Laguna Bluebelt » Seashore

At The Water’s Edge

Charlotte — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 22:19:09 +0000

Observations and thoughts on a flat, calmy day at the water’s edge in August: Sedimentary rock of taffy San Onofre Breccia swirls is a glorious sandstone with a color as vibrant as butter that abuts our beaches. Sea Wrack, the brown seaweed and Giant Kelp that washes ashore in abundance from the storms and natural action of the waves surround us while I enjoy the morning with my sunny friends. Perhaps this is obvious but because the tide rises up and down twice a day things at the top of the shore get much less water than things at the bottom. The ocean is so moist and glistening and heavy and fecund and the California Breccia rock formations barely 20 yards or more away with the Coastal Sage Scrub up above are as crispy and dry and brown as some parts of the desert. I am amazed at this dramatic contrast – it is so distinct – you can close your eyes and be immediately transported into another world… At our point of entry to the beach at Reef Point there is a family of California Gnatcatchers in the dry scrub, chattering away happily. Down on the beach if you are lucky you can see Western Snowy Plovers tucked up in seaweed resting from the winter storms. Both birds are on the Endangered Species List. Both birds live in entirely different habitat but exist and shelter together within 100 yards or less of one another. And then ‘trip-out’ and think of the weather zones beneath the ocean… 20 and more Big Blue Whales seen in a day on our whale watching boats out of Dana Pt recently. (Click on Photo)Remarkable. We saw them blow two miles off shore – they have two blow holes side by side and their blow is huge and quite visible from the beach. Big Blues can grow close to 100 feet, the largest living animal ever known on earth. They follow the Krill and are normally seen more in Central California than this far south. There is a world of weather under the ocean that I know nothing about but them Big Ole Blues, they know.

January 1st is D-day when the Marine Protected Areas of Laguna Beach will be officially implemented – I think of all the ocean’s marine creatures that will benefit from this protection and I am happy as I stroll along the shore with the walking group.

BOUNTIFUL, BEAUTIFUL BLOY!

Charlotte — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 16:42:07 +0000

Black Oyster Catcher Breeding Pair- displaying “Piping” or greeting behavior.

Over the years we have seen Black Oyster Catchers (BLOY) from Dana Point in the south to Crystal Cove in the north, wherever there are healthy mussel beds and rocky ledges. Often YOU CAN hear them FIRST, calling to each other with a very distinct and plaintiff cry. It is a wild and haunting sound which carries above the surf. Knowing they are close by is good enough for us, we do not have to see them. They cry hew, hew, hew when alarmed but seem comfortable around low-profile rock scramblers like us.

BLOY foraging in the mussel beds along the Laguna coastline

Sometimes, you can find their nest, sometimes not – it can be totally inaccessible. They make a small, inconspicuous scrape in the rock face and wedge their nest in tightly. They have been nesting on our rocky shores for the past 4 years at least – that we know. Two chicks show up in the nest in June/July and they are off flying within 40 days of birth.

Adult BLOY bringing food to two BLOY chicks on their protected rocky ledge- these chicks are not flying yet. Sandy swam out to this location and took this photo from the water.

Adult BLOY (solid bright red bill) presenting a limpet to two BLOY chicks (bi-colored black and red bills). These chicks have fledged from the nest site and are nearly the size of their parents but are still dependent on them for much of their food.

The Laguna Bluebelt’s rocky coves covered with healthy mussel beds on intertidal rocky ledges (the intertidal zone) provide excellent habitat for BLOY. They will eat oysters when given the opportunity but they mostly eat mussels, limpets, chitons, crabs and barnacles. They hunt through the intertidal area, searching for food visually, often so close to the water’s edge they have to fly up to avoid crashing surf.

Adult BLOY with a limpet.

They use their strong red bills to dislodge food and pry shells open. They also forage on the beach. They are very clever!

BLOY chic (on left) and Adult BLOY (on right) foraging on the beach.

A few interesting facts:

A group of Black Oystercatchers are called A Parcel.
Just take a look at a Black Oystercatcher’s eye – it looks like a bull’s eye.
And how about that thick red mollusk-cracking bill? Amazing!
The Black Oystercatcher can live for more than 15 years – a goodly time for a shorebird.
Black Oystercatchers are found along rocky shores from Alaska to Baja California.

