Journal of a Sabbatical

May 11, 2000

practically pelagic

Today's Bird Sightings:
Plum Island
120 double crested cormorants
18 purple martins
4 herring gulls
22 common terns
500+ oldsquaws
10 barn swallows
5 northern gannets
6 ringbilled gulls
10 great black backed gulls
1 greater shearwater

Joppa Flats
88 brant
6 great egrets
1 northern mockingbird

Today's Reading: Uttermost Part of the Earth by E. Lucas Bridges

Today's Starting Pitcher:
i have no memory of who started, only that the relievers were good and the Red Sox won

Considerably more weathered, the gull skull is still there. It seems to have gotten blown slightly further up into the dune.

The sky is heavy and gray. The morning shift warden is not here of course because it rained in the morning. However, since it stopped and the forecast is for clearing this afternoon, I figured I'd better show up to be north plover warden at 11:30 AM as scheduled. The wind is from the northeast as far as I can tell. It feels like it's all around me. I'm glad I brought my jacket.

Nobody's around for the first couple of hours, so I have plenty of time to check out all the weird stuff washed up on the beach: tennis balls, golf balls, shotgun or flare gun shell casings, plastic tampon applicators, beer cans, soda cans, plastic cups - at least 11 million plastic cups scudding along the sand in the wind - and plastic army men. Well, one plastic army man. One plastic army man is enough to spark a reverie of all those "plastic figures" I used to play with as a child. We'd set up huge communities peopled with blue plastic farmer women feeding red plastic chickens, cowboys and Indians driving tractors and building roads, army men herding tiny plastic cows...

Barn swallows swoop by every 20 minutes or so in a flock, low to the ground after the zillions of flies hovering over all this seaweed washed up. It's definitely good pickings for bug eaters today. A visitor asks me if those are piping plovers. Uh, nope - just swallows. The sun comes out. Purple martins join the swallows.

A flock of oldsquaws surfs the waves fairly close to shore. A few couples split off from the main flock and come within naked eye range. They paddle up the side of the wave into the curl and ride it down until they flip over completely upside down inside the wave. I can see the upside down ducks through the wall of water - like fruit suspended in Jell-O or something. They pop back up and do the whole thing again on the next wave. They look like they're surfing for pleasure! If I weren't so cold, I'd join them in bodysurfing.

Out beyond the oldsquaws, I spot a northern gannet circling and plunging into the water among a flock of cormorants, terns, and gulls. How cool, I think - a gannet so close to shore. Then I spot another, and another, and another... There's five of 'em! I love gannets! Whatever they're after has attracted hordes of cormorants and a very noisy flock of terns along with the usual suspects (three species of gull). Then I notice something different, a brownish bird with a u-shaped white band on its rump near the tail. A shearwater this close to shore? Now that's weird. I watch it for a long time. The whole crowd: gannets, gulls, cormorants, terns and the shearwater come in even closer to shore. It must be the wind. My brain is registering "greater shearwater, greater shearwater" after many very good looks from just about every angle. I pull the book out of my backpack and look it up. The picture in the book looks exactly like the bird I'm seeing. How about that? A greater shearwater without having to leave land. I guess Plum Island is so far out there it's practically pelagic.

All told I only encounter four visitors. No dogs. An easy day. The refuge biologist comes by on her ATV to do her plover survey. She's not back by the time I leave (it takes a long time to survey 6.5 miles of beach), so I don't know how many she counted.