Author: Carrie

Last week we traveled around wine country sharing our beautiful home with my parents who were visiting from the East Coast.

One day to beat the heat wave sweeping Sonoma County, which I guess could technically be called summer, we headed to the shore hoping to see interesting sea birds and a colony of harbor seals with their pups at Goat Rock Beach.

This beach is particularly interesting because it’s where the Russian River intersects the ocean. Below you can see the river on the right flowing westward into the sea on the left.

The two sides are distinctly different not just in the salt content of the water, but also in the clarity, color and turbidity. During the summer months a sandbar builds up along the beach, separating the Russian River from the Pacific Ocean, making an idea location for harbor seal pupping.

The smooth sand and interesting driftwood also make for a fun place to explore.

Any time we travel to the beach we bring several field guides so we can identify the animals and plants that we encounter. Here are the best ones we’ve found, our favorite beach field guides:

– California Seashore Life: An Introduction to Familiar Plants and Animals (A Pocket Naturalist Guide). If you’re going to buy just one California beach guide, this is the one to get. Laminated and pocket-sized, this is our most used guide. (Evidently they have hundreds of guides in this series, so you’re likely to find one specific to your area.)

– Pacific Coast Bird Finder: A Pocket Guide to Some Frequently Seen Birds and Pacific Intertidal Life: A Guide to Organisms of Rocky Reefs and Tide Pools of the Pacific Coast are inexpensive, pocket-sized guides with great picture and interesting factoids (shown on the top row, above). There are many books in this series focusing on trees, tracks, flowers, and wildlife across the United States and Canada. Check them out!

– Pacific Coastal Birds (Peterson Flash Guide). Evidently this laminated field guide is out of print, although there are several others in the series that are still available (including the Atlantic Coastal Birds). An alternative to this guide is the Peterson Field Guides for Young Naturalists: Shorebirds that contains more in depth information about commonly found shorebirds for elementary and middle-school students.

To ensure that we always have these guides with us on impromptu beach trips, I try to keep them packed away in our trunk all summer long (along with our picnic blanket and sand toys). With the beach just a half-hour away, we find the cool ocean breeze to be a needed reprieve on hot summer days. We want to be able to hit the beach in a moments notice. We love California Living!