Walking the BEach #22 (Apr 07)

There’s ice on the outside dog water bowl, again, this morning and patches of frost on the lawn. Izzy and I are out an hour earlier than usual because of some errands today so it’s a little cooler for this walk.

A high, thin cloud cover allows some sun to get through and the sun has a large halo from high altitude ice crystals. Fortunately the air is pretty still, so no wind chill to worry about.

The tide is out and wavelets reaching the beach are small, rolling in about one a second. Still they generate most of the background noise.

Only one fishing boat is visible. It’s the large size with several boom arms clustered around the cargo area. It moves down river and out of sight, engine sounds drifting in to us over the river. It shows up later, after our walk, probably just be returning from work elsewhere. By the time we reach the half way point two of the regular oyster boats have taken up their stations near the lighthouse base.

Jet noise and at least one prop-driven airplane can be heard, but contrails never appear. Towards the end of our walk a small single-engine plane crosses high overhead.

On the way down we spook a lone juvenile eagle near the fancy pier. It moves a short distance to a tree where another bird is visible. A lot of eagle talk ensues. Two juveniles then fly off, but another form is still visible. As we get closer a third juvenile and then an adult eagle leave the three and head downstream along the riverbank. Mom appears to still have a brood she is teaching or trying to disperse.

Going and coming I look for the thick oyster shell fossils and note there are no concentrations of them. There’s perhaps a few dozen strewn along much of the mile we cover. Also, the thick layers of gray clay with a dense mixture of fossils visible at a couple places are made up mostly of the gray Chesapecten jeffersonius fossils and another white, fairly smooth and oval-shaped clam shell. A quick look at one area turns up just one small oyster shell. The small conical shells I found at another place were mixed with a brown soil, sand and mixed crushed shells. They are present in the gray clay, too, but only rarely.

Near the waterline where we first join the beach are two of the bullet-shaped Styrofoam floats on top of the water. They look like those attached to oyster bed markers, but appear to mark crab pots and will almost be left dry at low-low tide. If they’re crab pots, they must be from last year as this is not crab season. Our lowest tide should occur in a couple weeks and the reason for the floats may become visible then. —-

Walking the Beach #12 (Mar 07)

 A much nicer day, though still a high tide. It’s clear, the river water is bright with sparkles and a comfortable breeze. Only six oyster boats today, but two tugs (one in front and one in back) are moving a large gray ship downstream. It has a radome on one end and several very large radio antenna amidships, so it could be military or research. There’s an Army transportation base on the river upstream and it might be from there. The ghost or reserve fleet is not scheduled to remove any more ships for awhile making it an unlikely source. As it moves downriver a small helicopter hovers nearby, perhaps a news chopper. I take several photos with the binocular camera and they come out with limited haze, but not great.

Four contrails are visible in the clear sky. That’s average. Later there are six. One has red coloring on the nose end, so it must be a commercial airliner. At the end of our walk a Sikorsky helicopter comes over the bank and crosses the river a mile away.

When we start our a blue heron flys up from some nearby spot on the beach upstream and heads downstream. They are common and there’s one or two somewhere along the way when our walk included an upstream portion of the river. It may be a seasonal thing.

We still have to clamber over the jettys and this time I use a small dog leash I carry to mark off dimensions of a concrete block. It is 68 inches long, 23 thick and 22 high. That makes for 20 cubic feet and at 150 lbs a cubic foot of concrete, a weight of 3000 lbs. So it’s not a cubic yard and it’s not a one-ton block. Dunno, but it’s pretty hefty, yet still gets moved around by the water when conditions are right.

Only three pull ups today.

A small chunk about the size of a match box of concreted (cementitious) fossil shell mix catches my eye because of some clear material mixed in with it. This is the third time I’ve found this clear material. It looks like mineral crystal. One piece another time had a geometric shape and the third was a thin slab about a quarter inch thick and six inches on the side. All of it looks like it comes from the same source. I’ll add this one to the others at home.

The blue heron landed in the water at the shoreline near the fancy pier and allows several photos to be taken, including one in flight on the way back upstream when we get too close.

We get past the halfway obstacle this time. Less wind must be a factor today, but it’s still a close call for getting feet wet.  Right in this area we find a nice matching pair of chesapecten jeffersonius fossil scallop shells.  They are stuck in place, filled with and partly covered with the cement-type stuff making it all weigh about five pounds, but certainly more durable than clean half shells.

The halfway obstacle is at the biggest promontory and two turkey vultures are circling overhead. A house sits on this point of land and they appear to be interested in that area. I get a good shot of one with the binocular camera and am concerned he may be too close for the lens, but it turns out ok, though still not great quality: not the greatest camera. A couple kingfishers buzz us and I get one coming directly overhead which also turns out with the same, but lesser quality. The regular camera just doesn’t have the design that allow quick viewing and shooting, especially with bright lighting.

