This afternoon I was hanging some laundry to dry on the back deck, when something reddish caught my eye. I grabbed the binoculars, peered down into the bushes, and saw a pair of ears emerging from behind a bush. Soon a very handsome coyote came out to bask in the sun. Just in case it did anything interesting I fetched the camera, which was fortunately already wearing the 400mm lens, and settled down to watch for a while.
After a few more moments enjoying the sun, the coyote got up and went on alert. It had clearly heard something. A late lunch, maybe?
But in the manner of a cat, the coyote dropped the rodent and played with it for a while.
Once the rodent (which I think was a rat of some kind) was captured, it took more chomping than I had anticipated for the coyote to actually eat it. I kept thinking, “Okay, it must be done now,” and the coyote would turn its head to show me the rodent sticking out of the side of its mouth.
The entire event, from when the coyote first heard the rustling of the rodent to when it stood up and walked away, lasted about five minutes. Shortly after finishing its meal the coyote stood up, threw a glance down the hill, and disappeared into the bushes.
We often hear coyotes yipping at night, which inevitably riles up all the neighborhood dogs, and occasionally we capture one on the critter cam. It’s not unusual to see coyotes in the daylight, but this is the first time I’ve gotten to see one hunting and making a kill. This coyote looked very healthy. And this is why we keep the cats indoors!
My home town of Santa Cruz made national news the other day, 23 December 2024, when a series of massive swells caused part of the Municipal Wharf to collapse into the ocean. People in the restaurants and other businesses had to evacuate immediately, and three people were dropped into the water of Monterey Bay (they were all rescued safely and no human lives were lost). The bathroom building fell into the water and washed up on the beach at the mouth of the San Lorenzo River. Almost immediately, memes appeared, advertising a 2-bathroom unit with both river and ocean views, renting for $6000/month. Given the exorbitant rents here, you could argue that maybe this is a pretty good deal.
That afternoon, the same swell tore through the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor and replicated the damage done by the Fukushima tsunami in March 2011. The damaged docks had been replaced in 2014, but this recent damage ripped them up again. Boats and docks were thrown around and crashed into each other. An unknown amount of diesel fuel and gasoline were also “liberated” into the water.
My friend Murray has a little boat, Scherzo, that lives in the upper harbor on G dock. On the day of the worst swell, Murray had gone down to see how Scherzo was faring. At that point she had taken at least some cosmetic damage to her paint but didn’t seem to be taking on any water except rain water. The harbor patrol had closed all of the docks so he couldn’t get close enough to see if there were worse injuries. At one point another boat had come down the channel and gotten wedged under Scherzo so she was floating on top of it. Somebody rescued Scherzo and tied her up at a spot just under the ramp from her usual berth. Yesterday, Christmas Day, Murray called us to say that he was down at the boat and asked if Alex (my husband) could help him get her out of the water, as more big swells were forecast. I’m not very useful when it comes to boats, but I went along to watch things from above and hold lines and such.
Before they could take Scherzo out of the water, they had to make sure she was seaworthy enough to be driven down to the boat ramp at the lower harbor.
Behind Murray, who is wearing the pink cap, you can see damage to the finger dock. And notice that the big boats aren’t sitting straight in their slips. Scherzo‘s usual spot is on the other side of the ramp; she got pushed under the ramp and a kind soul tied her up here.
This is the capsized boat that had gotten wedged under Scherzo. It was now stuck under the ramp, just in front of Scherzo‘s spot.
Scherzo‘s engine started right up, and the boat itself having been deemed safe to drive by Alex the Engineer, Murray took her down the harbor slowly. Alex and I met him at the boat ramp.
While we were waiting, we noticed that some of the pilings from the busted-up Wharf, which is more correctly a pier rather than a wharf, had been hauled out of the water and set in the parking lot.
Knowing that the biota on the pilings would be very similar to the critters I see in the rocky intertidal, I had to investigate. And it was very sad. Most of the animals had died waiting for a high tide that wouldn’t return. Some of the barnacles were still alive, albeit just barely so.
To get a feel for how big Balanus nubilus and Tetraclita rubescens are, my left index fingernail measures exactly 10 mm across. That B. nubilus is a big sucker!
