Journal of a Sabbatical

June 15, 2000

beached kayaks

Today's Bird Sightings:
Plum Island
eastern kingbird (4)
bobolink (6)
gray catbird (9)
American goldfinch (3)
mourning dove (1)
purple finch (4)
least tern (7)
semipalmated sandpiper (25)
herring gull (6)
double crested cormorant (38)
Bonaparte's gull (2)
yellow warbler (2)
song sparrow (2)
cedar waxwing (2)
common grackle (4)
northern mockingbird (1)
redwinged blackbird (10)
Canada goose (23)
brown thrasher (1)
American robin (3)
common tern (1)

Today's Reading: Summer: From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau edited by H.G.O. Blake, Birds of Concord by Ludlow Griscom

Today's Starting Pitcher:
it's an off day

The weird Bonaparte's gull has taken up with a flock of semipalmated sandpipers now. They are even smaller than sanderlings, so he (it's a male) looks even more out of place. It stays with the peeps until a second Bonaparte's gull shows up and they fly off together. Within an hour, though, it's back - alone. The sandpipers move closer and closer to where I'm sitting, but the gull stays put. Every once in awhile the entire sandpiper flock rises up and returns to where the gull is and they start working their way back toward me along the water line.

The yellow warbler pair must be nesting somewhere on the bluff just above the little patch of yellow flag. They're hanging around in the same place and the male is madly singing sweet-sweet-sweet-I'm-so-sweet. I'm watching them - I have a lot of free time since no visitors have showed up yet - when I hear the sweet-sweet-sweet-I'm-so-sweet song behind me. Expecting to see another yellow warbler, I turn around and see a catbird perched on the fence its beak opened in song -- yellow warbler song. The warblers don't seem to mind though. Do they know somehow that it's not really another warbler invading their territory?

The morning at the south beach goes on uneventfully. I was of course late this morning. 8:00 AM seems like a foreign country to me lately, plus I've been a half hour late for everything lately. I got behind a school bus on 133 in Rowley where the road is narrow and there's no passing allowed. That ate up a good 20 minutes right there. Anyway, when I finally got here, the scheduled south warden had taken my place at the north end and I was dispatched to the south.

All morning, I see nobody, until a little after 11:00 when two guys in kayaks show up. They surf the incoming waves in what look like river type kayaks, not sea kayaks. As they're not on the beach, they're not a problem. Then one guy beaches his kayak and starts working on something on one end of it. I walk down to where he is and ask him to leave as the beach is closed. He says he will as soon as he's finished with whatever it is he's doing. I turn around and walk back to the boundary. He goes back into the water. As soon as my back is turned, they both haul out on the beach and hang around. I call law enforcement. By the time he gets there, they are back in the water.

Unit 61 hangs around for awhile watching them until they haul out again. Then he goes to speak with them. He radios me that he has negotiated with them. By this time it's after 12:00 and I'm hungry and my shift is already over. On the way back out, I stop by 61's truck and tell him those guys were so young they just didn't want to listen to an old lady. I think this may be the first time I ever called myself an old lady out loud. Anyway, he laughed and said they didn't want to listen to him either and that's why he had to negotiate a compromise with them. They supposedly agreed that if they dumped and had to empty the water out, they'd only come in to waist deep water and not haul out on the beach. I doubt they'll stick to that, but 61 is on the case...

The kayakers and 61 were the only people besides the gatehouse attendant that I talked to all morning. No biologists. No visitors. No news of the little invisible beasties and their imperiled nests. But I did get to see a heck of a lot of semipalmated sandpipers.