horizon

June 17, 2004


Is it good luck if a woodchuck crosses your path?

The day started with a couple of beautiful mammal sightings. First, two white tailed deer posed on the edge of a clearing perfectly lighted by the morning sun so that they looked like they'd stepped out of a landscape painting instead of a thicket of shrubs. Then a woodchuck crossed the path to the beach from the parking lot at the south end. The sun gave depth to the color of its fur, making it a handsome wondrous creature instead of a mere woodchuck.

On the beach, the light was even more extraordinary. A silver-white haze obliterated the horizon. The sea and the sky were exactly the same silver-white color with no indication of any discontinuity. A fishing boat appeared to be floating in the sky or to be a boat-shaped speck on a vast vertical mirror. And it was all so BRIGHT. Clouds, fog, haze are all words that make you think dark. Not today. This must have been the most reflective haze ever because even with sunglasses on I had to squint to pick out the gulls, who were also bright silvery white.

The birds and the visitors spread themselves out pretty well -- no bunching up a million visitors in 10 minutes -- OK that was an exaggeration but I have had some shifts where I have seen no humans for 3 1/2 hours and then had to deal with 10 or 15 people in the space of half an hour. Anyway, today they were spread out. When I arrived, a mother and child had just walked into the closed area, so my first task was to ask them to leave, which they did with no problem at all. It was a pretty easy day visitor-wise.

An eastern kingbird came over the dunes and took up flycatching in the wrack. It's a wonder more flycatcher type birds don't come looking for flies on the beach. This kingbird was having a field day. It was doing its whole aerobatic catch-em-in-the-air routine about 6 inches off the ground. Low flying flies. A few swallows came and went but the kingbird stayed at it for well over an hour. There don't seem to be as many eastern kingbirds or as many swallows as I remember from past shifts on the south beach. I should look that up in my inifinite series of notebooks sometime.

A pair of piping plovers flew in from the south. The two of them, both adults, arrived together and then went their separate ways. One fed avidly in the wet sand above the water line. The other ran around in the wrack and was only visible when it happened to pass in front of a particularly large and dark pile of seaweed, otherwise its cryptic coloring blended in perfectly with the dry sand. It was the incredible disappearing/reappearing bird. The one on the wet sand was so pale it stood out against the dark sand like a beacon in that weird bright hazy light I mentioned earlier. This was a text book comparison of protective coloration. They stayed around for about an hour. I started to wonder if they were a childless couple. Who's minding the chicks? No biological staff were around my end today, so I didn't get a chance to ask about that. Anyway, they were two beautiful adult piping plovers and it was a treat to watch them for so long.

On the way back to the gatehouse to return the radio and hand in my report, I spotted a stunning black crowned night heron just south of the salt pannes. I stopped to watch it for awhile but all it did was stand there looking cool with its plumes trailing in the breeze. It was so close I could've gotten a good picture if I had bothered to bring the camera (for some reason I never bring the camera any more). There had been reports of a yellow crowned night heron around there the past couple of days, but I missed that one. The black crowned will do though. It's a fine looking bird.

Today's Bird Sightings
Plum Island
northern rough winged swallow 2
double crested cormorant 20
herring gull36
great black back gull 6
ring billed gull 4
Bonaparte's gull 6
tree swallow 26
eastern kingbird 4
killdeer 1
American goldfinch 3
common grackle 7
common tern 4
least tern 5
piping plover 2
mallard 10
yellow warbler 3
cedar waxwing 5
American robin 2
song sparrow 1
mourning dove 2
bobolink 5
snowy egret 1
gray catbird 7
northern mockingbird 2
osprey 1
Canada goose 15
redwinged blackbird 9
brown thrasher 2
black crowned night heron 1
mute swan 2
American black duck 1
purple martin 3
house sparrow 1
willet 1
great blue heron 1
great egret 1

Mammals
white tailed deer 2
woodchuck 1

Today's Reading
Walden Pond by W. Barksdale Maynard

This Year's Reading
2004 Booklist

Today's Starting Pitcher
Derek Lowe


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Copyright © 2004, Janet I. Egan