Same Bird, Different Tree

Out near Hole-in-the-Wall on Rialto Beach.

... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)

Earlier in the week, COASST sent out an alert about a mini-wreck (outburst of beached birds) and a reminder of the protocol for recording large numbers of birds in a single survey,

Thanks to early reports from Third Beach, Shi Shi, and others, we're seeing an uptick of "true puffins:" Tufted Puffin, Horned Puffin and Rhinoceros Auklet on northern Washington beaches in January. For those of you around for the algal bloom in the fall of 2009 - don't panic! - this is a "mini-wreck" in comparison.

but I was not surveying, just paradin' the beach. Spent more time down near the surfline than up in the drift. But really I don't think there were any dead birds here, no puffins nor anybody else. Though they were being found to the north and south, if any had arrived on the swept-clean Rialto beaches, they were carried off or buried.

Soundscape for Cee

Where Skates, Rays and Chimeras Fit Into the World

Dark on the beach on Friday. It was so gray and dim that I kept thinking that dark patch of sand over there, those cobbles in the hollow, that blackish cut end of driftwood, anything might be oiled. Not. I even sniffed the end of the log. No oil smell, of course not. The oil has not come this way. As usual, there were no beached birds at all. Nothing there but beauty, a dark undistinguished beauty.

Looking North from Ellen Creek (Click for larger image.)James Island from Rialto Jetty, February 11, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

What I think of as the Raymond Carver point, where(ever) on the beach that Ellen Creek comes together with the Pacific Ocean, had shifted back south again from its temporary northward position last month. A couple of eagles flew by just there, very vocal, and landed in a tree a little ways behind the beach along the course of the creek. They went on talking to each other for a few minutes. Gulls. A few seastars washed up in the surf line as the tide came in. A skate carcass behind a log; images: (1)(2).

Ellen Creek on February 11, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

I just wasted at least an hour trying to make clear to myself where skates fit into the world; who could resist 'skates, rays and chimeras'? I'll spare you all but this (since you probably don't care):
          Class Osteichthyes (bony fish)
               + Subclass Actinopterygii (ray-finned fish)
               + Subclass Sarcopterygii (lobe-finned fish)
          Class Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fish)
               o Subclass: Elasmobranchii (sharks, skates, and rays)
                     * Superorder: Batoidea (skates and rays)
                     * Superorder : Selachimorpha (sharks)
                o Subclass: Holocephali (chimaeras)

It didn't rain until I was reaching for my notebook to record the end time of the second survey. My pen was missing and I looked down in case I'd dropped it right in that thought moment; there were raindrops on the cobbles. For the record, since this was a COASST survey, I will mention that the last time I found a beached bird was two large immature gulls on September 5, 2010; and before that, not since the end of the wreck, on 11/14/09.

And yes, this was the day that Egypt's revolution had its climax. I left home very late, because I was watching AlJazeera English online. And they were on my mind all day, those millions of people who went to the streets and turned the world upside down almost entirely peaceably. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, millions of Egyptians. Thank you, Egypt.

High Surf Advisory

Saturday was a having-it-all day: high tide with storm surf for a few hours, then some charismatic fishes leaping up the Salmon Cascades, then a terrific bird talk with an identification for the September 5 mystery-birds.

It was supposed to be a space between storms, cloudy no rain. And the high tide only a 7.1. 'Oh,' thought I, 'I will go to the beach, take a walk, and then sit and read.' But the moment I came around the curve where you first can see the ocean, I understood there was a flaw in the plan: surf breaking way out, and lots of foam (and also rain).

Oh storm surf, how could I have forgotten about you. #bigswelladdictagain http://twitpic.com/2s0gx0about 20 hours ago via Twitpicmb in Port Angeles
mir_b

Pelicans, too. Any day with pelicans in it is already a good day. But I got tired of pitching the camera up at the wet sky or out over the waves and pushing the button without much hope of success. Blurry waves and microscopic pelicans. So no pelican new pix.

Rialto Beach, September 25, 2010 (Click for larger image.)

(I checked the NOAA warnings when I got home and there was nothing, but today they tell us it's still surfy out there:

...A HIGH SURF ADVISORY HAS BEEN ISSUED FOR THE NORTH AND CENTRAL WASHINGTON COAST...WHICH IS IN EFFECT UNTIL 3 PM PDT THIS AFTERNOON. SEAS HAVE REACHED 15 FEET AT THE CAPE ELIZABETH BUOY THIS MORNING. THIS IS THE HIGHEST THE SURF HAS BEEN SO FAR THIS SEASON."

So I spent a couple of hours watching, sitting on first one log, then another higher up the beach, then another. A lot of other people were doing the same, not always being careful. Some people came along the beach who had gotten caught in a wave up to their waists.

On the way home, I detoured up the Sol Duc River to see if the salmon were jumping. I assumed not, as there didn't seem to be much water in the river at the highway crossings, but I thought I'd go see with my own eyes, and anyway the forest is very beautiful there. There actually was a cheerful plenitude of water in the river at Salmon Cascades, and by golly the coho salmon were jumping. Not too many. Jump. Wait. Jump.

Sol Duc River at River Mile 59 , September 25, 2010 (Click for larger image.)The Forest at the Cascade (Click for larger image.)

Decided not to try to capture a fish in flight with the camera. Too hard; pretty soon you stop seeing them as charismatic embodiments of life at its most determined, and instead see only one missed photo op after another. So I just watched. This one from last year will do, no?

A Coho Salmon on October 18, 2009 (Click for larger image.)

In the evening, Barbara Blackie's talk at the Feiro about Olympic Coast birds. She talked about our own familiar critters, common murres and auklets and puffins and murrelets and sooty shearwaters. I was looking out the window at Jupiter rising incredibly bright over the Strait, when I heard her say something about 'tens of thousands of sooties'. Immediately I thought of the flocks of mystery seabirds that had been on and over the water north of James Island at the beginning of the month. I asked after the talk, and sure enough she thinks my skillion floating and flying seabirds were sooty shearwaters, she heard there was a shearwater event on the outer coast earlier this month.

I just KNEW somebody would know, disgraced myself by asking the impossible question ('please tell me what did I see even though I couldn't see clearly enough to describe it to you') over and over until someone knew the answer.

The NOAA folks at the talk said that although there was an algal bloom in progress offshore, there was so far not a mortality event. I reported I had seen a whole lot of latte-colored foam stirred up by yesterday's swell. If there is a wreck, it probably won't be scoters, they are finished molting and can just leave (which last year they could not).

Days Are Scrolls

"Days are scrolls: write on them only what you want remembered," Bachya ibn Pakuda, 11th century (copied out of the prayer book this morning). I'm in Florida, the usual mis-planned family trip.

I'd rather think about home:

On the ferry home from Vancouver Island last week I saw a humpback whale.

OrcaLab has posted a blog entry about the A30s, the orca family we followed most of the day on the 11th. There's a gorgeous audio file included in the entry.

Decided the many small seabirds I saw flocking and floating early in the month could maybe have been auklets. No reason to think so really, but I'd rather think of them as Somethings rather than Unknowns. Update on September 25: Barbara Blackies thinks my skillion floating and flying seabirds were sooty shearwaters, she heard there was a shearwater event on the outer coast earlier this month.

Tim McNulty emailed that Nalini Nadkarni, the canopy biologist, says branches in the high canopy she cleared of mosses were essentially still bare ten years later. So I might have to stand several decades with my arms out to grow a moss curtain in the understory of the rain forest.

JL from COASST emailed that there is an algal bloom developing, and "there are white wing and surf scoters on beaches in the Kalaloch area. The majority were still alive, but there were also dead birds on each beach that she checked. We now have a similar report from the mouth of the Hoh River. We have no definite information about beaches north or south of that area." She asks all the volunteers who work beaches on the outer coast to go do a survey as soon as possible and report on conditions. I'm in Florida now, and working next week. Can't do my beaches until maybe Sunday next. By then it will already be known how large a 'wreck' is in progress.

