Walking the Beach #82 (Dec 2007)

 

This may be the last entry for the year due the busy holidays. It’s the day before Christmas; very calm, clear and cool but the humidity makes it feel warmer. For two days the tide has been up to the riverbank where we access the beach and this is the first day we could walk along the river, although the tide is still quite high. Daisy was house-bound for a week after a neutering operation and this is the first we’ve seen her, not that Izzy missed her heavy-footed jostling efforts to play with him. She has the endurance, flexibility and nimbleness of youth. I’ve learned to be forewarned by the slight tinkle of her dog tags as she rockets up from behind in case she happens to clip my leg, because she can hit right at the knee and drop you like a professional football player if you don’t brace for it.

Another reason Daisy has been house bound is that she had been in heat and a male dog had appeared, mated with her and hadn’t left the area. He appears to be a stray too with no collar, but healthy. It looks like these were pups last year for Christmas and abandoned now just before Christmas when a new crop of puppy will be given away! Daisy’s new owners don’t need another dog and placing found-dog ads in the local newspaper didn’t locate an owner, so the animal control folks were brought in. The male is very cautious, though, and a trap had to be set. It seems to have worked after a few days because the trap is gone, Daisy has been allowed out, and the male hasn’t appeared.

A heavy rain occurred right after the last high-high tide leveled and smoothed the beach. It changed the smooth sand to a dimpled surface.  The next high tide, a smaller one,  smoothed the sand part way up again. Then in a few places where water flowed off the bank it left a woven pattern. Most of the fallen leaves that had collected in windrows are gone, probably buried.

Only contrails are present overhead this morning and a good twenty old ones are visible, but grouped on one side of the sky like they were all pushed over there. Four active trails are being added to this collection.

Two more dead birds are on the beach close to our starting point and a few tens of yards apart. Both are seagulls and neither appear damaged.

Only three oyster boats are out, two far out but further downstream than normal, and the one small boat that works close to shore. A container ship is headed upstream when we start out. Behind the ship a quarter mile or so a tug pulls a large black barge. Barges are often loaded with piles of sand or gravel that make characteristic shapes above the barge. This barge shows none of this, but the sides look high which could mean it’s empty and riding high or just that it’s a different type of barge with a different load.

We make it almost to the turnaround point before the high tides stops us. On the way back Daisy discovers and attacks a large cube of Styrofoam and tries to demolish it leaving little pieces of plastic at several places on the beach before I can wrest it away.

An interesting bullet-shaped pink Styrofoam float marker with a green band and engraved owner number washed ashore. It’s totally covered with barnacle footprints where they attached and then broke away. It looks like it has been used for a few years before breaking loose. All the others I’ve seen have been white and painted one or more colors. This one looks like the pink color is throughout.

Walking the Beach #81

Only a few leaves are left on trees and a small windrow of fallen leaves have washed ashore along the beach. Over several days the leaves have mixed with sand and some are being ground up. This must be what leads to periodic swaths of ‘tea leaves’ appearing, as the leaves disintegrate and age.

Most leaves are larger maple, sycamore and oak varieties. A small amount are tiny, fingernail sized and som of tese are seeds that may be from tulip trees. They look like pine cone seeds except the seed end of the ‘leaf’ or petal is angular, not round like the pine seed. Very few tulip trees are in the area so I thought. The beached seeds must number in the tens of thousands so few tulip trees are certainly scattered along the river nearby.  On warmer days small flies gather along these areas perhaps because the moisture level is just right.

Kudzu leaves are totally gray now. They don’t fall off, or not immediately, and when they do will stay with the vine unlike tree leaves that launch from a higher altitude.

Today is cold and it looks like warm weather has finally finished making short visits. It’s breezy, but not cold enough to be uncomfortable. Still a light coat is welcome.

Far-out tongers, often two to a boat, have been out every day. Today they are strung out like morse code with one then a hundred-yard space downstream to a group of three followed by another hundred yards to one, then a hundred yards, two, and a hundred and finally another single boat.

The oyster dredgers appear sporadically, now, sometimes one small and one larger, at widely separated locations. A crab boat is even less visible, but does still appear every few days.

 

At one small area where runoff washed a thin layer of clay from the bank over the sand at its base, the half-inch thick clay collected in a oval depression several feet long and a couple wide. When the clay dried it broke into small pieces and each curled, the result looking like a shallow bowl full of thick brown potato chips.

A thin layer of liquid clay spread across the soft sand can make a surprisingly firm surface when it dries. It can be treacherously slippery and soft, too, while wet. The amount of moisture isn’t obvious until you step on or into a surface. The firm version is interesting. The wet is the type that stays on the sides of your shoes until scrapped free with a stick!

No new gopher tracks have appeared. The couple places where they appeared are barely visible and would be long gone had they been closer to the water line where tidal movement could reach them.

Two sea bird bodies are on the beach, one near the low pier and the other farther along a couple hundred yards. It’s a seagull near the pier, high up on the sand and looking undamaged with beautiful sleek white and gray feathers. The other is in the water and also looks undamaged. It’s smaller than the gull, a white body and black wings from just a quick look. The bill is short and sturdy. The legs are pink and webbed.

Between these two bodies is a splash of white feathers on top of a rootball at the end of a dislodged hardwood tree on the beach, the one I have to creep under or climb over each trip. It’s seven or eight feet to the top of the root and dirt cluster. The feathers could belong to seagull, but probably not to the unruffled looking body nearby, by the low pier. Nothing other than feathers are visible.

Daisy, who likes to drag half-decayed fish and birds home takes a liking to the gull and speeds triumphantly home with the prize. Izzy pays no attention such things.

 

Walking the Beach #80 (Dec 07)

 

It’s getting colder now. We’ve had days that started in the 60’s and dropped twenty degrees by evening, while a normal day starts and ends cool with a warm mid day. Today it’s calm, overcast and grey, as well as in the 50’s, which will drop to the 20’s tonight for the first hard freeze. It’s a good day to rake leaves; they’re dry and won’t blow about. The high tide level on the beach is marked with small windrows of leaves and while leaves still trickle down, the flow is dwindling. The colors are fading, too.

We walk later nowadays to capture warmer temperatures, just the opposite of summertime. No birds today. Heard a single cry of loon yesterday. A couple days ago another flock of cormorants attacked a patch of river but without the seagulls.

The small oyster dredger is back near the turnaround place. Several far out tongers are back after a few absent days. Meanwhile one larger dredger appears each day somewhere in the bay.

Workman gloves wash ashore from time to time; never in pairs. Most are rubber coated, a black one here, yellow there, blue another time. Once it was a knit glove that could have been used as a liner. I started making photos of them. One stuck up out of the sand like it was the last part of a buried person.

The last two days one or two gophers have left tunnels in the beach sand near the base of the bank. A single tunnel in two places meanders along about thirty feet. The two places are fifty yards apart.

One day while looking in the vegetation along the bank base for a small stick to throw for Izzy a sand spur attacked my finger. It’s the first one I’ve seen in our area although they are plentiful along the ocean south of us. It is not a welcomed discovery and hopefully won’t be repeated.