Journal of a Sabbatical
The Plover Warden Diaries

July 23, 1999

deet

July 23, 1999
Plum Island

267 sanderlings
5 semipalmated plovers
3 piping plovers
3 ring billed gulls
5 herring gulls
1 Bonaparte's gull
9 double crested cormorants
1 great black backed gull
9 common terns
2 ruddy turnstones
17 semipalmated sandpipers
16 least sandpipers
1 American goldfinch
1 eastern kingbird
5 gray catbirds
1 snowy egret
1 great egret

Official Plover Count: 18 adults, 13 chicks, 2 fledglings

Today's Starting Pitcher: Tomokazu Ohka

Today's Reading: Feng Shui for Clearing Clutter (or something like that - I read it over iced chai at Borders and decided not to buy it because it would just be clutter)

Sanderlings to the left of me, sanderlings to the right of me, sanderlings before me, sanderlings behind me ... along with semipalmated plovers, piping plovers, semipalmated sandpipers, and least sandpiper... and there go two ruddy turnstones...

This is the first time this summer I've worked the south refuge boundary. I almost called in as "north plover warden" on the radio 'cause I'm so used to saying that. Bob's been telling me for weeks that there are way more shorebirds on the south beach than the north. Man, is he ever right! I lost count at 167 sanderlings and guesstimated there were about another 100. It's probably more.

I met Bob in parking lot 6, where he was already hiding out from the greenheads while he waited for me to arrive. Geez, I wasn't that late. So I got the radio and the clipboard from Bob who said he'd seen 5 plovers and the greenheads were bad today. Just as he said that, one bit me.

I sprayed on Deep Woods Off, which has tons of deet in it - you're not 'sposed to use it on kids, it's got so much deet. I soaked my clothes and coated my skin so I shone and glistened with it, feeling guilty all the while. I try to do the "all natural, nontoxic" thing in vast areas of my life, but citronella does not repel greenheads or (more importantly) deer ticks. So I'm stuck with deet. The other night I started to wonder if my ear congestion was allergy to deet rather than to mold spores, but after taking multiple showers between applications of deet the ear congestion came back as soon as it got humid again.

Oh, did I mention it's 90 degrees F and intensely humid today?

I sweltered through the whole shift. I took my shoes off and moved my chair into the water to keep cool.

This led to people trying to enter the closed area by going behind me, but I have eyes in the back of my head (just ask my nieces) so leaped up from my chair and politely greeted them repeatedly until they responded. No way was I going to run after them in this heat.

Actually, there weren't that many visitors today but not a single one of them knew about the beach closure for the piping plovers. Now to get to the south end of the island, they had to pass at least 4 signs along the road in addition to the one at the gatehouse, and they had to have walked directly past the State Park's informational signage with tons of piping plover information and begging people to respect the closed areas. Yep, they had to have passed all of those signs before they got to the gigantic one identifying the actual closed area. People are oblivious.

All but one of the visitors appeared in the last hour of my shift. Most of the day I just watched shorebirds.

The coolest thing was the patterns the sanderlings leave in the sand as they run around probing with their beaks. When I walked over areas where they'd been I'd see a hole with sanderling tracks in a jagged s-pattern on one side of it. The tracks never encircled the hole, but they did show that the sanderlings probed from several positions.

Sanderlings are quite social when they feed - always in groups clustered together. The semipalmated plovers hung around the edges of the sanderling group at some distance from each other and from the sanderlings. They seemed to need a vast amount of space around them in order to feed. The piping plovers would fly over, land amid the group and then either chase the other birds away or run up onto the dry sand and feed at the wrack line instead of the water line - also way far apart - even more far apart than the semipalmated plovers. One piping plover, who looked to be a fledgling was doing the foot trembling thing that's characteristic of plovers feeding in very shallow water, but he was doing it on dry sand. It didn't look like he was succeeding in stirring up the sand.

By the time my shift was over, I was too hot and bitten to do much birding beyond noticing anything I encountered on the 7 mile drive to the gatehouse to turn in my report.