Journal of a Sabbatical

July 11, 2001



cats, cats, and more cats





Adopt these cats at Merrimack River Feline Rescue Society

Today's Bird Sightings:
Plum Island
herring gull (2)
American robin (2)
redwinged blackbird (19)
eastern kingbird (4)
snowy egret (1)
short billed dowitcher (59)
great egret (1)
American goldfinch (3)
double crested cormorant (2)
gray catbird (10)
Canada goose (23)
osprey (2 nestlings stretching their wings)
salt marsh sharp tailed sparrow (2)
northern mockingbird (3)
cedar waxwing (2)
great blue heron (1)
common tern (1)
purple finch (1)
least tern (2)
mallard (2)
stilt sandpiper (1)
eastern phoebe (1)

Today's Reading: A Conscious Stillness by Ann Zwinger and Edwin Way Teale

Today's Starting Pitcher:
still All-Star break

The Lists

2001 Book List

2001 Plum Island Bird List

Plum Island Life List

The Photos
Angel
Elmo
Friday
Maddy
Madison
Oreo
Pearl



Sandy got adopted! Sandy got adopted!! Sandy got adopted!!! Hooray for Sandy who gets a nice home with a young guy and no other cats. For Savannah this means control of the big yellow bucket and Roy's pockets. For Seamus this means having to find somebody else to pick on. He doesn't seem interested in the big yellow bucket without Sandy on it. While Savannah is enjoying watching all the action from the bucket, Seamus is gallivanting around harassing anybody he can find.

Cats, cats, cats all over the place. It's kitten season and there are grillions of them. Lots of new full grown cats too. Umm, do people not realize that kittens grow up to be cats? I so wish it were not so hard to convince people to spay/neuter their cats. Overpopulation causes so much suffering! End of mini-rant. Back to our cats already in progress. The kittens are adorable. I didn't take the time to photograph them for the web site because we have so many new adults who are harder to place. The kittens will "fly off the shelf" (see Christopher has me thinking of it as a store now, arrrggghhh!). Of the newbies, Pearl is the cuddliest and Elmo is the biggest talker. They're all great. Adopt them.

Red (formerly Red Head but somebody copied over the card wrong and everyone has been calling him Red since) is taking on Seamus, much to Seamus' surprise. Much to our surprise Red is winning. They segue from fighting to playful wrestling with Seamus in the submissive role. Now that's a change!

Roy has taken to calling Kendra Deirdre or Cassandra and now can't remember her real name. His under sink reorganization from last week seems still in place - nothing is sticking out and tripping us as we do the dishes. There seem to be way more litter boxes than usual. Maybe they are reproducing. Or maybe there are way more cats.

I can't believe this is my last Wednesday morning shift! I haven't achieved spiritual enlightenment through washing litter boxes yet! Kendra summons me to the conference room where a rich chocolate cheesecake inscribed "Good Luck Janet " commemorates this historic event. Leaving that is, not enlightenment. Roy says he's going to charge me to come to my office and give back rubs. I am going to miss the humans and the cats. To paraphrase the late Douglas Adams: So long and thanks for all the shit.

The old salts are on the topic of unsafe Middle East ports again. I'll miss their analysis of current naval disasters. Guess I'll have to call them whenever there's a threat of tragedy at sea.

For some reason, I am not hungry immediately on finishing with the cat photography. Could that be the cheesecake? I decide to get a cup of coffee at Fowle's and go play drive-by birding before lunch. The traffic in downtown Newburyport is unbelievable. After not moving for several minutes, I finally turn on the first available side street and bypass downtown heading directly for the refuge without the coffee. With all that traffic in the downtown I half expected the refuge to have the same bumper to bumper lines, but fortunately it doesn't.

The two black skimmers I saw last night are nowhere to be found. I had kind of hoped to see them feed as their lower mandibles are sort of their main claim to fame but all they did last night was stand around with their heads tucked under or sometimes wake up and look around but not fly or feed. There is a cluster of birders at the salt pannes evidently waiting for the skimmers to come back. Mostly there are a helluva lot of short billed dowitchers. I lost count at 59 but there are obviously more than that. Most of them are feeding in that pump-like or sewing machine like way they have. It's quite a spectacle to see dozens of them in action at once.

I finished reading Return of the Osprey last night (after midnight, which explains my tiredness today). So, of course, the osprey young in the book have fledged and flown off south. But that's Gessner's 1998 ospreys. Now in 2001 in local osprey time it's still only early July. I watch the nest at the Pines Trail for awhile. Two heads pop up above the rim of the nest. Then wings appear. Two chicks stretch their wings and flap as if practicing for flight, or more like trying to figure out what their wings are for. The chicks are sort of mottled looking, not the smooth black and white of the parents. I don't see the parents anywhere around. One chick seems to get a little hang time - a few seconds - above the nest before it flops back down. I could actually see its talons above the edge of the nest. Watching them I get the same feeling I got from reading the book: ospreys are way more charismatic than piping plovers. You'd never see a bumper sticker claiming ospreys taste like chicken or it takes six to make a meal or whatever... I can't help but think that the reason the ospreys have made such a terrific comeback in Massachusetts is simply that people like them.

I guess I'm experiencing a tiny bit of regret at not having come up with a book about the piping plover in all my time off from the high-tech grind. That's not to say I won't ever do it, just that I haven't done it. I was whining to Ned yesterday that I hadn't accomplished much on my sabbatical. He pointed out that nobody said the result had to be a book. That was a notion, not a plan. He came up with a term for what I've been doing "living responsively", which really gets to the core of the cats, piping plovers, Hungarian dendrologists, and all that. And who's to say that Sewage Outflow and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, Sadie's Kittens and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, and the Binoculars of Enlightenment (with or without the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch) won't get written eventually?

If I had any doubts about going back to work, they're gone now. I just checked the stock price. Cosmodemonic's stock dropped 35% today. And that's on top of 12% yesterday and 11% the day before. Eek!

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Copyright © 2001, Janet I. Egan