Blue Bloods

Though never in proportions that we witness in our cities and along our coastlines, big storms do bring a measure of chaos and loss of life to marine communities beneath the waves. The situation here along Florida’s east coast gives the appearance of being not far from the norm and people are back under the sun with their boogie boards, fishing rods, bicycles and suntan oil. The difference out there now is the seeming closeness of people finding space on a beach with high rolling tides, one made narrower without the dunes that disappeared with the passing of Hurricane Sandy.

In living here the past couple of years and walking on the beach daily I’ve developed an eye that takes in many of the shifts and changes in life on or along the beach. But really, anyone ‘unplugged’ and sensitive to the sights and sounds will see the same thing. Pull out the earphones, put away your smartphone and on any day a mini-Jacques Cousteau special will unfold at your feet, but this time it will tell a story of storm effects on a creature 300 million years old—the horseshoe crab. A day after the storm passed Florida on its move north, horseshoe crabs began washing up on the beach in numbers not seen in a few years. Some quality or condition in their habitat was badly disrupted, causing many of them to die and wash up on the beach.

These ‘living Fossils’ with their fierce looking shells and long tails are interesting animals. They live primarily along the eastern North American coast in the soft sand of shallow waters. It surprised me to learn that they are not related to crabs but to spiders, scorpions, ticks and mites. Horseshoe crabs require sandy beaches to bury their eggs where it isn’t unusual for one female to lay between 60,000 and 120,000 eggs. Only the tiniest number of those eggs hatch and grow to maturity, since they are an important food source for shore birds. A horseshoe crab has five pairs of eyes, one pair of small pincers and five pairs of legs. The long tail is used for steering and to flip itself over if stuck on its back. Another curious characteristic is seen in their blood. Because of the copper in their blood, once exposed to air it is blue. Females are often twenty-five to thirty percent larger than the males. The appearance of these rather large prehistoric holdovers can be intimidating but horseshoe crabs are not at all dangerous.

Out for a bike spin on the beach Sunday morning, after riding south for about two miles the sand became less than hard and I cut up to the paved road for an easier ride. Decided for a change to ride on the much more picturesque Saxon Drive, one block west and that same street with the big, tall flowers that look so much like sunflowers. The street was never before familiar to me from the prospective of a bicycle and I was surprised by the charm of a shaded street nestled in the mangroves between the Atlantic and the Halifax River. Little traffic, wide sidewalks under an overhang of green, a bird sanctuary and a handful of beautiful homes make for a very pleasant Sunday morning bike ride. Very likely that my next bike outing will retrace the route along Saxon Drive. 

      

Sandbars & Driftwood

Barefoot in the surf again on Sunday. The last few weeks have taught that a walk in ankle deep water offers a completely different perspective, lowers the heat factor by several degrees and takes the mind off time and distance. Tidal flow these past few days has created a long sandbar about twenty yards offshore, a swath of nearly submerged sand enclosed on either side by knee deep water. Constantly washed by the surf, it offers the perfect conditions for wading birds hunting small fish, and for the solitary shell collectors who meander among the pools and inlets. 

Summer is at our doorstep here on Florida’s east coast, a season when few could ask for a prettier or more felicitous environment. While schools are still in session the weekdays remain quiet and unruffled. Weekend crowds are still small, still manageable and arrive with their temporary dash of color and unthreatening ruckus. The days are still untroubled by the furor that comes in mid-June with a bombardment of families on holiday arriving with insatiable children and 200 pounds of beach equipment. For now, a few children romp in the pool, build sand castles and watch daddy fish, but hardly a number to dent the passage of golden days.

Not the avid shell collector, my walks on the beach are never an eyes-down search for the perfect specimen. That’s not to say that I amble along uncaring or blind to the possibilities of the unusual, and I do turn my attention to the curious shape or color half-buried in sand. By now, the dime-a-dozen examples that blanket the sand seven days a week go by unnoticed, but I am vigilant for a couple of the rarer shells or lifeforms. One favorite is something called a seaheart, and in my days here I’ve managed to find eleven of them, most often pulled from a tangle of seaweed. A dark brown tropical seed, they are carried to the ocean by freshwater streams and rivers, drifting on ocean currents and later washing up on distant shores. They float because they have an internal air pocket trapped by a hard outer covering on the bean.

