Walking the Beach #79 (Nov 07)

Another cold morning, but gray and overcast, like snow weather, but no wind and the tide is way out. Very small ripples are slowly rolling in, so small that where the water meets the sand, there’s no motion towards shore. Traffic noise from a distant highway can be heard because it’s so still. The traffic noise is a constant rumble punctuated, as they say, with periodic big truck sounds .

One lone heron ahead and downstream of us – Daisy, Izzy and myself – lifts off from the shore and heads further down. Later it, or a relative further out, heads upstream about the same time as two canada geese head the opposite way. Those two may have been part of the trio that went up yesterday, perhaps taking a relative home.

A small woodpeker surprises me by its nearby appearance on some vegetation covering a piece of riverbank that had collapsed onto the beach months ago. It’s black, white and red; probably a piliated type. It makes a peeping sound as it flits around and soon disappears on up the bank. Woodpeckers like kingfishers have a built-in 50 yard rule where they never let you get any closer than that and it’s rare I manage to surprise them as I round some piece of the bank or big tree stump.

The dead rat/muskrat is gone with no evidence of who or what removed it. The tide did not come up that high, but where it did the water was splashing a lot because just above the faint high water line are little splashes of sand tossed on top of the smoother base.

No evidence of the robin from yesterday is visible around the now-exposed tree on the mud flat. Nothing washed up on the beach, either. That was a strange event, it’s flight into the river.

The dogs only follow partway today for some reason. They often lag behind, checking all the places around the piers where other dogs have been, then catching up as I reach the turnaround. While Daisy was with us at the beginning, only Izzy appears as I head back. Sometimes he also heads home on his own. Today he was barking at some black bird or crow on the beach before I arrived.

Not far from where the dead rat had been there was a bad smell for several days that seemed to come from the bank or one of several patches of vegetation at its base. The dogs even nosed around the bank as if they noticed it, too. It’s the first time for such a strong sewer-like stench and it could be another dead animal, but one isn’t obvious and the smell discourages much searching.

Some wood burning is also noticeable today because the air isn’t moving enough to disperse it. This isn’t the pleasant leaf burning odor, but a more acrid smell caused by smoldering wood.

Eight or nine far out tongers are present and a nearer single moving dredger. The tongers are always clustered with a couple outcasts at either end. It looks like a bunch of guys having a bull session while working. Perhaps the outcasts really are being left out.

On the way back some strange rumblings can be heard lasting for half a minute or so. They happen a couple times and can finally be identified as big rocks being dumped, probably for a riverbank protection project. The rumbling is very distinctive. These rocks oftentimes weigh a quarter ton and make such low rumblings that if you are next to the truck you can feel the sounds as well as hear them.

Walking the Beach #78 (Nov 07)

It’s cool this morning and windy, windy enough to whip your pants legs, tumble leaves along the beach, make you keep your hands in your pockets and lean slightly into it on the way back. So going down was easier, but you know it’s going to be worse the other way; we jogged part of the way back just to get it over with. So it’s long sleeved shirt, jacket and knit cap weather.

The wind is blowing parallel to the beach, but the waves are rolling straight in. It’s like the wind changes direction, 90 degrees, as soon as it hits land.

The waves are dirty from churned mud they stir up as they come ashore. The wind has cleared the air, pretty much, and only a few light clouds are up there. Despite the noisy wind and waves you can still hear a boat motor coming over the water.

The leaves make tracks along the sand. It looks like many tiny animals with different types paws have scampered about.

The tide is out and just before the new #2 fancy pier (versus the #1 fancy pier of long standing) it has uncovered the bottom of a small cast iron bathtub. It’s covered with heavy rust and the four feet are just rusty nubs. It’s only about three feet long, which seems a little short for a bathtub and is buried near the remains of a set of steel steps, the type used in factories or on big ships. Both could have been thrown over the bank, been thrown off a ship or been washed out during a hurricane.   Just the very bottom is visible.

The #2 fancy pier has two boat lifts as does the #1, but only one has a roof.  Both of the #1 lifts have roofs.

