First day on the river

I posted a (close similarity) to this in the comments below, prompted by Tate's question: "so how was the sea lion counting and watching?????"

This is the early season, so our down-the-river locations for observation had nothing going on. But we got up by the dam and saw one Stellar [the Endangered type] dinking around a bit, dam they're big.

The best sighting of the day was an immature bald eagle tag a 2' sturgeon and head off with it. Very cool.

The seals and sea lions won't be in in force for another month or two, so right now we're basically providing "0" slots for the data, which is important for the timing of arrival information.

The wind cut right through me, I'll be adjusting my gear. It was about 35 degrees with approx. 25mph steady wind to the East. I.E. pretty fucking cold.

Was great to be outside, getting school credit, on the lookout for animals, and getting fieldwork experience.

Pretty quickly I fell back into "Fire Lookout" habits from back in the day, it was funny to notice. I did the whole "open eye scanning" where your whole field of vision is fuzzy and you only focus on movement or details that needed clarification, this certain timing I had when I was doing the lookout came back to me as well. It's almost a robotic head turning-without-thinking-about it thing.

This should be another post in and of itself -- I'll repost it above.

Thanks for asking Tate, apparently I had a lot to say.