Another Hot Day at the Beach

It was already 80 F, windless and sultry when we got down to the beach this morning before 9 AM.  Not a cloud in the sky.

FWIW, the Sea Nettle probability is still pegged at 100%.  This enormous mass of them collects behind the jetty at Flag Harbor.  The rest of the beach is bad but not quite this bad.  Enough to discourage barefoot wading, though.

Fortunately for Skye, her thick fur keeps the nettles off her skin.  This is about as deep as she'll go (voluntarily), and she did a lot of wading to beat the heat today.  As it was, she was getting pretty miserable, and we turned back early, fearing that she was overheating.  But she's fine, after a shower and a nap.

The Weed du Jour.  It seems to be about the only wildflower flowering this time of year.  I'm still trying to figure out what it is.

It has pretty yellow flowers, that continue to emerge from the top of the long stem.  It'll probably turn out to be some horrible invasive weed; it seems like most of the stuff that does well in the cliffs is.

Fellow shark's tooth hunters.  Actually, a boy with them turned out to be a fisherman of sorts, when we came back he had a Skilletfish in his bucket which I identified for him.

Only a few small sharks teeth today, and one drums tooth; nothing picture worthy.

Another fisherman (or is it a fisherwoman?) perched on the root ball of a tree deposited in shallow water by Tropical Storm Lee last year.  Almost time for more storms to come and shuffle the trash around and let a few new fossils out of the cliffs. We saw lots of Ospreys, and maybe one eagle, at a distance.

Someone kayak fishing in the channel at Flag Harbor.  I didn't see him catch any fish, but I did see him try, unsuccessfully, to bring in one of the boulders that make up the jetty.  10 lb test won't cut it.

Butterflies are Cheap at Work, Too

If it's not a female Eastern Tailed Blue, it's something pretty similar, on Joe Pye Weed, a native in wet places around here, and an excellent plant for a butterfly garden. We have some.  Click pic to embiggen.

WTF?

Is this?  Some kind of beetle I guess. 

The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other, for the simple reason that there are nearly 300,000 species of beetle known, and perhaps more, as compared with somewhat less than 9,000 species of birds and a little over 10,000 species of mammals. Beetles are actually more numerous than the species of any other insect order. That kind of thing is characteristic of nature.

J.B.S Haldane - What is Life? The Layman's View of Nature, 1949

The quote is also sometime rendered "The Creator, if He exists, has an inordinate fondness for beetles."

Have I told you it's hot outside yet today?

July 4, 2012 at the Beach

Anticipating another hot day, we once again decided to make an early start, and got down to be beach at 8 AM sharp(ish).. It was already getting warm, but a slight north breeze kept it tolerable at least on the way up.

Something I'd never seen before; a mass flight of dragonflies.  Over about 5 minutes, there must have been hundreds flying north along the beach.  I've never heard of that.  You can see a few blurry ones in the photo with the crow.

The crow?  It had just been mobbed by a Mockingbird.  It's carrying something away; baby Mockingbird maybe?

 A Mom and kids out for an early walk and dip on the Bay









Skye saved one of her "special" kisses for the baby.

A Morning Glory, that's either native or escaped cultivation to the cliffs.  There's a lot of Morning Glories so I won't pretend to know, or even care much either way.

Trumpet Vine, a native to the Southeastern US, but widely planted elsewhere.  Sometime welcomed, sometimes not.  Hummingbirds like them.

-Wear gloves when handling trumpet vine. Some people will get a rash from handling the foliage, so it's better to err on the cautious side.

-Some modern cultivars are suppose to be less invasive than the trumpet vine found in the ditches and growing wild.

-Do not use a tree as a pole for the trumpet vine to climb. Eventually it will strangle the tree. Use an actual pole or fence instead and again, prune in spring or fall, or even during mild winters.

A Spin Around the Garden

I went out a little after lunch today to pick up some of the debris the "Super Derecho" (yes, it's new word for me too; I wonder how it's pronounced?)  left on our lawn, and brought the camera.  I was pleasantly surprised to find another Great Spangled Fritillary on the Purple Cone flowers.  They seem to attract a remarkable number of pollinators and nectar sippers.

I find it hard to get a good shot of the top of the wings; they seem to spend most of their time with their wings folded up, just to frustrate me.  But I did get this shot of it leaving the flower, that's sort of in focus, and shows most of the upper pattern.

These are Cleomes from the seeds I won in Laurence Meade's contest to identify the seed capsule over at the Althouse blog.  We have Cleomes that we allow to reseed from year to year (in fact, you would have to be ruthless to root them out entirely), but we were hoping these might be a little different.

And in fact, they are.  Our original Cleomes (on the right) are much farther along at this point, and much taller.  I guess in Wisconsin you want to be sure spring has really sprung before you put much effort into growing.  Meade's Cleomes are also a darker shade of purple than ours.

Another butterfly, the Red Admiral, on our deck.  Top view...

... and the undersides of the wings.  A very cooperative butterfly.

