It started off with a nice sunrise.
Lately, it has been cloudy so I haven't really seen the sun rising too much. So this was a good start!
I knew it was going to be a good day when I was greeted by my friend (Mark named him "Stretch")
and his whole family!
I have never seen this many blue herons on the beach in the same spot before so this was very exciting. Since these birds let you get pretty close, I took about 50 pictures. I won't bore you with all of them but here are a few.
While I was taking these pictures, the BP convoy came out and scared all the birds away. Guess that was good because it got me moving.
Every morning at 6:30am sharp the BP convoy comes out onto the beach. About 4 or 5 jeeps go one way and 4 or 5 more go the other way. A couple tractors go each way also. These are the BP people out cleaning up the beach from the oil spill last summer. They park their jeeps and then get out with these big nets. After watching them for two weeks, I finally asked one of them what they were scooping up in their nets. He told me they were looking for tar balls. This looks like a very tedious task to me and they never have very many in their nets. I'm not sure exactly what a tar ball looks like but I don't really see any problems with the beach. It looks pretty clean to me. I think they should be more worried about the trash on the beach at this point.
I am always taken aback by the amount of trash at the beach. This is one reason why I don't usually walk up the condo side of the beach. The trash at the public beach and in front of the condos is horrible. People leave piles of 10 to 20 cans of beer and soda just laying there.
Well now that the BP guys have scared the birds away I can get on with my walk. The first thing I notice is that the "cliff" is getting bigger and the slope is getting steeper.
The next thing I notice are these little white/cream pellets all over the beach right at the surf line. I don't know what they are but they were new today. I hadn't really every noticed them before. Maybe I just noticed today because there were a lot of them.
You can see a closeup of them in this picture below. As I continued on my walk, I saw this beetle. He caught my eye because he was very colorful. He was fun to watch. He really should not have been near the surf. He seemed quite out of place. He did move very fast and he kept trying to climb up the "cliff" to get out of the water. He wasn't having much luck with that.
As I continued on down the beach I saw a really neat piece of driftwood. Of course, I wanted to take a picture of it (because as of late I take a ton of pictures of everything at the beach). I took 200 today. Good thing it is digital and not film!
I didn't get a picture of it then because there were several people standing near it. It was funny there was a mom, dad and a little boy about 6 years old. They were walking towards it and he was creeping up very hesitantly like maybe it was going to jump on him. You could see the relief in him when he realized that it wasn't a sea creature but just a piece of wood. It was funny to watch him. They were pretty close to it so I just passed by and thought I would get a picture of it on the way back. Here is that picture.
Shortly after this there were some men fishing from the beach. They were there yesterday. Fishing must have been good because they were back again today. I thought half the thrill of fishing was holding the rod especially when you feel that first bite.
Glad to see that they had other rods too. They looked like they were having fun.
As I continued on my walk the slope of the beach was hurting my ankles so I went up and walked in the soft sand. It is sort of compacted from the tractors riding over it so I walked up there for a while. Got tired of walking in the soft sand so I moved back down to the hard sand with the slope. Was into a power walk at this point and walked about 10 minutes past my 30 minute point.
As I walk down the beach there is a boardwalk that comes out of the dunes. It leads out to the street. This is my 15 minute mark when I am power walking. So whenever I am walking back I know at this point if I walk fast I will be back in 15 minutes.
My 30 minute mark is a pavilion that is part of the State Park.
I continued on down to the beach houses today.
I don't know why, but I haven't timed it to this point. Anyway, I turn around and head back up the beach. I notice that a group of Pelicans has been flying around in a circle and now they land and are just sitting in the water. This is rare, you don't see them doing this very often.
I am now into a full power walk. As I am walking along I notice there seem to be a lot of feathers on the beach today. I noticed some when I was walking down the beach, but now they just seemed to be every 3 feet or so. This is along the part where I was walking in the soft sand so I didn't notice this on the way down. Anyway guess what I do? Your right, I start to take pictures of every feather that I see.
As I get closer, I still cannot quite make out what it is. I can tell it is a bird but I just don't know what kind.
When I get close enough to see what kind of bird it is I get really excited. I cannot believe my eyes!
It is a pelican, about 15 feet from me!
I'm so excited I don't know whether I should take pictures or movies. He is getting fish and eating them and this was one of the most amazing things I have seen. I have closeups of all the birds I see at the beach except for the pelican. I have been taking pictures of them flying over head and out across the gulf but nothing really good.
So I was really excited to finally get a closeup picture of a pelican. What struck me most about this pelican, is that he was not bothered by me one bit. He was totally oblivious that I was watching him and I was as close as I was to him.
I took several videos of him. He was so much fun to watch.
Suddenly there were a bunch of these Jelly Fish in the surf. They were pretty. They were really plump looking and pink. They reminded me of Sand Dollars. So now I am dodging these while I am trying to film the pelican.
I probably watched him for about 15 minutes. After a while he flew away. He flew down the beach where I had just been. If this had been at the beginning of my walk I would have followed him. But I was now an hour and a half into my 1 hour walk on the beach.
So now I am heading back to the pier with about 10 minutes left in my walk and suddenly right in front of me is one of the "feeding frenzys". That is where all the fish start jumping out of the water because there is a predator fish in the area. It was so close to me I was getting splashed from the fish jumping in and out of the water.
As the feeding frenzy ended, I noticed a dark spot on the water like I saw last night at the beach. Since I was right there at the waters edge I decide to see if I could tell what was causing this dark spot on the water. To my surprise it was a school of minnows. I couldn't believe it. There were a ton of them and they swim really close together so that is what was causing the dark spot on the water.
Also the whole way on my way back to the pier there were random fish that would just jump about 3 feet out of the water and fly over about 4 feet. I probably saw at least 10 of those on my walk back. They were different from the "feeding frenzy" jumping fish.
As I approached the pier after my long walk (about 2 hours) my good friend "Stretch" was waiting there to say good by to me!
After the last few days, I don't know what else could come along that would be more amazing than the things I have seen in the last few days.
However, I am looking forward to tomorrow's walk!
PS - In honor of Shark Week, here is my contribution:
During one of my first walks on the beach after moving here, I came across this baby hammerhead shark lying on the beach. I took this on my cell phone. It was finding things like this that made me decide to take my camera to the beach.
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