Home Monday night. Back to work at the college on Tuesday.

Two Glimpses of Citizen Science

The Value of Dead Bird Watching, an article about the seabird wreck last fall and about Julia Parrish, the founder of COASST (the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team); it's by Eric Wagner, the writer I took out to Kalaloch on a COASST survey last fall,

and another profile of Julia, Redefining the term ‘Hip to be Square’… Introducing Dr. Julia Parrish.

Wet Weather, Seabird Survey (I)

Friday. Up and out of the house before daylight, to get to Makah Bay with my COASST mentors M-S and JL while the tide was in our favor (and anyway the days are very short.)

On our way out of town we stopped at Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary's warehouse for sample bottles and freezer packs. The bloom of the algae Akashiwo sanguinea is still happening out there in the ocean, though not in quantities sufficient to distress birds. MS planned to get water samples both at Hobuck and in the marina at Neah Bay to send to the Northwest Fisheries Science Center for testing. One of their boats is in there, a Hurricane Zodiac looking like it was ready to drive its own trailer out the doors; and all their dive gear; and endless shelves and tubs and stacks of science tools. Coming along on this survey is a great opportunity, both because M-S is the boss and knows every bird, and everything about them, and is happy to talk science All Day Long; and because her beach, Hobuck Beach (maps, 1 & 2, and a nice video from youtube), is a deposition beach. There are ALWAYS beached birds there, so it's a good place for training new volunteers, as well as no-longer-new volunteers like me who still mostly can't identify a bird carcass when she's alone with one. :-(

MS & JL at the beginning of the survey, still south of Hobuck Creek. (Click for larger image.)

Rain on and off all day, and many beached birds, something like 27 (JL has the data sheets, and beyond a certain point I was not keeping a separate list in my notebook). All but three were 'refinds', birds tagged on previous surveys. They don't wash away again from Hobuck, (the way they do from my beaches, in fact presumably washing away before I ever see them). The most frequent finds were northern fulmars, both light and dark forms; several red-throated loons; a couple of common murres, a large immature gull, a white-winged scoter, a perfectly enormous common loon. There were also several marine mammals (dead ones, that is), and a whole lot of sand dollars.

We crossed Hobuck Creek, and began heading north towards the Waatch River. Since there were three of us spread out across the wide beach, we could cover it pretty well, though most of the finds were far at the back of the beach, close to the bank and nearly up in the grasses. Bird after bird, sometimes two or three or five at a time.

Got absolutely coated with sand from head to toe, because when there's birds to identify and record you gotta get down in the sand and measure things and handle things, and crawl around variously, dragging your rain poncho through the sand in such a way that it's as wet and sandy underneath as it is on the outside.

When we reached our turnaround point at the Waatch River, there was some of what appeared to be Akashiwo foam, though up to that point we hadn't seen any. MS took water samples, and a sample of the foam. As we headed back there was now foam coming in on the high tide where it hadn't been earlier.

Sampling foam on the beach near Waatch River. (Click for larger image.)

By the end of the day JL and I were pervasively damp, sandy, and chilled. MS, the pro, was still going strong: we stopped in Neah Bay at the harbor for a water sample, and at the Museum shop, for Christmas shopping ;-)

Updates

An agitated email arrived yesterday from the COASST people, again again there is "a lot of Akashiwo sanguinea foam on the coastal beaches." Northwest Public Radio had a story about it on Tuesday. So far no distressed birds reported. Apparently the beautiful cleanswept beach I saw Saturday was only a lull in the ongoing event. The Kalebergs saw the same beach aspects the day before, on Second Beach: swathes of clear beach, and a lot of long-familiar wood moved or removed. They have comparison photos.

Now the beaches are slimed again. Come on algae, go to sleep, it's winter.