Another hard-to-find favorite is the sand dollar, something that is commonly seen in broken pieces on the beach. These shattered remnants are part of the animal’s sun-bleached skeleton, minus its skin of tiny velvet-textured spines and small hairs. Only once have I come across a whole, unbroken sand dollar skeleton, and until Sunday had never found a living specimen. Conditions were right, and suddenly there at my feet, half buried in sand three inches underwater was a brownish-green sand dollar. From the moment I lifted it from the water I could feel the spines and tiny hairs moving in my hand. In spite of my fascination with a living sea creature I had never seen up close, underlying that feeling was a tinge of guilt at killing it by not returning it to the water.

The photo above shows a white sand dollar skeleton and the brown sand dollar picked up on Sunday. Along with it are two shells, a starfish and three small pieces of driftwood that caught my fancy on different walks.         

Pretty Little Carnivores

Living on the edge of an ocean means living in what can be described as a hyper-active environment, a setting of ever-shifting adjustments to wind, water, light and weather. Adding to the mix the interaction of living elements that color their coastal habitat insures that the faithful observer can never take for granted the scene outside his windows. With two years experience in the beach bum life, one would like to say that awareness of even the small things going on ‘out there’ are by now familiar. But there’s always something new that in some cases is not new at all, only previously overlooked. 

I have by now either wandered, trudged or sloshed my way through almost 2,000 miles of Florida beach, by turn attentive, distracted or curious, and it seems fair to say that I’ve seen a good portion of what goes on there. What exhilarates me is a new discovery just when I think I’ve seen it all. That happened on Thursday and for at least a couple of hours I lost myself in the briny schemes of a sea snail. Hard to count the shells either turned over or picked up in my walks, and many times a new find has brought a whoop of joy. But there are times too when it seems little more than hot, dry sand.

Normally, a pair of Reeboks and a path above the waterline make for the best walk. Something on Thursday morning made me forego the shoes and set a path in the sweep of surf, the water covering at least my feet most of the time. Wave action during the night had created unusual pools and sandbars and a lapse of attention once or twice sent me splashing in water up to my calves, but all of it was refreshing. Before long I came upon something burrowing into the wet sand, its hind parts just disappearing beneath the surface. Stopping for a minute to watch, I was surprised by a tiny white, elongated snout poking out of the sand and waving about like a flexible periscope. I dug the small creature up and saw it was a gooey thing in a pretty cylindrical shell, gray with brown markings. In the space of ten minutes I spotted four others pushing their way through the sand and leaving a curling trough-like trail behind. How could I have never noticed these curious creatures before?

The Oliva sayana, or lettered olive, is a species of small predatory sea snail, a marine gastropod mollusk that lives in surf line waters, on shallow or semi-exposed sand flats from North Carolina to Florida and the Gulf states of North America as far as Louisiana and Texas. It is also found in Mexico along the Yucatán coast, and may also be seen in Brazil. It is a carnivore, capturing bivalves (clams and mussels) and small crustaceans with its foot and taking them below the sand’s surface to digest.

The name ‘lettered olive’ comes from its dark surface markings that resemble letters. Because of their beauty, early Native Americans as well as colonists made jewelry from the shells, and possibly for the same reason it is the state shell of South Carolina. The shell is smooth, shiny and cylindrical with only the rear portion having whorls or coils. A narrow opening extends almost the length of the shell, continuing around the bottom. 

           

Humbling to think that this small beauty has been out there under my feet for so long without any notice from me. Hate to think that my powers of observation are becoming slightly jaded.

The Seagull

Friday was a cold day in beachtown, leaving the water and wind-stirred stretches of sand for hardier specimens. A long part of the afternoon was washed in clear sunlight common to colder months along the east coast and I took advantage of it to wander off on a walk. It was one of those times when the sand was clean and hard-packed, easy for walking and free of anything to turn you from a straight line. At first were a couple of gulls standing a good distance apart, an everyday sight of normally social birds having some solitary time away from the colony.

