With two treasured companions, I set off on an easy stroll on the Rainforest Trail on North Douglas. As usual, we went in search of nothing in particular and whatever things of interest we could find. Not having a specific, predetermined goal is often a good way to stumble upon the unexpected or just touch base with the familiar.
At the trail head, we meet a couple of Fish and Game biologists who were monitoring bat movements. They shared their discovery of a marked bat that was apparently roosting in the cliffs next to the beach. This little brown bat, a female, had been tagged at Fish Creek. The biologists reported that other marked bats were also moving around to different places in Juneau.
On down the trail, we encountered a small flock of ruby-crowned kinglets that included a brown creeper. The creeper hitched its way up a big dead tree and spent at least a minute checking out the space behind a loose flap of bark—just the kind of place creepers like to put their nests.
Down on the beach, we found deep windrows of rockweed piled up way into the beach-rye zone, clear evidence of recent high tides and high winds. Now the tide was low, and we ambled along the water’s edge, peering into rocky crevices and turning over rocks (and turning them back, too!). Some rocks were obviously favored habitat, housing quite a community of miniature critters: dainty six-armed sea stars only half an inch across, tiny limpets and chitons just two or three millimeters in size, sea cucumbers an inch long or less, and an occasional miniscule sea urchin. Toothpick-size towers stuck up from the mudflats; excavation revealed skinny tubes of sand grains, presumably inhabited by some kind of worm.
I was fascinated by the burrowing anemones, buried up to their tentacles in muck. They came in many colors, including green, tan, yellow-orange, and brownish, all with white bands on the tentacles. They may come in many other colors as well, including red, blue, and black, depending on location. Many of them had bits of shell stuck around their bodies, so when they retracted, all one saw was a ring of broken shell about the size of a silver dollar. They are reported to feed on fish eggs and small, floating invertebrates.
We perched on Shaman Island for a while, just to watch what might be going on in the coves on either side of the tombolo (a.k.a. the spit) that connects the island to mainland when the tide is out. A group of twenty or thirty black-bellied plovers prospected over the sand flats (and I got a quick reminder-lesson on how to tell them from other plovers that have black fronts). Crows were foraging in the mussel beds, sometimes walking around with straggling bits dangling from their bills and seeming to cache their prizes among the cobbles. Groups of harlequin ducks and common goldeneyes floated peacefully around the edges of the covers.
A sizable flock of scoters suddenly erupted in panicked flight and fled out around the point. Just the sort of thing they would do if an eagle swooped down over the flock. But the eagles were quietly perched in spruce trees on shore. The perpetrator of the panic was a male harrier that coursed low over the flock, briefly followed the birds around the point, and then turned to follow the beach, perhaps looking for something of a more convenient size. Could a harrier actually take a scoter that weighs twice as much as itself?
On the way back up to the parking lot we noticed quite a few flowering fern-leafed goldthread; close inspection showed that all of these were male. Maybe those that also have female parts (that is, they are hermaphrodites) flower a little later?
Finally, as we left the parking lot, we spotted a snowshoe hare scampering up the bank. Not white, not brown, but in between, and not well camouflaged in any habitat. Although I’ve seen thousands of hare tracks, one dead leveret (baby hare) in the jaws of a cat, and one dead adult hare in the clutches of a goshawk, I can’t remember seeing a living adult hare around here. So this was a minor coup.
During our short perambulations on the beach, we also filled a yellow litter bag to the very brim, with cast-off food and drink containers, oil rags, broken plastic parts of unknown objects, and a thick, sodden seat cushion. The bag containing all that mess we deposited near the trash container at the trailhead. However, on the shore of Shaman Island there was a wheel, with tire, that was too much for us to carry out; we hope some kind soul with a boat might go and remove it to a more suitable location.
On the Trails in Juneau 