Pacific City Bliss

This weekend, we celebrated Sarah's 3oth birthday at the beach and it turned out to be the best time we have had at the coast since our wedding. Sarah's family and many of our friends joined us to mark the occasion.


After several days of cold and rain, the sun emerged on Saturday in time for a bird hike I led for the Pacific City Birding and Blues Festival. I had a small turnout for my group, but we saw 27 species of birds and found many interesting items on the beach including a beached longnose lancet fish.


These slender beasts swim in deep seas and occasionally show up on beaches.


After the hike, my friend Jere and I dug for clams in the mud flats of Nestucca Bay.


We returned to the beach house in time for the Birthday Dinner. We ate a lot of pasta, and the non-vegetarians enjoyed the clams.


We drank some wine and a lot of singing and dancing followed, making for a memorable night for all of us, including the yarn crab. I could not ask for a better weekend to share with great folks.

Weekend at the Beach

We had a very relaxing weekend in the sun at Pacific City. I am too absorbed in the Inauguration to write much about it, so here are a few photos.

Sunset on out first night

Sunrise on our first morning

Mouth of Sand Lake, where we survey beached seabirds

A huge beached moon jelly

A smaller sea nettle

Winter surfing near Haystack Rock

Ziak Wildlife Refuge, full of ducks and coots

Blind Slough, where we saw a group of western grebes and an orange-crowned warbler, rarely seen wintering here.

Here's to a day of unbridled optimism!

Long Beach Weekend

Sarah and I spent three days at the beach this weekend to spend time with her family, celebrate birthdays, and count dead birds.

The weather changed by the minute from snow to rain to hail to warm sun and back to snow again.

Andie was eager to hit the beach regardless of the weather!

We conduct volunteer beached bird surveys at two beaches near Pacific City. We walk a mile of each beach to count, identify, measure, and tag the birds we find. On Saturday, we were accompanied by Sarah's cousin Sydney and her friend Alex. They helped us find 19 dead northern fulmars, one common murre, two short-tailed shearwaters, and one fork-tailed storm petrel wing.

At the end of our mile, we found six bird in the same area, so we lined them up and processed them as fast as possible. Our exhausted assistant can be seen on the right edge of the photo.

Northern fulmars appear to be having a hard time surviving at sea, as they were washing up all over the place. An alternative explanation for the high body count is that fulmar populations have a constant mortality rate and a higher than normal number of birds are wintering off the coast, resulting in all the birds we find. This question arises each winter when large numbers of a seabird species are found washed up on Oregon beaches.

I found a few other interesting birds as well, including a horned grebe in transition plumage and a breeding plumaged pigeon guillemot.

The foot color of the guillemot was an indescribably intense orange-red.

We saw and heard plenty of live birds as well, most notably rufous hummingbirds that were buzzing around and nearly colliding with us everywhere we went. Other new arrivals include turkey vultures and violet-green swallows. Wintering cackling geese and buffleheads remained, adding to a great bird diversity and activity this time of the year.