Oyster Blog — News from Here

We just about got skunked last weekend during the first recreational shrimp opening of the year.  Normally we shrimp at about 150 to 200 feet, and normally we do really well. There were 10 of us shrimping in the same area this year, but at 11 am, when we pulled our first pull, not a single one of us had caught a single shrimp. Zero. Zip. We panicked, and moved the pots as deep as our rope allowed, but when it was all over only one of us had limited. Another couple caught 20 to 30 shrimp each, one person...

Killdeer are darling little birds and their high-pitched calls echo across the oyster farm on summer evenings. A couple of days ago Dave noticed that a mother killdeer had built an oyster shell nest in a gravel pile near the shucking plant. Today one of the eggs hatched. It was a very slow process.... we filmed the egg for about 10 minutes and got about 16 seconds of action. (And don't worry: we didn't actually help the bird.) We went back to the nest a half hour later and the bird had hatched and its shell was gone, but it...

Friday both the tide and the sun were out during the day, and it was marvelous.

Coyotes. So much less scary than these guys:

The other morning two of the graybeards were driving to work in the woods above the oyster farm when they noticed a dead deer lying in the ditch beside the road. The deer's body was still warm, and it had two deep puncture wounds in either side of its neck that were bleeding profusely. And since vampires don't actually live on the Olympic Peninsula, their best guess was that it was a cougar kill. So they called Jim, who set a motion-activated camera up on the deer carcass. Here are some of his photos: Cougar with carcass, 5:11 pm. The...