Seven Kingdoms

Much of Thursday I spent on the phone. Lo-o-o-ong talks with old friends displaced the planned expedition to the coast. So late in the afternoon I went out to the Hook again, just as I had gone on Tuesday. It's the right time of year for ducks and shorebirds. Again there were surf scoters around, and buffleheads. Black turnstones; a black oystercatcher working the log boom by the pilot station.

Oystercatcher near the Pilot Station (Click for larger image.)

A little flock of sanderlings were out there by the boat docks both Tuesday and Thursday afternoons; however unlikely it seems that they are treating the boatramp like a beach and running back and forth there with their little windup legs, yes they were. A sea lion hurried past on the outside; it was large, it was porpoising along moving eastward, I got barely a glimpse of head, flippers, head...

Victoria was very clear on the other side of the Strait, the buildings along the waterfront standing out crisply from 20-odd miles away. At sunset Tuesday, the near fringe of the Olympics peeked out through the clouds.

Blue Mountain seen from Port Angeles harbor, December 22, 2009 (Click for larger image.)

At sunset Thursday, Mt. Baker a hundred miles away to the northeast suddenly lit up with a pink glow. I need better binoculars, and a better camera.

Sitting out there in the car, listening to the waves on the outside of the rock jetty, or hopping out with binocs and bird book to try again to persuade myself that really the sanderlings are sanderlings, I was reading Sylvia Earle. In explaining the extraordinary biodiversity in the oceans, she describes the seven kingdoms. Wait! What? Seven? Seven. Um... When I was little, there were two: Plants, Animals. More recently, five: Monera, Protista, Fungi, Plants, Animals. Now we have separated out Archaeobacteria and Chromista. Chromista include the brown algae.

Trying not to tear my hair here, or scream; no bolding, no italics, no caps lock: Kelp is not in the plant kingdom.

This is worse than when they decided Pluto was not a planet, or when I first had to overlay the modern particle zoo on the formerly simple protons-neutrons-and-electrons. You'd think that as a librarian I'd just cheerfully embrace changes in how we describe what we know. Things are still exactly what they are, but the names make a difference in what we see.

Perhaps I better go right out to the ocean and take pictures of a lot of Chromista not-plants washed up on the beach, don't you think?