Tree bones

Wind, salt, rain, blowing sand. Give them time, and they peel the thick bark off trees, snap off the branches, sandpaper the roots. Add a bit of moss and lichen and strew the resulting fantastic shapes all along the shore line and across the dunes. Ma Nature's modern art gallery.

Log, needles, lichen. And a sort of bird shape.

Standing statuettes, the innards of branch attachments. This wood seems to be tougher, more resistant to rot than the rest of the tree.

Log end and Big-headed sedge, turned yellow with the cold weather.

New tree, old tree, young tree.

Grandaddy stump, Saratoga Beach

The greys of winter

November. Here on Vancouver Island, that means rain, mist, fogs, and the colours leached out of the landscape. Grey days.

The view from Saratoga Beach. Grey, blue-grey, blue. The line of green along the shore is torn seaweed, tossed up at the high tide line.

Lonely young gull, waiting for the tide to retreat. Her colours are muted, too; grey-browns, palest of pinks, a hint of blue on beak and knees. Notice her painted toenails, though.

A Skywatch post

Sand, waves, and distant snow

Wandering idly on a sunny afternoon, I ended up on the sand at Saratoga Beach.

It keeps on snowing over on the mainland. Only the lower hills are blue.

That pale beige line on the horizon is Mitlenatch Island. Somehow, no matter the weather on either shore, the sun always shines on Mitlenatch.

In spite of the sun, the wind was chilly, and by the time I'd reached the water's edge, (with flying, icy spray) the sun had hidden itself behind the clouds. I walked to the rocks, turned over a few and tickled a couple of crabs, then hurried back; my hands had gone numb with the cold. It didn't help that I was carrying a collection of wet clam shells for identification practice at home.

A Skywatch post.

On Saratoga Beach, 2010

Laurie and I explored Saratoga Beach in the summer of 2010. This week, it was bare and empty. Back then, it was teeming with life.

I hadn't taken many photos of the beach critters, being more taken that day with the shapes of old stumps. But I found a couple, for comparison.

8 or more crabs, 2 (at least) hermit crabs, several limpets, a tribe of periwinkles, assorted clamshells, and barnacles, all coated with green algae. In a couple of hand-breadths of the gravelly spit.

Helmet crab carapace.

Looking south towards the spit in 2010. The previous two photos are from this area.

Over on Facebook, Fred Schueler was suggesting possible causes for the disappearance of all that life:

It could be from abrasion after really severe storms, maybe combined with winterkill - we were on Haida Gwaii for two winterkills-1985 and 1988 - and the first was mostly big rock-clinging invertebrates and the latter mostly fish and crabs - in 1985 folks were eating Octopus, and in 1988 Dungeness Crabs - the big slow-growing invertebrates just hadn't had time to recover in 3 growing seasons.
...or maybe rather than abrasion the spit had been buried in sand for a couple of years?

Or it could be just a feature of that tiny area of the beach. Or everything has dug in deep because of the weather. Or a slight change in the average temperature; climate change, in other words.

More investigation is needed.