Casey and I are relocating to Seattle in 2 weeks and, unless we find some amazing cheap house in a desirable location, we’re moving into a small top floor apartment just blocks away from the Ballard Locks. The City of Seattle has an extensive online repository of datasets to explore, which I used to create this map of buildings and tree cover in our future neighborhood. The building we’re slated to move into is highlighted in red, which when zoomed out gets lost in a sea of other buildings. The dog-friendly apartment is ideally situated in a quieter neighborhood near the water, within biking distance of Casey’s new job, and a short walk from our friend’s house, nice bars and restaurants in Ballard, a nice beach for viewing sunsets, a marina to store my kayak in, and one of the largest green spaces in Seattle. Download a higher resolution version of the map HERE, and the code used to generate the base map HERE.
Feeding Frenzy /
The 2019 seabird field season on the Farallones wrapped up at the beginning of August, and I’ve been off the island and back home for a few weeks now. Going through photos from the season, this particular shot of a humpback whale lunge feeding through a giant bait ball of northern anchovy stands out as my favorite. Anchovy was an important component of the seabird diet this year, and comprised most of the prey items being delivered to awaiting chicks for common murres, rhinoceros auklets, and western gulls. We were seeing many mixed species feeding aggregations near the island by the end of July, where whales, sea lions, and birds were all working cooperatively to take advantage of the bounty of fish.
Catching Fish /
Sometimes a net works best when catching fish. In this case, seabird interns on Southeast Farallon Island are extracting a rhinoceros auklet from a mist net, in order to identify and measure fish the bird is bringing back to its chick. Seabirds sample the marine environment for us, and provide insights into the types of fish available around the island and within the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary. This particular auklet was carrying a bill load of 2 northern anchovy, a common prey item for this location.