And then there was a huge gathering of them, all facing north at the water’s edge. For reasons beyond me, they suddenly took off in a fluttering cloud, made one low circular swoop out over the water and returned to settle again in the same spot. A moment after touching down every bird was once more stationary in a northward gaze. Gulls are very aware of attention, and when one of us large flightless creatures stops to watch them, they become nervous and edge farther away. Several times in my picture-taking, bird or birds felt threatened by my ‘stare’ and scuttled away.

Where numbers of gulls have gathered for their cryptic rituals at surf’s edge, there is always a scattering of left-behind tokens of their temporary stay, and if luck is on your side, a shed feather untrammeled and still dry makes a delicate and naturally beautiful picture. Too often the harsh setting makes quick work of these dropped plumes, quickly turning them into crusted, splintered leavings denuded of their beauty.

A few more yards down the beach and I came upon a near-perfect set of gull footprints, looking in their webbed shape like two tiny kites waiting for lift-off. Not quite sure how these isolated and static prints are left in the sand, but they appear with no beginning or end, a stamped image telling that one bird stood here looking north.

Whatever we may imagine about the presence of seagulls on a beach, one fact is certain: they are forever and always on the lookout for the next tasty bite of food. And obviously they do pretty well in their established habitat or we wouldn’t see them for long. Eating means eventual defecation, and if you pay any attention to it, seagull excrement is not the unsightly and malodorous discharge common to many land animals. More often than not it is a pure white splash on the sand, with now and then a dark speckle. The best thing about is that it’s gone in the next wash of surf.

Gulls are typically a coastal or inland species, rarely venturing far out to sea. In size they are generally medium to large birds, typically grey or white, often with black markings on the head or wings. They have thick, longish bills and webbed feet. The larger gulls take four years to attain full adult plumage, but two years is typical for smaller birds. Most are ground nesting carnivores, which will eat live food—crabs and small fish—or scavenge opportunistically. Like snakes, gulls have unhinging jaws which allow them to consume large prey. As strange as it sounds, gulls have been observed preying on live whales, landing on the whale as it surfaces to peck out pieces of flesh. Some gulls rely on what scientists call kleptoparasitism, a form of feeding where one animal takes prey from another.

The larger species in particular are resourceful and highly-intelligent birds, demonstrating complex methods of communication and a highly-developed social structure, with typically a harsh wailing or squawking call. They nest in large, densely packed noisy colonies, lay two to three speckled eggs in nests composed of vegetation and the young are born with dark mottled down, are mobile upon hatching and able to feed themselves almost immediately.

Cold Crabs

Tuesday is a day when only the most devoted venture out to the windy cold interface where ocean meets land. Looking north and south, the beach is an empty stretch, deserted by even the birds. One or two gulls, a small scatter of ruddy turnstones, only the hungriest among their flocks have come to the water’s edge. Whether it is the cold or otherwise, the pelicans are nowhere in sight. With the sun at its highest pitch, the temperature climbs a feeble degree or two, but the wind chill is doing its part and 38° F becomes 34°. Weathermen describe cold fronts and blasts of wind from Canada, advising locals to either bring plants indoors or wrap them before nightfall with its promise of 29°.

For the first time in memory I prepare for a walk on the beach with three layers and a wooly scarf tied snuggly around the neck. And that does the trick, but then why had I not considered gloves before leaving home? Barely a minute of southerly walking and fingers start to stiffen with cold. Fortunately, sleeves stretch enough to cover all but the fingertips, but do little for the icy blow in my face, sure to bring an ache over any distance.

The cold loneliness of the beach is a welcome sight after the holidays, when weather was warmer and attracted crowds with fireworks and leave-behind litter. Daily trash wagons do a good job there, but can’t be expected to stop for the hundreds of expended bottle rockets and dead flying spinners, or the scrap of countless exploded dragon tails. Here and there along the beach are small bits of colored paper that served as either wrapping or stuffing for the pink and green aerial displays that lit up the nighttime sand and surf last weekend.

