December COASST survey

Even though it is winter, we still enjoy going out to do the monthly Boy Scout survey. Compared to past year's weather, this one was a pretty mild one. The trail only had a couple of icy spots and except for the 30-35 knot winds on the north side of the beach it was pretty pleasant.

Except for missing our hiking buddy, Oso, we had a nice walk along the beach and found no dead birds. We enjoyed a nice turn-around treat complete with hot cocoa (made with milk) and various cheeses and crackers. We toasted Oso with carrots.




And what a difference a day makes! Here we are out for an afternoon walk at the airport dike on sunday. Next time, Tim doesn't get to pick which day we do the survey!

June Boy Scout beach

I got sunburnt. I was so careful the previous weekend when we were hanging out at the beaches and in the woods for 18+ hours a day. Then I got carried away. There was just enough breeze to keep the heat away and fooled me into thinking my skin could handle the rays. The sun god is LOL.

It was another absolutely gorgeous weekend so we didn't hesitate to head back out the road to conduct the official COASST bird survey.


No dead birds. We did find lots of litter and picked up quite a few aluminum cans, chip bags, juice straws and other misc. items. Why is it that people who drink Rainer Beer can't pick up after themselves?

We did run across a structure that is noteworthy and you wonder what the story was behind its creation. Does it represent a real place? What is the story that goes along with it?



I believe that this is the kitchen living room with built-in table.


and this is the sleeping area


and this would be the outdoor bath area complete with cockle shell tub


and every community has a dump or are these actually the sea creatures who came to invade the village?


When I was young I used to spend hours with neighbor kids building cities in the dirt/mud/sand. Having grown up in a toystore I had quite a few of match box cars that got used as props in the building process. We would work for days and into weeks creating roads, buildings, parks and making up stories along the way. It was always fun getting out the hose and filling up the riverways and ponds and then getting into water fights. Oops...I didn't mean to spray you!

Camping Trip Day 2-3

After spending a day in town and playing tourist, it was time to hit the woods and start the camping trip. On Saturday we packed up all the cars with our gear and headed out the road towards to Methodist Camp at Eagle River. We had set a departure time for noon and we were actually ready ahead of time!


We stopped for lunch at the Shrine of St Therese and managed to snag a couple of picnic tables right on the water so that we could enjoy the view. I had looked into booking a couple of the cabins here for our camping trip but wasn't able to find a weekend that worked with our schedules.


The view of the Chilkat Range was spectacular and getting everyone willing to move on to the next spot was tough.


Here is my sister Lori with her kids Naomi and Zac - this is actually one of a series of images which consisted mostly of a lot of goofing around pictures!


As many of you know, Boy Scout Beach is one of our favorite places to spend time so we were very pleased that we could show it off. As with the previous two days, the weather was incredible and it truly felt like we were at the beach.



Too bad this wasn't the week for the bird survey that we do monthly, with this large group we could really spread out and cover the beach from water's edge to the high tide mark.


The group on the beach!


Skunk cabbage leaves bigger than Bella!


We've just added our pictures to a shared flickr account and have over 800 images to review. We were able to get them all uploaded and shared within a couple of days. God bless digital cameras!

Boy Scout Beach and North Bridgette

Its all about the food, right? We had an awesome April birthday hike for Terry, with Oso, Linnie, and Kristie out to North Bridgette - Carnage Cove as our destination. We even had fresh wild strawberry shortcake with whipped cream courtesy of Kristi.


Beside the yummy food, the pay-off was seeing a pair of swans! Along with sapsuckers, gold-crowned kinglets, scoters, harlequin ducks, among others. We also saw whales breaching while we were eating lunch. We didn't see any northern shrike on this trip - the bird responsible for name of Carnage Cove.


The weekend before, Dave, Kristi, Oso, and Terry joined us on our beach survey. It was a glorious day - with the hint of spring in the air. They trail was almost completely clear of ice and snow.



We timed the walk with a low tide - this makes for a big beach and little chance of seeing any dead birds.


We looked for Mountain Bluebirds and other migration species but didn't see any. Kristi said that the next weekend was when the bluebirds came through.

COASST Survey

Results: no dead birds!

We had a quick walk into Boy Scout Beach this weekend and compared to other February months, the weather was incredible. We dressed in layers and quickly shedded them along the way. Since we had other plans for the day, we weren't to take advantage of the outgoing tide and arrived around the low tide mark. The beach was huge! The result of the winter storms has changed the beach a bit resulting in shifting high and low spots. We chose to stick closer to the beach as we normally know it and not go out to some of the new spits of sand.

