Ostensibly this journal is
about piping plovers, but long term readers will have
noticed by now that it's really about gulls and radios.
Well, that and the strange driving
habits of birders. Before today, I'd have to say the
traffic jam generated by a white-eyed
vireo back in 1998 took the
prize for bad birder driving habits. This morning
surpassed it though. A line of vehicles, most of them big
SUV-type things, some of them with Virginia license
plates, was stopped dead in the middle of the road at the
S-curves. They did not have turn signals or four-way
flashers on. They had made no attempt to pull off the
road even a little bit so other vehicles could pass. Now,
the S-curves are a prime birding spot. They are also a no
passing zone and it's really hard to see oncoming
vehicles. I had to think for a minute or two before I
decided to take the risk of easing my car past the whole
line of 6 cars. Fortunately, I did not encounter any
oncoming traffic. Talk about adventure. I'm not even sure
what they were looking at as I was concentrating on
driving. It may well have been a white-eyed vireo but I
think I heard rumors that it was a Kentucky
warbler.
And at least one bobolink is taking
lessons from either the suicidal mourning doves or the
driving-challenged birders. It is walking down the middle
of the road as if it has no concept that pavement and
motor vehicles are not normally part of bobolink habitat.
That was the only bobolink I saw, but I heard grillions
of them. They must have just returned. I mostly didn't
bird on the way to the south end of the beach because I
was running a tiny bit late and because there were so
many birders all over the place I felt like I'd be
cheating if I listed the birds they were looking at. I
decided to list only the birds I actually saw on the
beach or in the dunes and parking lot on the way to/from
the car. Sometimes I am amazed at how many birds you can
see just by sitting and not even looking for
them.
For the first three hours of the
shift I am alone with the gulls and shorebirds. When I
first arrived at the south boundary a huge flock of
herring gulls that had been resting on the beach took off
en masse and landed among the rocks. The sand was covered
with gull footprints. There was no place a gull hadn't
walked. The vast majority of the gulls were immature
herring gulls, very few adults. The huge cloud of gulls
yielded only the three most likely species, not a single
rarity.
A mixed flock of black bellied
plovers and ruddy turnstones flew back and forth together
sometimes joined by a few lesser yellowlegs. The
yellowlegs made lots of noise, sometimes more than the
gulls, thus living up to their nickname "telltale"
(that's what Thoreau called them -- I had to look up what
the heck he was talking about). I had a brief glimpse of
something that might have been a purple sandpiper hunched
down on a rock but it jumped down between the rocks
before I got a good look, so I couldn't be sure. Two
spotted sandpipers appeared and teetered on the rocks.
Spotted sandpipers always look like they're struggling
not to fall over. A semipalmated plover parked itself on
a rock the spotted sandpipers had just abandoned. It
stood absolutely motionless for the longest time. An
adult herring gull began walking toward, clearly with
predatory intent, and I kept waiting for it to take off.
The gull got closer and closer and the semipalmated
plover just looked like statue. It finally took off and
landed among the black bellied plovers and ruddy
turnstones only when the gull was practically sharing the
rock with it. High drama on the rocks.
Unit 11 rolled up on the ATV at the
end of her piping plover search. I told her I hadn't seen
or heard any today so I guessed maybe the pair that had
been hanging out at the south end of the refuge beach had
decided to nest elsewhere. She reported 8 or 9 pairs on
the refuge and said that's fewer than last year. There
was some predation of adults last year, so obviously the
deceased haven't returned here to nest, but everybody is
reporting lower numbers this year. I asked if there were
any big storms in the wintering areas or along the
migration that would account for the lower numbers, but
it's probably not a big enough drop to have been caused
by a cataclysmic event. Oh, and she likes my volunteer
sweatshirt and wants one. She asked me where I got it.
Apparently she hadn't seen them before. Me, I just kept
waiting for it to finally get warm enough so I could take
the sweatshirt off.
It had been foggy and cool all
morning, and like I said it was just me and the gulls for
hours. Then all of a sudden hordes of visitors streamed
in all at once in the last 20 minutes of the shift. The
sun came out too. One of the visitors hadn't seen the
ocean in 12 years. I don't think I could stand that. One
of his buddies had a scope so when I wasn't busy giving
the life cycle talk or explaining the purple sand or
telling people no they can't walk in the closed area even
at the water line and no there are no chicks yet and no
those are black bellied plovers over there not piping
plovers.... I asked the guy with the scope if one of the
black bellied's could be an American golden plover. I
couldn't quite figure it out with binoculars and thought
that a scope and a knowledgeable birder might help.
However, the scope guy responded that he'd been asking
himself the same question, and then moved himself and the
scope further south and closer to the rocks for a better
look at the spotted sandpipers. I got busy with more
questions and more people who really really wanted to see
chicks already. It was weird having all the vistors of
the whole shift arrive at once. I felt like I was in
hypderdrive answering their questions. At least none of
them asked me where I got my sweatshirt.
It finally did get warm enough to
take the sweatshirt off.
