According to my handy beach book, this is a skate egg case, or "Mermaid's Purse".  Skates (which look like rays) are related to sharks.

I also saw these little amber "beads" along the beach this evening.  They are actually the tiny air bladders of algae, or seaweed.

And this is a sponge called "Dead-man's fingers".

Yesterday it rained really hard all morning.  Then, in the afternoon, the sun came out.

There were two Black Skimmers down at our end of the beach...

I also saw a tiny Hermit Crab in an auger shell.

Very windy today, and a very rough sea.

A Ring-Billed Gull had found a bit of apple or something on the beach.  But a Fish Crow was also eager to partake.

Here's a video showing how the crow eventually stole a bit of the gull's treat.  It's too bad it's so windy; you can't hear anything but the wind blowing.

Well, as promised, this morning I walked down the beach to find out where the Black Skimmers are nesting.  Turns out they are behind the Bon Aire motel in St. Pete Beach, just where they were last year.  The nesting area hasn't been cordoned off yet.

Royal Terns in foreground, Black Skimmer nesting area in background...

Black skimmers are comical-looking birds, with long lop-sided bills, long ungainly-looking bodies and short little legs.  You can barely see their eyes, in the dark part of their head.

But if you look at a Skimmer in flight, you can see that the body is not really that long--it is only the very long wings that make it look that way...

These two Skimmers are evaluating the nesting possibilities of this particular area...

A Black Skimmer with some Willets

A lovely evening at the beach.

I saw a little striped Hermit Crab...

... and a Black-bellied Plover.

Oh, and the Black Skimmers are back!  Over the weekend I'm going to walk down the beach and see where they're nesting this year...

And maybe I can get a better picture...

I saw two unusual birds on the beach today.  One was an American Oystercatcher, which I have never seen on Pass-a-Grille Beach before.

Lovely red eyeliner...

The other was a pigeon, which I have certainly seen almost everywhere else but at the beach.

 I am now revising this post about the three Royal Terns I saw on the beach, one with a fish.  I had thought it was a parent with its young.  But I have been seeing some Laughing Gulls mating, and it occurred to me that maybe it's too early for young birds, but the right time for courtship.  An online search revealed that the male tern will present a fish to the female.  In that case, it is possible the other two terns are females, and the male is trying to get one of them interested in his fish.

He would fly away, circling around, but always coming back to the other two terns.  He did this several times, not trying to eat the fish, just showing it off.