June, 2023
On another drive around this beautiful Bay View area, I found a nice spot where I could park and walk to the beach. I thought I would stop and look and enjoy it for a few minutes. I ended up staying there over an hour. You know how it goes. 🙂
When the people in the photo above walked away, I walked out that little path to see what they were seeing.
I turned to the left to see their view, and snapped the photo below. The small hamlet of Bay View is off to the left, outside the photo. But WAY off there, on the very far, way far left side of the water … do you see those small black dots?
Wow! At least 20 Great Blue Herons. I’ve never seen more than two or three together in one spot. They compete with each other for food, they don’t share! But look at this.
I liked that one heron in the photo above who seemed to be looking up at the sky. I wonder why, she was looking up at the sky, maybe she looked for shade, with nothing to do but wade.
Ok, enough poetry. 🙂 These herons did not seem to be feeding. Do any of you folks have ideas about why they were gathered there? Too late in the year for breeding. They all seemed like friends. They seemed to have fewer feathers than most Great Blue Herons that I see … maybe these folks are juveniles? teenagers?
I wish I’d been closer so I could get more detail, and better focused photos, but you get the idea.
So then I turned and simply walked along the beach. And … I started to notice a whole lot of tiny white “sticks” on the beach, especially in the moist dark areas of the beach.
Here’s a closeup below. Lots of white little sticks.
Ah but no. Not sticks. Shells! There must have been thousands of them, millions?
If any of you folks can help me identify these, I’d sure appreciate that. I look online and get all sorts of results for the Sanibel Islands, or Hawaii, or the California coast, but nothing specific to Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest of the State of Washington.
And, in the end, I had a wonderful walk along a perfectly beautiful beach on a glorious sunny day here on Puget Sound. Nothing could be better. The tide was out … my shoes made squishy sounds as I walked … birds were everywhere (ok, mostly seagulls) … and it smelled so luscious and rich. 🙂