Some pier owners have brought in their boats for winter storage. The #1 pier still has one lift occupied. (The lifts are made of two broad slings that can be lowered under the water so the boat can glide into them.) This pier owner also has a freestanding platform nearby in the sand. It’s about ten feet square and mounted on pilings similar to the pier with a set of steps to the platform that’s five feet high. A small flat-bottomed boat with a 2.5hp motor is hoisted by hand under the platform in a homemade trailer made of plastic pipe with two big plastic wheels. The wheels leave crenalated tracks in the sand, tracks with square notches running up each side.

The robin was gone from yesterday’s safe place, but Daisy was with us and just past that point startled one, probably the same, from nearby kudzu. Like yesterday, it flew for the water, but this time it went straight out where a fallen tree trunk was partly submerged. It almost made the tree then went into the water and was gone! Daisy followed it and couldn’t find a trace, but kept looking. This was about a quarter mile from the turnaround point and the dog was still searching around the tree when Izzy and I returned about ten minutes later. I kept looking back to see if she found anything, but nothing happened.

A small flock of Canada Geese, about twenty-five, flew up in tight formation a few hundred yards downstream from the turnaround. They were probably startled by someone because they settled right back into the water.

The dead muskrat, or rat, is face up, now, and you can see its teeth, two long ones up and two down, both in the middle like a rabbit.  It’s pretty furry, too. The paws don’t look webbed, if that’s what muskrats have.

Walking the Beach #77 (Nov 07)

 

 

Fall leaves are leaving a thin layer along the beach and more are slowly being added with the gentle breeze this morning. It’s cloudy, but several commercial jets and one fighter appear beneath this during our walk.

A new dog often goes with us. She is Daisy, a very young, mostly black lab, mixed with something else and very energetic. Izzy is a tenth her size and goes on the attack when she wants to play, which is often. He has little choice, she is so heavy handed/footed and young-clumsy. She was a stray without a home who turned up a couple months back and a neighbor took pity. This morning she flushed a Robin from the kudzu and captured it at the waterline. It must have been injured or sick for this to happen. While it was rescued and left in a safe place, tomorrow we’ll see if it survived.

The description of medium-sized oyster boats with the V type hoist was a little off on looking at the only one out this morning. The hoist is closer to the bow than the stern.

The river water is much clearer nowadays. This is due to the shortfall of rain. Normal rainfall washes topsoil from farm fields and it clouds the river; helps form the mud flats, too. Less rain means less soil in the water.

A dead rodent on the beach is a first. It might be a rat or a small muskrat. They look very similar and even googling each hasn’t helped, so far.

It’s warmer today; back to shirt sleeve weather for the moment. Three Canada Geese fly northward overhead, less because of the weather than nearby forage.

Jellyfish have been in the news lately, but not here. A few small ones have washed ashore, a couple inches across and lacking any visible tentacles. The news has been that huge numbers of very large jellyfish are appearing around the world and the most toxic forms have spread from Australia to other continents.

 

Walking the Beach #76 (Nov 07)

T-shirt weather has changed to a light jacket version, but today we had both. During our walk it was cool with enough humidity and still air to bring moderate fog. A loon sounded twice, a bird that’s not normally heard here.

Bird life declined during the hot and dry season and the only regular birds were one or two herons and periodic kingfishers. Great white splotches along the beach showed where herons have bathroomed, but during the walks the birds are always high up in trees along the bank.  The loon is an exception.   Another are two pelicans that appeared several days back, the first since springtime. They were heading upstream.

Another exception was a flock of cormorant mixed with seagulls.  Over two hundred cormorants were swimming, diving and flying about over a football-sized patch of river.  The seagull were flying amongst the airborne cormorants; none in the water.  Looked like the seagull were harassing the other birds, trying to steal what they were eating, probably a school of fish.

Signs of the river otter appeared again at the turnaround point and its tracks are often visible as we proceed. Having an oft-washed beach leaves a clean slate making such tracks easily visible.

