At the Beach

I am up in Sitka visit family. One of my niece and nephew's favorite activities is going to the beach and trying to catch bullheads (little fish) in the tide pools. This is a great time of year to be down at the beach because there are some of the lowest tides of the year so a lot of interesting things are visible that normally aren't.



I really enjoy watching and listening to the ravens while I am up here. I run into ravens on occasion in Washington, but they are very common around Sitka so it is a lot easier to observe them. This one was pecking in the seaweed finding things to eat.

Nature Quiz of the Week 25

I'll be camping for the next few days, so if you leave comments or questions (please do), I won't be likely to respond until I get back.

Setting: Middle of April last year in Sitka, Alaska.

1. What are these?

This is scat on top of a midden pile of cones.

2. What two species (not in the same kingdom) are represented? (I imagine this will be a much easier question if you have a knowledge of what's around Sitka. Field guides are handy if you don't have personal experience.)

The scat is from a red squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus), the cone parts are from a Sitka Spruce (Picea sitchensis).

The Sitka area has a conveniently limited species list in both mammals and trees. From what I've seen, Sitka Spruce cones are some of the favorite foods of red squirrels there, at least of foods that leave large piles of refuse after consumption. Also, the scales of other cone bearing trees there look quite different. And while other small mammals may eat spruce cones there, I don't think there are any that leave middens like this.

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Raven

I've been excited to have my new camera and actually be able to get decent pictures of birds, so I've been going around town like a dorky tourist and taking pictures of everything. (Have been taking pictures of flowers and general scenery as well.)

This raven (Corvus corax) was hanging out just down the hill from my brother's house in Sitka. I believe it is a juvenile as it appears to have a pinkish gape at the corner of its mouth still.

Ravens are really cool birds so of course I was interested in photographing one, but I also like all the moss on the roof of this building.

Beach Tracks

Intersection

I thought this was fun with the three different species all in one spot (it may be a little difficult to see the mouse tracks without clicking the image to enlarge it).

Deer Mouse Tracks

On the same beach as the earlier mink and bear tracks we also saw deer mouse tracks. They have bulbous toes rather than more finger like digits of a vole. It is a little unusual for them to be walking (trotting?) around much, though there were other places where they were moving in a bound which is the normal gait of a deer mouse (voles commonly move in a trot).

These tracks turned out to be very common along the beach right at the edge of the forest. I wonder what they were doing out in the sand. In most of the trails it didn't appear that they were headed toward the detritus washed up on the beach. Perhaps they were hunting invertebrates? Doesn't seem like a particularly good season for them to be finding plant material to eat there.

Dead Eagle

My brother tells me it was a hard winter for bald eagles in Sitka. While walking one of the beaches on the tracking field day Scott found this eagle floating in the water near the shore. He was pretty excited because it was the beach where he has been doing dead bird surveys and it sounds like he hadn't found too many dead birds there yet.



I am impressed with the talons. After the body had mostly decomposed and who knows how long it had been bobbing in the water, the talons still seem almost synthetic in their smoothness.

Bears

It didn't take too long before we came upon these bear tracks on the beach. It appeared that there were a couple of different ages of tracks and they wandered up and down the beach quite a bit. We figured it (and pretty much everything else around) had probably been partaking of the abundant herring eggs on the beach.



It put its dirty feet up on this snowy log. This is the front right foot - unlike us, a bears largest toe is on the outside and smallest on the inside.

While there are only brown bears in the Sitka area, even if that weren't the case it is possible to tell that these are brown bear rather than black bear tracks. One thing to look for is that the toes are straighter in brown bears then in black. On the front foot, if you draw a straight line from the bottom of an outside toe across the top of the heel pad if the other outside toe falls at least half above the line then it is likely a brown bear, below and likely a black. On this track the toe would be completely above the line.



Another thing to look for is the claws. You can see here that the claws on the front feet are pretty long (good digging claws), whereas black bear claws tend to be much closer to the toes.

Mink Tracks

I didn't really know what to expect for the tracking over on Kruzof, but it turned out great. Shortly after we arrived we came upon this gorgeous mink trail.

It appeared that the mink liked to run along the water's edge so we were able to estimate when it made the tracks by how high the tide would have been and knowing the times of the tides. I don't remember exactly but think we figured this trail was made at something like 2 in the morning. From other trails we found it seemed that was a fairly active time for mink in that area, though there were also trails at other levels as well including one that we came upon in the middle of our day that may have been made since we arrived on the island.



These are pretty classic mustelid tracks. The one above is the front right, the one below the hind right. Note the five toes, clawed, with small inner toe almost not showing up. Without that fifth toe they look fairly similar to canine tracks.



Mink hind tracks are supposed to be a little bigger than the fronts (it appears to be at least partially due to more space between the toes and heel pad), but one thing I notice here that I don't recall having read anything about is that the toes on the front foot appear to be larger than on the hind.

Sea Anemones

These were in a tide pool along the beach where we were stranded. I accidentally took a picture with a flash and it turned out much better that way.



This one was in a tide pool on Kruzof. I wonder what the ribbony stuff in the middle of this one is.