August 15, 2018: part 2, Petoskey State Park

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Sky over Little Traverse Bay (an arm of Lake Michigan), at Petoskey State Park.

Sight and sound of the Big Water.

Mother Nature's assemblage on the beach.  Pretty sure those are (invasive!) zebra mussel shells.

Closer crop of the middle of the left edge.  I'm still amazed that a phone camera (with its teeny lens) can do this good a job.

Also amazed at the diversity of rocks that make up this sand...........

Betting that brain-looking thing, lower left, above, is a seed?



Ok, never saw this before........  It was floating around in the water, looking like a piece of cloth.

Pretty darn sure this is a fish skin.  !!!  It felt like you'd expect the skin on a bucket of paint to feel, if you were to pick it up.  Flimsy, slimy, feeling as though it was barely holding itself together.......  This was a pretty big fish.  This is more than two feet long, even without its head and tail.

Closer look at a part that's near what I presume is the tail (which is at the top of the prev).

Guessing these are the reinforcements that hold up fins.  Interesting that they are stuck to the skin, rather than being with the skeleton.  Assuming there was a skeleton -- I don't know of any cartilaginous fishes in the great lakes, but that doesn't mean there aren't any............

These sticky-up things were as long as my fingers.  And I bet we can tell how big the scales were from the marks on the skin.  BIG.

I'm not sure what this is, but I think it is a fish bone.  It smelled very fishy.  But what sort of bone, I have no clue.  It's not exactly small!

We saw thousands of shells.  This is the only one I noticed that was not made by a mussel (guessing those thousands of shells are invasive zebra mussel shells).

I don't know what this teensy snail-ish guy is, nor whether it belongs here or not.

Another of Mother Nature's assemblages.  Someone on my Instagram account identified this as a sphinx moth.   What cool markings.

We picked up smooth beach stones, feathers, a few shells, and a LOT of trash.  Sigh.

I believe this is a ring-billed gull, sitting on a beach that is totally solid with human marks.

Because I can't get too much of the Big Water.........

We had dinner in Petoskey, and then went to East Park again.

Sunset over Lake Michigan.

I think this is snowberry.  We saw a sparrow-size brown and black bird taking the berries.  Interesting that this shrub seems to be blooming and fruiting all at once.  This must be a good source of food, over a long-ish period of time, for whoever likes it.

I wonder what happens to the levels of the great lakes when ocean levels go up.

All of that construction on the shore just left of the sun is brand-new rich-people condofungus.  Wondering what happens to all of that when the water level rises............

The sun got redder and redder as it went down.

Closer crop of the above.  I have cropped this, but have not done anything that affects the color.  This color is just as the (phone) camera and I remember it.

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