Sea Urchin Regret

Beached bird survey in Clallam Bay, COASST beach segments Slip Point and Middle Point. Friday, April 26. E. and I tagged along to keep JL company. There are just about never any dead birds on any of the Strait beaches: you drive out there, you walk the beach, you find nothing, you come back. Though in fact JL found a cormorant on the Slip Point beach earlier this year.

Westbound we took WA112 the whole way. There were elk by the highway.

Elk by Highway 112, April 26, 2013 (Click for larger image.)

We traipsed across the footbridge over the Clallam River, out on to the beach; and headed east towards Slip Point. You could see snow up on the hills on the Vancouver Island side of the Strait. (At Clallam Bay on the Washington side you are perhaps straight across from Jordan River along the West Coast Road on the Canadian side.)

JL mentioned we had just missed a 2-foot minus tide. There is supposed to be great tidepooling at Slip Point. Since it was a weekday and one of the best tides of the year, I was a bit surprised that the tidepool end of the beach was not aswarm with middle school students, waving checklists of invertebrates. But it was quiet. We had the beach to ourselves. At Slip Point just the old lightkeeper's house remains; the lighthouse itself and the boardwalk out to it are gone. This beach is really the community beach for the town of Clallam Bay. You are definitely not in the wilderness. The houses on Salt Air Street sit right behind the berm. :-)

... (Click for larger image.)

JL had trouble getting me to turn around once we reached the outlying rocks of the tidepools. Just on the first bits of rock there were carpets of aggregating anemones, and limpets and chitons and barnacles, oh my. Sea urchins were calling to me further out on the point. I was sure they were there, we had seen broken sea urchin tests in the wrack. But this was JL's expedition. We had another beach to walk, and a lunch plan, and she needed to be home for dinner guests. No time for making my way out to the sea urchins' pools.

Limpets and anemones (Click for larger image.) Where elk? Pin on the right. Where bridge and where tidepools? Pins above left. (Click for larger image.)

Then we quickly moved to the tiny beach segment called Middle Point—no dead birds there either, though more trash to pick up—and then adjourned as is JL's practice to the Breakwater Diner, before the drive home. We took WA113 and US 101 on the way home. No elk, no eagles either. We were home by 3PM.

Wings of a Black-Legged Kittiwake

March 22, 2013. Up and out early, rendezvous at the Albertson's parking lot to join the beached-bird-survey for COASST at Hobuck Beach (map). PG much interested to see how we do what we do when presented with the need to identify (parts of) a dead bird. It snowed the night before, we drove west through a fairyland of snowcovered trees. (No pix.) (Last year it snowed on March 15. Good tsunami debris pix in that post, too.) But when we reached the outer coast, blue sky and sunshine, and so it remained for the whole day. Swans on the Wa'atch River. Not much in the wy of other live birds.

Sunshine in Neah Bay, March 22, 2013 (Click for larger image.) Sunshine at Hobuck Beach (Click for larger image.)

We were seven people altogether, one of us a high school student from Forks, learning how a COASST survey is done as he is considering using COASST for his senior project next year. We found not so many bird carcasses, three new ones, three re-finds. There was a common murre, and the wings of a black-legged kittiwake. So brilliant is the Beached Birds field manual and the identification protocol that we had very little trouble knowing just what we had from the wings (and the manual pages) alone; both PG and S. from Forks learned a lot on this one bird.

Working the kittiwake (Click for larger image.)

There was an area of the beach with a whole lot of fibrous wrack (washed down the rivers from the forests??); surprisingly many razor clams which we've never noticed at Hobuck before; an orange finger sponge; and the usual enormous intact sand dollars.

Orange finger sponge and sand dollar (Isodictya rigida and Dendraster excentricus) (Click for larger image.)

We were also doing a marine debris survey, following the new protocol: photograph anything of note ANYWHERE with the identifying slate to show size, date and location; and gather everything the size of a bottlecap or larger in a GPS-located 100-yard-long stretch of beach, from the grass down to the waterline, and tally every bit of it.