Over the course of two miles I pass not another person and see none in the distance north or south. The sand is wrinkled by no other footprints but my own, a solitary walker passing among seashells, dead crabs and a clump or two of tangled wrack. Many would call this the best time, perhaps wishing for less aching cold, but relishing the undisturbed elements weaving their patterns.

Here is one large crab that seems to have been caught in the wind driven sand and molded into a deadly bas-relief. The gradation of color on its shell is one more marvel of the ocean come to land. Two eyes like shiny black BBs poke from the serrated edge of curved shell and for a moment suggest the crab is still alive. But the cracked shell tells another story.

There is another crab, one long dead and diminished by the scavenging of other life forms, but in some way still beautiful with its intricacy of stilled legs and claws.

The next encounter is with a third crab, this one aloof in its unlovely and threatening stance, a dull shape and color scheme that describes an ugly duckling of the crab world. The threat is impotent since it is one more dead crab having breathed its last in a ready-to-strike pose.

Back in the warmth of home, the outside cold has done its work and I’m left to deal with an ache that thrums inside my windblown head. However, that will pass and leave no regrets about my hour with the cold wind and dead crabs.

A Morning’s Fury

Little doubt that some readers found the Friday post full of ugly jellyfish a mite off-putting. Well, thankfully such nasties aren’t a frequent sight on this front yard beach I often attempt to describe. The tables can turn quickly and what is Thursday’s goose bump heebie-jeebies by Friday becomes an array of nature’s jewels. Coming on this day it was a surprise, because I awoke to what sounded like the clash of the Titans, and a violent rat-tat-tat of rain on my bedroom windows and door that made me wonder if the glass would hold. Looking through the glass door I saw the heavy Adirondack chair had been blown across the patio and pushed against the table. There was also a missing chair, blown away and nowhere in sight. The exhausted plants were beaten down, limp and curled leaves a soundless cry for shelter from the tornado-like winds.

Impossible to open the glass slider onto the patio without gusts of rain drenching the living room, I could only look out at a churning fog of rain that erased my view of the ocean and everything else more than twenty feet distant. It was too furious and explosive to last more than a half hour and so I waited, crossing off the notion of a morning walk on the beach.

In time, I rescued the plants and found the airlifted chair hanging over a broken light halfway up the walkway, four panes of glass and the bulb as well shattered by force of the wind-driven patio chair. The rain eventually blew away, and the wind dropped off to something less than threatening, or enough at least to make me reconsider a walk. A little wind and rain is okay as long as the beach is not a bog of mushy footing.

By 9:15 it was good to go. No washed up jellyfish or headless fish, but here’s what I found instead…

Bigger Than a Jelly Jar

Every now and then a walk down the beach brings me face to face with a sight way out of the ordinary. Most things that come up with the surf are in the line of seashells, an old barnacle crusted flip flop, seaweed, a dead fish, maybe an old Clorox bottle split up the side. But you can’t ever rule out the unusual, the amazing, beautiful or even the now and then scary surprise.

Thursday came with another beautiful morning on Florida’s east coast, the beach swept clean by what blows like an early autumn wind, the sand packed, easy on the feet, and as always the incomparable pelicans patrolling the surf line, eyes sharp for a morning mouthful. Not many people, a jogger or two, three fisherman trying their luck knee-deep in white froth, the lady looking for shells, all of us under a blue sky half full of white cotton candy. Little to see at my feet, nothing to sidestep, nothing to catch the eye.

Nothing at first. At the usual turnaround point I came upon the scary surprise, a sloshy blob of the biggest jellyfish in my experience. These were the kind of monsters that drove swimmer Diana Nyad out of the water last week on her attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida. Such large creatures are surely beautiful swimming or floating in their watery habitat, but it all falls away when they are beached and lay sprawled on sand in a poisonous clump.

A jellyfish nightmare that even alligators and hippos run from.

