Sixty-five degrees. Sunshine. The tiniest of sea breezes. It doesn’t have to be any warmer than that. Lying in the sun barefoot with my shirt off sure takes me back to my youth. The smell of the salty air. The sound of the waves. Sleepy in the sun. Judy and I spent a lot of time on the beach together when we were kids. Not only did I get to run on the beach today, I got to run barefoot on the beach. It was nice. Mostly. I may not do it again. It’s a very shelly beach. It’s a little hard on the feet. I was careful not to get too much sun today. Saved some room for tomorrow. We have a new yard decoration. A four-winged whirligig pelican. Imagine that! Just try. I dare you. Just try. Judy is assembling it at this very moment. In fact, she just claimed this is no ordinary pelican. She got that right. Oops! Pelican update. The pelican has five wings! How can a pelican have five wings? Think gattling gun. The barrel spins. The wings are attached to the barrel. Actually in this case, any breeze spins the wings, which spins the barrel, which is in the middle of the Pelican. We’ve been watching this little Piping Plover on the beach. It runs around on the sand right at the water’s edge. It is so cute. It is only slightly bigger than a sparrow, and looks like a little Friar Tuck. He has a white belly, a light brown back, and a white collar around where his neck would be if he had a neck. He is a really really cute round little bird. You have to just want to hug him. They do have a sparrow here, called a seaside sparrow, we’re interested in. I read the description carefully, and he is never once described as “the elusive seaside sparrow”, or “the secretive seaside sparrow”. Promising. Tomorrow’s mission: the seaside sparrow in the salt marsh. We drove down-island for a while today, just looking around. There are a lot of vacation homes here, right up on the beach, and right up on stilts. The legs have to be long and strong so they won’t provide any resistance to the storm surge when the water is blown across the barrier island during hurricanes. There are some mighty fine looking vacation homes here. Clearly these are million dollar plus houses, and they’re empty; shuttered up tight for the off-season. By driving out of the state park and down the island, we got to where we could get the car back out on the beach again. There is something about driving on the beach I really like. It was so foreign to us the first time we did it. This is not something you would ever imagine doing in California. But now I’m hooked. I love driving down the beach looking at everything. The weather is so nice now that we slept with the furnaces completely off and both the windows above our bed open all night. We got to sleep to the sound of the waves. I could do this for a while. Oh. We’re told there is a nesting pair of crested caracaras here too. We’ll look for those tomorrow.