Balanus nubilus is a strictly subtidal species that I never see in the intertidal. Tetraclita rubescens occurs in both the intertidal and the subtidal; some of these subtidal specimens were larger than the ones I see in the intertidal. Most sessile marine invertebrates can feed only when they are covered by water, which means that the ones living in the intertidal don’t feed at low tide. Thus the subtidal T. rubescens can get larger than their intertidal conspecifics, simply because they can feed 24/7. We see the same pattern with mussels in the intertidal: those higher up in the mussels’ range are smaller than the ones in the lower part of the range.
Some of the barnacles were still alive. They can close up their shells and wait out a low tide. But sitting out of the water for longer than a day was more than even they could withstand.
Other old friends were there, including many sea anemones. This is the sunburst anemone, Anthopleura sola, looking the way it does when I see it in the intertidal at low tide.
Probably the saddest thing was a desiccated red octopus on the pavement. It had probably plopped out of a nook and tried to make its way back to water. Poor little thing.
The organisms on these pilings were caught in their final moments of life, just as the citizens of Pompeii and Herculaneum were when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. Some of them had tried to escape (the octopus) and some were not quite dead yet (the barnacles), but the inevitable is well, inevitable. At some point the pilings will be removed to the landfill. The same thing happened when the harbor docks were replaced in 2014. I happened to be there with a class and we saw all of the old docks piled up in the parking lot, with all of the attached biota slowly drying up in the sun.
So while there will be reports in the coming days about how many millions of dollars it will take to rebuild the harbor (again) and the pier, let’s not forget that there were other losses that cannot be assigned a dollar value. There is also a potentially major ecological impact of new (again) harbor docks. When the old docks were removed in 2014, they had been covered with a decades-old fouling community. The new docks were pristine new habitat for recruits, and shortly after they were put in I noticed an invasive brown alga, Undaria pinnatifida, which I hadn’t seen before. Undaria is a western North Pacific edible seaweed that is known culinarily as wakame. In recent years it has become one of the most abundant macroalgae in the lower areas of the harbor. The docks that were destroyed this week had been in place for only 10 years or so, and it will be interesting to see how primary succession occurs when new docks are installed. Hmm, that sounds like something I can have my Ecology students document and monitor!
Last month I spent four days in the town of Egmont, BC. My husband and I had joined a friend on his annual excursion to the stomping grounds of his youth. We trailered the friend’s boat, Scherzo, up through Oregon and Washington and into British Columbia. We took a ferry and then ditched the car in Sechelt, piled our belongings and food into Scherzo, and headed up the Sechelt Inlet to arrive in Egmont. Incidentally, Egmont is entirely reachable by road, but it was kind of cool showing up in a little boat to the dock of the house we had rented.
On our way up Sechelt Inlet I had noticed quite a bit of brown scum on the surface of the water. I couldn’t collect any on my hands and it didn’t have a detectable odor, but some of my cerebral neurons did their job and the name Noctiluca came into my head. Noctiluca scintillans is a bioluminescent dinoflagellate. It is a regular component of the plankton in Monterey Bay at this time of year. What makes it distinct from other dinoflagellates are its large size (can be greater than 1mm in diameter) and the fact that its hydrophobic theca (cell wall) causes cells to get stuck at the surface of the water. They can look like tiny bubbles floating at the surface.
There wasn’t as much Noctiluca at our dock in Egmont as we’d seen on our way up the inlet, but it was worth going out at night just to see. Dinoflagellates and other bioluminescent critters light up when disturbed. We borrowed Scherzo‘s oar to disturb the water and see what happened. We could see light when Alex drew the oar back and forth in the water, but a washing machine-like agitation was the best for getting the cells to flash.
Bioluminescence is one of those phenomena that never gets tiring. In this case, each Noctiluca cell emits one tiny flash of light when it gets bumped. These photos give you an idea of how dense the population was. Dinoflagellates tend to be late-season bloomers, becoming more abundant than the diatoms that dominate the spring and early summer phytoplankton. Many dinoflagellates, despite being considered part of the phytoplankton, are heterotrophic either in addition to or instead of being autotrophic (photosynthetic). Noctiluca is one of the heterotrophic dinoflagellates. It preys on smaller cells, including diatoms, small invertebrate larvae, and fish eggs.
If I had been at home with my lab supplies at hand I would have collected some of the cells in a scintillation vial, brought them into a dark room in the house, and shaken them up to observe the bioluminescence under controlled conditions. As it was, seeing it in the field, so to speak, was really cool.
