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The Daily Bucket - low tide activity: vultures, eagles, crows, swallows, otter [1]
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Date: 2023-05-20
mid May 2023
Salish Sea, Pacific Northwest
We’re seeing more low tides in the daytime now as spring moves into summer. Wider beaches can be handy for some wildlife. I saw all the critters in the title this past week, though not all in the same part of the beach.
Swallows often cruise the beach hunting sand fleas that feed on washed up seaweed. Barn swallows have nested in the derelict fish processing buildings in the field behind the beach for many years. But I discovered that’s not what was going on once I looked at my pics. The 10-12 birds darting back and forth from the beach to the building were Cliff Swallows, and it was mud they were collecting. I didn’t know Barn and Cliff swallows can share a nesting site. We have no bridges or overpasses here so an abandoned building is probably an attractive site.
Higher up in the intertidal zone (including the beach) the sediment is sand, while farther down is mud. The swallows wait for the receding tide to reveal suitable mud for their nests.
🦠
Otters are fairly common in this bay. There are gazillions of crabs to be caught here, of several kinds, so it’s not unusual to see otters coming and going. I watched this otter cross the road heading down the beach to the water. An oddity is that it was already wet. I don’t know why.
🦠
At the far end of the beach there was a lot of activity one day. At least a dozen Turkey vultures were working on something, with crows darting in as best they could. Then a pair of eagles cruised in to check out the action. While eagles are more often known as predators, they actually get quite of lot of their calories by scavenging. And a scrum of vultures is a tell for them. Generally vultures will give way to eagles once they show up, just as crows defer to vultures — size determining dominance. Crows weigh about a pound, vultures 3 lbs, eagles about 10 lbs.
Video clips from the road:
After some desultory examination of the remains, the eagles departed, the good stuff already eaten. Then I was able to approach that section of the beach close enough to see what they were all working on (eagles are much more skittish than vultures, and I didn’t want to spook them…the vultures are far more tolerant of human proximity). Interestingly there were no gulls there. They are scarce in the bay these days now nesting season has begun. Mostly offshore.
Turns out the birds were scavenging the last bits of two fish: skeletons, skin, heads. Pretty good size fish too. Given there were two skeletons in the same place, these fish probably didn’t die from natural causes and wash up. Most likely whatever humans had caught them had disposed of everything on the beach except for the fillets. This spot of beach is directly across from the one wide spot by the shoreline road, hence easy to park and toss stuff there.
Actually I have no problem with that form of disposal here. The leftovers provide food for scavengers: birds at low tide, crabs at high tide, and an assortment of smaller critters like sand fleas, tardigrades, bacteria and such. Putting fish guts in the garbage to be landfilled would be a waste. What’s surprising is that the fisherpeople didn’t clean these fish (likely salmon) on their boat — it’s much easier disposing of fish guts over the side.
A couple days later I checked out the site where the scavengers had been working. Everything was gone except two very clean skeletons. No smell even. It was a quiet day. The vultures and crows had moved on, carcasses to clean up elsewhere.
🐟
Sunny and a bit cooler than our seasonal average for mid May in the Pacific Northwest islands.
What’s up in nature in your neighborhood?
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