Very few days offer the amazing variety of natural history discoveries that we were presented with today. A brief early morning stop at Kasnyku Falls brought everybody onto the foredeck to admire the twisting rush of melt water cascading down from a considerable height into Chatham Strait. The magnificence of this waterfall is truly awe inspiring, and it created in our minds a heightened sense of awareness, which carried us for the rest of the day from event to event. Dall's porpoises, humpback whales, sea otters, and Steller's sea lions formed a parade of marine mammals that caused rush after rush of excitement. At one stage the Sea Bird sat still in the water with giant humpbacks blowing all around.
For the afternoon the crew ferried all the guests by Zodiac to the picturesque shoreline on Halleck Harbor. This gravel beach runs along the foot of a towering limestone cliff, a craggy wall festooned with hanging junipers, pink roses and a variety of wildflowers which in sections overhangs the beach. At one place, an indentation in the rock face ends in a long narrow cave, and there one of our naturalists made a rare and unique discovery. On the moist limestone wall some forty banana slugs (Ariolimax columbianus) were clustered in one area, as if they formed a colony, or were there together for some higher purpose. These giant slugs are not rare in the coastal rain forest, but they are known to be solitary animals that only come together by chance, or for the purpose of mating. But an aggregation like this, in a place where there is nothing for them to eat, was a truly surprising sight. We picked one of these slimy denizens of the forest up, and holding it in our hands we admired its external features as it came alive and started to investigate the hand that was holding it. Feelers, stalked eyes, a single breathing aperture that opened and closed rhythmically, and its slow muscular sliding movement on a cushion of mucus. For some of us it was a revelation that the much maligned or at best overlooked slug could be so fascinating an animal.
After hiking and kayaking we all returned to the Sea Bird for an evening of comfort and conversation. The entertainment of the day was focused on a cluster of live barnacles, which was invited to spend a small portion of their lives in a dish under the stereoscope, waving their feather legs on the video screen. At 'recap' the barnacles even had their sex life explained in front of everyone.
