seldovia critters

I took loads of sea otter photos on our trip to Alaska, they didn’t seem to mind our boat nudging up fairly close for a peek.

I found this pot during our foray at the dump, at the same time as I nabbed the roller blades. So I painted the pot before I did the painting on cardboard.

My aunt and uncle had a little bird house on their deck, so we got to see a family of swallows fly in and out all day. I think this is the male one, since his feathers are so bright. There were also lots of bald eagles hanging out across the slough, waiting for salmon to swim by. For some reason, the crows liked to give them hell; they’d even jump on their backs. And the eagles would put up with it until finally they’d crack, and kill one of the crows. It was so weird.

The place was never quiet because the magpies were always squabbling. I wish Gary Northfield had been there, he’s always watching the birds from his balcony; perhaps he would’ve made some sense of all the fraught avian politics.

I was totally in love with the otters.

We didn’t actually see any bears, but there was bear scat everywhere, so we were never far from them. Here’s one of the piles we saw when we forgot to bring along the bear bells and had to spend a whole hike singing very loudly.

Camel Rock really does look like a camel:

I found this sea slug on the beach. It did this crazy thing where it puked out its whole face to crawl forward. Or something, I wasn’t quite sure what it was doing.

And here’s a fine specimen of a Great-horned kinsfolk: