Journal of a Sabbatical

October 8, 1999

snow geese

October 8, 1999
Plum Island

Plum Island
78 black ducks
1 killdeer
1 downy woodpecker
2 great blue herons
1 herring gull
10 greater yellowlegs
30 lesser yellowlegs
1 black capped chickadee
2 northern mockingbirds
8 dark eyed juncos
4 American crows
1 tree sparrow
60 snow geese
22 Canada geese
2 whimbrels
1 yellow-rumped warbler
2 great black back gulls
a million starlings

2 coyotes
2 white-tailed deer

Over Ward Hill
7 turkey vultures

Today's Reading: Danube by Claudio Magris

The Honda Barn called this morning to tell me that the insurance adjuster had finally been there and gone over the car with them and is going to rerun the numbers now that he's seen the car up on a lift. This means, according to the Honda Barn, that the car is more likely to be totaled. I have to wait until Monday for a decision. So, like another week has gone by without my doing anything about getting it fixed or getting a new car. At least I'm wide awake reasonably early. Well, that and the pot of coffee I made and drank right after the phone call.

I called Ned after 10:00 AM and ascertained whether he was conscious before asking about borrowing the binoculars as we discussed yesterday. On the theory that "right now" is better than "some time", he suggested I come over and pick them up immediately. Naturally he fed me more coffee, allegedly decaf but I seemed to get a buzz off it anyway.

Ned invited me down to the basement, the inner sanctum of old books, but I took off for Plum Island as I couldn't endure another minute of bird withdrawal.

The borrowed binoculars are not what I'm used to but I gamely identified as many birds as I could. A flock of about 60 snow geese flew directly over my head, cackling away. They seemed like a gift from the universe. Sparrows of several kinds are all over the place but I'm not quick enough to get a good look at them. Also there was way more than the one yellow-rumped warbler that I wrote down, but I only got a good look at one.

After a couple of hours, I realized I could just go and buy new binoculars - that I didn't really have to try to get the old ones back on the stolen goods market. Somehow, borrowing Ned's mother's binoculars freed me up to make that decision. I wrote a little note in the sand "Dear Mrs. Claflin, thanks for the snow geese" and drove back to Newburyport to look at binoculars.

I narrowed the choice down to two brands of 10 x 50 binoculars, testing them on gulls flying over the Merrimack River. I spent a long time trying them out and finally picked the ones easiest to focus in a hurry. By this time it was kind of late to go back to the refuge to get another look at the sparrows, so I'll have to break them in in the field over the weekend.