One of my favorite seabirds is the pigeon guillemot (Cepphus columba). According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithololgy, pigeon guillemots should be present along the California coast year-round, but I seem to see them only during the summer breeding season, when they forage close to shore. Having first to incubate eggs, and then to feed hungry chicks, the adults cannot venture too far from land. At this time they are central place foragers, which just means that they make short flights to find food, then always return to the same site (where the nest is). During the nonbreeding season the pigeon guillemots are still around, but forage farther out to sea. Once their young have fledged and are feeding on their own, there is no need for the adults to spend much time on land at all, and they certainly are no longer tied to any particular location.
This morning I was at the marine lab looking for the black oystercatcher chicks that hatched recently. I didn’t seem them today. However, patience was rewarded and I saw a pair of pigeon guillemots land on one of the cliffs near where I was sitting. For a while they just rested, then they rose up onto their feet and started circling around each other. That sure looked like courtship behavior, so I brought up the camera and snapped away.
Given how conspicuous those red feet are, it’s no surprise that they are indeed used in courtship displays. The birds walk around each other to show off their feet, and touch their bills together. The inner surface of the mouth is a matching crimson color. Presumably the redness indicates vitality that would be desirable in a mate.
I’ve seen pigeon guillemots nesting in cliffs up at Pigeon Point. I’m not sure where the birds at the marine lab have made their nests, though. Must investigate further!
For years now we’ve known that the world just beyond our back deck was owned by a variety of wildlife. We’ve seen coyotes and bobcats often enough to think “Good to know you guys are still there!” and of course we hear coyotes a lot more often than we see them. We’ve also known the arroyo behind our house to be in the territory of a mountain lion—a collared female had been tracked there. She, however, has proven to be much more elusive, hiding from people just like the cat she is.
In late November I bought a critter camera for my husband’s birthday, and it arrived on the slow boat from China about two weeks later. We joked that it would be really cool if we caught a mountain lion some time, ha ha ha. But we honestly had no great expectations. I mean, once you set up the camera you have to hope that it’s pointing in the right direction and that something interesting walks in front of it. Alex set up the critter camera in the afternoon of Sunday 10 December, and then we forgot about it until the next day. . .
. . . when we saw that the camera had captured both photos and videos of something, and it was a big something! It was a big cat!
Funny how even a mountain lion (Felis concolor) is still a cat. The posture and behavior is not at all different from the feline tasty morsels that live inside the house with us. We thought that someone we know should buy a new refrigerator, so we can give the big kitty a box.
Look at the size of these paws!
Mountain lion (Felis concolor) caught on our critter camera 2023-12-10
Note the time stamps on the photos and video. This cat was prowling around after dinner time. Of course, being mid-December-ish it was already full dark, but this is hardly the middle of the night. So the camera caught its first big animal just a few hours after it went live. Call it beginner’s luck.
A week later we caught another mountain lion! Or maybe it was the same mountain lion. This one was also uncollared and, from what we can see of the footage, has about the same build. Given that mountain lions tend to be territorial, I think this is the same cat, and this path above our beehives is a regular thoroughfare for it and other wildlife.
Mountain lion (Felis concolor) caught on our critter camera 2023-12-17
In a related coincidental matter, the first mountain lion was filmed using the new wildlife crossing that goes underneath Highway 17 in the Santa Cruz mountains!
Yesterday, 30 June 2023, was deemed by the National Museum of Natural History to be International Polychaete Day, and the Smithsonian had an entire day of talks and activities for visitors to learn about the marine segmented worms. And you know me: I’m in favor of any event that draws attention to the animals that are not like us. So this is my own little celebration of worms I encountered over this past week.
Living with sea stars
I’ve written before about how many of the bat stars (Patiria miniata) I see at Pigeon Point carry small commensal polychaetes on their oral surface, often associated with the ambulacral groove. Several taxa of echinoderms are known to have associations with polychaetes, and I’ve seen worms crawling around on sea stars, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers. Oxydromus pugettensis is the polychaete I’ve seen on the bat stars in the field.
Years ago now, I collected some bat stars to bring back to the lab. Some of them had worms, and I was interested in seeing how long the worms stuck around once the stars were in captivity. The answer was “Not very long.” I seem to remember that the stars had lost their worms within a week. And since then, despite having many bat stars come through my hands at the lab, none of them have acquired worms.
