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. :-)

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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.

Whales, Waves, Wading

Charismatic megafauna FTW! Sunday the 21st headed for the outer coast, to look for gray whales at First Beach. There were elk by the highway at Beaver Prairie, but I had rapture-of-the-road and did not stop for a photo, allowed nothing to interfere with my pre-determined program: to get out there and See a Whale.

Out on the point in La Push, there was a woman with binoculars sitting on a log, looking over First Beach. "I don't suppose you've seen any whales," I said. "Oh, yes, right... right there, see it, see the sun gleaming on his wet back??"

Yes YES. I waved my arms in giant semaphore circles, and hooted gleefully: primate greeting cetacean. Woooo!

For the next while, the one gray whale (some of the watchers thought they saw two, close together; in which case it was likely a cow/calf pair) worked the area at the nearby end of First Beach. Watchers arrived, watched. You could tell where the whale had most recently surfaced by seeing which direction the watchers were looking.

Watchers Watching, April 21, 2013 (Click for larger image.)

The sea surface was calm, the tide low; it was gray to the south, more blue to the west.

Sky conditions, First Beach, April 21, 2013 (Click for larger image.)

Here's the thing: you can only see them when they are there. If they are there. There's 19,000 or however many gray whales on the move right now, but to see one from the shore at La Push, there has to BE one hanging around to be seen.

I think it (she?) was feeding, all that back-and-forth, perhaps glimpses of a flipper as she tilted on her side in the low-tide water to scoop up a mouthful of mud and amphipods. Mysterious parts appearing, anyway. Which was always pleasing, but the blows are the best part. Whoosh! There it is, the air that they breathe...

I set the camera on burst and took many many pix of empty ocean right where the whale last was.

Perhaps accidentally a bit of whale. (Found in camera.) April 21,2013 (Click for larger image.)

Then gone, and all the watchers too. Time for part two of the day's plan: wet feet, and a sloshy progress to the south end of the beach to get a photo back towards The School at the Edge of the World, one of my most favorite views on all the earth. Seeing the whales goes better with even a tiny bit of elevation, so I couldn't go down onto the beach itself until the whale was gone.

Oh, did I mention the sea lions? Sea lions working the river (what fish are running?), and intermittently barking up a storm. There were lots of eagles. The truly gigantic piece of driftwood was still there (a year later ), still attracting climbers. (Note the woman on top of the top of the roots, for scale.) The Quileute tribal school presented the hoped-for photo opportunity, blue roof with blue water and blue sky. Towards the southwest, it had gotten very dark, it was plainly pouring rain out there. I was 5-layers-warm on top as I sloshed along inside the edge of the ocean, but my feet were freezing. It was actually warmer in the water than on the sand with wind blowing on wet skin.

Walking First Beach, La Push, April 21, 2013 (Click for larger image.) Water Shoes, April 21, 2013 (Click for larger image.)

On the drive home, the elk were no longer out on Beaver Prairie. It poured down rain twice along the way. Then I was home. Shoutout to IJ and @helgagrace for encouragements, and @vcmcguire for the wet feet.

Complete Confusion of Chronology

PG says I must mention that the posts about our vacation days did not appear here in order written, newest on top, but rather were intercalated below carrying the dates they happened. March 21 Shipwatching, March 22 Wings of a Black-Legged Kittiwake, March 23-25 Mostly Being Together With Friends (in Another Country).

Even I can't make sense of what I have done to chronology. It's all because blogs are upside down, yes? I will now complete the disorder with some headline no-longer-news about our last day. On 26 March we went out to the Outer Coast to look for Whales at First Beach. We saw elk on the way, yaay for charismatic megafauna, but no whales at First Beach. The light was flatter than flat, no decent photos. We ate our sandwiches while not seeing the whales, then drove around to Rialto for a little beach time. Beauty, flat light, in truth flat spirits as well. But we were there. As were the elk, still, on the drive home.

Those elk on Beaver Prairie, March 26, 2013 (Click for larger image.)A boat in the channel. Quileute River as seen from the point in La Push where we didn't see whales, March 26, 2013 (Click for larger image.) Rialto Beach in flat light, March 26, 2013 (Click for larger image.)

Coming Attractions

PG has been visiting since Thursday last. We have been on Ediz Hook, at Hobuck Beach (and on the Strait at Deep Creek), up to Surrey BC and back with much running about while there, and to First Beach to look for whales. Got elk on Beaver Prairie instead. Details will follow.

Elk by Highway 101. March 26, 2013 (Click for larger image.)

Hmmm. Am posting these adventures with their actual dates, so they precede this post on the page...

Being Here

While I was gone, and preoccupied, I kept setting aside links to stories from home.

The log yard is nearly empty. At least one logship loaded while I was gone, according to David Sellars' December 15th 'On the Waterfront' column. He says (near the bottom of the story) POS Jade was the 13th log ship of the year to sail from our harbor.

A big dock washed ashore down the wilderness Olympic National Park coast, somewhere nonspecified between Toleak Point and Hoh Head. Is it tsunami debris? Unknown but likely. Japanese writing found on it.

The elk herd in Sequim were hanging out by the highway. Motorists were warned to watch out since they seemed to intend to cross...

Discovered there is a weather station down on the harbor. Who knew? Apparently it's associated with the tide gauge. (1)(2)

'Tis the season to watch for high tide and heavy surf warnings. We had a king tide while I was gone, water splashing ashore in West Seattle, lots of debris and fresh erosion out on the Hook. With all these storms, there will surely be a Mavericks this year. My twitter stream brings me news of events in the rarified realm of big wave surfing, in this case a near-fatal wipeout on Cortes Bank; and I have resumed my not-so-secret winter habit of watching surf videos on youtube. I have watched Mike Parsons ride this wave very many times, and it is still breathtaking...