Changing Faces

A walk on the beach these days offers up faint signals and a small hope that weather patterns, along with ocean currents are on the edge of a shift, that a long hot summer is melting away. Nothing too obvious about it, but still the occasional crackle that nature is on the verge of changing faces. Holiday crowds have thinned and the long sweep of beach is now no longer a tangle of gazebos. Rain and dark clouds have also been part of the change, and not only the parched green but the dry and powdery sand has had a good soaking this week.

Early morning rain on Tuesday gave this unflinching walker a good sopping while cooling the air and smudging the hard lines between sand, ocean and sky. Ocean currents that are a part of August have brought an endless smorgasbord of fish for the pelicans, and in morning and late afternoon hundreds of the big birds gulp down fish, sit on the water for a few moments then flash upward again for another dive into the swarming schools. In the attached photo of two people fishing in the surf, faint specs of brown out on and over the water are pelicans on the hunt.

No doubt the marine biologists who patrol the turtle nests this month are happy to see fewer people at what is a critical time in the hatching season. Only a week ago the beach was a nightly circus of flickering flashlights in the hands of tourists looking for turtles. People visiting the area during these months are warned repeatedly not to interfere with the turtles, the nests or the hatching process, but sadly those warnings do not stop them from running up and down the beach at night with their flashlights.

Two weeks ago the hours between 11:00 and 5:00 were a time of furnace hot heat on the beach, a time when many retreated, waiting for more bearable conditions later in the day. But maybe it is the heat and sun that are in retreat now. The photo here showing the red lifeguard’s chair was taken at noon on Thursday, the first time since May that I have walked on the beach at any time other than early morning or early evening. Temperature in the high eighties, water temperature at 79°, endless vista of blue on blue, and a small sprinkle of people—it doesn’t get much better than that…or at least not until October.

Death Takes No Holidays

With all the severe and mostly miserable weather affecting much of the country over the past couple of weeks, it seems almost spiteful to bring up Florida weather conditions. True, here in the near tropical clime of central and southern Florida there is little to complain of weather-wise. Not to say that every day here is sunshine and shorts. On one day this week I walked an hour on the beach in T-shirt and shorts and the very next day shivered under my sweater, pullover and jacket along that same stretch of beach. Certainly not Chicago, but then neither is it Rio.

Friday was another of the cold days and one with not a lot of sunshine. Definitely felt like winter all day long. As far as walking on the beach goes, time and stubbornness have hardened me to some degree and short of a thundering downpour, some time in the day will find me plodding along the sand. So I bundled up this afternoon and struck out. Didn’t even have time to settle into a pace before coming upon one of those disturbing but inevitable sometime sights in nature’s coastal preserve. First thought was, “Why isn’t that bird scrambling to get out of my path?” Well, the unfortunate creature was beyond flight, and very near beyond any movement at all. It was a young male pelican. Standing a mere three feet away, I watched his final strength draining out on the sand, a once magnificent bird unaware of all outside the final struggle for life, unseeing of the tall human bulk looming over him. His head slowly drooped to the sand and then just as slowly struggled up again. With legs stretched behind him in an ungainly spill, I began to feel like a peeping Tom intruding on the bird’s closing battle. I moved on down the beach.

For the past week or more there’s been here on the central east coast what they call a bloom of jellyfish. This time it’s the cannonball jellyfish and the surf line is dotted with numbers of them washed ashore. From the first appearance of these odd-looking blobs I’ve been struck by how much they resemble the one-man fighter planes of the type flown by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. Odd thing is, these are edible “fighter planes” considered a delicacy in Japan. But hold on, it’s not likely to see anyone picking up these interesting jellyfish to munch on.

The cannonball jellyfish, sometimes called a cabbage head jellyfish, despite being a good swimmer sometimes washes up on beaches in large numbers. The shape is almost what you would expect a futuristic plane to look like. It has the stealth bomber type of graceful flaring wings and a circle of “thruster jets” at the back. Naturally, in the water the ‘wings’ become an umbrella shape with the ‘thruster’ becoming short stingers or nematocysts. Some books will describe the cannonball as bluish or yellowish with a brown border. Those here on Florida’s east coast are clear and uncolored apart from a reddish border and reddish stingers. The reference books describe them as sometimes reaching seven inches in diameter. Many of the New Smyrna Beach cabbage heads are eight to ten inches in diameter. The good news is, a cannonball jellyfish has only a mild sting and brushing against one in the water won’t usually result in a sting. As for eating the jellyfish, bear in mind that it must be harvested alive and healthy and prepared properly. Dried is the most common method.

Two photos show what looks likes like healthy (at one time) specimens.

Forty minutes after first seeing the unfortunate pelican, I passed him again on the way back. Struggles over, he was at peace finally in some other plane.

Winter Salt

In my absence from Florida the elements have been at work on the ocean at my doorstep. A departure in mid-November left behind the signs of autumn at play on sand, sky and water. There was a crispness about the scene that identified the season in ways akin to, but unlike the November foliage of New England—a note in the air that said, “This is autumn.” At the halfway mark of November’s passage, the seasonal earmarks were obvious to any walker on the beach.

All that has been replaced. More correctly, all that along Florida’s central east coast has been replaced, or redesigned. On December 1st I look eastward out my windows and see the start of winter. A walk on the beach displays a different palette defined by the change in weather patterns. There is a new and somber hue to the morning sky that announces something will now be different about the light under this blue dome. Tides have shifted, shaped the sand into an unfamiliar hardness. The movement of feet and legs across its impeccable surface sounds a note not felt two weeks ago. In the roll and foam of surf its constancy is unchanged, but these days it comes from a body of water darker in color, showing less range in its cycle of blues, greens and browns. Staring for a few minutes through binoculars, I see nothing in its vastness but cold dark blue. Walking on the beach, for a moment I wonder if a gull there in the wash of surf has cold feet.

A few people continue to walk in shorts, but long sleeves are needed to blunt the steady north wind. An early morning low under 40° discouraged all but one or two sunrise walkers, while most of us—some in jeans and a hoodie—wait until it gets a few notches higher later in the morning. Best part is, hot or cold, August or December, the myriad facets of this environment promise each day a new or different appreciation.

Tangled in Seaweed

This Wednesday past, a combination of wind and tides worked a magic wand over the beach here, and as far as the eye could see was nothing but a wide and flat, clean ribbon of beige, almost white sand. The trash buggy that trundles by two or three times a day never had occasion to stop and scoop up so much as a bottle cap.

But tide and wind are fickle, and the scene is quick to change. With the arrival of true autumn weather, the morning tide has shifted such that early morning walks have become impossible, or next to it, unless you have webbed feet or the stamina to trudge through loose unpacked sand for long distances. After lunch has now become the best time for good beach conditions, and I’ve adjusted my walking schedule to fit that hour.

Today I look out toward the beach as I am tying my shoelaces and see what looks to be a long unending smudge of seaweed browning the waterline. Before my feet ever touch sand, a strong salty tang of ocean and fish reaches me, growing stronger the closer I get. I haven’t seen the seaweed this abundant in weeks, and it doesn’t bode well for clean, trash-free walking. Sure enough, within minutes I spot the first gaudy splash of red plastic tangled in the wrack. The seaweed works like a broom to sweep rubbish in to the beach, and when considered, you have to say it is a good thing. Once the plastic is tossed up on land, it’s less risk to the ocean ecology, and easier for a regular patrolling trash collector to find. Certainly not pretty to see on the beach, but much of it will be picked up before washing out to sea again.

Old plastic bottles and waterlogged shoes aside, the ocean and sky today are outstanding, and bubbly tiaras of foam dance on the wave tops under a wide stretch of puffy clouds and cerulean sky. I stop for a few moments to look out and over the seaweed mess to the majesty of two blues above and below, and the twin whites of cloud and foam. I aim the camera but have doubts that any gadget can capture and hold this almost perfect combination of elements.

Something new in the tide these past few days, another deposit of seed pods, possibly from a faraway land. Like the seahearts, these smaller black mangrove (Avicennia germinans) pods have drifted on the currents to wash up on a Florida beach. They are a pretty diversion from the bottle caps and bits of plastic, and lay in olive green scatters around clumps of wet and glistening yellowish brown seaweed. I find a plastic cup that once held Cheerios, and rinsing it clean in the surf, use it to hold a collection of the green pods. By the time I have finished my walk I have what turns out to be a bowlful. Two of them I plant right away in the big white urn of geraniums outside my windows. A friend tells me she tried getting these pods to grow, but had little luck. Black mangrove naturally grows in coastal tidal areas throughout the tropics and subtropics of America and Africa. It grows marginally removed from the shoreline, where it can be reached only by high tides. Not exactly the conditions found in that white urn of geraniums outside my window, but…

Golden Days

Cold this morning, land and seascape all but empty. Wind skates across a flattened beach raising phantoms of sand that shift and swirl in a wind-driven blanket of powdery white. Involved in their secret motives, the birds, unlike last week, this time all face due north. The thought comes to mind that it is the wind that determines their orientation flocked there at the water’s edge. Facing into the wind prevents the ruffling of feathers.

Odd to see so few people on a morning bright with sun. The two men surf fishing in the same spot every morning are today nowhere in sight. Off in the distance two or three small silhouettes are visible, nothing at all to the north. The chill of what is October’s last blow is perhaps the reason for all this sparkling space empty of people. Empty too, of seaweed and the occasional blemish of washed up bottles or stray plastic. This time the sand is flat and clean, clear of all but shells and the restless skitter of Ruddy turnstones digging for breakfast.

For the distance of a mile and a half I walk south, like the gulls, head on into the wind, waiting for the eye of white sun free of clouds to warm my sleeveless arms. I’m grateful that the hard flatness of sand allows a faster pace, a pace that I know will soon enough send a flush of warmth down my arms.

And so it happens. I slip into automatic steps uncounted and beyond awareness, thoughts flying away over the tumbling waves and deep blue water. Almost by accident I look to the right some time later and see the familiar landmark, a weathered brown gazebo set on top of dunes half-shrouded in sea oats. I am warm again and turning back feel the south wind pushing now at my back.

It surprises me that even now the long stretch of hard white is clear of figures for as far as I can see. Friday usually brings a few more people to this paradise of blue and white, but I can only guess that they are still indoors, leaving me to enjoy in solitude this blessing of autumn morning on the outer edge of Florida. I pass a man riding south on a bicycle, not realizing it is my neighbor, Dietrich. Too late now to wave a hello, but then, like me he is focused on other things, wondering perhaps at the absence of pelicans. Just as well, since I am one who lacks the skills of conversation at this early hour on the beach.

Almost unaware of the last hour’s hard walking, I am back at the familiar grouping of palm trees that spell home. I notice how the wind has completely re-drawn in one hour the lines and ripples of sand at my starting point. The peculiar beauty of that earlier sandy design has been blown away, leaving me and my camera to make something of nothing.

The moral, if there is one is this: A morning on the beach in late October is worth a week in August.

The Water’s Edge

Living where I do, smack on the southeastern edge of the USA, sometimes the natural wonders of my front yard get overlooked and lost in the passing days and weeks. Most days here are sun-drenched, idyllic and colored by a wealth of seashore biology. Still, it’s easy to grow blasé and take it all for granted. But every now and then a wake up call opens my eyes afresh to the miracle of life along the ocean’s shore, and once more I stop to examine a small thing or two of beauty so special to my environment.

Walking the same stretch of white sand beach early every morning will over time blot out many of the details along that path. Oftentimes, eyes become set on the sand under your feet, and things outside that focus get fuzzy and indistinct. Surely not the best way to appreciate the blessing of water, sky and life that throbs all around you. It is after all, not a treadmill inside a walled room. And so I try to jerk myself out of those times when the ocean surroundings are lost to my inward focused reverie.

