3 days on the Bay

We spent three wonderful days on the Bay with the teachers at GSB this past week.  I'll tell you all about it when I finish this post later in the day!

So, the folks at Karen Noonan Center take us out to an island that was a home to folks who lived on the Bay and worked the Bay.  Long story short, the rising seas have won.  Now those very shrunken islands are a rookery for brown pelicans and cormorants and gulls.

There we are among more birds than you can count, more nests than you can count, and more babies and eggs, and hatchlings than you can count. Wow.  Plus we are looking for remnants of human existence.  Sea glass, bottles, brick, arrow heads, etc.

Surreal.

I could talk about the beautiful moon rises, and sunsets, and sunrises, and the Milky way so close you could touch it.  But, on the last day we scraped grass beds looking for creatures.

We found hog chokers and flounder and oyster toad fish and grass shrimp and crabs and busters and most everything, except a seahorse.  11 years later the seahorse still eludes us.

This year we had the privilege of having Richard LaMotte come and share his expertise on sea glass.  He shared his travels around the Bay and world looking for sea glass as well as helping us identify the history around the pieces we had found earlier out at the rookery.  Check out his book - Pure Sea Glass, Discovering Nature's Vanishing Gems.

The next day we had two birding experts share their knowledge of birds and e-bird.  They helped us understand how we can incorporate birding into our curriculum while also using e-bird to document our sitings and adding to the real work of scientists around birding and the environment.  Too cool!  Their dedication to birds and teaching are commendable.

Bay experiences are all pure magic and the CBF folk never forget that and neither should we.