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plover warden stuff
official plover count
Official number of plovers on refuge: 31
What's up with them: re nesting. some of the
nests got washed over in an unusually high tide last
week. It's early enough in the season that they just make
another scrape in the sand and do it all again.
Number of visitors I talked to today: 25
Other sightings:
Least Terns: at least 2 - couldn't
tell if there were actually 4. There were always two
within my line of sight or within earshot all day. At
one point they flew so low over my head I was afraid
they thought I was a fish.
Cormorants: 5
Ring billed gulls, herring gulls, black backed
gulls : lots
Purple Martins: 4
Bank Swallows: ubiquitous
House Sparrows: 2
Common loon: 1
Refuge biological staff: 1 - I scared the
daylights out of her when I said good morning. She
clearly wasn't expecting me. Too bad this was not the
same biologist who practically made me pee myself a
couple weeks ago by driving down the beach on her ATV
without radioing me that she was coming. She's up in
Canada on a bird banding mission.
Other observations:
weather: hazy all morning, clearing
around 2:30 PM and clouding up again at 3:30PM.
water: pale pinkish gray most of the
morning, light blue in the afternoon - nothing like
Homer's "wine dark sea".
an encounter with bad dialogue
A man in his thirties, bare chested with his
jeans hanging low and his crumpled t-shirt tied to his
belt started to walk onto the refuge beach. I politely
approached him:
"Good morning, sir. The beach is closed."
"You're the guard?" he asked. It sounded more like
"Yaw the gahd?"
"Yes." I answered.
"You got a gun or anything?"
"No" I said brandishing my radio "I got a radio."
"I can call law enforcement" I added with my finger
inching toward the transmit button.
"I better go then. I don't want to get shot." and he
turned and left.
Most bad movie dialogue is better than this! Real
life. Real conversations.
bizarre questions
what's up with the bugs?
Not one, not two, but four visitors asked me
"what's up with the bugs" referring to these winged ant
things that were swarming the beach and dying in huge
numbers. I don't even know what they are let alone what
they were doing there or why they were dying. One woman
claimed that one of them bit her, but I had them crawling
over me all day and didn't get bit. Since insects of all
kinds normally find Irish flesh the tastiest, surely if
they were biters they'd have bitten me. I dutifully
recorded this in my report. The gatekeeper had no idea
what was up either.
what happened to the sculpture
that was here 8 years ago?
This one mystified me.
The woman described some kind of trash art that
everyone added to. At first she told me it was there
recently. Then she said, well, it was about 8 years ago.
8 years! Let's see, that would place it at about
1989.
If there really was such a thing on the beach in '89,
umm, there've been many storms since then, including
Hurricane Bob and the No Name Storm (also called the
October Nor'easter , the Halloween Nor'easter and The
Perfect Storm) in 1991. Anything that was on the beach in
October of '91 sure as hell ain't there now! Including
some houses (not that there were houses on that end of
the beach - I'm thinking more of some of the other
beaches along that same area of the coast). The beach
dwelling members of my family refused to evacuate and
watched the storm from their living room. Donald reports
rarely having been so scared in his life.
But I digress. This woman who was asking about the
sculpture had no clue about the processes at work on
barrier beaches. I'm too tired to write up my long
promised barrier beach piece, but soon, soon, I'll get to
it and you'll know more than you ever wanted to about
sand, longshore currents, jetties...
nothing to do with plovers
the basketball diaries
yet another hoop gone missing
When I left my house this morning, I noticed the new
basketball hoop is gone. The backboard is still nailed to
the light pole, but there's no sign of the hoop. The old
backboard is lying in the dust at the bottom of the pole.
Clearly there is an anti-basketball terrorist at work!
And it isn't the crotchety old maid who done it.
no place to play
I feel for the kids. At one point a few years ago we
actually paid to have a real basketball court with
regulation hoop put in next to the pool. That worked fine
for awhile, but then the bigger kids started using it as
a place to smoke pot and drink beer. Then somebody lit a
huge bonfire on the court that burned up the net and
stuff. Now the whole thing is gone.
vandals at the gates
We have a lot of trouble with vandalism here, usually
to the lights along the walkways. Oddly the kids only
vandalize common property, never individual units. I did
have a kid try to break into my unit one night but my
former (deceased) next door neighbor
Mike-the-mad-daisy-planter scared him away. Another kid
tried to break into my car and messed up the lock, which
I had to have replaced, but Mike scared him away too.
Don't think the Beans of Egypt Maine are all that
concerned about protecting anybody's property but their
own.
an aside about lawn kitsch
As an aside, I should take a picture of the Beans'
lawn kitsch. It's truly inspiring
happy Gaspee Day a few days late
the burning of the
Gaspee
I meant to write about the burning of the Gaspee on
Monday, which is Gaspee
Day in Warwick,
Rhode Island. Rhode Islanders regard the burning of the
Gaspee as the "first
blood of the revolution". Frequently the citizens of
Warwick re-enact this episode in RI history variously
thought of as heroic or cowardly and ignoble. A recent
art installation in downtown Providence contains ceramic
tiles depicting great moments in RI history. Sure enough,
there are several children's drawings of the burning of
the Gaspee.
history of Rhode Island
I've been reading Rhode Island: A History by
William McLoughlin, who was one of Nancy's teachers at
Brown. Synchronistically or coincidentally, I got the the
section about the Gaspee on Monday, June 9. On June 9,
1772 a Rhode Island ship lured the hated British ship
Gaspee into shallow water where it ran aground off
Namquit Point (now known as Gaspee Point). The Rhode
Islanders attacked the ship, rowed the crew ashore, shot
the captain, and burned the ship. McLoughlin doesn't
record what part of the anatomy the captain was wounded
in, but I've always heard it was the umm, family
jewels.
when the revolution comes
Astute readers will notice that this event happened
well before the Boston Tea Party, generally acknowledged
as the beginning of the revolution. I'm sure
schoolchildren in various parts of the country learn
various historical events as turning points, key events,
etc. depending on where they are. My cousins in
California knew next to nothing about the revolution when
they came here to visit and my Mom showed them around the
Freedom Trail, so I'm sure they've never heard of the
Gaspee. Yet schoolchildren in RI draw it for their
contribution to the public art. To paraphrase Tip O'Neill
: "All history is local history."
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