The Sound of Waves

Which brings us to yesterday, June 9: I went to the ocean.

IJ asked for pictures of elk. No elk by the highway on Beaver Prairie. I drove via the side loop past Quillayute airport. No elk on Quillayute Prairie either. Only once have I seen them out on the prairies in the summer. Don't know where they go...

Except for one eagle sitting in the river, the only wildlife at all at all were the itty bitty flitty birds singing in the woods behind the beach. Never saw a one of them, but they were rocking out all afternoon. The only little birds I know by ear are white-crowned sparrows and canyon wrens, and it wasn't them. Even had I seen the little dudes, I'd probably not have been able to identify them. Happy enough just to be an ear tourist.

Rialto Beach, June 9, 2013 (Click for larger image.)

There was a lot of kelp on the beach, each big mound a single plant— but brown kelp are not plants, they are in the Kingdom Chromista (1)(2)— torn loose and bundled up onto the shore. Wonder just where, out there, the kelp beds are. Plenty of nice waves. The tide was coming in. I thought I didn't have the energy to run away from the waves outbound, or scramble through the drift on the return; so I turned back from my walk after a while, and sat on a log and read. Got so absorbed, a wave sneaked up and washed up my legs and into my hiking boots. Eeek.

Rialto Beach, June 9, 2013 (Click for larger image.)

Later I decided, oh I might as well go home; but when I got to the parking lot I realized, 'I can't leave now, the ocean is still making the sound of waves.' On this silly thought I went back out onto the beach in the other direction, and sat on another log. Pretty soon it occurred to me that if I can't leave while the ocean is making the sound of waves, I'd get to stay there forever. Oh, well, maybe that won't work, huh...

The foam in some places left iridescent bubbles in the wrack. (Click for larger image.)

The whole train of thought was so entertaining and silly it made me smile, and pretty soon I was smiling and feeling quite contented. I slid down off the log and sat in the sand and among the smooth stones, since the tide should by then be going out. A wave washed really rather close, however, and looking REALLY close since I was down at eye level with it.

Soundscape for Cee. Sorry there's so much wind. Rialto Beach, June 9, 2013.

Eventually I did come home. I presume the ocean is still making the sound of waves.

Shout-out to @shinyinfo , usually in urban Michigan, right now in California for a librarian convention and Seeing the Ocean while she's there. She inspired the act of will that got me on the road, late late late but hey I got there. Also: thankyou, Olympic National Park.

The Ocean on Sunday

Did went. I decided the whales either were at La Push, or not; and that I was happy to have seen one a month ago, and happy to know I could go look again. But really I needed a long listen to the sound of waves. So I went to Rialto Beach, and had the nicest time in months. Sea stars, anemones, black oystercatchers, gray sky turned blue etc.

Rialto Beach, May 18, 2013 (Click for larger image.)

I ambled out

Bryozoan, Bull Kelp, Rockweed (Click for larger image.)

toward Hole-in-the-Wall,

... (Click for larger image.)

beginning an hour before a not-very-low low tide. Maybe there wouldn't be any tidepool critters with the tide at this level, I thought, but yes there were.

Giant Green Anemone (Click for larger image.) Chiton (Click for larger image.) Pisaster ochraceus (purple sea star) (Click for larger image.)

Bird nerds will be happy to know I don't only greet cetaceans (and other charismatic megafauna, rivers, or stray sweeps of landscape). I also talk to birds. When I heard oystercatchers whistling and saw a pair circle past, all flappity flap, I too flapped my arms. 'Hi,' I told them, 'Hi darlings.'

Full confession. Later I had this guy nearby on a rock and I started edging closer to get a better picture. Bad me. After a while he squawked indignantly and flew away. No cheerful sounding whistles that time. 'Sorry, sweetie,' I told him.

Black Oystercatcher (Click for larger image.)

Eagles in the forest trees behind the beach. On the way home, an eagle sitting in the Quileute River from the pullout behind the beach.

Blurry eagle. (Click for larger image.) Quileute River eagle (Click for larger image.)

I kept looking back along the beach, unable to understand how it can still be so beautiful when we know we have spoiled the world. It's done. See what we have lost.

Not a single panoramic still in the camera. All the little videos I took for soundscapes have mostly only the sound of the wind blowing across the camera. But they are where the panorama of waves sweeping up the beach are.

Rialto Beach panorama, May 19, 2013 Rialto Beach panorama, May 19, 2013

Shoutout to @7shores for putting me in mind to go listen to the waves. Thankyou, Olympic National Park.

Red Alder Catkins

Where the Elwha River flows into the Strait, the new landscape architecture remains, at least as of March 29: flowing straight out, the new sandspit gone or rather smooshed strait-wards creating wide shallows even at low tide. There were eagles hanging around, and black oystercatchers, grebes in the water and maybe a loon or maybe no. The light was murky, it was hard to see. The camera wasn't happy at all, nor was JL who had had sunshine at her house and dressed accordingly.

River Flowing Out, March 29, 2013 (Click for larger image.) A little movie Blurry eagle (Click for larger image.)

