Jess & Thomas A - Interview · 20 October 2007, 21:44 by Julie Loyd
(We sat at The Bar, a beach kitchen facing Saturna at Sandy Point. There was talk about tea)
Julie: Plan A is to archive everything in the library. Plan B is to figure out what people are telling me and see if I can digest it and spit it out in some kind of big picture. But right now I’m just looking for details, one offs.
(talk about tea, dogs that look like bratwurst)
Thomas: So, have you been going all around the island?
Julie: Yes, I’ve interviewed Carol S, Bob W, Chuck L, the C’s.
Thomas: Turns out Bill C’s mom was really good friends with my dad’s mom. They were best friends over on Orcas. I just met Elaine and Bill recently. Elaine had some great stories about them. She said they were flappers.
Julie: That’s pretty funny.
Thomas: Yeah, totally. The short hair, flirting and smoking and drinking. (Jess arrives with tea) We were just talking about the C’s family, Elaine talking about flapper girls. (tea noises)
Jess: So, did you tell her about the eagle?
Thomas: We’ve been talking about social history, not natural history.
Jess: I bet there are a lot of other people besides us who probably have some interesting stories about the Point, like Chris, or Skye and Richard from when they lived here.
Thomas: Even our parents. Right up here, just back from the Cowlitz bluff, there’s been an eagle’s nest for probably as long as we were here, right?
Jess: Yeah.
Thomas: Yeah, it’s always been there.
Julie “As long as you were here” is how long?
Thomas: Which is since 1990, so, 17 years. Pretty much every year
Jess: Yeah.
Thomas: Is it, every year or every two years that they’ve had a baby?
Julie: The tradition is that they’re supposed to alternate nests, one year one place and another year another place, but they can surprise you.
Thomas: Well, whatever it was, it was fairly regular. Then this year, this spring I think in May, the adolescent, the immature from last year … First of all, there was a hatchling, a baby there that we could hear – that my mom could hear, crying and crying and doing its normal carrying on. Then one day the immature came from the year before, and there was a big flapping around, and it was flying around the nest, and there was all this squawking. When we next looked up there, the nest was about at a 45º angle, and no more baby calls. Probably about a week later, we didn’t see it happen, but the nest fell. It’s up there now, all the sticks and scraggly feathers and little animal bones and things, all up there.
Julie: I’d love to take a picture of that.
Thomas: Absolutely. I’ll take you up there.
Julie: Yeah, I’d love to. Nasty!
Thomas: Yeah. And then over the next weeks, the parents were still around. They actually came down here. They went down the beach that way, (Eastwards along the North side of Sandy Point) and it looked like they were starting a new nest there. We saw them carrying materials, sort of about by Chris W’s place, maybe in a little bit. Yeah, probably right around there, we could see them going back into the trees up on the cliff there. But right next to the old nest, there was another tree with big crags on it, a big branch that the eagles would always sit at, it was kind of their lookout. They would still go there but sometimes the immature would be there, and it seemed like there was territorial fighting going on.
Julie: Do you think this immature one was theirs, or was it coming in from some other place?
Thomas: That’s what we figured.
Julie: I guess it must have been, otherwise it wouldn’t dared.
Thomas: Yeah. It seemed like it was trying to come home, or trying to reclaim its territory, or push its parents out, or who knows. We always had thought that it was from the year before. And that eagle’s been around some. Sometimes we see it up in that tree still, sometimes down the beach in between here and … maybe about 50 yards down the beach, it’ll sit on a fallen tree.
Julie: Do you know what it likes to eat? Is it a fish eagle or a rabbit eagle or an anything?
Thomas: Don’t know.
Julie: Chickens.
Thomas: Chickens! Hopefully not. Today there were crows sitting up in the eagle tree and we haven’t seen many eagles lately up there. It seemed kind of like a regime change.
Julie: I woke up this morning to hysterical crow calls in my garden. I was too late looking out the window, but maybe the crows are doing something this time of year.
