Walking the Beach #15 (Apr 07)

 Ah, a people-free day, again. It’s warm this morning and clear with a mid-tide and very little breeze, so we warm up pretty fast. We had a small shower last evening making it much more humid this morning. Raindrop dappling of the sand echoes the rain where the tide hasn’t smoothed things out.

On the way to the beach we pass under a thirty-foot cedar tree and flush a mature eagle. Just as we reach the beach the new resident blue heron from near an upstream pier also flys off at our approach.

Six instead of seven oyster boats are out this morning and only two jet contrails. As I write this I see two oyster boats making an early return, then realize they are connected and the second one is in tow, so there must have been mechanical problems.

A couple dogwoods along the bank are much further along with blossoming than the one we saw yesterday half way up our access road. Several yellow forsythia bushes are also out. Unfortunately I see there are some tent caterpillar webs evident, too, at two places along our route.

The fancy pier now has a second boat in the second, new hoist or sling. This was where the fire could be seen yesterday. From the ashes it looks to have been treated wood, sort of a gray-green color. The ashes would more than fill a five-gallon bucket. Any breeze that comes by kicks up a small green cloud, covering the nearby sand. I guess dilution is the solution, combining wind action and water by way of rain and tide to disperse the toxic stuff.

Disposing of treated wood is troublesome to me because that is all that is used on the piers and large amounts are swept into coves after hurricanes when piers are heavy damaged or destroyed. A small pile of ashes is less hazardous, hopefully, than a very large pile that would result if anyone decided to clear storm debris in a cove with fire. The cove I pass going to the beach with Izzy is a wetland with a small stream and some twenty Cyprus trees. It’s more a low spot than a cove, but a lot of treated lumber was extracted from it after Hurricane Isabel in 2003.

Anyway, we can make it all the way down the beach today. Three Kingfishers set up a clamor towards the end and individually launch from the downstream bank to dance through the sky around and over us to downstream perches.

Lots of pollen can be seen in patches and longer runs of water at the beach edge. A close look at the sand shows a light coating of yellow where the tide turned a couple feet above the waterline. Today’s paper shows a very low pollen count of Oak, Birch and Cedar. An online check from another source shows a very high count, almost the maximum, for today and the following three, made up of Maple, Cedar, Juniper and Birch. What’s on the water agrees with the online report. The Internet version of the newspaper doesn’t contain a pollen count; too bad.

Close to the halfway mark we find a marker float washed up that looks brand new. A waterman must have lost if off his boat. The top half is fluorescent-orange and bottom is candy-apple red. There’s an art center in the nearby town of Smithfield where I’ve dropped off interesting beach stuff and this will make a nice addition. The museum in town has river-related artifacts and is another possibility, but the art center doesn’t and probably should. Besides, the museum has been closed for awhile due to some flooding from an unusual rain we had last October — eighteen inches in less than twenty-four hours!

Other insects besides the tent caterpillars are beginning to appear. A small black fly that circulates low to the ground and around damp sand is evident and bothers Izzy some, but he’s antsy anyway. The carpenter bees are out and have been busy helping with pollination. Two butterflies are out and I can’t identify them, although one is commonly seen. It is canary yellow and black, might be a swallowtail without the tail; has the markings of a monarch, except the monarch is orange and black. The other is mostly black with a band of canary yellow across each lower wing. Another research project, it looks like.

Izzy has finally decided it is warm enough for him to get his feet wet and find some drinking water along our route. He isn’t afraid of the river, at least not historically, but nowadays tends to avoid it, until today. When we get home I have to wipe him off with a damp sponge to remove any pollen, then strip myself and rinse my hair because we have an allergic person inside who is not enjoying this particular time. —

Walking the Beach 14 (Apr 07)

 It’s the other weekend day with one person burning wood scraps on the beach at the Fancy Pier with two larger dogs nearby. We do the usual short beach trip and notice on the way back that two joined bones from a deer leg at the waterline show a lot of activity in the sand around them and they are no longer joined. The activity looks like a small animal, such as a river rat, regular rat, possum or small raccoon had been working on the bones and stirring up the sand in the process. I’ve seen this around some of the bones at another location on the beach before, at least once. No obvious tracks are visible. A single rib, several joined breast bones — that’s what I think they are — that look like flat vertebrae, and a shoulder bone are also in this part of the beach.

