Journal of a Sabbatical

November 21, 1999

a snowy owl

Today's Bird Sightings
Plum Island

1 northern pintail
hordes of mallards
hordes of Canada geese
1 American robin
1 American crow

Salisbury Beach
1 merlin
1 snowy owl!
1 northern shrike
1 double crested cormorant

30 seals

Today's Reading: Woman Alone: A Farmhouse Journal by Carol Burdick

Today's photography lesson: It is easier to photograph one seal than thirty seals because thirty seals just looks like a pile of rocks. Pile of seals, pile of rocks, only difference is the seals move and bark. Video. That's the ticket. Then they can look like a pile of moving, barking, rocks.

The weather is so spectacular and warm today I'm surprised people didn't join the seals in sunbathing. When I went to Plum Island, I noticed that the parking lot at Sandy Point was full. That usually only happens in the summer.

As I was scanning the pine trees in the Salisbury Beach campground for crossbills, a blue-gray shape carrying a grayish-white shape streaked past in front of my car. It landed in a pine tree (no crossbills there) and proceeded to rend whatever its prey was so all I could see was bloody entrails. The blue-gray shape resolved into a merlin when I got the binoculars focused on it. A teenage boy with binoculars who was looking for crossbills asked what I was looking at. "I think it's a merlin" says I. The kid agreed and wanted to know if I could tell what it had caught. By that time the prey was turned inside out. I ventured the opinion that it was a mouse or a vole rather than a bird, but I really had no idea. It was quite a spectacle. Even grosser than a nature documentary.

I kind of wanted the merlin to be a peregrine falcon. But merlin is good.

On the way out of the Salisbury Beach reservation I saw somebody staring out into the marsh, so I stopped. I asked the guy what he had but he wouldn't tell me. He said "If you look out there about 200 yards, on a log, you'll see something very nice." I scanned the marsh. There was more than one log. Then I saw it and yelped "Ohmigod! It's a snowy!" It was indeed a huge snowy owl perched on a big log. It stood absolutely still except for its head. Every once in a while, it would slowly rotate its head as if scanning for something. I was thrilled. I havent' been this excited about a bird since the first time I saw a piping plover. A snowy owl is a sight to behold.