Seal Harbor Beach, Valentine's Day, 2012 (Beachcombing series No.61)

It was 9:30 in the morning on a bright, sunny Valentine's Day when I headed over to Seal Harbor to see what the sea had washed up. There was a light but steady breeze from the east that made it feel much colder than the 30ºF on my thermometer, and when I took my gloves off to pick things up or to take pictures, my fingers froze quickly.

The beach looked fairly clean as I walked down; not a lot of debris at the tide lines, although I could see some seaweed piled by the water off to the west. As I walked toward it, I found a small, dead sea cucumber. It was the first time I've ever seen one washed up. I threw it back into the water, hoping it would revive (and if not, it would at least have a sea-burial).

Ever see a beach full of sand dollars? Yup, that's one right there! Most of them are buried, but you can tell they are there by the circular lumps in the sand.

Lots and lots of them had left tracks like these. I think they move around on the little spines that cover them (it looks like dark pink fur).  I need to learn more about sand dollars.

This little guy is a scud (a kind of teeny tiny shrimp). They are about the size of my pinkie nail. I love the way they wiggle - top photo is stretching out, bottom photo is curling up. Stretch, curl, stretch, curl... (there's more information about scud here.)

As the sun rose higher my fingers began to thaw, and I took my hat off. It was even warmer on the rocks, but snow and ice lingered in the shadows. That was distracting because, you know me, I can't resist trying to photograph ice.

These are of frost on the pinkish sand. I want to blow them up to at least 3 feet wide and savor all those intricate squiggles.

Then I got distracted by some sand formations and lay down to photograph them up close. I didn't get any great photos, but I figured I show these anyway so you can amuse yourselves picturing me digging myself into the sand to take them. (The cliff is about 5" tall.)

After a while I worked my way back to my starting point, where I got distracted again, this time by reflections on the stream bottom under the ice.

Altogether a satisfying day out!



P.S. These photos were all taken with a new camera I'm testing.

I bought it for a big trip that's coming up soon - I'll tell you more when departure day is closer. Here's a hint - this camera is supposed to be good to 30' underwater...


So far, I like it. The (above-water) photos seem fairly crisp, colors are good, the macro function works well. The lens doesn't have a cover, though, so I worry about scratching it. It's also flush with the casing, so I have to concentrate on NOT putting my fingers in front of it. Haven't used it underwater yet, but I'll report back when I do.

The Bar, February 3, 2012 (Beachcombing series No.60)

On February 3 it was 22 degrees F, sunny and dead low tide. I went down to my favorite beach for collecting trash, only to find the gate locked! The gate is tucked in by a store between a lot of restaurant piers, and is the only access to the whole strip of shoreline. That beach is where the fishermen have always pulled their boats up for maintenance and painting. Looks like someone has decided to buck tradition and close the access. To be fair, the stairs are their private property, and of course they have that right, but it's still sad. There is now no access to the shore between the Bar and the Town Beach. I'm going to try to contact the new owner for permission, but I suspect the building and stairs are slated for 'redevelopment' like the rest of the street.

I was determined to go beachcombing, though, so I headed up the street to the Bar. A stiff wind was blowing from the north and it was very cold.

 I got a few ice photos in mud puddles along the way. A lot of bits were frozen to the beach. I kept tucking my chin into my coat collar for warmth, but then my glasses would steam up, and the steam froze!

The gulls were curious. First one started to follow me, although I didn't notice for a while.

Then there were four standing huddled into the wind and watching me. Then eight gulls were moving down the beach with me, rising into the air if I got too close, and hovering on the wind just above my head.

It was cool and a little eerie at the same time. I've never seen them do that before.

 Maybe they thought I had food, because eventually a whole flock of them were flapping around, just the way they do behind a fishing boat. There were even a couple of crows. Yes, I did think of That Movie, but they didn't seem aggressive. I just kept beachcombing, and when I found this:

I forgot all about the birds!