No oyster boats are visible, again. You never see them close and to get really close enough for a good look you have to go to their piers. I think most of ours come from a nearby marina at Tyler Beach, about a mile upsteam. Another source is about three miles downstream at Rescue. These are also the two nearest navigation channels that show on our navigation map. These boats probably do the crabbing when it’s in season, too, so you may see equipment associated with both activities at these two piers.

It’s very calm today and partly overcast; very quiet with much less background noise. A couple eagles, one mature and one juvenile circle nearby coming directly over us at one point, an unusual occurrence, before the older one goes off and the young one finds a tree top on which to land. The tree looks pretty flimsy when you see the huge bird flapping its wings as it positions itself to roost.

We head back to the “alternate beach road” up to the surfaced state road and return. The wheat fields we pass alternate with wooded areas, more properly called woodlots because they produce trees that are harvested every thirty years or so. These look like they were all harvested about ten years ago and are dense with soft and hard wood trees combined with just plain brush that’s about ten feet high and impenetrable. None of the kudzu you see in the beach area is present, but other types of vines are and the result looks difficult to navigate, if you had to pass through. This, I think, is not unlike some of the woods that Civil War troops fought in while the woods were burning, making for worse than usual combat conditions.

On the way back we detour onto a wheat field around the back side of the blackberry brambles which line the road by two of the fields to see if any praying mantis egg cases are visible from the back side. Each row of brambles is about eight feet deep, six high and mixed with a few small trees and honey suckle vines (an invasive species I was surprised to find). The brambles include two types of blackberries and raspberries. Only one egg case is apparent and it looks like last year’s. I wonder what happens to the old cases.

We take a return route to a beach access by the last house upstream in our neighborhood.  The tide is in so we just make that a turnaround point rather than try to head down the beach.  Just as I turn around a blue heron about fifty yards down the beach near a small jetty and patch of grass can be seen.  It is intent on fishing and I’m able to stop, slowly extract a camera and take several pictures as the bird makes a strike into the water and recover.   —-

Walking the BEach #13 (Mar 07)

 Well, it’s Saturday and we can only go a short ways downstream because several people and dogs are working around the fancy pier. We can’t go upstream along the beach, either, because the high tide is right against the riverbank rocks, unless you want to clamber across them. They pose a potential hazard because stability isn’t guaranteed. If they’re ok one day and a storm comes through, the waves can shift them and cause instabilities.

I’ve begun carrying a walky talky partly because my wife can call, if something comes up at home, but also in case I encounter a problem, my own or someone else’s. A cell phone might be better, but we’ve only one of those and should have a second, if it is used during these walks. So today it’s the radio, the camera, the binoculars and a tape measure just to take a short walk!

Izzy and I do cover enough of the beach to reach the first jetty because I did bring a tape measure. The concrete blocks measure 2 feet x 2 feet x 6 feet, close to what I measured yesterday, but still no reason to call them one-ton or one cubic yard blocks.

The riverbank for this property is high, but sloped more than others and covered with kudzu, that infamous vine that grows very fast. Right now it’s dormant and leafless, leaving a mat of gray vines like a solid mass of spaghetti plastered onto the bank. A few other properties have some of it hanging over, but vines closer to the beach have been carried away by water action and sloughing riverbank.

While kudzu grows fast and can smother vegetation, it is easily contained and pieces washed away in storms do not seem to take root elsewhere. Not everything succumbs to it, either. It will grow up to the base of pine trees, but not climb up the bark. Some of us encourage it, along with anything that will root in soil on our riverbank, for erosion control. The broad leaves that are present during hurricane season, and tangled vines, do help slow soil loss, but are not effective against even a small amount of wave action. The riverbank with the greatest kudzu coverage has the widest beach and little water has reached the bank base for more than a year, so far.

