Leopard Crab

This is a Leopard Crab, claws retracted, and trying to hunker down in the sand to appear inconspicuous.  I’ve come across and saved a few empty shells, but he’s the first live one I’ve found.  He was blowing bubbles in the wet sand as I walked by, which gave him away.  It was dead low tide and he was a long way from the water.  Fearing he had been stranded, I picked him up to carry down to the water, and he latched onto my fingers with both claws, in a pretty painful little grip.  These are little fellows, maybe 3″ across, and normally live in water up to 150 feet deep.  They aren’t shore dwellers, which explains never finding one.  Something wrong with this one’s GPS, I guess.  They have a beautiful, leopard-like random pattern across the carapace, which retains its color even when the animal is dead.  A rare and happy find.

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These are Royal Terns.  Talk about birds of a feather hanging together, you never see just a few of these guys, but a large crowd.  They winter here and like to mix with the Skimmers, maybe because of the orange beak similarity, but they hang around into summer long after the Skimmers have gone.  A very vocal bird, they have family arguments that might include twenty or thirty members all squawking loudly with their heads thrown back.  Lots of fun to watch.  A very dressy bird for the beach scene they have grayish feathered backs and white bellies, a bright orange beak, and a tuft of black feather atop the head that’s kind of spiked.  I think they all look like Rod Stewart.  Like most northern visitors, they don’t do extreme heat very well, so most of these guys will be gone by June.

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The game is officially on.  It’s getting harder to beat the sun up in the morning.  Official sunrise this morning was 6:54, still within our comfort zone, but starting to occur at the latter stages of newspaper reading which is a little anxiety-producing.  We will compensate, of course, by getting a little earlier start.  Sunset today is 7:53; that’s a full 13 hours of daylight, and growing, and one of the reasons I love summer so much.  But the days don’t just keep getting longer all summer, you know.  Oh, no!  In fact, they start getting about a minute shorter every day from the official midpoint of Astronomical Summer, on or about June 22, the Solstice.   And the cool thing is, up until that point, it’s not just more daylight added on at the end of the day, it’s added on at both ends!  Expanding!  Lengthening like pulling a strand of bubble-gum from both ends.  And then, after the Solstice, the days contract!  From both ends.  Expansion and Contraction.  Very useful concept.

Coming Up

No birds or animals were injured or insulted in the making of this blog.