Regarding the elk on Quillayute Prairie, a big "Aha." According to Erna Gunther, in Ethnobotany of western Washington : the knowledge and use of Indigenous plants by native Americans, "the Indians, meaning the Quileute, burned over Forks and Quillayute prairie in order to lure elk and deer to feed on the young fern shoots." Other sources say the same(1). The big field in Beaver, where I saw the elk last winter, is also a prairie that predates current uses, and is thought to have been maintained with fire by the Quileute before the time of European settlement.

I'm reading a terrific small book about a trip to find surviving, even thriving, Olympic oysters on the far Vancouver Island coast. The Living Shore : Rediscovering a Lost World is the perfect mind-rinse to follow Margaret Atwood's grim The Year of the Flood, which I just finished. ('Dystopia' is the most frequent label the LibraryThing taggers give that one. I'll say.)

Haven't gotten a good representative photo of my new workplace yet. Peninsula College has a handsome campus with great views of the harbor and the Strait, and a gorgeous new (opened September 2008) library. Big windows. I can stand at the circulation desk and see Victoria across the Strait (weather permitting), or watch the pilot boat chug out around the end of Ediz Hook, rendezvousing with the big ships. Being in an academic library is something new for me, and I don't yet have a clue how to write about it. I watch the student traffic flow in and out of the library, young ones and older ones, busy working on transforming their lives. Haven't been tweeting, and I miss it; but at Elwha we were busy moving bookshelves, and the college is not yet mine to write about either.

Students at bus stop; harbor; Ediz Hook; Strait; Victoria beyond (Click for larger image.)

The Hurricane Ridge camera has been broken for a few days. The Port Angeles Inn harbor cam was pointing up at the mountains until a couple of minutes ago, but I messed up and didn't save the image in time. The south-facing cam at the airport gives us this:

Wings Of

I went to do my regular survey for COASST on Saturday. The weekend before, during the big swell, there had been improbable amounts of foam in some places but on 11/14 almost all of it had been washed away or, if blown above the tides, reduced away to a grainy pale brownish residue. On Rialto Jetty there was some notably new drift (those bright red-alder trunks really stand out), the gulls were very active both over the river and over the ocean, the foam coming in was mostly the clean white stuff that sinks right in with a fizzy noise like bubble water shaken up and opened too fast--

Fresh drift, Rialto Jetty, 11.14.2009... (Click for larger image.)

and I had one beached bird. The wings of. (Well, yeah, with a bit of breastbone and some connecting stuff, but basically if it's not a measurable and identifiable part, it doesn't count.) With only wings, all there was to measure and write down was the wing chord, and all I had to go on for identification in the field guide was the wing table. That part— unshipping the pack, laying out the tools, measuring, writing down— doesn't take very long. Flipping through the book, looking up each bird whose wings were the right size, changing my mind, measuring the one measure over and over (absolutely definitely 31 centimeters every time), thinking some more, sitting on a log and mumbling to myself ("No! This mantle is definitely not dark!") is what takes all the time :-) I decided it was a northern fulmar.

Northern fulmar, wings of. (Click for larger image.)

For COASST, the formal ID photos: 769b, 769c, 769d, 769e.

When I got home, illustrations in Sibley of the light form of northern fulmar, and photos on the web, gave me a little confidence. OK, then. Northern fulmar. A bird that lives on the open ocean. OK.

On the Ellen Creek beach segment, the shore was mostly swept clean; plainly the waves in some places washed right over the berm, sometimes all the smaller wood and even the pebbles pushed up past the really big logs, and nothing at all on the sand. Some small accumulations left here and there. In one place there was (part of) a skate carcass. No dead or distressed birds. At Ellen Creek itself there was some smaller wood, but most of it had been carried away.

Ellen Creek, Rialto Beach, 11/14/2009 (Click for larger image.)