No oyster boats are out today, but a small boat stacked high with black crab pots travels across the bay in preparation for a forthcoming season. The pots are square cages of light gage wire coated with black vinyl. They can be stacked six feet high and out over the edge (gunwales) of the boat, so from a distance a boat load looks like a black cube traveling across the water; very distinctive.

Izzy and I head up our access road. The weather is cool, but we both are pretty warm by the time we get back; that kind of weather. Also, we appreciate the pleasantness even more because the bitting bugs have not yet appeared, but we know they are coming.

The tent caterpillars are more evident today than last Saturday. Their tents have grown from pingpong ball to softball size and larger. I must check trees around our house for them because they can appear anywhere without warning.

The summer wheat is starting to look unkempt as it gains altitude.

One dogwood tree has blossoms that have just started opening. The new green appearing on most trees is developing different shades and tints of the color. An exception is the maple tree that is producing small clusters of young, rusty-red wing-shaped seeds instead of any leaves to get the jump on any competition. The seeds will begin showering down within a month.

The most interesting tree-development is an unknown species that is producing a seed-related cluster on the tip of every twig making multiple tassels of two or three inch length in a tanish-green color. These trees look like they’ve been draped with dreadlocks.

Despite the recent dusting of pollen on just one day along the river, the few pines along this route are still developing the new pine cone clusters that will soon dump great amounts of pollen. So some other major source of pollen has been at work.

As we start up the road some loud engine noises are apparent from the highway area. We never see anything even when we reach the main road, but the sound is pretty continuous. It sounds like dirt bikes are being raced around behind homes across the two-lane highway. When we get home I notice the sound carries all the way to the beach, standing out from the other background sound always present from aircraft, boats, waves, and ground-based vehicles, including lawnmowers, garden tractors, road graders, and construction equipment. Chainsaws and whole-house generators are also around. So, when a rare heavy fog or snowfall block all this sound, it’s really noticeable and you realize how much activity we have around us even though we are miles from any towns. —-

Walking the Beach #10 (Mar 07)

It’s almost a perfect day for walking,, cool with a slight breeze, although Izzy starts lobbying to return home before we are halfway to the turnaround point.

A few last words about piers, or the one fancy and other low damaged one. The high fancy has a red navigation light on the edge of the roof at the end that is always off during our walks. It’s something to monitor and see if it’s turned on at night during the summer when boats are out, like on the Fourth of July. One of the two boat lifts for this pier has a roof. The second lift was just built and may acquire a roof later. Lastly, this pier has a railing on both sides of the walkway and all around each landing, while the low damaged pier has none. The low pier is also lacking a boat lift, but has no need, being low to the water already.

Several oyster boats are again loosely clustered in a row a half mile out. This morning there are two, a small gap, then one, a gap and two, a gap, and the last two which are next to the skeletal base of an old screw piling lighthouse. The wood lighthouse is long gone, now. It was no longer needed and demolished some twenty years ago. The metal-framed base is a square with a leg at each corner and braced with another leg at a diagonal into the water. The bottoms of these legs have a screw tip used to embed the ends into the river bottom before the tops are welded in place. The base sits in shallow water averaging about five feet deep for about a quarter mile out before the water deepens. Where the lighthouse stood is a sort of submerged island and called a shoal.

All these distances I’ve been quoting caused me to pull out a navigation chart to double check them and find I’ve been overestimating. It is only four miles across the river here, instead of six, and ten miles instead of fifteen to the James River Bridge downstream, so the field of view is only fifty square miles instead of the hundred or so I noted on another day. Also it looks like our walk covers almost a mile each way according to this chart; pretty good for a little dog and old guy.

Pollen season has begun. It has dusted a yellow coat on the water along the shore.

