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.

In Which Many Places Happen

On Wednesday, went with EW to Neah Bay. She spent two happy hours in the Makah Museum, then we went on to Hobuck Beach. There were gulls, and quietness, one intact sand dollar, one passing eagle, and one dead bird (a gull). EW lives in the desert. All our greenness and damp air and oceans and so on, including grey skies and bits of rain, are very pleasurable for her.

Hobuck Beach, August 8, 2012. Sand dollar, Dendraster eccentricus (Click for larger image.)

On Thursday, a very full perfect day. Over we went on the ferry to Victoria. Ferry was late on account of thick fog, was foghorning itself along for 3/4s of the trip until popping out into the sunshine, then got stuck behind a huge double barge full of dirt (huh?) on its way into the Inner Harbor, then when finally the ferry could move it went too fast and failed to stick its landing, had to try a second time to line up the ramps correctly before we could debark.

Houseboats in the Inner Harbor, Olympic Mountains on the skyline across the Strait, Victoria, BC, August 9, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

For these three reasons we lost nearly an hour of our planned time in the Royal BC Museum, which turned out to be ok with me because I had become disoriented and claustrophopic in there and had to go outside, even though the First Nations artifacts were amazing, mural-sized vintage photos are a whole different experience from seeing the same ones in books, and the dinosaur exhibit was also terrific.

T Rex, Royal BC Museum, Victoria (Click for larger image.)

Then we trotted off to our reservation for high tea at the Empress Hotel, EW's lunatic desire. Finger sandwiches, scones, little tartlets and other fancy desserts, all on a three-story stand and much tea and faux Brit elegance at vast expense (EW's expense). You put the milk in first if you are having proper British tea. And of course you let the waiter pour to refill your cup. EW got up, refilled her own cup and put the milk in after. The waiter pretended to reprimand her. 'M.I.F. is the rule. Milk in first.'

WC fetched us from the curb in front of the hotel after tea, and off we drove west along the shore to an easy-access beach. This was carefully planned by me: Wednesday we drove west to Neah Bay and back on the Olympic Peninsula shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Thursday I wanted us on the Vancouver Island side, looking back across to where we had been. The weather cooperated. West we went to French Beach Provincial Park, admiring the other side across the blue water all the way along. EW and I took off our shoes and got our feet wet, then she flopped out for a nap on the cobble shore while WC and I sat on a log and discussed my health. (Sigh.)

French Beach Provincial Park, August 10, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

Leisurely indirect drive back into Victoria proper, and an impromptu early supper in WC & PW's sun porch, pizza and leftovers of our Empress high tea goodies. It was fine. They dropped us off at the ferry terminal early and went home to presumably do something more sensible about their dinner, and EW and I had a happy time loving the Victoria harbor and all its activity. Sea planes, water taxis, the Clipper setting forth, etc etc while we waited for the ferry, which was again running a little bit late. We sailed for home. A brass band on a small boat paralleled the ferry as we departed the harbor, giving us a mariachi serenade. We waved and cheered for them. Woo hoo. I mean, really, whatever gods orchestrated this day outdid themselves. A waterborne mariachi band sendoff?

It would be sort of terrific to live on a houseboat and let the water taxi deliver your groceries, no? (Click for larger image.)

Mariachi Send-Off in the Inner Harbor (Click for larger image.)

So Friday we went up to Hurricane Ridge. Conditions were against us. The air was thick with Asian smoke again, as it was a few weeks ago; you could barely even see Mount Olympus; also the road to the Hurricane Hill trailhead was closed for paving work. By necessity we stuck to the trails near the Visitor Center, and managed to have a tiny bit of Lupine Heaven even in the flat smoky light.

Bailey Range & Mt. Olympus behind, in smoky air, August 10, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

Lupine Heaven on Hurricane Ridge, August 10, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

Saturday we went to Rialto Beach. See next post.

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.)

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.