A small oyster dredger that started with two men and shifted to one is usually close-in, near the turnaround. Today it was absent, though other, larger boats are out. My son noted, during a visit, that while the close-in boats move about, the group that gathers much farther out seems to be stationary. Through the binoculars you could see that the watermen in these were using oyster tongs. An experienced neighbor explained that the distant oyster beds were public and only oyster tongs can be used. The tongs, which are about ten feet long, require a lot of upper body strength for all-day sessions. Google the term if you want more info and to see pictures.

 

The tongers were absent for a few weeks and on each side of that time only a couple were out. Recently as many as 18 of these ‘far out’ boats were present, the most seen at that location this year. All summer, also, two crab boats have been fishing the same area. Crabbers move over the entire bay while the oyster boats that do move only cover one or several small areas of an acre or so. The crab traps used here are black-coated wire, so when a crabber has a load of traps to distribute the back half of the boat starts off topped with a huge black cube of stacked traps.

The oyster boats are of three types. The tongers use a simple open boat with no superstructure, usually. The small dredgers are similar to tonger boats but have an 8-foot post mounted about midway, closer to the stern than the bow, and topped with an arm that extends about 4 feet out. A pulley at the end of this arm allows the dredge to be dropped and lifted. I don’t think the post pivots. Rather, the operator has a second line attached to the dredge to swing it into the boat. Several guy wires anchor the post but are almost invisible from a distance.

The next larger size dredger has the post, a larger one, and a slightly longer beam attached at the base angles out like a fishing pole, forming a V with the first post. Wires anchor the first post and one connects the top of it to the angled beam where the pulley for the dredge is attached. The bottom of the posts are attached more towards the stern than the smaller boats and I think the angled beam can swivel once a loaded dredge comes up to swing the load aboard.

Walking the Beach #75 (Nov 07)

 

 

Let’s call this gap since the last entry the Dog Days of Summer — very little going on. Meanwhile the kudzu reached its full growth for the season. The kudzu develops scented flowers, blue ones a little like to sweet peas. The vines finally buried the large onion patch on one section of river bank and now periodic nighttime frosts are beginning to kill the leaves, the dead parts turning gray like weathered wood.

Unusual beach bodies that appeared over the last few months included one skate, one adult eel and one deer, a doe. The skate was about a foot and half across, the eel two and a half feet long. The doe quickly disappeared from sight, either washed away from shore or buried; I’d vote for the washing because the sand is too shallow. Parts of the skull and a few long bones washed up shortly, the result of warmer water on the decay process. Nowadays fresh deer tracks are visible each morning in the sand. The deer population has increased in the area so much so that one farmer had to shoot 120 of them to protect his 50 acre crop. Of course the dry summer reduced forage for wild life and that has driven them to eat things they usually avoid. The farmer, a hunter, had to bury all the carcasses because the warmer weather ruined the meat.

For several weeks blue-black wasps hop-scotched along the beach looking for spiders to capture. A surprising victim was a small land crab about the size of a nickel attacked by four of them. I didn’t stick around to see how the wasps handled the result.

A new pier was installed just upstream from the fancy one and almost as elaborate. The stairs from atop the bank descended through two landings and straddled a jetty before reaching the pier. A short second set of steps descends from the pier to the beach on each side of the jetty. The remnant of an old set of stairs at the bank top was the starting point of this project. Just the other day a couple months after pier completion some signs of erosion appeared on the bank under the stairs and washing down the bank to fan out across the beach towards the pier, as if a small swimming pool had spilled its contents over the bank. No other erosion signs were obvious anywhere along the bank.

Our fall colors appear to be at their best and mixed with the evergreens. A very dry summer did not affect the result and may have improved them, nor did it have much affect on the small streams and springs issuing from or through the riverbank. However, the amount of water did decline and several wet spots dried up. Leaves are falling everywhere. Even the cypress trees lose their very fine needles, turning brown before dropping. A pleasant cypress scent is strong now perhaps because more seed pods have fallen. The pods contain lots of sticky sap where the fragrance is greatest.