Until now. This past week I was moving stars around and cleaning tables after flushing seawater pipes. I have a large bat star and a smaller one running feral in one of the tables. I picked up the larger star and turned it over just to check on it, and saw a dark squiggly thing. It was a worm!
This is the first time I have ever seen a sea star acquire a commensal worm. It’s gotta happen, because we see worms on stars in nature. But I do wonder about this relationship. The worms are highly mobile and probably leave one star and join another quite frequently, or remain free-living (i.e., not on a host star). I had brought in some algae the previous week, and it’s quite possible that the worm came along as bycatch and found its way to the bat star. I checked on the star later in the week, and did not see the worm. It hadn’t joined the smaller of the bat stars, either.
Baby worms
This past Monday I did a plankton tow off the end of the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf. This was my first plankton tow of the year, and I wanted to see what was there. The water was very clear and the phytoplankton were lacking, but there was a decent diversity within the zooplankton. Of particular interest to this report were the baby worms.
Baby worms are present in any plankton tow collected at any time of the year, although they may be more abundant at some times compared to others. Clearly there isn’t much seasonality to reproduction in some of our local polychaetes. The most commonly seen baby worms in plankton samples are the metatrochophores of worms in the family Spionidae.
Adult spionids are benthic and live in tubes. They have two long palps that extend from the anterior end and are typically used to scrape up organic deposits from the area surrounding the tube. Like most polychaetes, spionids are broadcast spawners that cast gametes out into the water, where fertilization and development occur. Polychaetes go through a larval phase called a trochophore, defined by a ring of cilia (the prototroch) that produces the feeding current for the animal. Incidentally, many molluscs also go through a trochophore stage, but that’s a story for another time. Some polychaetes, including the spionids, have a second planktonic stage called a metatrochophore. The metatrochophore is a much larger and more elaborate version of the trochophore, with eyespots and few to many segments complete with associated bristles. They can crawl as well as swim. Some of them can be 3 mm long, which is pretty big for something that is still up in the plankton. The spionid metatrochophore also has the two long palps, which sometimes remind me of the flaps on Elmer Fudd’s hat.
These are photos of the same individual worm. It’s about 2 mm long, a little longer if all stretched out.
There was another type of polychaete metatrochophore in the sample, but I don’t recognize which family this one comes from. I should, because I see it frequently enough to know it isn’t unusual. It might be a young phyllodocid metatrochophore, but that’s just a guess. Anyhow, this creature has fewer segments than the spionid metatrochophore and lacks the spionid’s long palps. It does have eyespots, segments with bristles, and (I think) two pairs of tentacles associated with the head region. This individual also contains a lot of oil droplets, visible as those small dark circles in the dorsal half of the body behind the head. Oil droplets serve as energy stores and flotation devices. Many marine invertebrate larvae stockpile calories as they feed and store them in oil. In some cases, these calories are needed to sustain a later larval stage that doesn’t feed.
There you have it, my belated contribution to International Polychaete Day 2023. I always enjoy finding worms in our plankton. They have a lot of personality, and it’s fun to watch them zooming around. They are really fast swimmers, and I have to squash them under a coverslip—just a little—to get them to hold still long enough to take photos. Always worth the effort, though!
A week ago I was with a group of students at Moss Landing, where we spent a couple of hours watching birds on our way down to Fort Ord Natural Reserve for an overnight camping trip. The visit was well-timed: we arrived at low tide so there was a lot of mud flat exposed, meaning ample real estate for foraging shorebirds. By now the students were pretty comfortable using binoculars, and it warmed my heart to see them getting used to one of my favorite tools in the naturalist’s kit.
The real stars of this particular tale were the birds. Specifically, a pair of willets (Tringa semipalmata). As we walked along the road towards the dunes and beach, I caught sight of a pair of willets involved in what appeared to be an altercation of sorts. I snapped off a bunch of photos and continued on.
When I had time to review the photos a few days later, I saw that what I had thought was some display of aggression was actual mating, or preliminary activities to actual mating. Oops! That hadn’t occurred to me at the time because somewhere in the back of my brain I thought that willets are winter visitors here who breed elsewhere. Of course, courtship and pair-bonding involve multiple bouts of copulation, and any single copulation event may or may not result in successful insemination. It does make sense for copulation to occur before migration to breeding grounds, whether the “real thing” happens here or in the birds’ summer range.
