Journal of a Sabbatical

January 16, 2000

the canvasback show

Today's Bird Sightings:
Watchemoket Cove
41 mallards
6 herring gulls
148 ring billed gulls
64 mute swans
14 American wigeons
307 Canada geese
6 hooded mergansers
5 buffleheads
92 canvasbacks
2 domestic geese
3 mystery scaup
1 common black headed gull

Today's Reading: Winter from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau edited by H.G.O. Blake, Beach Grass by Charles Wendell Townsend

The cove is teaming with life today. Everything is flying around. Even the swans are getting airborne in groups of 4 or 5. They look so ungainly on take off and landing but in the sky they're magnificent. V-formations of Canada geese by the hundreds swirl around. Buffleheads and hooded mergansers dive and pop up like corks.

The best show is the canvasbacks. Usually when I see them, they are sleeping with heads tucked under wings. Today they are preening and splashing and swimming back and forth among the swans and geese. I count 92, but don't know how accurate I am. They keep coming closer and closer to shore, something I've never seen them do. And they do it together, all 92+ of them at once - a kind of group mind thing. What a day to have forgotten to put a disk in the camera! But who needs pictures? This is one great show whether I record it or not.

The mystery scaup stay just far enough out past the encroaching ice that I can't get a good look at them with the glare. I only see three of them this time, but that doesn't mean there aren't seven there. With ice and gulls and canvasbacks and wigeons and everything it's amazing I can pick out anything.

As we're about to leave, I scan some gulls on an ice floe one more time and notice a small gull with red legs and bill ... in fact I think there maybe more than one, but I'm only sure of one.

The sunset reflected in the ice is spectacular.

Quite the show.