Ann's Adventures: As Foggy as a Summer Day in Daly City

I awoke to the sound of the foghorn early this morning. At sunrise, the island was covered in thick fog which ebbed and flowed throughout the day. (The title of today's blog post is a tip of the hat to my sister in Daly City, California where the community's semiofficial motto is "If it's summer, bring a sweater". ) Fog makes seawatching impossible, but also makes quick work of solar panel cleaning. You only need a mop and brush for the most egregious gull artwork as all of the other panels are already sufficiently wet. I had the panels cleaned and windows washed on the researcher residence all by 7:30. My weather report to Pedder Bay Marina lacked any information on the sea state, though, as I couldn't see the sea! I also had to run the generator, as the battery levels drop overnight, and without sun to boost them in the morning, they could get desperately low.

At 8 am and pm, I have to send a check-in message via a SPOT locator. It doesn't work great inside the house, so I normally put it on the railing of the back deck. There was an incident today. It seemed inevitable, really. I was not expecting this reaction from the device, though.

"An issue has been detected..."

I also washed outside of the windows on two of the sheds today. Check out my supervisor in the reflection. (Yes, I can see the inside of the windows need some work, too!)

Bubbles lounging right behind me

Today was a good day to launch my major project: rejuvenation of the compost bins. I noted last year that one of the 4x4 ft bins has "matured" to the state that a good layer of grass was growing out of it. This year, the vegetation was even taller. My goal is to empty one side completely and then move the contents of the other side over, adding much needed aeration and turning. I made a good start today by clearing the grass layer and moving 15 buckets of compost into one of the dips in the ground.

Before

Another supervisor

Plastic fruit stickers don't compost

Progress

First bucket of compost into the depression.

Apparent approval by this gull chick

As usual in the afternoon, there were almost as many Black Turnstones as stones. I counted 174 in the east bay.

Black Turnstones with a smattering of Surfbirds

With the island blanketed in fog much of the day, there wasn't much scoping going on, so my attention turned more to the gulls. I made a rough map of the ones I could see from the front window today and will be interested to see if they are all in their same places tomorrow. Many of the young are starting to test out their wings against the fairly strong winds we had today as well. Today's gallery is mostly of Glaucous-winged Gull antics.