The sun was behind thick clouds when I began my walk this morning, and judging from the thin and watery light leaking from those clouds, you might have thought it earlier and the sun not yet over the horizon. But before I had covered half a mile, suddenly the sky did one of those Hollywood things with rays of sunlight bursting forth like the birth of a miracle. There must have been others like myself who were brought to a standstill, unable to ignore the play of light on clouds and ocean. The attached photo offers little more than a weak reflection of that splendid sight.

I was still thinking about that sunlight when my eye caught an odd shape just at the water’s edge. Dead fish, crabs, jellyfish and even the rare bird carcass are not unusual along this beach, but I was surprised by the sight of a baby hammerhead shark not long dead. This was a first for me, and I didn’t hesitate to examine the shark with a finger. The flesh was still soft and moist, which led me to think it was only recently dead. The body appeared to be undamaged and I wondered if it had been sick, or perhaps stranded when swimming too close to shore. Hammerhead sharks characteristically like warm shallow water—or so the book says.

You would think the sunlight and then the shark enough for one morning, but it wasn’t over yet. On the second half of my walk, I came upon five or six others stopped and looking intently at the sand about ten feet above the surf line. As I approached, I sort of expected to see something dead on the beach. Far from it. The attraction was a newly hatched sea turtle making his dash for the water. The nest was higher up the beach, and the tracks showed it was only one baby turtle from a nest of probably about 100 eggs. The predicted hatching window posted on the nest made it clear this one turtle was an early hatchling. Had the people not been gathered to watch, the turtle would have been savaged and eaten by a dozen or so gulls waiting at a short distance. But the turtle made it through his dangerous gauntlet and disappeared beneath the waves. Hopefully, he is now on his way to an offshore haven.

Not far from the end of my walk I came upon three snowy egrets looking for breakfast in the shallow water. These birds are not unusual in these parts, but you don’t often see three of them together. They appear to be solitary birds. I watched a child chase one of the birds for fifteen minutes, sure he was going to catch it. The egret seemed to laugh at the boy’s futile attempts, dodging away casually each time his inept stalker made a dash.

Feet in the Water

An hour before high tide, water temperature 73°, on a near perfect day for fun in the sun. Good time for walking through a stretch of surf looking for Gidget and the cast of Beach Blanket Bingo. When I lived in another place, I used to enjoy walking along crowded streets, building sand castles out of the parade around me. Walking on a Florida beach offers a thousand opportunities to do the same.

There is a lot to see on a beach in the early days of summer, and for once, rather than brown pelicans, my eyes are on the people, the faces, shapes, chairs, coolers, kites, toys, tents, and towels, all swamping my vision. And at my feet the plash of water swarming over my ankles and legs.

There is one clan-like gathering of 20-25 family members staked out under, or nearby three broad Beach Gazebo cabana sets and all the convenience of what could pass for a portable version of home. Two children are stretched out on their backs in the surf, half buried in the re-assembling rush of sand, and the bubbly retreat of water sucked back into the ocean, the deep blue simple. Two attractive young women in bikinis, one of them elaborately tattooed draw more than one lingering appraisal from the college boys tossing a football. Unknowingly, a woman stoops and picks up a bean bag, while from a short distance away someone calls out that she is moving a game marker. Two boys decorate their sand castle with red and blue, shaking out drops of color from two small bottles that appear to be food coloring. Untanned grandmothers from Ohio search for seashells, their pale legs shocked by public exposure and burning sunlight. One well-shaped woman of about forty has commanded space enough to practice tai chi, a discipline, one would think, at odds with the rowdy soundtrack of whizzing balls and frisbees, the happy squeal of toddlers.

Straight in line with the usual personality of this climate, this month, out of the west comes a slow moving tumble of gray clouds. I am not alone in seeing the approach, and now people here and there stare up into the western sky. Mothers begin gathering beach toys and fathers start their tussle with the Beach Gazebo take-down. Aunt peggy is wrapping the sliced watermelon and brother Bill calls the kids out of the blue green water. But there are still hundreds who refuse to stop their play, to give up this day. After all, that rain looks like taking its time getting here.

Back on solid ground and walking along the brick pavers to my door, I come upon a cute little tyke of about three, and he says in passing, “Thunderstorm comin’.”