Only a lone eagle can be seen perched in a tree and he flaps off as we approach. Several kingfishers fly by. They are regulars to we see from day to day, but always from a distance. They are careful to keep their distance and fly off with a characteristic chatter when we get close. I want a good photo or two, but so far have not been able to sneak up on them.

Very few aircraft have been airborne the last week. A couple commercial passenger liners fly by in the distance today as we walk. I don’t hear them but do hear what sounds like a large engine idling; big, like a railroad engine, and then realize it’s the oyster boats. Their engines run continuously and the breeze is such that it carries the sound ashore.

The trees along the shore are showing a lot of spring green. Our last date for frost is Apr 15. Many fruit trees have produced blossoms and if we do have a freeze there will be less fruit to pick this year.

On our return lap I remember the three-way driftwood tree knot and find it still perched on the fallen tree beside an interesting fish bone left on another day and bring them both back. The bone is an odd shape with one projection looking like a small section of an old-fashioned folding fan. Attached to the body is a pointed piece about three inches long with a few sawtooth-looking projections toward the tip along one side. If you watch The Simpsons, it looks like Mr Burn’s nose! I think it’s from a catfish. I must try not to accumulate too many of these things or our place will look like a museum.

Manage four old-guy pull ups both ways this time. Must be the nicer weather. —–

Walking the Beach #9 (Mar 07)

 It’s very warm this morning and hazy out over the water. The tide’s about midway and no wave action, so pretty quiet. Only a slight breeze is blowing, probably the reason for the absence of waves.

The fancy pier and low one that’s missing most of its planks both extend out about 210 feet. The fancy one uses pilings spaced about ten feet apart. The other uses the same size pilings but spaced closer, about eight feet. Older pilings can be square, but nowadays they are round; probably cheaper to produce.

These piers often have an expanded area at the end. Both of these have a t-shaped end, the T being about twenty or thirty feet long.

It’s rare to see a storage shed on a pier. The shed on the fancy pier looks to be 5×10 feet square, seven feet high, and made with treated lumber.

The birds are quiet this morning and only a few are flying about. But the oyster boats are still busy and far out in the water.

A large container ship is moving upstream on the other side of the oyster boats. The main navigation channel is at least four miles towards the other side of the river, maybe five. While the river runs fairly straight to the James River Bridge, downstream, the channel goes through a sharp bend just before the bridge; don’t know why, but ships appear to disappear as they reach the bridge and turn so you only see them endwise.

My binoculars contain a digital camera that lets you copy what’s seen.  It has about an 8X magnification and is pretty nifty.  It’s certainly better than the camera at letting you find what you want to shoot.  However, the haze is intensified in any photos making many unacceptable.  Certainly the haze today makes photographing the container ship an futile exercise.

I found an unusual weathered tree knot washed up on the beach.  It’s a joined set of three knots, two large and one small, with the larger two forming a V and the third leg pointing off at a right angle. I left it on a fallen tree on the way down, but forgot to pick it up on the way back.  It’ll be there tomorrow.

Periodically I find some object left hanging or perched in an easily seen location.  It’s like the lost license plate or hubcap you see placed on a fence post along a roadway. The beach stuff shows someone has passed by like the signs a tracker sees.  Each is in an out-of-place item in an out-of-place location: a halter top hooked on the branch of a fallen tree above the high water mark, or attractive shell perched atop an outcropping where it is unlikely to have appeared naturally.

The beach provides a clean slate after each high tide so human and animal movement is more easily studied.  One set of animal tracks were in dry sand and looked a little like bird prints, but a continuous narrow groove ran between them from start to end, over one hundred feet.  A possum might have made them, but it’s a mystery for now.

