Cloudy with showers, heavy at times. Moderate winds, and temperatures in the 40s. Snow levels down to 3700 feet, or maybe a little less.
I wanted to check how high the tide gets on a part of shoreline where I am thinking we’ll need to have one of the observers stationed in Silver bay. I had been thinking I might go for the higher tides later in the week (and I still may), but my morning call finished early, and I realized I had time to get out to Silver Bay for this morning’s high tide.
Connor was up for the outing, so he loaded up the bikes and we drove out there. The timing of our arrival wasn’t great from a rain perspective. We got started right in the middle of a moderately heavy shower. It was letting up by the time we made it to pole 52, where there’s access to a bit of beach.
Much of the shoreline of the bay is quite steep, but for whatever reason, there’s a small, flat point that only gets covered at the highest tides. The question I had was, just how high.
Arriving right at the scheduled high, I saw today’s 9.5ft tide would have presented no problem or observers. Even without boots, it would have been possible to keep my feet out of the water.
However, it would not take much more water for the beach to be covered. I’m estimating in boots it’s probably okay up to about 10.5 feet, but for tides higher than that, I think it will be an issue. For the 12 foot tides predicted during portions of the project, there may be an hour or so either side where the tide is too high to be out on the beach.
My camera had gotten wet when I had it out in the rain, and it was slow to respond to my efforts to take pictures. As a result, I had a couple of accidental photos that snapped after I thought I had already taken the picture.
I went out for a drive later this afternoon. Connor had seen a pair of Wood Ducks with the Mallards at Swan Lake this morning. Only a few Mallards were at the lake when I went by.
Crows were dropping mussels on the concrete at the channel. I made some half-hearted attempts to get pictures. It was really probably too dim to bother, but sometimes I can’t help myself.
Someone saw a lone Trumpeter Swan at Starrigavan recently. I didn’t see it today. It’s on the early side for them, but I expect they’ll be moving through and/or showing up for winter in the next two to three weeks.
This evening I experimented a little with the Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on the R7. I was able to use the ring light I have for the stereomicroscope on the lens. It would not be so helpful for field use, but it should helpful at home. If I am able to make a good set up for it, I think it’s likely I would get better photos than I’m able to get with the trinocular and 80D on the stereomicroscope.
I am quite happy with what I see through the eye pieces on my NexiusZoom, but not so much the results with the camera through the trinocular. I would guess there are stereomicroscopes that have better performance with the trinocular than mine seems to. Since I should be able to get 5x magnification with the MP-E 65mm, in principle, that should be comparable magnification to the maximum 5.5x the microscope does, but perhaps with clearer images. [Update: I saw something after writing this which suggested stereomicroscopes may be suboptimal for trinocular-based photography due to the way they are set up for creating the stereo view. Perhaps a dissecting scope without the stereo aspect would make for better photos.])
After experimenting with the camera and spending an hour or so cleaning slides and cover slips, I did finish up a couple collections I had looked at previously.
My iNaturalist Observations for Today
