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December 22, 1996
Weather: overcast, grayish, cool tending towards downright cold
Birds:
The common black-headed gull was in with a flock of Bonaparte's gulls and ring billed gulls. I was scanning the flock systematically with my new scope looking for anything different. Kinda like the Sesame Street thing: "One of these gulls is not like the others, one of these gulls doesn't belong.." Sure enough, there it was with its red beak amidst the black beaks of the Bonapartes. Another birder was there with a scope earlier. I suspect she was specifically looking for the black headed gull because it had been reported on the rare bird alert as being "on Veteran's Memorial Parkway".
The kingfisher felt like an extra added bonus. Nancy noticed the call, and I found it with the binoculars - it was moving around too much to track with the scope, which we'd left in the car anyway for the bike trail portion of our expedition. We walked further along the bike trail than we have before and were rewarded not only with the kingfisher but with a secluded cove with a stunning boulder in the middle and a dozen hooded mergansers and their American widgeon camp follower, along with 5 herring gulls, and a family of mute swans we'd never seen before. This family has 2 adults and 3 cygnets. The cygnets look to be a little younger than the families we've identified in Watchemocket Cove itself. We've been following 3 family groups: the 6-cygnet group, the 7-cygnet group, and the 4-cygnet group. The new group was entirely different. The cygnets had more of the sooty juvenile plumage and their beaks were still very dark. This suggests that all the eggs in the neighborhood don't hatch at the same time.
The sun started to come out just before sunset and the light on the water and the grasses was incredible. Startlingly beautiful in a stark New England kind of way. The red stalks of whatever bush it is the had red stalks (I'm not good on plant names yet) gleamed in the fading sun like something out of a painting. As we walked back to the car in the sunset, we spotted the great blue heron wading along the edge of the muck. This was the most visible it's been. We really got a good look at it. Even with Nancy's 8x binoculars we got good details. The sun seemed to light it up.
Reflections: I've started life lists several times over the last 20 years or so and they've all gone by the wayside as I got more and more into work. Every once in awhile I'd realize I was working too hard and make a frantic effort to "relax" by taking up the old hobby or even a new hobby but never stuck to it. I was never able to sustain interest in anything other than work. At some points work even totally blocked out baseball, which I'm even more passionate about than birds. It is only now that I've taken significant time out to reflect, that my old interests are flowering. It isn't just having the time. It's also somehow making the space in my soul for things that nourish me. I never did a good job of balancing work and other stuff. Work always seeped into every aspect of my psyche all the time. Yesterday I realized how different I am now. For 4 hours, I was totally in the present - not thinking about Xmas shopping or finding a job or graduate school or chores or anything but enjoying the life that surrounded me, noticing and connecting with the birds and the water and the grasses and the tides...