Journal of a Sabbatical

June 25, 1999

starfish

June 25, 1999
Plum Island
3 piping plovers
1 cedar waxwing
12 laughing gulls
2 mourning doves
2 American goldfinches
68 Canada geese
2 green-winged teal
8 gadwalls
10 mallards
2 willets
31 double-crested cormorants
6 redwinged blackbirds
3 eastern kingbirds
1 clapper rail
2 snowy egrets
3 great egrets
4 common terns
100 herring gulls
7 great black-backed gulls
3 mute swans
8 ring-billed gulls
5 American robins
1 gray catbird
1 killdeer
1 white tailed deer

Today's Starting Pitcher: Jin Ho Cho

Reading: Before the Dawn

Another hazy, hot, and humid day except there's a breeze that stirs the leaves.

I slept late, hung out at Starbucks with Dan & Geri, George, Hussein, and Ned, returned the broken power antenna to Home Depot, took a walk at Sandy Point,found a starfish, looked for birds and found some, took some pictures, played with Photoshop (see starfish above), and read to page 315 of Before the Dawn (only 445 pages to go). All of this I did in a bad mood.

The walk at Sandy Point improved my mood somewhat. It was cooler there with a nice breeze coming off the water. I saw three piping plovers, and heard them too. Two were definitely adults and one looked kind of young. One of them flew around making that distinctive piping plover call and then landed on dry sand where it blended right in.

The tide was out and the beach was littered with seaweed of various kinds, halves (bottom halves) of extremely weathered beer cans, golf balls, razor clam shells, moon snail shells, mussel shells, quahog shells, plastic spoons and forks in bright colors, pieces of plastic cups in equally bright colors, crabs in three colors and a dozen states of being eaten by gulls, more crabs, more crabs, and more crabs. So the natural detritus and the beer cans, dining utensils, and cups I understand, but golf balls? Where do the golf balls come from? Undersea golf courses? Cruise ship driving ranges? An underwater golf ball factory? The Gulf of Maine as water hazard on Earth's biggest golf course?

The mood improvement lasted long enough that I was much more into birding on the way back. Regular readers who deconstruct my entries with a fine toothed comb may notice that the order of the bird list goes south to north instead of my usual north to south list. I even stopped at Hellcat today in hopes of seeing the great crested flycatcher that's been reported. I had to laugh at myself when I got out on the dike and realized there were about 10,000 swallows of various species chasing bugs, which began to munch on me every time the wind died down. I had about a snowball's chance in hell of locating a great crested flycatcher among the swallows unless I stood still in one spot for a really long time. I was unwilling to endure the biting insects (mainly no-see-ums) for that long. However, the universe rewarded me with a totally unexpected clapper rail. It was in the reeds near the beaver dam. I was scanning the area around the beaver dam looking for a kingfisher who sometimes hangs out there when I spotted the cinnamon and brown coloring and the unmistakable rail shape. It disappeared into the marsh grass a minute later, as if it had shown itself only for me. 

There were slews of gulls of several species, but I wasn't about to sort them out either. It's tough to scratch the bites with one hand and keep the binoculars steady with the other. Gotta remember to bring bug repellent next time. It'll be greenhead season soon.

I checked out the rest of the usual spots (north pool, salt pannes) from the car to avoid adding to my collection of itchy spots. I kept having to brake for mourning doves. I see in my notebook I only wrote down two of them, but there must have been at least a dozen. They forage on the edge of the road or, in the case of the dirt road, in the road. They don't make much of an effort to get out of the way of the cars. It's a wonder the road is not littered with flattened mourning doves.