All this to say that I captured a series of photographs that, if they were of our species, would be considered pornographic. But since the subjects were willets and not humans, I can call them wildlife photography!
This is a series of 21 photos, presented as a slide show. The entire sequence of events took about 10 seconds.
I didn’t catch the exact moment of cloacal contact, if indeed there was any. It does still feel a little bit voyeuristic, but that’s why I like watching birds in the first place—they carry on their lives and don’t care about human morals or pruderies. It is always an honor and a privilege to witness nature doing its thing. And who knows, perhaps a new generation of willets was conceived by this pair!
Today my co-teacher, Gabe, and I took our Ecology students up the coast a bit for the first field trip of the semester. We spent the morning at the bottom of Big Basin State Park, where we did a little walking and a lot of looking and talking. In 2.5 hours we traveled maybe a mile, which is the appropriate pace for studying nature.
Much of this area burned in the CZU Lightning Complex fires of 2020. That was 2.5 years ago now, and a lot of vegetation has returned. My favorite thing to see was the lace lichen, Ramalina menziesii. It drapes over plants and has a special affinity for the coast live oak Quercus agrifolia, just like I do. I was very happy to see a lot of new growth in the lichen, all spring green and fresh.
After lunch we crossed the highway and went down to Waddell Beach. The tide had receded and we could see that a tremendous amount of sand had been washed away by the storms, leaving exposed rocks that were usually covered. Students found all sort of interesting rocks, including fossils. We also found several sand dollars, a few of which hadn’t been broken.
This was one of my favorite finds:
It’s the test of the sand dollar Dendraster excentricus. In life, sand dollars are a purplish gray color, covered with apparent fuzz that consists of short spines. I’ve seen sand dollars described as gray shag carpets, and that’s actually not too far off. When the animal dies the spines and living tissue erode away from the test, leaving behind the white calcium carbonate.
Okay, but what’s that round black spot? That’s the super cool thing.
It just so happens that there’s a barnacle, Paraconcavus pacificus, that attaches to sand dollars. It lives on other hard surfaces, too, but the fact that it lives on sand dollars buried in the sand brings to mind all sorts of questions.
Question #1: How does the barnacle’s cyprid larva find a host? My best guess is that the cyprid locates a sand dollar by scent. Sand dollars live partially buried in sand, like tortilla chips in guacamole. Enough of the sand dollar protrudes from the sand to provide plenty of real estate for home-hunting cyprids.
Question #2:What happens to the barnacle if the sand dollar gets completely buried? Well, this I don’t know. A barnacle buried in sand cannot feed. But if the barnacle is attached to the part of the sand dollar that is always (or almost always) sticking out of the sand, then the barnacle could feed perfectly well. Which brings me to . . .
Question #3:Do the barnacles always attach to the same part of the sand dollar? The answer to this question is “Yes”, because sand dollars bury themselves with the “posterior” part sticking up. Yes, it’s hard to talk about anterior and posterior in an animal with pentaradial symmetry, but sand dollars do crawl across the sand in one direction, which defines “anterior” even though the animal doesn’t have a head. Since the sand dollars bury their anterior edge, barnacle cyprids have access only to the posterior edge.
Which in turn explains why the sand dollars with barnacles have barnacles at the bottom of the petaloid, the bit that looks like a 5-petaled flower. That’s the posterior area.
Question #4: Does the weight of the barnacle affect the sand dollar, perhaps by making it top heavy? I can’t imagine that it doesn’t have some effect on the sand dollar. A barnacle is a pretty hefty object, after all. But I can’t find any research about these barnacles and their strange habits.
Returning to that black patch on the test above, now. That’s the scar left behind by a barnacle that used to live on that sand dollar. I have no way of knowing whether the barnacle died before or after the sand dollar died, and suspect it could be either. This barnacle-on-a-sand-dollar is one of those known phenomena that are pretty much not studied at all. It’s really too bad, because I’m convinced there is a fascinating story to be told.
Yesterday and last night California was hit by an atmospheric river bringing lots of rain and the flooding that comes along with it. Combined with a spring high tide, the storm surge gave us tremendous swells and surges along the shores of Monterey Bay. At this moment it isn’t raining and the sky is lifting, so we are getting a brief break to dry out before the next storm comes through on Saturday. The National Weather Service’s small craft advisory continues through tomorrow night. The NWS forecasts continued swells of 24-26 feet, with a period of 18 seconds, for the rest of today and tonight.
