How can I write when Harlequin Ducks have been sighted at Sachuest Point?
It is winter for sure. Last night it was 14 degrees F when I left Kevin's house. My fingertips started to go numb on the steering while as I drove past house after house with neatly stacked woodpiles. Orion glittered in the freezing sky. Another sign. Brrr!
Despite getting home around 1:00 this morning, I was up and at 'em by 8:30 with the brilliant plan to pick up Nancy in Providence and drive to Sachuest Point to look for Harlequin Ducks. I packed:
Notice anything missing from this list?
I thought both the Peterson's and the National Geographic one were in the trunk of the car. I didn't check. They weren't. OK. So we'll take Nancy's Stokes book. Nope. It is nowhere to be found. Well, we don't need a book to identify the harlequins so we'll just let anything else we encounter remain a mystery.
After a wrong turn that ended up at Third Beach - not a bad place to be but no Harleqin Ducks there - and a short walk among the black-backed gulls, we found Sachuest Point and immediately ran into someone Nancy knew in the parking lot. The Rhode Island village phenomenon. She said she'd seen 3 Harlequin ducks. We set out on the trail and two mockingbirds started following us. Hey, I can see mockingbirds at home, let's get on with this.
The trail was gorgeous - through lots of weeds, grasses, rosebushes, and bittersweet. We spotted 22 Harlequin ducks in a group near some rocks in rough surf. Also 2 common eiders. We watched them for a long time. The ducks were chasing each other, diving, surfing...
We met another person Nancy knew from work. They had a discussion about something from staff meeting while I watched the ducks.
A northern harrier passed overhead hunting for something or other in the brush.
A guy jogged in place as he told us he had seen short-eared owls that hunt every day there from 2 to 6. We didn't see them.
We started back toward the car via a different trail. We spotted a dozen more Harlequin ducks and a double crested cormorant on the east side near some rocks.
The jogger returned telling us we'd just missed a kestrel.
We topped off the day with a Japanese dinner at Hisae's. Excellent food and unsurpassed homemade red bean ice cream (Nancy had ginger ice cream and said it too was unsurpassed).
Oh, and when we got back to Nancy's we rented Wallace & Gromit's latest A Close Shave and laughed ourselves silly before retiring very early.
/';L., <-Wilbur's journal entry
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