Journal of a Sabbatical

The Plover Warden Diaries

May 24, 1999

terns in the mist

May 24, 1999
Plum Island
2 common terns
8 Bonaparte's gulls
2 double-crested cormorants
1 great black-backed gull
6 herring gulls

Today's Starting Pitcher: Brian Rose - This just in: tonight's game against the Yankees is rained out.

Reading: Murder at Monticello by Rita Mae Brown

Providence Journal's Coverage of yesterday's science journalism debate

The early shift, 8 to 12, is often fairly quiet after the first hour. Today I got there a half hour late because of the fog but missed nothing. No people. No dogs. No piping plovers. The beach was the quietest I have ever seen it.

About 20 minutes after I got there I was deep in reverie watching the huge waves break in front of me. Sometimes they sounded like thunderclaps. They hypnotized me. I jumped when Unit 65, one of the law enforcement guys, materialized out of the fog. He looked south and exclaimed "It's gone." I agreed and noted that it looked like something had taken a bite out of the island and left a little stub where we were standing. Unit 65 replied "Where we are is the only part of the world that exists."

To the south I could see to the big piece of driftwood just south of the marker for parking lot 1. To the north I could see to the gap in the dunes that leads to the public parking lot - I could not see the first house. About 10 minutes after 65 left, the boundaries of the world drew even tighter.

I'm not sure why I stayed. I clearly wasn't necessary. But it was pleasant wrapped in the cocoon of fog watching the waves dump piles of cordgrass detritus and globs of sea lettuce at my feet. Sea lettuce is such a bright green color that it looks fake. I keep thinking nothing in nature can be that green. There's piles of knotted wrack and rockweed, as well as some Irish moss too. I was going to make a list of all the seaweed species I encountered today but I didn't write them down at the time, so I'm just mentioning the ones I remember. There was a fashion in the 19th century for collecting and pressing seaweeds of different species. People would keep their mounted specimens in scrapbooks or even display them on the walls. I think they did this with mosses too. Anyway, since the birds were mainly invisible in the fog, I took to examining seaweed.

Of the bird life that was intermittently visible, the terns were the most interesting. I'd hear them calling long before they emerged from the fog only yards from me. They'd dive, catch fish, disappear back into the fog. Watching them leave it looked like they were fading - just getting paler and paler until I couldn't see them anymore. The Bonaparte's gulls emerged as a flock all together and seemed to materialize directly in front of me. I neither saw nor heard them coming. One of them looked like it might actually be a common black-headed gull but I wasn't going to bet on that in this visibility.

Several shorebird shaped phantoms flew by singly or in big flocks. They all looked like they were behind a scrim. I didn't even guess at the identities of any of them.

I heard some purple martins and I think I heard a brown thrasher, but I'm not that good on songs - even though I've been practicing listening to the tapes a lot lately.

I left at 11:30 because there was really no need for me to stay around. I didn't see a single visitor the whole time I was there. But it still felt good - almost like meditation - to have been there.