Tallying debris from the transect. (Click for larger image.)

The new protocol follows from the increased attention to debris because of the March, 2011, tsunami. But you usually can't say more than 'might be tsunami debris'. Also might not. We know we see the flying saucer floats since the tsunami debris began arriving; but no proof that any particular flying saucer float is Japanese, still less certain that it was torn loose in March of 2011. A Korean instant noodle packet, obviously not. A notched piece of house lumber? Sure looks like Japanese joinery to me...

Dragging a barnacle-covered float out of reach of the tide (Click for larger image.)Korean noodles. Netting entangled with kelp. Tagged float. (Click for larger image.) A piece of house from Japan? (Click for larger image.)

On the way home we stopped along the Strait at Deep Creek so our leader, HP, could look for a piece of equipment she had lost last week when laying out the marine debris transect for that beach. The weather remained glorious. (We heard later it had snowed in Seattle...). PG says there has to be a picture of me occasionally. Here I am on the Strait at Deep Creek, in my Lewis&Clark pose.

... (Click for larger image.)

Birds in Hand

Rain, sneaker wave, sand in everything, yikes. A fairly large crowd of us (seven people) went out to do the monthly COASST survey at Hobuck Beach. We found two (dead) birds before we even crossed Hobuck Creek, so we thought we might be in for a 20-bird day. We divided into two teams for efficiency, and leapfrogged each other down the beach, one team assigning odd numbers to its finds, and the other even numbers.

It was grey and misty, and forecast for showers after 11AM. "Looks like rain," said GD. "It's fog," said SP, who lives in Neah Bay and who is assigned to cause us good weather every month...

Hobuck Beach, September 28, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

High Tide. Kayakers So Close in We Could Have Counted Them As On The Beach, If We Were Counting. (Click for larger image.)

We worked the birds.

Doing Birds, September 28, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

A Bit Baffled, We Lay a Bird's Beak Right on the ID Page. It's a Match. (Click for larger image.)

The four of us on our team were giving proper attention to a dead pelagic cormorant, nothing left to do but photograph it

Tagging A Pelagic Cormorant (PECO), Bird #87 (Click for larger image.)

...so we were all getting up from the sand and about to pick up our stuff, to get out of the picture or move around to a good angle to take the photographs; and nobody was watching the ocean. Eeeee-too-bad, as we used to say in New Mexico (NM spanglish for ¡Que lastima!) A sneaker wave came rushing up; we ran but not soon enough, were wet at least to the knees, jackets and other equipment on the sand had to be grabbed half-wet out of the wash; SP tried to rescue my pack and fell so she got wet all up the back AND the wave poured into her own open pack and soaked her camera.

Since S lives in Neah Bay and had her own car, she immediately headed back to try to dry her camera. The other three of us sorted ourselves out as best we could. GD searched around in the rearranged seaweed until she found our original tagged bird, though the chalkboard and any ID tools were washed away. We rummaged out someone else's tools and I took its picture, though it was not nearly as neatly arrayed as it had been before the wave caught it and us.

Very sandy and bedraggled Pelagic Cormorant (PECO) (Click for larger image.)

And on we went. It began raining, and kept it up on and off for the next couple of hours. There were lots of birds, we kept flopping our sticky selves down onto the sand to work on them, and the wave-caught team soon felt as sandy and bedraggled as the PECO. One by one we reached our limit for being wet or sticky or trudging in wet sand, and peeled off to head back to the van. That left three people still on task: JL, HP & NM, the few, the brave. All the way back they kept finding birds, you could peer out into the rainy air and see them down on the sand clustered over some late sentient being to give it what amounts to a memorial service: to recognize and identify it, and enter it into the scientific record... In the end we had 14 birds; the last was a puzzle and held the remaining three observers out on the sand at the end of the day for a long time. It was a Northern Pintail. "During migration, they have been seen in offshore waters," says Birdweb. They are in the ID book, and have been found on the COASST beaches before but not often (only 79 occurences on 419 beaches over the past 14 years; compare to almost 10,000 (dead) common murres over the same time frame).

There were elk in the elk fields by Highway 112 to the west of Sekiu. When we picked NM up at her house by the Strait just beyond there, I asked if she ever sees elk on the beach. She said people say they come down to the beach, but she has never seen it...

PS We called SP afterwards from the marina in Neah Bay where we always stop to wash up. She was home and dry, and her camera was resting in a container of rice. As of Saturday it had regained a couple of functions, but seemed likely to get no further toward recovery.

Kelp Dragon

Friday morning we did the monthly COASST survey for beached birds at Hobuck Beach. It was a quiet, partly cloudy day. There were a lot of people on the beach. Of live birds we had 2 eagles along the highway, posing nobly at the tops of trees as if they were wood sculptures; a great blue heron in the Wa'atch River; least and western sandpipers, semi-palmated plovers, a whimbrel. And of course gulls.

Hobuck Beach, August 24, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

(Blurry) Whimbrel with Kelp (Click for larger image.)

It was not a notably low tide, but so much sand has shifted in over the past month that the beach is wide and flat and seems to go out forever, a true summer beach profile. There was a kelp dragon.

Kelp Dragon (Click for larger image.)

Being out with people who know things is an endless delight. Now I know how to distinguish male from female crabs by the underside of their shells.

Boy Crab (Click for larger image.)

There were four of us, and five dead birds to work. Two gulls which were re-finds, already tagged last month (and not the more full of information for being a month more deteriorated). A baby cormorant, still in down. And two rhinoceros auklets, the first of which was so freshly dead it was soft, intact, very much itself still.

HP found some olive shells (Olivella biplicata). The Makah use them for regalia, so HP gave them to SP, our Makah teammate; who accepted them and gave them back to her, to pass on as a birthday gift. A small formal moment; careful hands, purple shells still wet and shining. Giving, returning, passing on.

The village of Neah Bay was hopping with people, boats, floats; gearing up for Makah Days over the weekend. We left HP at the trailer which the Marine Sanctuary maintains on the Coast Guard Base in Neah Bay, to get ready to set up the Sanctuary's educational booth for the event. JL and I stopped for a late lunch in Clallam Bay. There was a deer swimming in the Strait. Half the patrons of the diner went out across the highway to get a better look. When we left, the deer was ashore, sitting unmoving on the beach. We hoped it would recoup enough energy to move up the beach as the tide came in...

"The Trailer": National Marine Sanctuary's home away from home on the Coast Guard Base in Neah Bay (Click for larger image.)

Just for the record, people see summer-resident gray whales sometimes in Clallam Bay, but of course we didn't.

Being Out, Doing Science

Hobuck Beach on the Makah Reservation. We think the weather was supposed to turn good in town; but out here, gray and quiet.

Whimbrels, July 27, Hobuck Beach on Makah Bay (Click for larger image.)

Hobuck Beach, July 27, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

It's the monthly beached seabird survey for COASST. The dead-birds birder team is large this time, seven people. The tide is low and the beach is wide, but with so many people we can cover the whole thing in one pass. It's a long drive (2 hours) and we got a late start. We were on the beach for four hours and the tide seemed really really low the whole time, which is basically not possible, but there you are. For live birds, we saw whimbrels, killdeer, plover, gulls lots of gulls. Heard eagles, never saw them.

At One Point an Additional Wrack Line Appeared, Further Out (Click for larger image.)

We had seven (dead) birds to work, not too hard to deal with when the recorder, the measurer, the photographer and the person wielding the ID book are four different people. Two fork-tailed storm petrels. A baby gull still in down except where his new flight feathers were just coming in. A large immature gull. A sooty shearwater, a northern fulmar (dark morph) and a Cassin's auklet. We had our bird mentor MSB with us or we'd NEVER had gotten the second petrel, he was just a delicate handful of bones; but yeah, a sufficiency of measurable parts when you looked: beak, tarsus, barely visible foot details.

Fork-Tailed Storm Petrel #1 (Click for larger image.)

