Beach Report 4/6/26

A bright and sunny, but cool spring day. A faint yellow in the water from pollen. It's that time of year. I'm happy not to be allergic to tree pollen.

This was the scene a couple of days ago, when the wind as just right to pile all the pollen up against the shore.

A pretty low tide allowed us to go all the way up the beach.

The best of 20 teeth, a medium sized upper Snaggletooth with classic feeding damage. 

A young Northern Water Snake out in the sun (from 2 days ago when it was warmer). 

Beach Report 4/10/21

Foggy, with a side of pollen. We had fog at home this morning, which lifted while we were outside doing a garden chore. But when we turned onto the beach road, there it was again. It lasted the whole walk. Relatively warm moist air over cold water.

Lot's of pollen rolling around in the water, especially thick in corners where it piles up. I think it's mostly the oaks and other hardwoods but it could be pine too. 

High tide, and not much wave action, but between Georgia and I, we got 20 sharks teeth, none remarkable, and a fragment of a big bony fish vertebrae. 

At some point Skye got pretty excited and interested in the cliffs. 

It's Mr. or Mrs. Groundhog in the browned out Kudzu. Once it get going again, you'll very rarely see them. 

The groundhog is also referred to as a chuck, wood-shock, groundpig, whistlepig, whistler, thickwood badger, Canada marmot, monax, moonack, weenusk, red monk, land beaver, and, among French Canadians in eastern Canada, siffleux.

Easter Sunday at the Beach

A glorious spring morning at the beach, 65 F, sunny, with a few puffy white clouds, and a light south wind. The trees a turning green fast . . .

. . . as is the water (that's pollen, not algae). Otherwise the water was quite clear.

 A Black Snake suns himself in a root ball exposed on the cliffs. Georgia didn't see him until I pointed him out.

 A view looking south as a lag behind Georgia and Skye scanning for teeth.

Not a bad day, 28 teeth including these two large Snaggleteeth. The largest one is broken, but it's still the biggest of the year by bit.

Fun on the sandbar.

EPA Identifies Cause of Bee Deaths

Bees threatened by a common pesticide, EPA finds

An insecticide widely used on grains, vegetables, fruit and other crops nationwide threatens honeybees, federal environmental regulators said in a decision that could lend impetus to efforts to ban the chemical.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday that imidacloprid, a nicotine-imitating chemical found in at least 188 farm and household products in California, “potentially poses risk to hives when the pesticide comes in contact with certain crops that attract pollinators.”

The EPA's decision was prompted by increasing concern that the chemicals might be contributing to the sudden collapse of commercial honey bee colonies over the last decade.

Those bees pollinate crucial food crops and contribute about $14 billion in value to the agricultural economy nationwide.

This is the first of four risk assessments conducted by the EPA on the class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids. The rest are slated for completion by the end of the year, after which the agency could tighten controls over the insecticides.

However, as we've seen before, the problems with colony collapse disorder may be substantially exaggerated:

I rarely see Honey Bees around our garden any more. However, I do see plenty of native bees, and other pollinators, including butterflies, wasps and beetles. and things seem to get pollinated (especially the weeds). Remember, the Honey Bee is a non-native species in the western hemisphere, and they displaced many native species.

Peak Pollen at the Beach

When we headed for the beach this morning, it was 60 F, still, and mostly cloudy, with rare sunny breaks.  A pretty tolerable spring day.

One of those weird things.  The beach was overpopulated with these shiny green beetles today (God love beetles, that's why he made so many of them). I've seen a few before there, but never like this.

The big story of the day was pollen.  We had hoped that the three day rainfall would have removed the pollen from the air, but we were wrong.  The oaks are all in tassel now, and every flat surface is yellow.  It accumulates in pockets in the surf too, concentrated by some odd  trick. This is a particularly thick spot.

Here you can get a better sense of the size and degree of concentration in one of these patches.