2022-0211 A Day On The Beach
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Key Beaches North of San Francisco
All the photographs in this gallery (save one) were taken on Limantour Spit and in the Bodega Bay area. All but a few came from 3 days in early December 2021.
While almost all of the photographs are very recent (thank you Sony α1), I have inhaled these beaches since 1975 when I began part of my Ph.D. research, on Sanderling at U.C. Berkeley and the Bodega Marine Laboratory. And that inhalation process continues. For example, during several recent years my family spent the Christmas Holidays on Point Reyes, and I spent multiple Christmas mornings photographing on Limantour Spit.
The photographs in this gallery could never have been taken back in the the 1970s, or even the 2000s. Cameras and lenses are generations more capable now.
A key geographical feature that Limantour and Bodega hold in common is both have extensive sandy beaches and a nearby set of sandflats and mudflats, Limantour and Drake's Estero and Bodega Harbor. Shorebirds move between these habitats very predictably: At higher tide levels they are on the beach. As the tide recedes and the mudflats are exposed, they move to the mudflats.
With two high tides and two low tides every day, on average, this means sweeping movements. Almost no shorebirds are on the beach at low tide: the feeding is too good on the exposed mudflats and in nearby shallow water. And high tides force all birds out to the beaches.
Peregrine Falcons, Merlin and Northern Harriers move with the tides also, for they are following their shorebird prey.
The other rhythmic change that dominates these patterns is that high tide comes approximately one hour later every day. Thank you, Moon. As a result, the lunar progression means that daylight and tides are continuously changing their relationships. Two weeks after a high tide rises at dawn, it will be the low tides' turn. This progression has huge impacts on what and when you can see (and photograph) things on the beach.
My favorite time/tide for photography is when the high is an hour or two after dawn. Walking west on Limantour Spit with the sun at your back and the tide right for lots of birds on the beach is heaven for photography, if the wind is light.
But typically on Limantour the wind is out of the NW. And it can be strong. This complicates photography because... well... more on that later. But it means that with NW winds the time to be on Limantour is on afternoons when high tide is in late afternoon.