The Second Petrel (Click for larger image.)

The beach was very clean. SP, who is Makah, says the tribe is doing a tsunami debris survey every Friday, and they are evidently also picking up trash. Hobuck accumulates trash as readily as it does dead birds, so it was surprising to see it so pristine. There were a LOT of people out, surfers, kayakers, stand-up paddlers.

A Lot of People (Click for larger image.)

... (Click for larger image.)

As I said, the beach was clean. Mostly there was only styrofoam, probably left by last night's high tide. We started picking it up on our way back. For the last 500 yards of the return leg, the protocol calls for a marine debris survey, in which you count about one pageful of possible debris categories (and only pick up as you are up for it). This has been being done for about 11 years, a considerable baseline record. But now there is an extremely demanding new tsunami-debris survey which is being developed, which is to cover only 100 yards as far as possible from the beach access and in which you walk a narrow grid, and pick up and tally everything. The seven of us huddled to discuss and discuss what it means, what we should do. It seemed obvious to me that it made no sense WHATSOEVER to do a tsunami debris survey on a beach which had already been cleared and tallied end to end by the Makah Tribe; and that the new protocol must go back to NOAA, to the OCNMS office, for further refinement. Plus everyone was far too tired to trudge back to the further end of the beach, and the first time they field tested the new protocol it had taken four hours... (I was tired and getting crabby. I removed myself from the discussion and ambled to the vicinity of our starting point, read a book. Took a soundscape for Cee.) In the end, the rest of the crew used the old marine debris protocol, listing only this and that, picking up what they could.

Here They Come: HP, GD, JL, MSB, SP, & NM, citizen scientists extraordinaire (Click for larger image.)

Soundscape for Cee. Hobuck Beach, July 27, 2012. See what I mean about the tide?

SP took the sacks of trash to put into the tribe's designated marine-debris dumpsters at Hobuck Campground. The rest of us adjourned to the Marina bathrooms in Neah Bay, to wash up, so that we dared eat our lunches. We're fairly cavalier about whether or not we put on gloves as we handle the dead birds, but it's sort of like the 5-second rule: you know when the ick factor has been exceeded, and then you need to wash or disinfect.

Makah Marina in Neah Bay (Click for larger image.)

Looking Around

The contractors have returned the Elwha River to its original channel at the site of the former (FORMER!) Elwha Dam. Peninsula Daily News (see also the Seattle Times stories) and the Park's dam-removal blog tell us that

Elwha Dam, from the Dam Cams (original channel to left side of image) (Click for larger image.)

For the first time in a hundred years, salmon can move upriver a few more miles, until they reach Glines Canyon dam. (Salmon, come home. Salmon, come home.) Glines Canyon dam is a lot lower after six months of work, and will be completely removed as much as a year ahead of schedule, but is plainly still there for now.

Glines Canyon Dam, from the Dam Cams (Click for larger image.)

Thankies to both newspapers cited above, which are doing great work to keep us informed about the restoration of the Elwha River. We are by the way being welcomed to hike down to the delta at the south end of ever-shrinking Lake Mills. But it's all so very ugly, and will be for a long time... Not sure I'll trudge down there... Well of course I will. Eventually. One of the articles I read asked us please not to step on the plants. A lot of the native veg from the restoration greenhouses is already out there on the former lake bottoms.

It's gone on raining, a lot, and the snowpack up in the Park is suddenly deep.

Data from the Waterhole Sno-Tel on Hurricane Ridge (Click for larger image.)

In fact, all of Washington looks good for water storage in the mountains.

River Basin Snow Water Content (Click for larger image.)

There's a log ship at the T-pier. Will try to score some photos this afternoon.

