Journal of a Sabbatical
The Plover Warden Diaries

July 19, 1999

sanderlings

July 19, 1999
Plum Island

3 double-crested cormorants
58 sanderlings
4 ring-billed gulls
2 great black backed gulls
1 common tern
loads of purple martins

Official Plover Count: 17 adults, 6 chicks, 4 nests left to hatch

Today's Starting Pitcher: Tomokazu Ohka

Today's Reading: Before the Dawn by Shimazaki Toson

It's hazy, hot, and humid. Again. The haze is so pervasive that the Isles of Shoals are completely invisible to the north and parts of Ipswich to the south look like they are floating above a thick, shiny, blue band of smoke. The green heads are out in force. So, apparently are the sanderlings. I counted 58 close enough to see in the haze, but it looked like there were more further down the beach running like small black shadows through the blue smoke.

Very few visitors came this far down the beach. Only one couple tried to walk right past me into the closed area. It's funny how people - adult grown-up people - think you can't seem them if they don't look at you. As soon as I spoke to them, they turned around and walked back the way they'd come. One person wanted to know how to get to Sandy Point (get back in car and drive, it's 6 miles south - even if the beach was open you wouldn't be walking that far today). Another guy asked about green heads. People are always asking me about green heads. I guess sitting out there for hours getting eaten by them qualifies me as an expert.

Actually, I only got two green head bites, which is incredible considering the number of green heads that flew around me. I guess maybe Deep Woods Off does work.

I had plenty of time to watch the sanderlings and try to figure out how they coordinate their group movements. I think the cues must be visual, because they weren't calling much if at all but they were well synchronized running in and out of the water. Except for one. One sanderling consistently ran in the opposite direction from the other 57. It ended up some distance further south than the rest of the flock and then had to fly back up to join them.

Other than the sanderlings, there weren't a whole lot of birds around. Every once in awhile a gull or a cormorant would fly by, but no big flocks like there have been the last few times.

I felt a few drops of rain after I'd been there about two hours. At first I was kind of enjoying it, but then it started to pick up. I was just about to radio the gatehouse that I was getting wet and packing up when he radioed me that there were storm warnings in effect for Worcester County (not where we are) and the storms were expected to come this way. I packed up and hiked back over the dunes to my car.

Now that the boundary is at parking lot 2, the walk to and from the car is a lot more difficult. The sand is really soft and the "road" isn't even close to flat. But the landscape is gorgeous.

As I left the beach, I stopped at the top of the dune and looked down on the plum bushes, rose bushes, and purple loosestrife and it struck me what a beautiful spot this is. I grabbed my camera out of my backpack and recorded the view. The rain was coming down pretty hard so the photo was kind of marginal, but it made good input for some Photoshop fooling around resulting in a kind of nice watercolor image (except I'm still not happy with the sky).