Cloudy and rainy for much of the day. Winds were up from recent days, but not especially strong where I was out and about.
With this morning’s low predicted to be -3.1ft shortly after 9am, I decided to get out and see what I could find at the beach.
I didn’t get an early start, but arrived at Sandy Beach shortly before 9am.
I was surprised at how many others were at the beach. One of the cold water dip groups was toweling off on the beach, so they left shortly after. I think several of the others were a parent with a child or two. I guess with school out now, that’s not so unexpected.
No one was on the rocky shoreline area where I wanted to look, so I was not dissuaded from heading down.
When I arrived, there was a steady drizzle coming down, but before long it intensified to a soaking rain. There was a bit of a breeze as well, and with temperatures in the mid-40s, it was not especially comfortable.
The rain made it more challenging to get photos, and I did not end up staying as long as I had originally thought I might.
Over the slightly less than an hour I was there, I managed to make 25-30 observations. That’s a not a bad pace (though for big day purposes, it’s well under target rates), but I suspect I doubled up on a seaweed or two. The algae (especially reds) were especially lush today. It seems like many of them die back by later in the summer, so this might have been a peak time. Seaweeds can be challenging, and I have a fair amount of work to do to get even the more common species sorted. In addition to the red algae, many of the creatures I happened to observe were red, so it seemed to be a bit of a theme during my visit.
I spent the rest of the day at home, but did manage to finish working through the Usnea updates on the wiki and cleaning out most of the long-neglected messages in my iNaturalist inbox. This reminded me that the red gunnel (Pholis schultzi) was only recently reported in Alaska via iNaturalist observations (including one of mine), so I think I’ll write up a little post about that soon, and try to let folks who maintain state checklists know about it.
My iNaturalist Observations for Today