I spared y'all the sight of dead birds when I wrote the blog post about Friday's survey at Hobuck Beach. But I wanted to mention that we found four dead birds. The tufted puffin had been buried in the sand to where only his beak showed; JL spotted him. The wind was blowing so hard someone had to hold down the immature gull for the record photographs, because the wings still functioned as sails and kept flipping up. The common loon was a re-find, first recorded the month before (protocol says you don't need to re-measure, or take more than one photo, for a re-find.) And the white-winged scoter, oh my, the scoter was fresh and soft and intact, a whole different experience to handle. You could almost imagine setting him on his feet and expecting him to go back to paddling around, except he was entirely limp and dead. We found him (her?) on the way back, by then dragging our bags of marine debris and our tired selves, and with the car in sight; not wonderfully pleased to have to drop baggage, rummage out the tools, and do another bird.

For context, here are the overall Beached Bird Patterns, from the COASST web site.

This Beach Gets Everything

Friday morning early we headed out to Hobuck Beach on the Makah Reservation for the monthly seabird survey for COASST. The weather in town was rainy. By the time we reached the high point of the drive, between Lake Crescent and Sappho (map), it was snowy and downright discouraging. But people were waiting for us and it has to be done every month regardless of conditions, plus I had faith in the forecast, which was for a hole in the weather. It's going to clear, I kept telling JL.

US 101, somewhere west of Lake Crescent, March 16, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

We stopped west of Sekiu to pick up NM, spotted ten or a dozen swans in the Wa'atch River behind Neah Bay, and rendezvoused with SP at the parking area by the beach. By then the wind continued stiff out of the southwest but it looked like this:

Hobuck Beach, March 16, 2012.

We bundled up for wind protection, and set forth. NM was a relative newbie, so we went in detail through the process of identifying each dead bird we found, no shortcuts though in fact JL knew what each was. NM did the measuring, for practice. You get intimate with them by the time you are done giving each late sentient being its proper respect and a place in the scientific record. "We just leave it?" NM asked each time. Well yes. We don't have collecting permits, and anyway the bird belongs where it lies. But her reluctance to just leave it was contagious. I'd look back as we walked away.

COASST Volunteers Identifying and Recording a (Dead) Tufted Puffin (Click for larger image.)

Yeah, Hobuck Beach so reliably holds and accumulates what washes ashore that it is used for training new volunteers: there are usually dead birds for them to practice identifying. (Found the title for this post on my notebook page from the December survey, a quote from someone.) And usually has lots of wrack (this day not so much), dead birds, kelp, sand dollars and limpets and other invertebrates washed up,

... (Click for larger image.)

and marine debris. We citizen scientists are on alert for six particular kinds of floating debris which might be early arriving traces of the tsunami in Japan a year ago. And we found two of the kinds. Four of the big styrofoam floats, and two of the small flying-saucer ones.

Floats found on Hobuck Beach, March 16, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

Also lots of bottles with markings in other languages. Chinese. (Japanese?) [Later: IJ emailed persuasively that it is more likely to be Chinese as there are no hiragana characters, only kanji.] Something Cyrillic. Something Scandinavian [Later: AW says it is Danish].

Bottles from elsewhere, March 16, 2012 (Click for larger image.)Kitchen Table Portrait of Cyrillic Bottle, with Keyhole and Whitecap Limpets (Click for larger image.)

The others were inclined to at least consider that any bottle with kanji on it was fresh tsunami debris. But I remember finding a similar array two years ago in the spring when there had been a big swell out of the southwest. I think maybe even in the case of bottles which may be of Japanese origin (there were others not photographed) they are unlikely to be tsunami-related, just that conditions have fished them out of the garbage patch in the North Pacific Gyre and sent them to our beaches; and anyway there will be no way to say with certainty one way or the other. But the floats? There's a lot of them, all up and down the coast. People who know their beaches know they haven't seen them before...

Hobuck Beach. By this point we have moved on to the marine-debris tally-sheet part of the survey protocol

We came home via 112, hoping for elk. Saw two different herds in the fields.

Elk (Click for larger image.)

One last video. Two of the big foam floats we saw were actually out of reach, on the far side of the Wa'atch River at the north end of our survey territory. One had come to rest, the other was energetically rolling inland, pushed by the wind.

Foam Float on the Far Side of the Wa'atch River, Being Pushed Ashore by the Wind, March 16, 2012