Beached Bird Survey

Once a month I do a beached bird survey for COASST (Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team), an organization based at the Univ. of Washington. Volunteers monitor 1 km. stretches of beaches from Northern California up the Pacific Coast to the Arctic Circle and west to the Commander Islands in Russia. My stretch is at the south end of Bob Straub State Park near Pacific City. We identify and tag "beached" (dead) birds on our beaches and send the data and photos of the birds to COASST. They "collect and analyze the data to provide a baseline against which any impact, from human or natural origins, can be assessed".

A couple years ago, I surveyed a different beach, with Johnny, but we had to canoe across the Salmon River to get there and that was a challenge at times. After a year, we gave it up. The Bob Straub beach is much easier to get to and the interns at U of W enter my data into a computer for me. I can survey the beach alone and save Johnny's coast trips for Black Oystercatcher monitoring and other more fun pursuits.

So far this beach has had no major "wrecks" where hundreds of a species die and wash up. We had a Cassin's Auklet wreck on our first beach and it was no fun cataloging and tagging hundreds of dead birds.

Most months I don't have time to take photos of scenery but I hit a lovely, windless day in early October for my survey with lots of live birds and interesting beach scenery. So I took photos.

Several hundred Sanderlings were on the beach with me

Sea serpent?

The sea serpent was really a piece of driftwood covered in pelagic gooseneck barnacles

These five-plated barnacles form massive colonies on floating logs, etc., traveling great distances and sometimes, as here, becoming stranded on the beach during high tides.

Haystack Rock off Cape Kiwanda is visible from this beach.

This crab was washed up by a wave and grabbed by a waiting gull. But the crab fought back and the next wave took it out to sea again. The gull retrieved it on the next incoming wave but again the crab fought and eventually disappeared for good into the ocean. The gull sat down on the beach to watch and wait for another gift from the sea.

I took a lot of photos of enormous Haystack Rock, where Black Oystercatchers nest in the spring. It was a beautiful day on the Oregon coast.