On the way home I took the side road that loops up onto Quillayute Prairie, and there were elk in the field to the east of the Quillayute airport. I was driving along thinking about the eagles I saw apparently squabbling over Lake Crescent the previous weekend, and the seal I saw off Ediz Hook, and how we respond to wildlife, and about the phrases 'charismatic megafauna' and 'marquee animals'; and there by golly right out the window were the Olympics' marquee animals, munching peaceably in a field, miles and miles from the contiguous protected lands of the Park...

Elk near the Quillayute airport (Click for larger image.)

Somewhere To the South of Us

Late in October, COASST reported algal bloom resurgent, distressed birds and dead birds and lingering brown foam on the beaches to the south on the Long Beach Peninsula; and to the north, MS's email said, "Birds on the north beaches alive on 20-22 October but by 23-25 October only a few alive on the beaches. The counts are between 50 to 60 dead on each of the 3 major beaches in the north (Hobuck, Sooes and Shi Shi). Species about 50:50 red-throated loons and common murres on Hobuck and then almost entirely common murres on Sooes and Shi Shi."

So I was sent on October 31 to Kalaloch North to survey with a writer preparing an article for High Country News. The idea was he would see actual handling of dead birds by amateur citizen scientist (me).

Last Tuesday when I was out with Rocco at Rialto there had been quite a lot of foam, calf-deep at one spot; but no birds. It seemed likely that further to the south we'd have birds to work. It rained all Friday night, the Sol Duc River as we drove over its bridges en route west and south was really fluffed up, high and muddy. We thought, 'Working in the rain, storm surf, dunes of foam, more birds than we can handle...' But instead we had sunshine, a beach swept by high tide, very little foam (1)(2), and no distressed or dead birds. (I was glad, but not so good for EW's article about COASST.)

Near the mouth of Kalaloch Creek we were chased up into the drift by a tide that didn't seem to know it was supposed to be going out and instead was getting higher. We retreated up one of the beach access trails, and came down again at our start point. We looked fairly thoroughly, and picked up a lot of trash on our return from the north end of the beach. No birds. By then the tide really was going out. There was the wide flat Kalaloch Beach to examine, but the retreating tide left us no beached bird offerings in the surf line.

EW spotted a peregrine falcon. There was a group of happy live scoters out in the surf. It began to cloud up. Gulls stood around. We headed home.

Kalaloch North, October 21, 2009 (Click for larger image.)

Is the Sun or the Fog Going to Win

MP was cheering for the sunshine, I thought if we were going to be out on the beach for hours I'd just as soon have it foggy at least half the time.

Little James Island from Rialto Jetty, 9/25/09 (Click for larger image.)

After a while the sun took control where we were, which made MP happy. Off to the north you could see that the fog had not surrendered. The tide was coming back, the waves were beautiful, the gulls flying past were shining in the sunlight, there were not so many people on the beach, oh it was a fine day.

Tide Coming Back, Ellen Creek reach of Rialto, 9/25/09 (Click for larger image.)

This was Friday, we were out there to do the COASST survey of the three Rialto beach segments. We are keeping up the frequent resurveys for as long as the algae bloom is happening and the birds are still dying in elevated numbers (which I said I would not mention any more, sorry); and they asked if I was up for doing all three Rialto segments, instead of my usual two.

MP wanted to come, to see how it is done. We had a total of four birds. On Rialto Jetty, refound a white-winged scoter that AE and I had tagged on the 21st. On the Ellen Creek beach, two new birds, a common murre and a white-winged scoter. On the Hole-in-the-Wall beach, a surf scoter. We were working against the incoming tide by that point. MP went on to Hole-in-the-Wall to see if there were any more birds to work while I did #767, the surf scoter.

The minute she walked away I rediscovered that left alone with a dead bird I become excited and confused. My 'cootie discipline'—being careful about what I touch with the gloves, what I don't touch without the gloves— lapses entirely, and I find myself doing things like cinching down the tags with one glove off and one glove on; I flip the ID guide madly to and fro, change my mind over and over, remeasure, and forget to write everything down. I've put all the ID photos on a CD so don't need to show any here, but: wing feather detail of #765, a common murre if I got it right (you may remember that the last murre I thought I had turned out to be a rhinoceros auklet); and #767, a female surf scoter.

