Wet Weather, Seabird Survey (III)

Sunday. One last time, up and out of the house before daylight. A surprising lot of people on the beach at first.

A lot of the time you couldn't see anything except rain, clouds, floating greys. The waves came in. There were no birds to record on the data sheet. A lot more miscellaneous drift, pieces and jumbles of wood in all sizes. Mostly no wrack, though here and there a line of conifer tips and seaweed bits, extremely delicate.

It rained and rained. Heavy, light, heavy again. There were fewer and fewer people. After the two official walks— to Ellen Creek and back, to the end of Rialto Jetty and back— I sat on a log and watched and listened a long time as the tide rose. Time passed. I was very contented.

Two views of Ellen Creek

Though I'm glad the 'wreck' is over and Rialto is back to rarely having beached birds, I found myself wishing for just one, to assure myself that I was being observant enough to find them if they had been there— despite all the rain on my glasses, intermittent head down against wind, and so on. Speaking of wrecks, EW's article came out in the December 7th High Country News: The Wreck. Since I had not been able to find him any distressed or damaged birds the day we went to Kalaloch, instead of framing the article with a bird identification process, he framed it with the only handy bit of human interest, me. Yikes. My name is the first two words of the story.