Thomas: Yeah. Well, I’ve definitely heard about lots of raven and crow activity this year. The B’s said they’ve seen a lot more ravens in general. The crows, maybe in June, the crows were going crazy. And I think Linnea said that that’s usually the immature crows sort of learning to be annoying.
Julie: Annoyingness training?
Thomas: It sounds sort of like people screaming. You’re going to make some tomato soup? Sounds good. So I think I made it through the eagle story. We’re going to go up at some point and look at the fallen nest.
Jess: Yeah, you should.
Thomas: There’s lots of … we get quite a few baby seals that die every summer out on the Point.
Julie: Do you get survivors?
Jess: David picked one up and took it to Friday Harbor. I don’t think we’ve been able to identify if there’ve been survivors or not.
Julie: Yeah, because if they survive, they’re gone.
Thomas: I think definitely, in the past couple years, there’se been at least …
Jess; I don’t remember it from before.
Thomas: Yeah, I don’t remember it really either. But definitely in the last three years. This year, last year, and the year before, there’s been two or three dead ones every summer.
Jess; Lots of otters. There’s been a sea lion this summer, creepin’ around.
Julie: Just hangin’?
Thomas: Yeah we saw it a couple nights ago just sort of coming up and ducking under, coming up and ducking under, slowly heading out towards Skipjack.
Jess: I saw it off Bare Rock. Yeah, I think it’s the same one.
Julie: Barry M saw an elephant seal a couple days ago. Have you ever seen any one like that here?
Thomas: What do they look like?
Julie: They’re ginormous. They’re the size of Volkswagens, and they have that …
Jess: That flop of skin? Funny thing?
Thomas: Where’d he see it?
Julie: Mittelstadt’s.
Thomas: Wow. I know Carla, a week or so ago, saw a Minke Whale coming just right off the beach, moving towards …
Jess: At Point Hammond. We used to see whales off the Point, but we haven’t recently.
Julie: Whales like Orca whales?
Thomas: Orcas.
Jess: Blowing out off the Point. There’s always tons of seal activity off the Point. A lot of fish slapping and side slapping, flirting or whatever it is they’re doing.
Thomas: Yeah, the mating call on this side and on Cowlitz side. A lot of that slapslap, slapslap.
Jess: At least one family of otters down …
Thomas: Yeah, do you think that’s the same one though?
Jess: That’s on the south side? I don’t know. I mean how far do otters travel in a day? Would they explore the whole Point area?
Julie: I don’t know, but one of my potential hats is Latrine Queen. Joe Gaydos, who’s the otter guy in the County, asked me to identify latrine sites with his GPS, which he has yet to give me. If you guys know where they poop, that’s of deep interest.
Jess: Really?Thomas: Do they usually poop in one area?
Julie: I guess. He has yet to brief me.
Jess: We know where they live.
Julie: He does care. One of the reasons is to collect the scat and analyze it for toxins. I don’t know why else. Where do they live?
Jess; They live about 300 yards that way. Not that far, a hundred yards that way.
Julie: On the beach?
Jess: On the beach, right up into the brush in the grass. There’s a tent up by North side there, and they live about sixty feet … The dogs have been very curious, which I’m scared of. I talked to someone on South side of Cowlitz, who said that their dogs are kind of having face-offs. I’m sure the otter will probably win. Especially with pups.
Thomas: Before I forget, I think it was the A’s, someone who used to live here, said that Orcas used to come and scratch their bellies on the sand on the Point. It goes out for quite a ways in the shallow end. It’s just shallow for dozens of feet out there. They said that they used to just come up and hang out there.
Julie: Wow. I wish I’d seen that!
Thomas: Yeah.
Jess: We saw a schooner just about hit the Point about ten minutes before you came. They were thirty feet off the shore …
Thomas: A little two-masted schooner, cruising along, and we were watching it, and someone went, “It’s going to hit the Point,” and it got up to the Point and suddenly they hauled hard to starboard …
Jess: Did a really abrupt …
Julie: Summer.