Beach Report: June 2, 2012

 An early beach walk this morning, because we had a 10 o'clock meeting.  At the beach we were greeted by a troop of Bay Scouts and their families, helping another scout with his Eagle Scout project, transplanting beach grasses from our natural dunes on the north beach to some recently rebuilt dunes on the south beach.

 Joel and Red remembered to come early. 

We had a large storm in Maryland last night, tornado watches, even a couple touch down, though no where near us. However, as a result the wind was up this morning and from the north, and the Bay was choppy and muddy.

Skye checks out a log that she has checked out a hundred times before.  But you never know, maybe there will be something exciting there this time!

A sheet of crusty algae growing on the cliff face.  These are fueled by the nutrients which get into the groundwater from the numerous septic tanks in our community.  The water seeps through the sand, but hits a clay layer and moves sideways until it come out at the top of the clay on the cliff.

A "wild" rose grows in English Ivy on the cliffs where soil permits.  Both are non-native invasive species.  This rose is clearly a domesticated rose gone wild, as it has the many extra petals that have been added to the basic rose design of 5 petals by gardeners breeding for "showiness."

Oh My, What a Morning at the Beach

Oh my, what a morning!  Sunny, warm, but not too warm, not too humid and just the right amount of breeze.  Weather doesn't get any better than this.

Skye decided that these sun bathers needed checking out.













The water has warmed up to comfortable wading temperatures.  We waded around looking for shark's teeth, but it wasn't really good day for us.











However, Joel brought the big one he found last week for our viewing pleasure.  This is a once a year grade tooth, a fine specimen of what we call the extinct Mako, but which is likely a precursor to the modern Great White Shark.




A good day for a ride on a jet ski.

Or to paddle around in the shallows while silly dad looks for sharks teeth

 Or to paddle around in a kayak.













The flower of the day.  I still haven't figured out what this is.  It's a shrub with leaves like a Black Locust, but a very different flower.

I also took a picture with a flash, and it looked very different, because the flash brought out the purple in the flower, and somehow diminished the orange.

Back to the Beach

The conditions here this morning were pretty much the same as in Anchorage two mornings ago, cloudy and rainy, except for that temperature thing.  It was more like 70 F here instead of 40 F.  Shorts and T-shirt weather instead of jeans and flannel shirts.

An interesting version of the beach's colors, courtesy of Paintshop Pro's temperature correction.  It looks a little too pink to me.

Skye was pretty happy to see us, and clung pretty close last night.  But she was raring to get back down to the beach.  We met Joel and Red on our way back, and filled Joel with some misinformation about the cruise, or at least Georgia did.

The flower du jour was the Japanese Honeysuckle, a common invasive species in the US.  I remember sipping nectar from these as a kid back in Los Angeles.  It's probably illegal to do that now.

This helicopter made a pretty low pass just off shore.  I assume from the lack of markings that it's military, probably from Patuxent River Naval Air Station, just down the bay, but I don't know for sure.  That's pretty much a stock response when something odd flies by here.

Georgia won the prize for the best fossils of the day with these, a large Snaggletooth shark tooth (on the right), and a crocodile tooth (on the left).  Joel had found a huge Mako tooth over the week and still had it to show us, a once a year type tooth, but foolishly, I didn't ask to take a picture of it.

Ketchikan

Our first stop in Alaska is the port city of Ketchikan. The ship eased into the dock in the early morning, and we were out on deck to see the last line being tightened up around 7:30 AM.

We had a long, leisurely breakfast and went into the town with the 'rents around 10. More below the fold.

Sunday, May 6 Beach Report

Today was not a repeat of yesterday's good sunbathing weather. It had cooled to the high 50's, and the area was blanketed by clouds.  Looking southeast across the Bay to Taylor's Island, the sky fairly glowers.

Looking north, it didn't look a whole lot better.  The Bay was a bit choppy, but not horrible.

We met Joel and Red on time.  Red found this nice stinky fish to pull out of the surf.  Fortunately, he was persuaded from making a meal out of it.

There were a few of these beetles washed up on the beach.  This one was battered, but still crawling.  What amazing colors!

Salsify, or Goat's Beard (Tragopogon sp., probably dubius).

Some kind of Milkweed (Asclepias) that is quite common on the dunes.

Pollination in this genus is accomplished in an unusual manner. Pollen is grouped into complex structures called pollinia (or "pollen sacs"), rather than being individual grains or tetrads, as is typical for most plants. The feet or mouthparts of flower visiting insects such as bees, wasps and butterflies, slip into one of the five slits in each flower formed by adjacent anthers.

The bases of the pollinia then mechanically attach to the insect, pulling a pair of pollen sacs free when the pollinator flies off. Pollination is effected by the reverse procedure in which one of the pollinia becomes trapped within the anther slit.

While editing the picture above, I accidentally hit the "threshhold" control in GIMP. I kind of liked the effect. I played with it for a minutes, and decided to keep this one....