Birds And Wrack

We'd gotten a bike at Bikrowave for my granddaughter.  They're all used bikes that the do-it-yourself bike repair shop takes in and fixes up.  Yesterday we were going to bike down to the Venice Boardwalk.  But we hadn't gotten far when we discovered her fingers aren't strong enough to squeeze the handbrakes tight enough to stop the bike.  She ended up against a low wall with a hedge on top.  

And the bike rental places at the beach weren't open.  It had rained all day Thursday and more rain was predicted and I'm sure they just said 'it's Christmas Eve, just stay home.'  But while clouds surrounded us, it was sunny though cool by LA standards - high 50s.  That didn't stop my granddaughter from ditching her shoes and pushing up her pants and playing tag with the surf.  

There were various layers of wrack on the beach after the storms this week.

  

"Natural material that washes onto the beach is referred to as wrack and includes algae, sea grasses, and some invertebrates such as sponges and soft corals. Wrack serves as the primary source of nutrients to beach communities and is the foundation for the food chain."  [from Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission]

And there was a fair amount of non-natural material in the wrack.  

There was even a woman picking plastic out of the wrack.  

Sanderling were also racing the surf - running down the wet sand as the water retreated, looking for little critters.

"Although Sanderlings are still considered fairly common, some surveys in the Americas show troubling declines of up to 80 percent since the early 1970s. Sanderlings' Arctic tundra breeding habitats are threatened by the rising temperatures associated with climate change, while their migratory and wintering habitats are at risk from coastal pollution such as oil spills as well as coastal development and other forms of habitat loss." [from the American Bird Conservancy]

There are lots of kinds of shore birds with longish legs and beaks, so I won't say for sure these are sandpipers, who moved in after the much smaller sanderlings.  

And we were even treated to a flying octopus.  

And toward the end this enormous flock of sea gulls took off at once and dotted the sky.  

Today was much grayer.  We opted for a walk along Ballona Creek.  This time I took my telephoto lens along.  

I'm including this one because I think the bird on the left is a female bufflehead.  The one in the water slightly to the right of center is possibly a male.  

"Black-necked Stilts are among the most stately of the shorebirds, with long rose-pink legs, a long thin black bill, and elegant black-and-white plumage that make them unmistakable at a glance. They move deliberately when foraging, walking slowly through wetlands in search of tiny aquatic prey. When disturbed, stilts are vociferous, to put it mildly, and their high, yapping calls carry for some distance."[From All About Birds] 

The waterborne American Coot is one good reminder that not everything that floats is a duck. A close look at a coot—that small head, those scrawny legs—reveals a different kind of bird entirely. Their dark bodies and white faces are common sights in nearly any open water across the continent, and they often mix with ducks. But they’re closer relatives of the gangly Sandhill Crane and the nearly invisible rails than of Mallards or teal." [from All About Birds]

There's a bike trail along the creek - really a cement waterway.