, over the mouth of the Elwha River instead of where we were. Distant flapping specks through the Audubon man's scope, flapflap, flapflap. The vulture lady counted several hundred as she peered through her scope. Meanwhile WC and one of the other birdwatchers and I were more interested in the ship traffic. We saw the sub escorts, Silverstar and Gemstone and two Coast Guard cutters move out to the west as a group, then turn around heading east again. Sure enough a submarine conning tower appeared among the parade, and after a while you could actually see the body of the sub. Oh my, really large. Probably longer than all four escorts end to end.

On Monday after work I went one more time to look for leaping salmon at the Cascade on the Sol Duc River. It is the time of year when the sunlight at any time of day is always late-afternoon rich and beautiful. But the river is very low. There were fewer fish in the pool below, and only one fish moved. He bounced off, splat, and washed back down.

The Forest at the Cascade, October 5, 2009 (Click for larger image.)

Now to see if changing the title makes the automatic email go again...

1 comment:

Sky said...

as usual such lovely photos of life on the peninsula!