Jess: I heard there’s a boat reefed up in Quimper Sound.
Julie: Yeah. That would be embarrassing!
Jess: Well, the same lady hit two island boats in a week last week. This woman hit my dad’s boat and then hit Carson’s boat. She said, “Oh, do you know Derek A? I hit his boat.” In different places, one in Anacortes, and one in Deer Harbor.
Julie: Does she have a mission in life or is she extremely clumsy or is she a drunk or what?
Jess: No.
Thomas: I guess when she hit Carson’s, she said, “Oh no, oh no, where are you guys from?”
“W*.”
“Oh no, oh no, I just hit Derek Arndt, do you know him?”
(general laughter)
Jess: Bad day.
Thomas: Yeah. Well, are there any plant changes?
Jess: A lot of the trees are dying on the North side, all the way towards Glenn’s.
Thomas: All the way?
Jess: I mean, far down.
Julie: What do you think that’s all about?
Jess: My uncle’s friend was here, they’re involved in logging and stuff like that, and they said they thought that they were being choked out by the underbrush? But then …
Julie: Choked out by the underbrush?
Jess: Yeah
Thomas: Yeah.
Jess: That’s what they said.
Thomas. They’re getting all the salt water or …
Jess: It’s a lot of really little trees that are dead.
Thomas: Yeah. If you look, it’s just forty feet down the beach here on the right if you want to look.
Jess: But it could be something else. We tried to plant about 200 madronas about five years ago and maybe two of them made it. I’m curious about where madronas grow, or how they grow.
Because I know up on the Mountain, there’s groves of them. Up by Cindy Stern’s, there a road that, on either side, there’s tons of young madronas.
Julie: I think they like to start in shade. I don’t know about when they’re adult. I also think there’s two different kinds of … viruses?
Jess: I knew there was one, didn’t know about the other.
Julie: Yeah. There’s one that makes the black spots on its leaves, and there’s another one that makes the cankers on its trunk. And depending on who you talk to, either that’s normal or it’s new and very bad.
Jess: I can’t say we got them to grow at all. Maybe we could start them in shade.
Julie: Where did you put them?
Jess: Everywhere.
Julie: Also, I think two out of 200 isn’t necessarily bad. Some plants are like that, right?
Jess; I think primarily, some of them were put in sandy places and they probably didn’t like that. Maybe they would have liked more rocky soil.
Thomas: What did you plant them from?
Jess: Dad did it.
Thomas: From seeds?
Jess: He had little startlings.
Thomas: Another thing that’s interesting here is how the beach changes every year. Every winter, the whole beach is carved out and pushed up and pushed in different directions, and every year we come out here, it’s a totally different make up. Different slants, and different compositions.
Julie: It would be interesting to set a camera up someplace in a predetermined spot and just take a picture every month.
Thomas: Yeah. Well, this bank is definitely building up. Like there’s a table right over there that used to be this high and it’s now right at your feet.
Jess: On the North side.
Thomas: Yeah, on the North side. Well, Hammond all washes down this way. And then, my Dad’s pretty sure that it comes around into Cowlitz and then at some point gets blown back around, back to the North side. I don’t exactly know how he knows what exactly is going on.
Julie: Maybe an aerial shot while there’s a storm. Sounds dangerous, but something like when you can see drifts of sand. Because he might be right.
Thomas: It doesn’t seem like the Point is going away.
Julie: Chuck was saying that he’s lost about 15 feet in the 50 or 60 years that he’s been here, from his Southern bank. And that prior to that, there used to be a road … the Sandy Point road was along his bluffs. I’ll have to go over my notes, but my understanding is that it washed away. You know, the beach just …
Thomas: Yeah.
Julie: So you’re saying that on this side, it’s gaining. That’s really interesting.
Thomas: Yeah, very interesting. Should we go look at the eagle tree?
22:08 Julie: I’d also like to look at the dead trees.
Thomas: Oh yeah. Let’s go do that now.
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