Adult BLOY with solid red bill and bright yellow eye with a surrounding ring of red skin

For the past five years Charlotte Masarik, Sandy Dildine and others have been monitoring Black Oystercatchers (BLOY) and all shorebirds along the beautiful Laguna Coast as part of Laguna Ocean Foundation’s quarterly Shorebird Survey. If you would like to participate in this all-volunteer survey, contact us at charlotte@lagunabluebelt.org; or contact the survey’s coordinator, Ed Almanza, at superpark@igc.org. You can also contact Laguna Ocean Foundation directly at lagunaoceanfoundation@gmail.com.

To See a World in a Grain of Sand

Charlotte — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:59:15 +0000

“To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower. To hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.” William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence” 1805 What is a grain of sand? A Beach?

Beautiful Sandy Beach at Crystal Cove

Sand consists of a vast collection of bits of crystals, coral, shells, sea urchin spines, silica, and calcium carbonate each with a unique shape and color. I am talking about our Laguna Beach sand not the sand of sand dunes in the desert which tend to be singular – silica in the form of quartz. Our sandy beaches are created by the long, slow abrasion of shellfish and coral. A sandy beach is essentially where pulverized, weathered rock along with some fragments of shelled creatures and other biota have collected, tossed up by the waves and as sediment from inland areas always shifting.

Sand is great for jogging - Reef Pt

Compact Sand is great for walking - Los Trancos

A grain of sand officially ranges from 1⁄16 mm to 2 mm. Sand feels gritty when rubbed between the fingers (silt, by comparison, feels like flour). For many of us sand is something we warm our toes in on the beach or play with under the climbing frame in the yard. It is yellow, small, gravelly and is trailed throughout the house.

Heartfelt Sand - Crystal Cove

Sand Dollar in the Sand

People who collect sand as a hobby are known as Arenophiles. The study of individual grains can reveal much historical information as to the origin and kind of transport of the grain along our rocky shores. The depth of sand at a beach can be anything from a few inches to hundreds of feet, maybe more. It all depends on the beach, the ocean and the shoreline. No coast is ever static. Beaches are constantly changing from waves, winds, currents and land storms, eroding and replenishing the ocean floor and tidewater sands. From one month to the next a completely different beachscape can be seen along all our coves.

December - Camel Beach, Laguna

January - Camel Beach, Laguna

Microscopic organisms settle in the sand and provide food for scavengers and filter feeders. Above the sand, crabs scurry for food. Flatfishes, skates, stingrays and some sharks hide in the sand as do sand dollars and crabs. Female grunion come ashore under the full moon on the high tide to lay their eggs in the sand and the males follow to fertilize the eggs. Did you know there may be thousands of tiny animals in that handful of damp sand you picked up by the water? Though it’s fun for us to play where the waves wash onto shore, it’s pretty hard for animals to live there: There’s no stable ground, and large areas flood or dry out as the tide changes. But, in fact, tiny animals are able to make their homes in the moist spaces between grains of sand at the water’s edge. Take a look at the bill of a Whimbrel, a Sandpiper, Willet or Marbled Godwit, our local birds, their very different bills determine the substrata in the sand at which they feed and what they feed on. A marvel in itself!

Long-billed Curlew - Crystal Cove

Sanderlings - Crystal Cove

Finally, let’s think of a few of the uses of sand in our lives: sandblasting, sandbags, sandcastles, sand in an hourglass, glassmaking. Or words that relate to sand: Sandals, quicksand, sandbox, sandpit, Sandman…

Draw a line in the sand

And here are a few idioms to amuse us: Bury one’s head in the sand Sand-bagging Sands of time Shifting sands

Happy as a Sand Boy (British)

Wrack, Wrack, Glorious Wrack.