The beach was pretty quiet - a couple of sea lions, many gulls, some barrows goldeneyes, a few ravens, eagles, crows, 5 people and 7 dogs.

And the clouds were so pretty with a variety of shades of gray, white, and some blue peaking in. For some reason we both forgot our sunglasses and could have used them.

On our last visit to the beach, some friends had a big bon fire and put up some prayer flags. After a month on the beach they were still there but they were pretty tattered.

New Year's Beach Survey

It was time once again, this last weekend, to do our monthly dead bird survey for COASST. It just so happened that we are having extreme high tides right now along with a beautiful full blue moon, high winds, and cool (for Juneau) temperatures. With some rain last week and the frosty temperatures that followed, many of the plants and trees are encased in sparkling crystals.


We like to do the survey at the higher tide because we feel that we are more apt to find bird remains and get to them before the other predators find them at a higher tide. There are eagles, ravens, crows, gulls, bears, and wolves that would probably love to munch on a bird carcass.

We found that the tide was so high that we weren't able to go our normal route and had to change directions several times. When we first came to a clearing and could see that Eagle River was rushing towards us instead of flowing down river (which would be its natural flow) we all had a feeling that we might not be about to go on our normal route to get to the beach.



We didn't have to bushwack too much - we were able to follow the tree line at the grasslands to get back to high enough ground to be on our way.

Around 1 pm - High Tide



Around 3:30 PM Receding Tide


The tide is very dramatic here - it went from 19.9 ft at 1 pm to a negative 4.3 ft by 7:30 pm. That's a lot of water shifting! We never did walk on the sand - we had to walk in the high grass and weren't able to walk the entire route. We dressed for wind but when we got to the beach it wasn't windy at all and we shed our gear. We had a nice picnic with lots of goodies and sat on our coats in the grass watching the incredible wave action.

It was very tempting to stay and take a nap but we knew we needed to hit the trail before getting caught in the dark on the return trip. There were several very icy patches on the trail and although there isn't a lot of elevation change, it does have a few ups and downs.

This was probably one of the most beautiful trips into boy scout beach we've ever had.

Oct COASST Survey/Fishing adventure

We had a beautiful weekend bird survey this month and celebrated our one-year anniversary of not finding any dead birds! YEAH! On this adventure, friends David and Kristy joined us on our quest.

In celebration, we decided to extend our stay on the beach and do a little casting. I would say fishing, but both Tim and David checked the regulations to see how many we could keep (6 each) and then I put an empty 40-gallon cooler in the back of the car. So we really only did some casting.


The wildlife viewing was really great though – we saw humbacks, harbor seals, a couple pods of killer whales, ducks, geese, ravens, eagles, and a ton of gulls. We even two a couple of fish follow the lures in but no bites.

Robyn goes to Juneau

We had an awesome visit with niece Robyn at the end of May. It was a busy weekend with hiking, eating, sightseeing, shopping…a bit of everything. Here Tim and Robyn look at the view from one of the foot bridges along the Dupont Trail.

A visit to the Mendenhall Glacier provided lots of entertainment. There were about 4 cruise ships in town so there was lots of activity. Its is always interesting what tourists find intriguing. We watched an older asian couple who were fascinated with the dogpoop bag dispensers.

We didn't see any glacier calving but there were many icebergs in the lake.





Nuggest falls was flowing with winter melt-off water:

We had a brilliant day-hike to the boy scout beach for our June coast survey. The weather was awesome. Unfortunately we planned our hike when the tide was really low so there was a lot of beach to cover. But it has such a nice day that we didn't seem to mind. I will admit that I insisted we should take a short cut since the tide was so low. This resulted in having to jump over a little crevass where I immediately turned my ankle. After a couple of minutes I was able to continue on the hike. It didn't really bother me until we got home. Its been a little tender since then.




and here is what they were looking at:


And what overnight stay at the Olson's would be completed without a picture with Cappy!


Thank you Robyn for your visit!

Beach Survey

Its been gorgeous all week long - cloudless skys, temps in the 60-70s, and long sunny days. This is was the weekend for our COASST survey out at Boy Scout Beach and we thought we'd take advantage of the long day and go after work on Friday. It doesn't get dark until about 9:30 and since part of the walk from the beach back to the car goes through the woods where it can be dark even during bright daylight, we didn't want to be on the trail too late at night. The walk in usually takes between 30 and 45 minutes depending on how many little birds we stop to listen and/or look at. But this plan worked out perfect!

We are happy to report zero bird carcasses, but we saw an incredible number of people who had staked camping spots along the beach. I think there were about 5 or 6 groups - a few couples and some larger groups who either packed in all of their gear or brought it by skiff. In total we counted 48 people and 4 dogs. A much lower ratio than normal.



