Walking the Beach #53 (May 07)

 

Saturday has come again and the beach portion of our walk is short. The river is very calm today. It’s low tide, almost no breeze and the water is hardly moving along the waterline. During this calmer weather different wave patterns are easily seen with large, slow waves moving in one direction and smaller ones superimposed and moving in another direction. Then there’s some rebound waves from those that reach the shore.

It rained yesterday making the air humid and producing an even greater amount of haze. We’ve varying amounts of clouds that are on the move. The predominate cover is basically high and flat for the moment.

The sand is dimpled from the rain. Remains of a medium-sized bird carcass with black feathers, probably a crow or blackbird, lies half buried.

No contrails today or airplane noises.

A barge is moving upriver. They can be seen several times each day, but this is the first time for one during our walk. Motor noise can be heard, faintly, from further downriver than the barge. For a boat it’s loud enough to be seen, but the haze seems to be obscuring the source.

Pollen has gone away for now. Over the last week the pollen count in the newspaper has been around 1 on a scale of a 100. When it was bad and pollen pools could be seen along the waterline, the count was well above a thousand.

We travel up our access road where the greenery is just as intense as last weekend, but darker. Some honey suckle blossoms are out and the damp air carries a faint scent from them. It will become stronger within days.

Another patch of asparagus is now visible near where the first one is alongside the road. The first one is larger with eleven spears, but the uncut ones are all blossomed out. The smaller one has six shoots and two can be harvested, which I do and consume en route.

Two of the four farm fields are planted with winter wheat which is half grown, though a little stunted compared with past years. The other two fields look like they were planted with grass. It’s higher than the wheat and thicker. Perhaps it’s a cover crop that will be plowed under. We’re waiting to see how many fields are planted this summer with corn due to the hype about biofuels and ethanol. Corn is commonly grown in the area, but has only been on any of these four fields one time in the last ten years. Peanuts were common for a few years, but of late only winter wheat and soybeans are grown in these fields.

All evidence of tent caterpillars is gone. The tent remnants have dissolved and limbs bare of leaves now have new growth.  No biting flies either for the moment.

Several yellow and black swallowtails are about, on the beach and the roadways. No birds can be seen although a few can be heard; nothing else of interest. —-

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. —