Shorebirds Make Me Happy

Sunday we went out to Neah Bay, so KB could go to the Makah Museum. Beautiful drive along the Strait, eagle sightings. After the museum, on out to Hobuck Beach for some ocean time. No swans in the Wa'atch River. It rained. We got rather damp.

Hobuck Beach on the Makah Reservation, May 20, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

There was almost no surf, just a quiet walk on the beach, with shorebirds.

Probably the little dudes are dunlin (Click for larger image.)

Probably the bigger dudes are whimbrels (Click for larger image.)

Shorebirds make me happy.

(Youtube offered to enhance the lighting on the video below, and I let it. And myself enhanced the dunlin picture. But what the world really looked like on Sunday was more like the whimbrel image above.)

Hobuck Beach in the Rain, May 20, 2012

There was were also the usual array of sand dollars and turban snail shells and rocks drilled by piddock clams and various bits of this and that. And a buoy of one of the types we have been finding on the outer coast beaches since the fall (and lately in the Strait!), thought to be tsunami debris.

Buoy, likely washed away from an oyster farm in Japan, likely by the tsunami in 2011 (Click for larger image.)

PS. JL confirms the whimbrel i.d., and clarified the image a bit. She says they saw a flock of 25 to 30 whimbrel at Hobuck last week.