Izzy started panting part way down the first leg and was pretty tuckered by the time we finished.  Oddly, though, he didn’t get in the river water or and avoided getting his feet wet in a small stream we ford that flows down the beach at one place. —–

Walking the Beach#8 (Mar 07)

We’ve the beach to ourselves today, Izzy and I. It’s Monday. The tide is midway and it’s cool again. We had lots of wind blowing towards the riverbank last night and it washed sand away. A shelf or ridge of sand usually runs along the beach and it’s more pronounced. The sand level below the ridge is a foot lower, now, and our path is littered with many more lumps and clumps of hardpan or caliche and clay. The water lapping at the shoreline is surprisingly noisy compared with low-low tide.

The fancy pier now has a boat suspended in one of the boat lifts. Also I see there is actually another landing , so add one to the number noted in that other entry; hard to keep up with such fancy construction.

Close to the halfway turnaround point a couple eagle take off from a downed tree lying on the sand. That’s unusual. They circle around up into a nearby, upright tree and one has a wing with a missing feather, one of the large ones in the center of the wing. Then a third one shows up and circles over the tree. At first I think it’s a vulture like the other day, if it was an actual vulture, because the two eagles launch themselves and the circling one starts harassing one of them. It looks like this might be two males fighting over a female, but then a fourth one shows up and harasses, too. Now it looks like a territory dispute. They wheel about one another and move off over the trees out of sight.

The floats tied to oyster bed markers are not visible, now, so they do disappear at higher water levels. Five oyster boats are at work a mile out. They always cluster together and this batch looks like it’s in a line covering, oh, a hundred yards. Sometimes only a single boat can be seen, and sometimes a couple groups are visible. When close to shore you can hear the engines running constantly. They start early and it can wake you up in the morning. A couple of their marker floats, one painted orange, the other lime, are washed ashore. I pick them up and leave them by the fancy pier, an offering to the pier gods.

The interesting find is a piece of driftwood. Tree knots, or the part of the limb where it joins a tree, are the last part of some woods to wear away as they wash about. The result can be interesting. This one looks either like a Star Trek phaser or ocarina but slightly smaller. You’d think all the sand washing away would reveal a few more interesting things. Curious how at low-low tide the removed sand isn’t visible, and how I don’t see things on the tidal flats on their way in, like old bottles, pieces of driftwood or the Bic lighter I mentioned in an earlier report. —-

Walking the Beach #4 (Mar 07)

A nice day today for a beach walk: low tide, no wind, but cool. The tide is so low we can even get by our biggest fallen tree, one that tumbled down the bank so its root ball is against the bank and tree extends into the river at an angle for about forty-five feet.

Seven oyster boats are at work. Six are probably a mile out, but one, a smaller size, is working close to shore. Two guys working on a dock we pass know the nearest boat operator and yell back and forth a few times. The dock guys also had an odd discussion about measurements, something about 3/8ths equaling 9/16ths. I missed what else they said while trying to figure how the fraction advocate got his result.

The dock being remodeled is the fanciest one on our walk, The boat landing is covered and there’s even a small storage shed. These docks usually connect to the bank top which, here, is at least twenty feet high. The dock is about ten feet up across the beach, a wise move. A second pier we pass under is five feet high and many walkway planks are gone due to high water wave action in the past. Some owners give up on repairs after this happens a few times. In this case the bank is only a few feet high and the pier connects with it, so an upward ramp should have been used to elevate the walkway.

We pass eleven properties on our walk. Besides two piers there are three sets of steps that hang open ended over the bank where they connected to piers before the piers were washed away. Another place has an intact set of steps down the bank to the beach, but no pier. Two places have several pilings out in the water connected together by a clothesline device designed to move a small boat into and out of deeper water depending on the tide condition. Piers and boating are popular with homes along the river, but the luxury is more expensive in our area when bad storms frequently damage them.

At one point I see an interesting bird perched at the top of a tree near a home. Through the binoculars I see that it’s only a pigeon, but then happen to see an eagle perched nearby in another tree at a lower level. Once before my wife and I had seen several pigeons perched above an eagle in a tree near our home. It must be significant because pigeons are easily spooked and also are a food source for eagles. Eventually the eagle flew off while the pigeon did nothing. ——