Charlotte — Wed, 14 May 2025 22:12:06 +0000

Laguna Beach Walkers Walk the Wrack. Definition: Perhaps from Middle Dutch, wrak,wreckage; the term corresponds to Old English wraec Wrack. Hence the term “Wrack and Ruin” What is Wrack? It’s the common name for several species of seaweed (mega algae) when it washes ashore having broken away from the Kelp Forest under the sea after storms or winter swells in Laguna. The wrack zone is part of the shore just above the mean high tide where kelp is deposited on the sand – this is wrack. Laguna Beach’s Giant Kelp Wrack is called Macrocystis pyrifera – got it?! We love Wrack. So much life goes on in wrack on our beaches that we feel it’s like a treasure trove of washed up seaweed salvage. We walk amongst the Winter and Spring wrack like an obstacle course enjoying the spongy beds as we clamber by, looking for animal life. Thousands of invertebrates live in the holdfast. Do you see the Brittle Sea Star holding on to the holdfast (foot) of the wrack in the photos?

Wrack use: It was dried to be used as fuel during the winter, for human consumption, animal feed, fertilizer, glass production, iodine and now for bio-fuel. The Irish used it as fertilizer to grow their precious potatoes. Amazing stuff! It’s work for the City of Laguna Beach though. Wrack has critters and birds and lots of strong, ocean smells with flies galore in it – bird-yummy. Understandably, Main Beach is bulldozed of most of its latent wrack in the summer because of the tourists. Rather than bulldozing, Crystal Cove lets it lie and the tides eventually take the wrack back out to sea for more food and habitat for our marine birds and critters. Talk about great recycling! Thank you Crystal Cove.

More than 800 species rely on kelp forests, and we are one of them! Homage to the Kelp and Hail to the wrack!

Shoreline Strolls

Charlotte — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 21:25:05 +0000

After a night of light rain the wind has blown out the storm at Crystal Cove and Catalina shines bright with her sandy bluffs, white and clean. It is a cool 54 degrees as we head towards Little Treasure Cove at the north end of the Park. The Park features three miles of Pacific coastline, plus wooded canyons, open bluffs, and offshore waters designated a Marine Park. Dozens of gregarious cliff swallows were catching insects in flight, often very low to the sand. The edge of the shore was a carpet of sand crabs. No bigger than a thumbnail, a sand crab spends most of its time buried in shifting sand except for spring time mating. And the Caspian terns were twisting and diving over the water. We all felt wind-tossed like the birds. The Coast Turkish Rugging (Chorizanthe staticoides), is still blooming on the bluffs. It is slowly declining in Orange County and is now a plant of concern. Sea Rocket (Cakile Edentula) in the mustard family and native to our shores, is beginning to bloom on the sandy beach just above the high tide line. There was a lone surf-caster with his big pole at the water’s edge with a bucket of surf perch and the stormy clouds behind him were threatening us with rain so on we hiked with gusts of rain at our backs. I looked out towards the bobbing kelp and imagined a pair of Sheephead gliding along a rocky cliff under the surface of the choppy water, all calm and quiet. The history of our coastal waters is one of astounding abundance of life and the new Marine Protected Areas I hope will inspire us all to better protect the marine resources we have today.

Shoreline Strolls

Charlotte — Fri, 06 May 2011 23:13:31 +0000

Today dawned quiet and calm on the beach at Crystal Cove for our walk at Reef Point. No wind, no harsh glare on the water, a minus tide and good tide-pooling.

We saw a Brittle Sea Star a nice treat as they are usually hidden under rocks and hard to find. The waves broke with an even rhythm and the overcast skies softened our vistas. We heard the dolphin before we saw them and the Whimbrel alerted us with their wild and distressing calls……

Walking along the shoreline is a unique opportunity to enjoy the many birds and other sealife that call Laguna home.

It is always an amazing journey – our minds and hearts are crystallized by the early morning light and the complete sense of communion with the shoreline is intensified.

I think the ocean is more vibrant and dynamic than any other ecosystem and we all feel it as we walk along.

Watching the Pelicans dive-bomb, listening to the shoreline wave-break, looking for new pelagic visitors, beachcombing and enjoying the walking group in a quiet way is the best way to start our day!

“With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you’re connected to the sea. No matter where on Earth you live.”

Sylvia Earle