Mostly cloudy to overcast with rain later in the day. Temperatures in the 40s.
Skies must have at least partially cleared overnight, as I saw frost on neighborhood roofs this morning.
By the time I got out this afternoon, it was full overcast, though the rain hadn’t yet started.
I checked the channel, but other cars at the ramp discouraged me from sticking around.
I spent a few minutes at Sea Mart parking lot, then at the kelp patch pullout. A roll of clouds out over the sound caught my attention. It seemed to extend from Mt. Edgecumbe well to the south. I’m not sure what might have caused it.
After driving out to Starrigavan and turning around, I made a detour up Harbor Mountain Road (Kramer Avenue bypass).
Roadside alders (mostly young trees) were trimmed at left just off roaded area, making access off the road less convenient than it used to be. Still, I stopped to look around in a scrubby open-ish area that I had previously visited.
There were clearly trails worn in, and someone had done some trimming. I wondered if it might be the initial efforts at proprety improvement, or perhaps for surveying, but after checking the city GIS, that seems less likely. A large parcel along either side of the road still shows as unsubdivided and owned by the city.
I did see someone had trimmed parts of a cedar that had tipped over, so perhaps the trimming along the trails was done to allow easier access to the tree. (I’m guessing the parts were harvest for Christmas decorations/wreaths). The trails themselves seemed more well established, and may be game trails.
A chickadee perched on a branch of the fallen cedar and called. It was close enough that I took a servicable picture with my phone.
I made observations of liverworts and more growing on old wood (old enough that it wasn’t quite clear to me what it was the remains of).
I have some ideas about what I documented, but I’ll need to follow up with some microscopy.
Before going home, I made a stop by Crescent Harbor to check out what the gulls have been doing. There certainly were many broken mussel shells on the dock.
Several dozen gulls were over by the larger wharf, where many seemed to be picking at the mussels growing on the pilings there. Despite the apparently heavy foraging on mussels the gulls have been doing, I still saw many mussels remaining on the dock floats an pilings. Gulls don’t dive, so any mussels that remain much below the surface should be safe (at least from the gulls).
My iNaturalist Observations for Today
