The Daily Bucket is a place to note what you are seeing around you: animals, weather, meteorites, climate, soil, plants, waters. Each note is a record that we can refer to in the future as we try to understand the phenological patterns that are quietly unwinding around us. To have the Daily Bucket in your Activity Stream, visit Backyard Science’s profile page and click on Follow.
Salish Sea, Pacific Northwest
A couple of days ago I posted a dramatic sunset moment as my Bucket observation for the day: late in the day clearing after a gray dark day of wind and rain. I stood on the beach with spitting rain and a 20 mph wind in my face. It got me thinking how radically different sunsets can be, even a day or so apart. A few days before the stormy sunset, the feeling was calm and quiet.
I can’t see the sunset from my house because there are dense trees toward the west. If I want to watch the sun set I have to walk 10 minutes or so to an open area (or if my back is hurting bad or the weather is super-inclement, drive). Most days it just gets dark, but on this calm day wispy clouds started forming in the late afternoon and I figured it might be a nice sunset. You never know. It had been clear and bright all day, cool but windless. I walked.
Standing on a bluff for half an hour, here’s what that sunset was like ~
There was a big upswing in bird noise as sunset approached. Most cacophonous was the hidden clamor of gulls settling down in preparation for sleep out on an offshore island, beyond the headland in the top photo. It’s several miles away but sound carries well across the water, and it was a windless day. Thousands of gulls calling at the top of their lungs...”Goodnight John-boy, goodnight Pa…..”
Closer, in fact 20 feet just below me, a Kingfisher landed on a rock by the water. It’s one of the two Kingfishers who have been flying back and forth and chattering away at this end of the bay here the past week. He perched there alertly, trading loud rattly calls with the other, somewhere off to the left.
When the sky darkened a bit more, the gulls suddenly quietened and became silent. The kingfishers, geese, towhees, flickers and blackbirds too.
Time for you to share what you’re seeing in your natural neighborhood . . .
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