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.)

The Dock at Mosquito Creek

The floating dock which came ashore in the Marine Sanctuary last month, presumed to have been set loose from Japan by the tsunami in 2011, remains in the news. (1)(2)(3)(4).

There's another story I saw earlier, with a closeup image of the concrete-with- rebar-encasing-foam material of the dock. Sounds like the same sort of stuff that PG and I found a piece of on Second Beach in October. Can't relocate the story now, and am on my way down the street to the airport. May add link if I find it.

Ah. Here. And photos galore, thank you Washington Department of Ecology.

Nu?

Update on the Japanese dock that washed up on the outer coast.

Update on the Elwha River. Sediment outflow is building sandbars at the river mouth. The present 'fish window' ends January 1, and the work crews will be lowering the remaining face of Glines Canyon Dam again. Given the amount of sediment which has been coming down the river even without the addition of what demolition might have stirred up, it seems silly that they even bothered to stop... but anyway, we should be seeing cranes and tractors and guys doing stuff in view of the DamCams again, beginning next week.

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...

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.

Awfully Far Away At the Moment

Wandering the web, thinking about there even though I'm in Florida, nearabout as far away as I can be. With the help of Mike Sato's SalishSea News and Weather, and twitter, and the PDN and the dam webcams, I may be 3500 miles away, but my head is still immersed in stories of home.

The arrival of a derelict fishing boat off the Queen Charlotte Islands means NOAA has had to begin changing its tsunami debris models, though they apparently still never acknowlege that Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham have been saying the same thing for six months. Seattle Times has a wonderful story about the Puget Sound pilots who work out of the pilot station at Port Angeles harbor, and another great story about revegetation work in the lake bottoms exposed by the deconstructn of the dams on the Elwha. The dead killer whale L112 died of an explosion. This is going to be a huge ongoing story, and will affect how my friends at the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary can do their work.

It's been raining all week up home, and we are good for snow in the mountains (1) (2). Other places I care about doing not nearly so well for precip and water-storage in the mountains, but it's dang hard to blog via the iPad. Will stop here...

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

I Found One

Tsunami debris? Tsunami debris. Here. Now.

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, the flotsam guy, was here in Port Angeles earlier in the month. He and James Ingraham gave a presentation at the college about the science of flotsam, their computer model, and the likelihoods— including that the earliest arriving tsunami debris, driven by wind as well as the known movements of water in the North Pacific Gyre, could show up at the 8-month point, like now, rather than at the two-year point as NOAA's water-driven models predict. They showed a lot of debris collected east of Neah Bay, including a big float that they were persuaded is surely from the tsunami coast. December 15 story from Peninsula Daily News).

December 16 followup story reported that similar buoys had been found up on Vancouver Island, and at La Push on Rialto Beach (eeeep, that's my beach, said I), and December 18 a story passing on a news story from Japan that "it looks like those used in oyster cultivation in the Miyagi area, The Mainichi Daily News said... Miyagi prefecture is in northeastern Japan and includes the hard-hit city of Sendai."

So on Sunday the 18th, KF and AM and I were ambling along at Rialto Beach. We crossed Ellen Creek, and there far back in the drift was, yes, a buoy, looking just like the one found at Neah Bay that they had on the stage at the presentation. But English markings.

... (Click for larger image.)

I emailed Dr. Ebbesmeyer. English markings, said I, so I assume not tsunami debris. Oh yes, he said, the same as the others and tentatively identified by Japanese officials. Eeeep, said I. Who manufactured it, what do the markings tell us, [doesn't seem very confirmed to me, I really meant], said I. Still doing research, said he.

But really it seems most likely. Why else are these things suddenly up and down the west coast here, exactly as predicted by the computer models for high-floating objects, unless truly they were carried away from the tsunami coast in the spring and now they are here? As will eventually be boats and houses and all the rest of what is now still out in the ocean... Dr. Ebbesmeyer says people in Japan hide mementos in their house walls, and we will need to be cautiously and even reverently attentive to the debris as it arrives, to preserve what traces we find for their families' sake. Oh my.

The One Beach

Off we went to the outer coast. The promised sunshine eluded us for some hours. On Rialto Beach we had wild water, the usual entrancement of visitors by the huge drift logs, a buoy up in the drift with English markings (apparently therefore NOT tsunami debris),

...eagles, oystercatchers, a little tidepooling—anemones, ochre stars,ribbed limpets and a seaweed called spongy cushion that first we looked in the book under tunicates and then under sponges before we found it—and, as Robinson Jeffers said of another place, "unbridled and unbelieveable beauty."

I still feel fine, you know. Well capable of hustling my visitors two miles along the sand to the most beautiful beach in the world, and back again.

(These images a mix of KF's and mine. You can tell mine 'cause my camera makes a grey world blue. (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)

Then we whipped around the corner to La Push, to the point overlooking First Beach, where I'd see whales in April if I saw any which-last-year-I-did-not,-not-once (see next post).