Excuses

Early morning: joined Trumpeter swan counters, walked 3+ km. Saw California sea lions swimming up the channel. On the way home, saw cormorants by the shore. Went home, grabbed camera, went to stalk cormorants down the beach until they flew away. Saw raft of sea lions, 20 or more; chased them up the channel on foot and by car. Drove to pier, walked to end, hoping to see the lions arrive. Beat them, waited. No sea lions, but saw a grebe.

Came home, booted up, fell asleep at the computer. Heading out again in a bit.

So no post today.

Well, maybe one photo.

Thatched acorn barnacles, Oyster Bay.

The dog ate my homework.

Or the cat-minder's equivalent: the kitten walked on my keyboard and scrambled the commands for my photo-processing program.  It took her a couple of seconds, and me a couple of hours to fix it.

So, no worms tonight. Well, maybe one.

Flatworm on a rock, with eggs.

More worms tomorrow, kitten permitting.

Rock Flipping on the Celtic calendar

One more Rock Flipper has reported in.

Mark, at Views from the Bike Shed, realized too late that he's missed the day, and claimed international dateline interference, and then expanded that to say he was operating on the Celtic calendar, and would flip his rocks a week later.

Excuses, excuses!

I let him get away with it, partly because he'd had a very exciting, very important week, partly because I'm a softy. But he lived up to his promise, and posted his results on Google+ today.

I don't know how linking to Google+ works, so I'm reposting the conversation here.

Mark:
we flipped rocks today - loads of em on the beach at Newgale (just as I said we would) - sadly we forgot the camera!

Me:
Find anything interesting?
I'll add you to the list, whether or not. 

Mark:
Very little - more noticeable for lack of creatures, with one exception.
So we found some anemones, small blennies, a few sand shrimps, what looked like lice, some egg cases, two large whelks - barnacles, limpets and muscles of course.
The unexpected find was a single By The Wind Sailor, Jelly Fish (Velella valella) - these are rare visitors here and normally wash ashore in their millions, not in ones or twos. They are an ocean species and evidently form huge rafts in warmer waters. Last time I saw them they quite literally covered all the beaches in West Wales (hundreds of millions of them) and it required diggers to clean up the rotting mess!

And now I'll go update the list.