Wrack 'em up!

This beautiful little sooty tern is resting amongst the wrack on Cocoa Beach. For the non-beach folks, wrack is a line of dried seaweed deposited on the beach by the waves. Beaner folks know that wrack is where you're most likely to find sea-beans. When Margie sent this photo yesterday, she reported Fall is coming! Sargassum has been coming in for several days now with a persistent east wind. Seabeans started coming in today. Not a lot, but this weather pattern is supposed to stay in place, so maybe there'll be more. (Click on photos to enlarge)

But birds, wrack, and seabeans were not all Margie found on the beach. Monday's early-morning launch of a Delta II rocket with a Navstar GPS satellite was a beauty, but Margie says she's still picking up rocket flotsam like the piece of foam shown here. She's saving this piece for Curt Ebbesmeyer, who will be here for the Sea-Bean Symposium, of course (mid-October). He'll love it.

The skimmers are reclaiming their homeland, apparently! Margie's photo shows not only the adults and fast-growing chicks, but an "unrelated" juvenile has snuck into the photo, also (lower right). She tells us The oldest three chicks are definitely flying. Whenever the flock takes off as a group, they go right along. The nest with 4 chicks in it has now increased to 5! There was a new little one this morning. But the biggest sibling was beating up on it quite a bit, so I don't know if it will survive. If it does, I'll be interested to see how one pair of parents deals with five youngsters. (Ed. note: They'll probably get their own reality show.)

Other good news - acquisition of the Coastal Jewel property we wrote about a couple of seeks ago was approved by the County Commission. You can read all about it on our Space Coast Eco site.

Gotta love good news!