Butterflies at the Beach

And yet another steamy morning at the beach.  It was already well into its way into the 80s as we got to the beach.  However, a nice southwest wind, helped quite a bit without making the Bay rough.

Just one of those weird things.  In a couple of places we foundlarge numbers of Bay Anchovy (Anchoa mitchilli), washed up and being sun dried at the high tide mark.  Pushed up and stranded by predators?  Avoiding low oxygen?  I can't see an obvious reason.

Bay anchovy are one of the most abundant fish in the Bay, and form huge schools that often look like rain on the water, and are often called rain minnows.

A father and son out enjoying an inflatable kayak.

 Butterflies!  There were lots of Eastern Tiger Swallowtails on the beach today, and I do mean on the beach, as they seemed to be "puddling"; finding damp spots on the sand to sip water from.  All were yellow phase except...

 ...this one.  We must have seen over 20 swallowtails, today, and this was the only dark one.  It's marked very much like the one I photographed at home in the woods yesterday, which makes me feel a lot better about my tentative ID of it as a dark Eastern Tiger Swallowtail.

After I disturbed this one, she went over to the Coltsfoot to rest, and gave me another great shot.

It's hot! Can we go home now?

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.

Last July Beach Report, 2012

Only one beach report this weekend; with Alex and Kelly staying yesterday morning on their way back from the Left Coast, we didn't get ready until it was way too hot and muggy.

It was a pretty nice morning; a bit of a front last night left us a lot cooler (in the high 70s) and less humid, with a decent NE breeze.  The breeze set up a nice "wave" over the cliffs, and the Ospreys and Eagles were out taking advantage of it.




A young Eagle, in a sort of mottled plumage.  It was all up and down the cliffs all morning  I wasted a lot of pixels trying to get a decent picture of this bird.  This one isn't great, and I stepped all over the brightness and contrast to bring out the pattern.  He might be this years fledgeling.

A family preparing for a jaunt out in their little inflatable boat, equipped with an electric trolling motor.

 And out on the bay.

A woman hunting fossils with a and held strainer.  It looked like it should be a good day, with lots of shell hash exposed, but Georgia and I found very few.

I did find this fossil fish vertebra though, which is pretty rare, so it wasn't a total wash.

Skye was feeling pretty energetic, after a day off from competing with a smaller and more energetic bitch...

 She even managed a run now and then.

An Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterfly in flight.












The probability of Sea Nettles is still 100%.












A Great Blue Heron trying to find a bid to eat on a beach full of people.  Feeling squeezed between us and the oncoming walkers, it flew away a few seconds after this.









By the time we were done with the walk, the beach was starting to get busy.

A One-Off Beach Report

The first and only beach report for this weekend.  Yesterday was a full day.  Rainy and cool, we had to drive Alex and Kelly to the airport to catch a flight to LAX to represent the East Coast side of the family at the annual reunion in Pismo Beach, Calif.  They also dropped off their dog, Hendrix, for a stay with us.

After dropping them off at BWI, we did some other errands, including taking my mid 70s J-45 Gibson guitar to a luthier (not a necessarily a Lutheran), to have it examined and possibly repaired.  Alex insists it needs to have it's neck reset.  By the time we got home in the afternoon, it was still raining, and a beach walk just didn't better than a nap.

So this morning, we bundled the dogs into the SUV, and headed off.  It's still cloudy, and the weather is quite tolerable.  Above, Georgia tries to wrestle with Hendrix, who thinks it's completely unfair for Skye to be off leash while she's stuck.  But it's for the best; on her own Hendrix will swallow enough bay water to get a bad case of diarrhea.

We saw the usual assortment of Ospreys and Eagles (I saw an Eagle being harassed by some small birds when it soared past "their" tree).  No photos though, but I did get the Mourning Dove above, sitting in a tree hanging over the beach, and the Great Blue Heron fishing along the shore.

Probability of encountering a Sea Nettle?  Still 100%.

Something a little odd, at least here.  A group of Canada Geese, probably expatriates, since any sensible goose has gone back to Canada by July.  Of course, in Maryland we have lots of geese that stay, so called resident or "golf course" geese who decline the annual trip to the Motherland.  I've never seen them around here, though.

Some fishing going on around the mouth of the harbor.  I didn't see any fish coming up, though.

Out of Breath at The Beach

Another beach day much like yesterday, warm, muggy, partly cloudy, but as always happens, somehow different too.

Today, what was different was the Bay.  We appear to have been on the edge of a low oxygen event, caused by a couple days of consistent south winds, which move the bottom water up on our shore through a process called upwelling.

 The first clue to that was a large number of pipefish, hanging right in the surf zone.  Pipefish are a relative of seahorses, both have their bodies armored in strong scales, a tubular mouth and an unusual form of reproduction where females lay eggs in a pouch that the male has, making them one for the few groups of animals where the males "give birth".

There were lots of other kinds of fish in the shallows as well, including this little flatfish.  Likely a Hogchoker, this may also be a relatively rare Winter Flounder.

There were also large number of crabs in the shallows, making wading a bit dicier than usual.  There were other fish in the shallows as well, silversides, clingfish and others, but I saw only a couple of dead silversides washed up.  By the time we finished our walk, the hypoxia must have been dissipating.  There were much fewer fish and crabs in the shallows.

The birds find these so called "crab jubilees" to be a good thing, because it brings a lot of fish up into the surface, for easy pickings.  This eagle was fishing in the nearshore waters.









 As was this Osprey.

I think the Cardinal in the Kudzu was just a coincidence, though.

Coming and going.













Another dragonfly.

There's Something Happening Here, at the Beach

 And what it is ain't exactly clear...

We got another early start to beat the heat, and even maybe the rain.  It was mostly overcast, with no wind, and temperature in the mid to high 70s and humid.  

 The Navy is doing something offshore, and it's very mysterious.  There were three vessels hanging out near the channel of the Bay, two small and one very large. 

One of the two smaller was clearly a crane mounted on a large barge.

 The big ship was odd; a catamaran design with a huge space under the hull.  It looks like another vessel maybe tucked up under there.


They were out there for most of our two hour walk.  Somewhere along the way, the two smaller one disappeared (moved away south or across), and eventually the big catamaran steamed up north.

Much like the Honey Badger, Skye don't care.  We attacked her this week with the comb, (it takes one of us to hold her down, while the other combs), and the result was a huge pile of down, and a dog that looks much slimmer and less scruffy.

Neither do the butterflies.  Eastern Black Swallowtail or Eastern Tiger Swallowtail black form? or maybe even a Spicebush Swallowtail?

Well, I'll leave that to the taxonomists among us.

For about 10 minutes the sun actually came out, and it was rather warm.

Probability of Sea Nettles, still 100%.

Lots of dragonflies about, but not streaming down the beach the way they had the last two weeks.