Estuarine, intertidal, gravel, open, eulittoral

Some open (relatively wave exposed) estuarine intertidal sites in the Salish Sea have a poorly sorted substratum of mixed cobble, gravel, and sand, often distributed in patches along the beach. The relative proportions of sand and gravel vary with elevation, space, and time. These habitats are less diverse than mixed-coarse beaches because they tend to lack the stable surface cobble. Eelgrass beds often lie just subtidally of these beaches where the substratum becomes less coarse. These beaches are used as feeding areas by cutthroat trout, juvenile salmon (chum and pink), fish-eating birds such as cormorants, grebes, loons, mergansers, and great blue herons, and bivalve-eating birds such as scoters and goldeneyes.