April 3, 2011

Temperature: 55 F. Cloud Cover: Sunny. Wind Velocity: Calm/Light.

Number of people: 2. Number of dogs: 1. Walking or running: 3. Photography: 1. No signs of human activity, no footprints (save ours), no tire tracks, no Snowy Plover nesting structures.

Three flocks of Sanderlings (?), two with thirty members, one with ten. Individual and pairs of very small birds, perhaps a dozen in all, Snowy Plovers? No other birds or animals seen.

About three crab carapices, very few fragments of mussel shells.

Seaweeds and seagrass, Animal casings (e.g., crab, shrimp molt), Ocean-based debris (from fishing boats, ship trash, etc.), Marine debris (plastic, styrofoam, etc. washing in from the sea), Shells, Small rocks, Styrofoam, Wood pieces. Very clean driftline, hardly anything.

None

Another rooted Gorse plant on west bank of New River. A couple of signs of the ocean over topping the dunes between the surf and the New River.

We removed a plastic zip lock bag.Beach Walk, Sunday, April 3rd, 2011 We left our house at nine-fifteen and reached the west bank of the New River across for the mouth of Lower Fourmile Creek about nine-thirty. The weather was sunny, and there was no breeze. The temperatures were probably in the mid-fifties. The waves were small, no more than four feet trough to crest in mile 94. The beach had two slopes, from the dunes the sand was inclined between ten and fifteen degrees, about forty yards from the surf there was a shoulder and the incline was more like twenty to thirty degrees. Where we reached the beach there was gravel about the size of grains of rice but as we walked north the gravel disappeared, and the sand grains were about the size of brown sugar. And the beach, from that point on exhibited a single slope from the dunes to the surf of between ten and twenty degrees. Oddly there were no jellies and very little kelp. I saw three small clumps of three different types. One was a single short piece of bull kelp. There were only about three crab carapaces and very few fragments of sand dollars and mussel shells. The wet sand was very clean. We found one automobile tire on the dry sand. There were no foot prints or tire tracks anywhere and no signs of human activity except a few small shards of plastic and some fishing floats. We didn’t see any enclosures for Snowy Plover nests. The only birds we saw were small shore birds my wife called Sanderlings. We saw two flocks of about thirty feeding in the wet sand as the water receded and another of ten. We also saw a few smaller birds we thought might be Snowy Plovers. They were either solitary or in pairs, not flocks. They too were around the wet sand. All told, we probably saw less than a dozen of those, perhaps just a half a dozen.