20-Nov-99 Plum Island
It was unnaturally mild today. This weekend is open studios at Brickbottom, but we can do that tomorrow even if the weather's not so good. Today was a day for the outdoors. We haven't been to Plum Island in a couple of years, and we were up and about early enough that we could get there and have several hours of daylight.
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horned grebe loon, red-throated great blue heron shoveler black duck mallard pintail scoter merganser, red breasted Canada goose snow goose (black bellied?) plover gull, bonaparte's gull, herring harrier mourning dove chickadee yellow-rumped warbler tree sparrow crow |
I was really hoping to see some snow buntings, longspurs, and winter finches. We didn't. Maybe the wind was too strong for the small land birds. The water birds were out in good numbers, though. We drove south through the refuge, stopping at the salt pans and um, I think it was called the north pond overlook. The Canada geese were obvious, and as we looked in the grass in front of them we saw first two, then more and more medium sized shorebirds. We figured them to be black-bellied plover. There were some smaller birds among them, but we had no idea what they were at that distance. We went on to the Hellcat parking area and walked out to the dike. At the end of the open area were some people looking through spotting scopes at a pair of snow geese and some sort of hawk resting far away along the dike. Going the other way on the dike, we got a good look at three shovelers. These are ducks with almost comically large bills. We rarely see them around here. That's the kind of bird that makes the trip worthwhile for us. There were also a couple of pintails farther away; we wouldn't have known what they were at that distance without the people with scopes saying there were some. |
Someone told us a shrike had just been seen at the pines, so like good birders we headed off to try to see it. We only saw one bird in that area, and we didn't identify it anyway as it flew away. The handicapped accessible trail at the pines is lovely, though.
We came back to the Hellcat area and walked along all the boardwalks we could find. I love boardwalks anyway, and these were lots of fun today. The leaves are almost all gone and the landscape is settling into its winter monochrome. A few bright red berries contrasted with the yellow and brown remaining leaves, the dark dull green evergreen foliage, and the tan dry marsh reeds. One boardwalk leads across the road toward the ocean and goes up and down dunes with many steps, leading you to the top of a fifty foot high dune with a view over the ocean and the coast south to Cape Ann. In the other direction the boardwalk goes through the marsh, ending at an observation blind directly across from the snow geese that we had seen from the dike. Without the boardwalks you wouldn't have slogged through the marsh and you wouldn't have wanted to struggle through the sand to the top of the dune, even if you were allowed to disturb it.
We drove back north, stopped at parking lot 3, walked out another boardwalk to the beach, and walked along the beach.
If you only get to the beach in the summer you don't know what the ocean is. We see so many travel ads about “ocean playground” that we sometimes lose our perspective on the ocean. In the winter, and even on a day this nice in the autumn, you can tell that the ocean isn't a playground. The ocean doesn't even have much to do with human beings. It's there, and has its own agenda, separate from humanity. You have to get out there when nobody is swimming and only a few people are walking along it to see that the world is big and people are little. You have to look long and hard with your binoculars and finally see ducks out there, bobbing in the waves; then you realize that people, though bigger than ducks, would be just as hard to spot if they were three times as far away, and the ocean goes on a hundred thousand times as far away. Of course, people without wet suits would be dead of hypothermia in this season. You realize why it could take three days to find an airliner black box at the bottom of it, even when the black box is doing its best to be found.
We saw several grebes in the water, closer than the ducks, and one loon. Bonaparte's gulls, much smaller and more graceful than herring gulls, went past, the white patches along the front of their wings shining. Small groups of red-breasted mergansers flew along, skimming the tops of the waves.
The boardwalk from the beach to parking lot three was almost as nice as the ones at Hellcat. The dunes were huge bowls of sand off to the sides, with beach grass and lots of dusty miller. It was a good distance, not an onerous walk, but far enough that you knew you had been walking.
By now it was beginning to get dark. We drove into Newburyport, parked, and looked for a place to get a bowl of soup. I was looking for some of the landmarks that Janet often talks about, in particular Angelina's. Our parking spot was about two doors down from Angie's Foods, which was closed, so we just walked around the block. We stopped at a Scandinavian imports store and got candles the right size for a little sheep candlestick we had bought in Stockholm over a year ago and never found candles to fit, a bottle of lingonberry syrup (just because I've heard of lingonberries and wanted to try it), and a loaf of great looking black bread. We ended up with bowls of totally undistinguished chowder at someplace like Bergson's. It was hot, inexpensive, and came right away. We zoomed on home.
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