Journal of a Sabbatical

December 9, 1999

blue sky, nothin' but blue sky, from now on

Today's Bird Sightings:
Honda Barn
200 Canada geese
Joppa Flats
7 buffleheads
26 American black ducks
4 mallards
1 northern harrier
2 American crows
1 herring gull
Plum Island
113 American black ducks
142 Canada geese
1 blue jay
3 northern shovelers
4 black-capped chickadees
1 song sparrow
16 oldsquaws
1 herring gull
1 horned grebe
3 snow geese
1 American crow
8 mallards
1 northern mockingbird
1 mourning dove
1 great blue heron
Salisbury Beach
6 red breasted mergansers
Mammal sightings:
20 seals (mostly swimming in the river)

Today's Reading: Wild Fruits by Henry David Thoreau, Autumn from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau edited by H.G.O. Blake

A stunning day. At the Honda Barn at 7:35 this morning 200 Canada geese flew low over my head honking like crazy. They looked almost like waves of liquid surging across the totally blue sky. My appointment for the new car's first routine maintenance wasn't 'til 8:00 and I can't imagine how I got there early, but it sure was worth it to see those geese. I can see how migrating geese can move grown men to tears.

I brought Thoreau's Wild Fruits with me to the Honda Barn and settled into the customer waiting area with that plus coffee and bagel from Sunrise Bagels across the street. I lost myself in the blueberry thickets of Concord until further notice. There are way more varieties of blueberries than I ever thought. When I was growing up we used to pick low bush blueberries on top of Prospect Hill in Waltham. There's a high-tech industrial park there now. We'd pick high bush blueberries too, up at my Dad's cousin's place in Maine. There was a time around my freshman or sophomore year in college when my parents started planning all their camping trips around when the blueberries would be ripe in particular places from Rhode Island to Maine. Blueberry pancakes, blueberry muffins, blueberry pie, blueberry bread ... but I never knew there were more varieties than those two. The memory of all those blueberries doubles the pleasure of reading the book. Not all the fruits discussed have been this evocative so far, but I've got a lot more of Wild Fruits to digest.

There was still plenty of morning left when the car was ready. The next order of business was to return Ned's mother's binoculars to Ned. Also to return The Worst Journey in the World and borrow Endurance. Ned's got a lot of Arctic and Antarctic books in his collection and he said he'd lend me stuff that's on my Antarctica reading list. Some of the Arctic ones looked pretty good too - for after the Antarctica trip. Must concentrate on Antarctica from now until January 22, which is coming soon, practically immediately.

After we exchanged books and binoculars, we had coffee and discussed high-tech stocks, Ned's impressions of the movie business, book collecting, why I can't find much information on Jacob Henry Studer, where to buy a good used turntable for Nancy for Christmas... The dog, real name Callie but called by us Woofie, started running in circles chasing its tail. It had started out chasing Midnight, the cat, but got really into its own tail. Do all little white dogs spin themselves in tighter and tighter circles until they turn into tiger butter? Woofie is a Lhasa Apso, so we got into developing a novel around how Woofie drives the Chinese out of Tibet and restores the Dalai Lama to power. By spinning?

Much as I would have liked to talk to Ned all day - and maybe write this "How Woofie Saved Lhasa" tale - the sky was way way way too blue for that. The only thing to do was look for birds. Winter ducks are starting to be more common. Buffleheads were diving in the Merrimack close to shore at Joppa Flats. It's easier to see now that they've taken down the chain link fence and put up a low wooden fence. The buffleheads were spread out, each vanishing separately under the solid blue surface of the river. They slid in like sharp knives, making hardly any splash. Even when they surfaced there was barely a ripple. I could have just stayed there all day watching the buffleheads.

There were plenty of birds around, though not anything particularly special. Nothing worth reporting to the rare bird alert for sure. The beach was gorgeous and I had it all to myself. I parked at Lot 5 and walked the boardwalk through the dunes, mainly because I heard a lot of chickadees at that particular spot. I did find 4 of them among the pitch pines, and one song sparrow also on a pitch pine. So the chickadees lured me onto that particular path and I was rewarded with a bunch of oldsquaws and a horned grebe at the end. Saw deer tracks in the sand, also coyote tracks, and tracks that looked like chicken. Beach chicken? I guess I need to study up on recognizing tracks. As I was leaving Plum Island a great blue heron flew underneath the bridge.