Ellen and I had the good fortune to enjoy a sunset gabfest with two of St. Simons’ most interesting locals, Stacia Hendricks and Cindy Janus. Both of them work outdoors and are wonderful teachers about the odd and unusual ecosystem of estuarial Georgia.

Stacia’s been looking at a die off of shearwaters. A pelagic bird, in between petrels and albatrosses, shearwaters are very rarely seen in inshore waters yet they’ve been washing up dead on Sea Island recently. She told me about this last week and I’d been idly pondering it and came across an article about mapping algal blooms in the Pacific which said that such blooms had increased greatly, leading to build up of toxic acids through trophic levels ( invertebrates and filter feeders, molluscs and the like, accumulate the toxins, are eaten by larger animals who acquire greater and greater levels of toxins, etc. ) leading to die offs of larger predators and neurological problems in the populations that didn’t quite die. Since drought and heat magnify the runoffs that create offshore algal blooms I thought it was possible that this might explain washed up shearwaters. Wrong again. Since I’d last seen her some necropsies had been done indicating a far more prosaic cause, starvation. The shearwaters had had a couple of good years and hatched out too large a population for the current conditions. We never did get to turtles but we’ll talk about that next time.

Cindy gave us reports from her most recent kayak tours. She leads trips along the Georgia coast, to the barrier islands, around the rivers and the meandering snakey waterways roundabout for Southeast Adventures. Check out the great pictures at her site for the amazing, unknown beauty of this part of the world. I’m so envious of her familiarity with the rarely seen parts of Blackbeard’s Island, Sapelo, Cumberland and the huge delta of the Altamaha. Every time we see her we say we need to go out on a trip with her. So far the quotidian demands of the farm have prevented it but some day we will.

We had lots of fresh veggies from the garden in our trademarked house hummus with good Greek olives and fresh farmers cheese. What a good way to enjoy a sunset.