Happy Valentine's Day

I'm one-half of an old married couple with two teenagers, so we've got pretty flexible ideas about what constitutes a good Valentine celebration. We agreed that cards and chocolate are kind of boring after all these years, but the romantic moments show up unexpectedly.
Today my 11-year-old daughter's fiddle group played at Sonogee, a local nursing home. It was once part of a row of grand mansions lining the shore, back in the days when the cream of Gilded Age society summered here and threw elaborate balls during the Bar Harbor Season. Most of the mansions burned in the great Fire of '47, and others were sold off when the income tax was introduced and the old ways were no longer practicable. Sonogee still has a couple of fancy neighbors to the northwest, but to the southeast, the remaining mansions have been absorbed into the College of the Atlantic and various hotels. The entrance hall is still rather posh, with a sweeping staircase and arched niches and marble floors. There is also a lovely dining room with elaborate coffered ceilings. The wings that have been built on to either side of the original building for the residents' rooms are more standard nursing home style; hospital-like and practical.

At any rate, the children played Irish jigs and ballads in the old dining room, under that gorgeous ceiling, with a sweeping panorama of Frenchman's Bay behind them and the residents gathered in front. Such a study in contrasts and the changes time brings to people and buildings and ways of life... We parents hovered just outside the grandly carved doors, trying to stay out of the way of people maneuvering their wheelchairs and walkers in to the hall.

Near the end of the performance, the fiddlers played a waltz, and my husband and I started to dance out there in the grand hallway with the industrial carpet. It was very silly, since we are ungainly and middle-aged and overweight, but it was also absolutely lovely. He doesn't love to dance as much as I do, and is even more self-conscious, so I can't think of a nicer present for him to give me than an unexpected waltz in a incongruous setting. As I said, after 23 years, you take the romance wherever it pops up.

P.S. The photos are from the Next Step Chocolate Festival we went to last Saturday. My husband plays trumpet in a Dixieland band, and they've been playing for this fundraiser for at least ten years. The kids and I never fail to come and show our support.

White Shell Valentine, Take 2

Sometimes I just can't stop playing. I started to clean up after arranging that obsessive central heart, but the next thing I knew I'd spent a couple more hours working with the rest of my white shell stash.

White Shell Valentine

I think these are Common Dove Snails (Columbella mercatoria).

Shark Tooth Valentine

Shark Tooth Valentine (available in my etsy shop)

I've made three valentines this year. This is the first one. I started out trying to make a heart out of sea urchins, because I liked the christmas tree I made with them and thought I might have a series of sea urchin holiday photos. They didn't work out well though - I didn't have enough variety of sizes - so I started pulling jars off my shelves. A box of mussel shells, mason jars full of little shells from Florida, several jars of white shells ... at the back of a shelf I found my collection of shark teeth. Aha! Fortunately it is a huge jar so I could pick out just the right shapes and sizes. It took about an hour and a half to sort them and make the basic heart shape.

How did I get so many shark teeth? Well, you know what a scavenger I am. Not just on the beach, but I also love yard sales and thrift shops. A few years ago I was visiting my sister in New Hampshire, and we went to a yard sale in an old barn. The owner had a huge copper maple syrup cauldron that I still remember longingly. But what the heck would I do with a cauldron? (More to the point, it wouldn't fit in the car.) Anyway, I dug around in the barn and way way in the back, buried under dusty boxes and spider webs, were five or six open cardboard boxes piled into each other, full of paper bags and shoe boxes. Everything was heaped with shells. I pulled them out into the daylight and tried not to scream while dusting off the spiders. The owner (who was in her fifties) said her mother had vacationed at the same beach in Florida for fifty or sixty years. She would bring the shells back every year, admire them for a while, and then dump them in the barn. (I could totally sympathize - I did something similar until I started photographing my finds, except I don't have a barn.) I bought the lot, and took them home to sort them and see what I had.

