When I woke up (early, for me) this morning, there was a low marine layer. It gradually rose throughout the day, but never broke up over town. Temperatures were in the mid-50s, and there was breeze out of the Southwest (where I was at, anyway).
I spent the afternoon on one of the Chaichei Islands (the not sandy one) after being dropped off.
In the five hours I was there, I didn’t quite make it around the whole shoreline of the main part of the island and the south islets that are connected at all except the highest tides.
In particular I was interested in revisiting Ramalina menziesii, a lichen I’ve so far only seen on this island. Prior to this visit I had only found it on one tree, but I ended up seeing it a couple of other places this time.
There were many fairy slipper orchids, but flowers were into the beginning of senescence and quite faded.
Reviewing photos, it was kind of a mixed bag of quality. Today I opted mostly for quantity. I had in mind to document a fair amount of the diversity on the island, so I didn’t take as long trying to get good photos as I would have had that been my primary intention.
It will take some time to process all the photos and get them into iNaturalist, but even with just what I used my phone for, I’m up to 80 taxa (71 species), and I suspect that will push towards 100 as I get everything else in.
It’s hard to say how many species could be observed on the island. With a couple of exceptions, I only did terrestrial life, and intertidal could add a lot more. While I think I got most of the vascular plants, I’m sure there are many additional lichens, mosses, and liverworts, not to mention the terrestrial arthropods, that I did not observe (or at least didn’t document). Over time and repeated visits, it might be interesting to see how many species turn up.
I added observation notes as captions to several of the photos in the gallery (click on the thumbnail to see a larger version with the caption).
My iNaturalist Observations for Today
Many additional photos from this day are available on iNaturalist via the link above.