We were accompanied by Terry, Oro, Debr, David, and Kristi and feasted on great "turnaround snacks" a short way form the our turnaround spot. We finally got our beach walk where we could wear shorts and t-shirts! Its just too bad that we weren't able to come out eariler in the day with out beach chairs and cooler – what a day this would have been!

Monthly COASST survey

I had high hope that this would be the week that we might be able to practice our identification skills on our monthly Boy Scout Beach walk. Friends Kristi and David, who live out near the beach and walk it quite often, had been out the previous weekend and sent us this picture. They thought it might have been an eagle because it was very large. Unfortunately there isn't enough to quality as an appropriate siting for COASST. It has to have a beak and a tarsus or a beak and a wing with primary feathers.

We look very close at the spot where they had found it the week before but of course it wasn't there.



On the "Bird-a-Day" calendar that Tina gave me the birds this weekend was the plover - its a perfect time to be spotting a plover as springtime approaches. But really, we don't really want to find any dead birds. I have to keep reminding myself of that.

We enjoyed watching this lone swan. I took this picture with the camera through the binoculars so they are a bit fuzzy. I think he was a young swam because of the slight discoloration of his neck. He doesn't quite have the mature all-white coloring.


And taking a nap standing up can be quite a challenge!


We also saw these cute little otter footprints. We haven't seen any otters here before. Its hard to tell on the beach though, there are usually so many dog foot prints that we could have missed them.

Coasst Survey - Blue Skys - 30 mph gusts

Fact: you often have blue skys when the wind blows at gusts of 30 mph.
It was cold.
At least it wasn't raining or snowing.
With those winds when it rains or snows the droplets hurt.
No dead birds found.

WInter Storm Warning

We made an agreement to survey the Boy Scout Beach once a month on the first weekend of the month so we had to venture to the beach for COASST. The road and parking area was nicely plowed and actually much better then the highway! Thank you David! We had our snowshoes and had great fun making our way out to the beach. A few others have gone in and a skier must have gone in earlier in the day or the evening before. There were a few places where the snow had drifted but it wasn't too bad. I mean, we never sunk up passed our thighs!



When we got to the beach it was low tide, very low tide and the beach was covered with a layer of snow. It was impossible to see anything and the wind was wicked. We made our way with the wind to our backs thinking about how cold it was going to be on the walk back. We were deceived many times by the small pieces of driftwood filled with snow that looked like turned-over bird wings but we didn't see any bird remains to identify. And the wind died down when we turned around and the walk back wasn't too bad. The trail out was nice as we had packed it down on our way in. Ran into a couple of skiers (Dave and Kristi) who were also out enjoying the day.

Boy Scout Beach and COASST survey

We had a rainy, warm weekend but hit the beach on Saturday to do our COASST survey. We signed up in the fall as observers for the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team out of UDub. We are obligated to do a specific beach walk once a month looking for bird carcuses and body parts. We share the beach with another guy who walks it 2-weeks after us. We went through a one-day training and have all kinds of supplies and guide books to help identify bird parts. The training was actually really fun and I think it will help with our general identification of birds.

We were told that most of the time the body part that you will find are the feet - the least fleshy and delicable bird part (guess the COASST people don't do dim sum). The guidebook they gave us breaks idenfication down into several questions based on the look for the feet:

1. Are the front toes free, lobed or webbed
2. if free, does the foot have 3 or 4 toes
3. If 4 toes is the 4th nail strongly arched
4. Are toes fleshy or not
5. if lobed are the lobes single or multiple
6. if webbed is the webbing complete or marginal
7. if completed webbed does the foot have 3 or 4 toes
8. if 3 webbed toes, is the foot huge
9. Doe the 4th toe have a fleshy flap
10. Does the 4th flap extend nearly to tip of toenail
11. If the tarsus extremely thin, flat and wide
12. Is the heel swollen or flat
13. if feel flat is the foot huge

From answering these 13 questions you can narrow down the species. After you narrow it down there are other specific questions that you use to verify your find. We got to practice in the classroom with various feet and wings. Some of them were harder than others.

So when we see live birds we just have to get them to show us their feet!

We have rules, clippers, fixed point dividers, gloves, chalk and blackboard, measuring tape, and rain-proof forms that we take with us. We have specifc color-coded plastic ties and specific numbering system we use to mark the birds we find.

When we are at Boy Scout Beach we always see multiple eagles, a few ravens, lots of gulls. This last time we saw some bear prints in the sand. I think our chances of finding any bird parts that aren't scavanged pretty slim - but we enjoy the walk and its all in the name of science!