I wasn’t the only person to brave the rain and see what was going on at Terrace Point. Several of the other marine lab folks were out there, and the common theme was “This is the biggest swell I’ve ever seen here!” I was grateful for my new boots and rain pants.
All of this action, combined with a high tide of +5.7 feet made for some cliff-bashing waves. When the big waves hit the cliffs, I could see large swaths of soil and ice plant falling away. Coastal erosion was happening in real time.
Here’s a 1-2 sequence of a wave smashing against the little platform where we sometimes collect water samples. I like how the gull just rises above the most violent part of the splash.
Given that I’ve been keeping a watchful eye on Younger Lagoon for the past week or so, to monitor the behavior of the sand bar, my ultimate goal for the morning was to see what was happening there behind the gate. Turns out that much had changed in the past 24 hours or so!
Yesterday, the mouth of the lagoon looked like this:
This is typical Younger Lagoon after it breaches the sand bar. Water is mostly flowing out, with the occasional splash of ocean trickling in. Note how extensive the beach sand berm is.
And here it was today, taken from the same location:
It wasn’t just a matter of breaching the sand bar. About half of the beach has been carved away. The ocean was pushing so far upstream that sea foam was deposited along the uppermost shores of the lagoon. All the white stuff that looks like sand? It’s sea foam.
But the truly impressive action was at the mouth of the lagoon. Given the rain there must have been some fresh water draining out of the lagoon, but the vast majority of the water moving back and forth was sea water. For the time being, Younger Lagoon was merely another branch of the Pacific Ocean, rather than a body of water in its own right.
Watch this video to see the effects of the combined swell and high tide on the mouth of the lagoon. The second half shows the swell pushing up into the lagoon, all the way up to and beyond the overlook.
I had never seen anything like this before. A week ago I was wondering how quickly the regular sand bar would re-form. Now I’m going to see how long it takes to rebuild that entire beach!
California is currently being slammed by another atmospheric river. A series of storms is blowing through, bringing lots of rain, which we always need. The National Weather Service has issued a flood warning and a high wind advisory here, lasting through tomorrow evening (New Year’s Eve). It is indeed blustery, and although the rainfall hasn’t been very heavy, our weather station has recorded 2 inches of rain as of 14:30 this afternoon. Slow, steady rain like this is what we need to make a dent in the state’s ongoing water deficit while (hopefully) not causing catastrophic flooding and landslides.
When we have had heavy rains for several days, I always look for Younger Lagoon to breach the sand bar and open out into the ocean. So over the past couple of weeks I went out after every rain just to see, and to watch the birds. Nada. But I always like watching birds, so it was hardly time wasted.
This morning I was at the lab doing stuff when Traci, who manages the marine mammal physiology group, found me and told me that the lagoon had breached, some time in the night. Cool! I had an appointment to get to, but had just enough time to rush down there and snap some photos. And I’m really glad I did, because I had never seen Younger Lagoon like this.
I’ve seen breaches before, but those were always fairly soon after the breakthrough, and there was a lot of water pouring out into the ocean. This morning it was very different. The lagoon had drained completely, and since there wasn’t much water running into it, the entire bottom was exposed.
This is what it looked like from near the overlook.
That reflective surface isn’t water. It’s the bottom of the lagoon. The bottom sediment is a shiny black, and probably smelled really bad right after the actual breach. I thought I noticed a little sulfur in the air when I came in this morning. Having seen what the top of the lagoon was like, I rushed down to the ocean end to see what was going on there.
The sand bar had been completely obliterated, leaving a sand cliff about my height. With nothing to hinder flow, was moving in both directions—every other wave or so flooding into the lagoon, and a steady light flow of fresh water draining from the lagoon.
Here’s a video, to give you a little taste of what it was like out there.
Younger Lagoon exchanging water with the Pacific Ocean 2022-12-30
I had never seen the bottom of the lagoon before, and wondered what it was like for the birds when the breach happened. In the past week or so I’d seen a variety of water fowl, with the occasional shorebird thrown in for extra flavor. Today there were none, even on land, where the Canada geese and mallards hang out. Granted, the wind was blowing, and birds are sensible enough to find shelter.
We’re getting more rain over the next few days, with a break in the action on Tuesday. I don’t think the sand bar will re-form for a while yet. Should be fun to keep an eye on things!