I ended up with many jars of seashells, and one huge jar of shark teeth. I wish I knew more about the teeth. I think a lot of them are fossilized. There are (or were, until my son snitched them) a few really big ones. I tried to count them once and got bored around 500, so there are over a thousand in the jar, ranging from less than a quarter of an inch long to an inch and a half. Some are broken, many are chipped, but there are still hundreds in perfect condition. Every now and then I pull out the jar and my kids and I play with the teeth. It is one of the few things about me that my teenage kids still think is cool.

And man, would I like to know what beach that woman went to!

A Long, Wandering Post in which I Have an Adventure

If you are too cold, too hot, hungry, thirsty, lost, hurt, frightened, nervous, or in new territory, and you are not sure when things will improve, you are having an adventure. I say this to my kids when we're in the middle of something unpleasant like walking through a blizzard, and they usually roll their eyes, because when you are hungry and lost it sure doesn't feel like an adventure! To me, an adventure is an event that is no fun at the time, but teaches you something and makes a great story when you are safely home again. If you think about the adventures kids have in books like Treasure Island or Harry Potter, you'll see what I mean.

My latest adventure happened a few days ago when two game wardens knocked on my front door. I hadn't been expecting them, but I was pretty sure I knew why they were there. See, back in December I got an anonymous email. I had just opened a second etsy store to empty out my studio of all the collections that have been piling up, and one of the things I listed were the feathers I'd picked up on the beach over the years. Here is what I read:


Oh dear! Well, I followed the links and did some further reading and determined that there are indeed laws regulating the feathers of certain birds. The writer was obviously confusing the actual feathers that were for sale with the photos I sell. Most of my feathers were probably fine since seagulls (the common Herring Gull, that is) are not protected birds, but to be safe, I immediately removed my feather listings. The email left me feeling very uncomfortable: I really dislike anonymous communication. Why would someone hide their identity when sharing important information? Notice their faux email address even uses my own name. If you are reading this, my anonymous emailer, thank you for letting me know the law, and take note that I consider "anonymous" a synonym for "coward."

At any rate, when two tough-looking game wardens in very official uniforms arrived on my doorstep I was pretty sure my anonymous friend had been at work again. Sure enough, it turns out that around the same time I received that email, someone called the Fish and Wildlife Services' anonymous tip line, and reported me as a Game Thief! (A Game Thief kills game out of season or kills protected animals.) Now I am a little bit of a Goody-Two-Shoes and I get very flustered when I break the rules or am suspected of it. I got a detention once, and I've been caught speeding twice, all of which I found very traumatic, and that is the extent of my contact with The Law. So when the wardens told me why they had come, I'm pretty sure I turned pink or red or white or mostly likely an unattractive mottled combination. They were very very nice about the whole thing. They had already looked at my website and seen that I was a beachcomber selling photographs, and were pretty sure before they came that I was not killing birds. Once I got over the initial shock that some stranger felt so strongly against me, I brought them up to my studio to see for themselves, and we had a nice chat.

What I was left with was that most of the feathers I find are probably not affected by the law, but that it is hard to identify them so safer to assume that they are. It is illegal to possess protected feathers, but photographing them is fine. So is selling the photos.

I was very impressed by the wardens - they were super knowledgeable and helpful, but I also got the feeling they were pretty tough guys, and I'd sure hate to break a law that would put me on their bad side! (Well, I kind of don't like to break laws anyway, but you know what I mean.) They gave me a great source for feather identification which I haven't had a chance to look through yet, but next time I do find a feather I plan to look it up as well as photograph it. And then put it straight back on the beach!

I have to confess that I have very thin skin, and I'm feeling very self-conscious now that I've had a couple of unpleasant emails. You know how an barnacle yanks its feathery arms back into its shell when it feels threatened? That's my first reaction. My second is to storm around telling people what I think in very strong words (inside my head, that is.) Then, when I calm down a bit and realize that it is only another adventure, I write it all down for your amusement and edification.