(Quiet) West End Rhapsody

The tide was receding, and the swell seeming to be diminishing at the same time. What started out quite a lively ocean had begun to settle into peaceable by the time I left. An overcast began to move toward the already lowering sun. What started out an improbably crisp blue horizon became softer.

Rialto Beach, Olympic National Park, November 25, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

The days are so short and the sun so all-afternoon-low-in-the-south, not a single photo taken into the glare to the south, towards James Island. Other than a few gulls, no birds.

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Accidental Self-Portrait, Rialto Beach. (Click for larger image.)

There were a fair lot of people wandering the beach, in family groups and pairs and solo. Many were picking up pebbles. The beach was mostly swept clean of wrack, a smooth slope right up to the drift way back under the ghost trees, so not likely they were picking up anything else.

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Soundscape for Cee Soundscape Number 2

On the way home there were elk on Beaver Prairie, to the west side of the highway. It was already getting dusky, because of the overcast moving in; and I was in a hurry to press the shutter because I was trespassing. But here is the blurry proof:

Elk on Beaver Prairie, November 25, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

PS for @vcmcguire: No, you can't call it exercise, other than the exercise of last minute will that got me on the road when the day was nearly already gone to waste. I only stepped up the pace to a brisk walk when I doubled back to rescue my forgotten wooly hat. But I got out there, sauntering along with all the other extremely contented beach walkers. It must count for something.

Sometimes You Can Have It All

October 2, early afternoon. Time for the dessert course (a peach and more chocolate) of our picnic lunch. From the Second Beach trailhead we drove down to the point overlooking First Beach and the river, to eat and look for pelicans. There were a few (no pix). They would fly by, from the river past James Island, then out over the ocean; then disappear. No idea what they were doing. The tide was still running full, washing in past the sea stacks which open the river to the ocean; with so much water and no boats heading out through the channel, it's hard to remember that the river's present course is not straight out where the eye goes. Quileute fishermen were working their nets in the river. There were seals also working the nets. One of the fishermen was shooting at them.

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Three fishermen having a gam. You can see Rialto Beach to the north, beyond the jetty (Click for larger image.)

We had in mind to round up DG for an early dinner at Toga's Soup House, which closes at 6. So we soon started rolling for home. As we followed a pilot car past the road work on the Bogachiel River bridge, PG was sure she spotted elk way back through the trees (map). Once free of the flag people we did a U-turn and came back again, negotiated for permission to dart down Erickson Road to get nearer the elk.

Faraway elk. (Click for larger image.)

A whole herd of elk were sitting in the shade of some trees. This made PG very happy. Sometimes you can have it all. Dinner was good, too...

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.

Aunt Mimi's Beach

Rialto Beach on Saturday last. Not too much bird action, not too much wave action. For Olympic National Park's easiest beach access on a weekend day at the height of the season, not very many people, either.

Rialto Beach, Saturday mid-day, looking north (Click for larger image.)

When GF and PB and I were out the weekend before, there was an old lady (the fact that in retrospect she may have been no older than me is irrelevant at the moment: an old lady bundled up in scarf and shade hat) looking closely at the pebbles. We asked what she was looking for. Garnets. Just then I flashed instead to picking up tiny carnelians on the beach of Rodeo Cove in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and to tiny garnets right in the trail heading up Arroyo Hondo south of Taos, other states and other times. Wasn't until I came home that I remembered that indeed there can be garnet sand visible sometimes on Rialto.

So on Saturday, I looked very closely for the pink sand, but didn't see any. (See the last image in this post for what might have been visible.) There were nice fresh hydroids and bryozoans washed up close to the surf line, but nowhere was the garnet sand visible. The summer beach profile is different, maybe that's why. Or the tide wasn't low enough. Or whatever. Maybe there's magic involved, like the magic that hid and revealed R. A. Laffery's 'Narrow Valley.' OMG, the whole text of Narrow Valley seems to be out there. I l-o-o-ove the web.

Bryozoan Washed Ashore. Flustrellidra corniculata (Click for larger image.)

I ambled along, eyeballing the foreshore closely. Could actual crumbs of garnet be found? An extremely modest henge-maker had been at work on a log. The sky-colors and water-colors were way richer than these images show.

Very Small Henge (Click for larger image.)

Rialto Beach, MidDay, July 21, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

There's a soundscape for Cee, but it was a little windy out and the sound didn't come out very well.

Soundscape for Cee

I thought about what my friend IJ said about what the word "beach" means to people. When I was in Florida in March, we three younger and more mobile generations of the family went off to the soi-disant 'best beach in America'. I suppose IJ is right. Take a look at the second photo in the blog post I made when I got home. That is what 'beach' means to everyone in the country except those of us who live near the coast anywhere north of San Luis Obispo. I showed my 18-month-old great niece photos from Rialto. Her dad, my nephew-in-law, explained to her carefully that they were pictures of "Aunt Mimi's Beach". (They decided that my name was too hard for Baby Genius to say, and named me Aunt Mimi. Pfffff. OK, sure, change my name.)

No pelicans were yet on the move, it was early. I did see elk on Beaver Prairie. Here, as promised, a picture of the pink sand:

Pink sand, March 23, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Elk On Beaver Prairie Yesterday

It is no longer true that I've never seen them there in the summer; and not just whimsical of me to look carefully every time I drive through, Just In Case. :-)

No pix. They were far back by the trees, flashing their beige back ends towards the highway. I was eager to get to the ocean, so I didn't stop. Hoped they would be still there and better located when I came back a few hours later, but they were gone.

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