We found a drift card buried in the sand behind the beach, released only two days before and already washed over to the backslope. We threw it back into the river to try again to get somewhere, though this may not have been the intention of the middleschool scientists who had made it.

Driftcard (Click for larger image.)Bloodstar (Click for larger image.)

Later we wandered back through the woods along the riverbank well inland; in New Mexico you'd call it a bosque. There were itty bitty birds, and some mergansers on the river. Exuberant red alder catkins.

Red Alder Catkins, Elwha River, March 29, 2013. (Click for larger image.)

Later still, we went to the Blackberry Cafe in Joyce. It was sunny in Joyce.

Mostly Being Together with Friends (In Another Country)

We started out even earlier on the 23rd, to make the ferry from Port Townsend to Whidbey Island.

The ferry Kennewick (Click for larger image.)

It had SNOWED a lot right there around Keystone Harbor where the ferry lands; and no snow at all within a couple of miles north. Very odd. We hustled ourselves north across Deception Pass and up across the border to South Surrey, BC, to visit friends. Saturday—Sunday—Monday. (On Sunday PG went down to Bellingham to visit other friends.)

We ran about locally, just north of the US/Canada border, variously seeing the Peace Arch, our familiar Mount Baker from a completely different angle, and lots of birds. On Saturday afternoon after PG had a quick nap, we drove around through White Rock, Crescent Beach, out on Blackie Spit, and into Elgin Heritage Park, birdwatching all the way.

Downtown Vancouver from Crescent Beach (Click for larger image.) The owlhouse in Elgin Heritage Park, along the course of Chantrell Creek... (Click for larger image.)

Sunday PG went off to Bellingham and the rest of us had a long slow morning (three breakfasts!), then went out to Serpentine Fen for more birds and more landscape and more sightings of Mount Baker and more failed photos.

A Shoveler in Serpentine Fen. About the only bird pictures that came out were shovelers. Lots of shovelers... (Click for larger image.) What the GPS exif data says about where all those failed photos were taken (Click for larger image.)

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.)

February Ibis Walks Away

Even though I'm not in Florida any more, came home on Saturday, here's another ibis. Also taken from mom's sliding glass door. Well actually, I dart out and stalk them. Him. I'm guessing it's the same bird, though that represents an assumption that ibis have some kind of site loyalty, which of course we don't know AT ALL, nor where they sleep at night, or basically anything else about them...

Late update: I love them because they show, as EW says below in the comments, "the combination of elegance and goofiness is so obviously possible." Though in fact I'm a bit old for either quality...

Florida Does Ibises

Away in Florida doing family stuff. Not much to look at, really. Everything not plastic is paved in inhabited Florida. But there are ibises hanging around the lawns and median strips, perching on the light standards... These are photos from last month. January ibises, not February ibises.

Ibises Leaving a Parking Lot (Click for larger image.)

There is no place wild, yes I know that. Humans have amended and affected everywhere, the air the ocean the swamps and deserts and forests. But I rejected this particular way of tailoring the earth 48 years ago, moved to the west and never moved back. Tho here I am for the moment.

Ibis By Momma's Window (Click for larger image.)

High Tide at the Edge of the Ghost Forest

On Sunday, did went west. It was gray here in town all day apparently, but by golly there was sun at the ocean. It began opening up at Lake Crescent, and just kept getting better.

Lake Crescent, Olympic National Park, December 30, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

Eagle at the Lake (Click for larger image.)

Pretty much all I wanted to do was to sit on the beach and read, but it was high tide. No beach. I found a log to sit on that seemed likely to be above sneaker-wave range, and watched the occasional extra-high waves wash salt water right into the forest edge among the ghost trees for a whole hour after the high-tide time marked on the tide tables.

Rialto Beach, Olympic National Park, December 30, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

Where I was sitting I could see to the north, and my body shaded the book. Almost right away I fell into it— Louise Erdrich's The Round House, wow— and would be gone away; and when I'd come back each time, there it was, the sunny ocean, the sound of the waves:

... (Click for larger image.)

The closest a wave came, it only caught my attention because I was taking a picture of two hikers as they came along the beach, and it washed them up to their thighs. I did a quick assessment: do I need to grab my stuff and scramble further back? No. But just in case I was wrong, I picked up the book and held it above my head.

That wave is probably the one that got them... (Click for larger image.)

There were a few eagles in the day, one in the tree on the point along Lake Crescent (where one often is); another at a turn in the shore along the Quileute River (ditto), one along the highway somewhere past Bear Creek. Not much of gulls, or ravens, or little flitty birds in the woods, or sea ducks.

To look south I'd have to be squinting into the sun, so I didn't, hardly at all.

James Island, Rialto Beach (Click for larger image.)

The web doesn't yet have a way to grant @vcmcguire what she wants, "Wish I could get a few deep breaths of salty Pacific air." But probably Cee is willing to share her soundscape, which might gratify a different sense:

Soundscape for Cee (Click for larger image.)

Thank you, Olympic National Park.