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The Daily Bucket - corner of the beach [1]

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Date: 2025-01-30

January 2025

Salish Sea, Pacific Northwest

Now it’s past midwinter, we’re starting to see lower tides in daytime in this area. On a recent day when half the intertidal was exposed, I walked down to a corner of the beach where the sand meets a rocky headland. These beach and headland scenes aren’t “spring” phenomena per se but are in the sense I haven’t been able to get access to them til now.

The beach is littered with bivalve shells from months and years of birds, mammals, crabs and even fish eating their soft parts, leaving the hard shells behind to wash up. Marine invertebrates don’t die of old age although you could say it’s from natural causes.

The farther down on the beach, the more shells accumulate.



On the headland you can see how far up the water reaches: a horizontal line separating vegetation from bare rock

The big one is a Butter clam. Others here are Littkenecks, Purple Varnish clams, cockles and lots of miscellaneous fragments

Pacific oyster

On the headland, the bedrock is a metamorphized jumble of compressed, sheared and fractured sandstones and shales pushed up by a marine terrane’s tectonic collision with North America. The rock is dated to the late Jurassic-early Cretaceous.

Quartz intrusions into fractures

Limpets and periwinkles live highest in the intertidal

Tidepool with several kinds of seaweed and invertebrates

Anemones, barnacles, bryozoans, hydroids, limpets — these are the animals that can tolerate the most air exposure

Higher up on the rock, terrestrial plants cover the headland.

The yellow is a splash-zone lichen. An old fir snag balances precariously. Dormant willow branches are festooned with lichen.

Where trees can’t anchor, mosses and ferns dominate

Stairstep moss, licorice fern (what Truckfern is), and lichens

The orange is the fruiting body of Frogpelt lichen

Cladonia is “fruiting” too

The only broadleaf trees with foliage right now are Madronas. Most of our shrubs are deciduous too, with a few exceptions like Mahonia.

Pacific madrona glows green amidst dormant snowberry, Nootka rose and other shrubs

Oregon grape flowers are still tightly closed

We’ll see lower tides more and more as spring settles in, trending toward the extreme minus tides of summer. Then it will be easy to get to the tidepools and headlands. For now I’m the only human down there.

Tide swash deposits debris in lines as it ebbs

🌎

Warmer today in the Pacific Northwest islands today, low 40s. Light southerly breeze. We may get lucky later today with some rain. It’s been extremely dry this month, no measurable precipitation for weeks.

What’s up in nature in your neighborhood?

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