The view from Yaquina Head
20 or so images, photostitched together to make a large image of most of one of the bird poop covered rocky islands that used to be part of Yaquina Head 10s or 100s of thousands of years ago. I didn’t get a picture of the lower right corner, thus the mysterious black outcrop.
What you don’t see in this picture is what happened just after I took these photos; a bald eagle swooped in and grabbed a seagull chick, but was then set upon and chased away (after dropping said chick – Russell said he saw something in its claws, which it then dropped; when I saw its feet, they were empty-taloned) by a mob of a dozen or so irate adult seagulls. The last we saw of the bald eagle was it making a beeline towards the shore, followed by a line of seagulls who were anxious to redefine the whole idea of an apex predator.
What you don’t smell in this picture is the stench of a long-dead sea lion that had washed up on the shore in one of the little tidal coves on the south side of the head. The wind was blowing north, so the delicate aroma of rotting megafauna was blowing across the end of the head, maddening at least one turkey vulture who spent the entire time we were there sailing back and forth and back and forth along the head, hoping that all of those pesky primates would just GO AWAY and leave her to her meal.