We had time to sit for a while in the sun and watch the waves, see the gulls fly by. Only a handful of pelicans, they must all be already well south of here. On the way home we went up the Sol Duc to see if the fish were jumping at Salmon Cascades. There were a few fish in the pool below, cruising around, but nobody jumped. Have to wait until after the next rain, probably, to watch Life At Its Most Determined. But it was nice to see the river.

Salmon Cascades, Sol Duc River, 9/25/09 (Click for larger image.)

Last Post About Dead Birds

OK. No more. Maybe some links to scientific conclusions. (Current thinking: a strong non-toxic algae bloom that creates a foam in active waters destroys the waterproofing of the birds who are in molt who therefore can not simply fly away to somewhere more congenial because they have no flight feathers. No longer protected from the cold waters, they die of hypothermia. The scoters are in molt. Bye bye scoters.)

My COASST mentor says my last-month bird (1) was not a common murre but a rhinoceros auklet. I did wonder, when I saw how much bigger the murre was that JL and I identified last Monday, and plainly different markings. OK, my first bird, the 'feather-duster corpse', was a rhinoceros auklet. And, she says, the mammal that weekend was indeed a harbor porpoise.

Birds In Bunches

Not that it wasn't beautiful out there on Third Beach, but we weren't paying much, well really not any, attention to that.

Third Beach, Olympic National Park (Click for larger image.)

We were working the bird wreck, me and BR and AM from WDFW. 62 dead birds on the north half of the beach. One red-throated loon, one pelagic cormorant, and 60 scoters. I was data recorder, A. tagged and took photos, B. did measuring. When I left at sunset they were headed for the south half of the beach. B. didn't expect to find nearly so many on the south half, the north half is where they accumulate. Hope he was right... A. loaned me her spare headlamp, good thing, it was too dark to see in the forest before I got back to the car. The two of them were going to keep on with headlamps until they had finished (I think rapidly cover the whole beach and move all the dead birds to one spot, then do the workups with the lamps.) The survey doesn't count unless you do the entire assigned segment all in the same day.

Sunset, Working Fast, Bunches of Birds (Click for larger image.)

I rarely stopped long enough to put notes in my pocket notebook, it's all on the data sheets that B. has. But I think there were about a dozen white-winged scoters, and the other 48 were surf scoters.

Today going to Rialto Beach with AE, another COASSTer. Please god Rialto should have only a dozen or so as it did last week. Lucky for me, Ann is driving. I am TOTALLY WIPED OUT.

PS Gonna get a headlamp immediately. Headlamps are the bomb.

Part of the huge accumulation at the north end of Third Beach (Click for larger image.)

Could, Would, Should

What I could do today is rendezvous with WR, a really skilled birder, to help him survey Third Beach. Third Beach will be just about the heart of darkness for this bird wreck. The problem is there's a longish access hike to get to the beach, and a longer stretch of beach to survey. Slow hiker that I am, and with not much stamina, I'm not sure I would be an asset as a helper. He's a pro, a wildlife biologist for WDFW (though in this instance functioning as a COASST volunteer).

I suspect I would just slow him down, and he can record and tag a skillion surf scoters without any help from me. Should I go anyway? Am I just talking myself out of it out of laziness, or being realistic?

Whichever, gotta call him soon.

Most recent article on the wreck: (1).

Bird Wreck on the Outer Coast

There are a lot of news stories about our bird wreck.(1)(2). So people who saw us at work out at Rialto on Monday, measuring and photographing dead critters for COASST, thought they knew what we were doing; they approached us to ask if right there we had perhaps just now solved the scientific mystery by examining this very surf scoter. Oh, we'd say, we are just collecting data, the real scientists are hard at work at figuring out what it means. And they would tell us where they had seen other birds, Ruby Beach etc.

In the end JL and I lucked out, rained on for less than an hour of our day, and only 10 dead birds to work up. Five on Ellen Creek beach, five on Rialto Jetty. Seven scoters, one common murre, two gulls. Also in two separate places a live scoter, one a male the other a female, each sitting far up the beach, not moving but aware. Here are JL's photos of bird #756, a surf scoter. And the living distressed male we saw.

Ten was few enough birds to work up that we got both beach segments done even though we didn't arrive on the beach until almost one o'clock. I could not have done my two beaches without JL, especially at the beginning when we had three birds pop pop pop the minute we got down on the beach. In the rain. And just then, though the tide was going out and we were well above, a wave came up high and sloshed over the clipboard and the field book. Very dismaying. But by the end we were quite old pros at recognizing scoter legs and scoter body shape at first glance even from a couple of paces away. Speeds the process a lot if you already know and only need to confirm.

Plus there were lots of occasions for pelican appreciation breaks as they cruised by, especially by the end of the afternoon as flights of them were angling low across the jetty beach to go in and land on the river. Must have been fish around, we also heard a sea lion barking over there on the invisible other side of the jetty. Whatever is happening apparently not causing stressed pelicans.

I told all this to AE, who also surveys the Rialto beaches for COASST. She wrote back, "I had visions of you last night with headlamps on after dark still tagging the pesky critters." Heaven knows we had the same visions, especially after the wave caught our gear, in the rain, on the 3rd bird within a few yards.

Now just have to clean out and reorganize my bird pack. Which seems suddenly to be full of psychic dead-bird-cooties in addition to the more tangible damp gear and sand. I don't even want to touch it.

MS wrote me, "Dead birds not quite my thing." It's not like they're my thing either, they just kind of come with my 'citizen science' backpack. By the end of the day yesterday I had a better separation between datum-for-science and recently-deceased-sentient-being. Ten dead birds will do that for a beginner. Though there was a moment when I was nose to nose with a surf scoter (corpse), so fresh that the brilliant sunset colors of his bill were unfaded, and I had to tell him/it how beautiful it/he was.

Ellen Creek was running.

Pelican Appreciation Break (Click for very-much larger image.)

Nearly Due East, Nearly Due West

And all of two minds about what I'm doing today. There's a 'wreck' in progress on the outer coast, many birds washing up live and dead, and COASST wants us to go do our surveys soon, so they can try to understand what is causing this mortality event. But I'm in the middle of putting together the next issue of the Santa Fe Poetry Broadside, and (truth) not eager to find myself alone on the beach with 10 or 15 dead birds that have to be recorded properly for science...

Sunrise this morning, nearing the due east point (which from the deck is by the light stanchion at the baseball field two blocks over).

Sunrise, September 13, 2009. Nearing due east. (Click for larger image.)

There was lots and lots of action out on Ediz Hook on Friday. The tanker Prisco Zaliv Amerika (flag Cyprus, home port Limassol) came into the harbor escorted by tug, let out her anchor, the pilot boat went over and picked up the pilot, etc. The tug Edward Brusco pulled his barge Paul Bunyan past the Hook and on into Puget Sound (or anyway eastwards). Many many little recreational fishing boats were up to something, tiny boats, families, little kids in life vests, their trailers putting them into the water or pulling them out. Oooh I just love the moment when the trailer is pulled up the ramp, drizzling harbor water onto the roadway as it goes.

A seaplane no bigger than the little boats suddenly landed, taxi'd to the dock, and disgorged a man with a satchel over his shoulder; the plane was already gone before he made it off the dock, though he was walking fast and proceeded right in through the gate of the pilot station. (Where was he fetched from? Why such a rush?)

Pilot arriving, September 11, 2009 (Click for larger image.)

The sun set already behind Striped Peak on Friday, so no more sun-drops-neatly-into-the-ocean-off-the-Strait for more than six months, eee-too-bad. And I haven't left the house yet, so I guess it's Poetry Broadside today, beach survey tomorrow.

Sunset, September 11, 2009. Nearing the due west point. (Click for larger image.)