Past this obstacle we have to climb over several piles of tangled tree trunks, driftwood, and big chunks of fossilized coral, and the cemented seashells. We are right up against the bank in places and have to keep in mind that chunks of the bank can come loose at any time, the reason we stay as far away as possible, when we can. We also have to start watching for snakes when climbing over stuff. As the weather warms they will be out and a driftwood pile looks like a good place for a reptile to roost.

It’s in this area we see some deer tracks in the sand. They are a regular feature on the upstream route at one location. These are where the bank is pretty high, but a deer could still find a spot to get up, if the need arose.

Also in this area there’s another float washed up. This one is half red and half orange with a number, 159, carved into it. A letter would precede the number, but a chunk of the Styrofoam is broken off where it would be. Nearby is also an interesting feather that may be from a brown hawk. It’s a foot long, in perfect shape and has eight alternating banks of brown and light tan along the length. Izzy is most interested in sniffing it, but doesn’t want to chew on it like the usual stick. We also find a ball that may be a tennis ball with the fuzz worn off for him to chase a few times on the way back before he loses interest.

This was definitely a better day. —-

Walking the Beach #3 (Mar 07)

It’s the first day of spring. It’s cold, cloudy, windy and a chance of showers. The river looks like dark dishwater. As we start down the beach there’s a rib cage visible at water’s edge. It’s from a five-point buck that washed ashore in January. The corpse looked very fit and undamaged, so it might have drowned, a not unlikely result with the river temperature in the 40’s. It was a white tail deer and the carcass washed up and down stream about fifty yards a couple times before becoming half embedded in sand next to a rock jetty. Buzzards abound in the area, but they never touched the buck for at least six weeks when little was left but hide. Then everything disappeared and periodically a bone shows up in the same area. The rib cage and a leg bone have been around a couple weeks now.

 

All this sounds morbid, but almost everything on the beach is either dead or discarded. A fossilized scallop called the Chesapecten Jeffersonius, which is 3 or 4 million years old, is available in the thousands in the short walk we take and surrounded by many times that number of oyster and the bones of other marine life. Dead trees stripped of bark are common on the beach and flopped down the river bank. A deer, fish, crab and sometimes, sadly, a hunting dog are bound to join this natural process.

The special event of today’s walk was an eagle that made a strike on a tree and instead of carrying off a bird appeared with a long stick that was probably destined for a nest. It was at least six feet long and a couple inches in diameter. Shortly after the snatch the limb slipped from the eagle’s talons. Then it looked like a few local turkey vultures appeared nearby and slowly moved towards it driving it down river. Izzy and I headed on down the beach and saw no sign of any big birds on the way back. —–

Diggin for Old Stuff in Isle of Wight and Surry Counties

I grew up in California and the only old stuff on the West Coast we ever looked for was bottles and gold. There’s a lot more to look for as you head East. Some of it is formal as reported in this newspaper article about the grave of Col Joseph Bridges at St Luke’s Church ( http://www.historicstlukes.org/ ) near Smithfield: http://www.dailypress.com/news/local/virginia/dp-va–colonialbones0130jan30,0,5731774.story

 

A short video about the same topic is at the same dailypress.com site. A link posted here will not load the video…

Much, though, is informal, such as fossils along the James River shorelines, and varying concentrations of civil war relics. The fossils are easily found and in great supply in more places than this one river and most are unspectacular. The civil war relics require more work, use of a metal detector, some digging and oftentimes permission from a property owner. Once found they, too, are mostly unspectacular, always corroded, and often of indecipherable origin. I prefer the fossils. They’re easier.

Some of the informal stuff is troublesome, such as the remains of a 400 year-old English colonist with thigh-length leather boots that began to surface as the riverbank of some private property eroded. He was removed and taken to a suitable burial site. You’d never find anything like that in California.

More of a problem is a group of folks devoted to mapping lost grave sites in the county who show up at your front door asking to probe your front door for a half dozen purported graves. They tried to get a bill passed in state legislature that would punish property owners who refuse to assist in such grave mapping. The bill died a quick death.

At what point does honoring graves pass from the revered phase where markers, fences, artificial flowers, cemetery signs and respect are required, to the historic phase where we dig ‘em up, store them in crates in museum basements or laid out for all to see? The revered phase requires sensitivity. The historic phase lets you build houses on top of the bones or dig up church floors to retrieve them. We decided we didn’t want our front yard probed, to stay in the dark about what lurks out there. We don’t bother them and expect them to do the same. That doesn’t apply to four million year old Chesapecten Jeffersonius mussels ( http://www.dailypress.com/extras/solutions/sol092303.htm).

At least we aren’t troubled by Roman artifacts cropping up in farm fields in Europe: “Oh, crap. Busted another tractor part on some damned chariot wheel!”