Journal of a Sabbatical

July 13, 2000

life goes on - on the beach

Today's Bird Sightings:
Plum Island:
Bonaparte's gull (11)
great black back gull (3)
herring gull (13)
ring billed gull (6)
common tern (3)
semipalmated plover (4)
piping plover (2)
double crested cormorant (14)
semipalmated sandpiper (20)
bank swallow (2)
Butterflies:
cabbage white
eastern tiger swallowtail
Things that bit me:
greenhead
horse fly
no see 'um
something weird and unidentifiable

South beach
midday shift (11:30 AM -3:30 PM)

Visitors contacted: 29
Refuge biological staff sighted: 2
Trucks on beach: 0
Greenhead bites: 12

Today's Reading: Cape Cod by Henry David Thoreau

Today's Starting Pitcher: Pedro Martinez

The south boundary has moved to just north of parking lot 7, which, among other things, means I get an actual parking space instead of trying to somehow squeeze my car into the over full parking lot at Sandy Point. The beach is buzzing with people, greenheads, Bonaparte's gulls, and semipalmated plovers. It is the height of summer. Wicked hot.

The north boundary has also moved to just south of parking lot 1 as of today. I guess that northernmost piping plover pair didn't make a go of it. The pair that nested there last year failed too. I wonder if it's the same pair. I don't know much about site fidelity in piping plovers.

In any case, I am the south beach today being eaten by greenheads and numerous other beings. A ring billed gull nonchalantly walks along the beach and chomps on a greenhead in mid-flight. As I watch, it grabs another greenhead out of the air. I've always wondered what eats greenheads. I now have a whole new appreciation for ring billed gulls.

Debbie, the biologist, whizzed by on the ATV and gave me an update on the invisi-birds. Another nest has hatched, with little hatchlings running around. She spotted one fledgeling. Five nests remain to hatch. They're running late this year because of that storm we had in June and the unusually high tide. The ones who got washed over renested. I told her I'd just seen a fledgeling but suspected it had flown over from Crane's Beach. She concurred and whizzed off to check on the chicks at Sandy Point.

In between talking to visitors and swatting at greenheads, I got a chance to watch the Bonaparte's gulls closely. For the first time, I noticed them "paddling": standing in one spot moving the feet up and down rapidly and moving the head side to side rhythmically like it's looking for something. It's kind of like the foot-trembling behavior that plovers use to stir up the shallow water looking for prey. I read about this behavior in Niko Tinbergen's The Herring Gull's World, but I never saw a gull do it. According to Tinbergen, herring gulls do it in meadows, not in the inter-tidal zone. Since I am almost always watching gulls on the beach, I probably wouldn't see a herring gull do it. Tinbergen does say he saw common black-headed gulls doing it on the beach in shallow and muddy water, like what my Bonaparte's gulls were doing today. At the time The Herring Gull's World was published there was some disagreement in the scientific community about why gulls do this. I suspect the questions have been settled by now, but a quick search of the Internet yielded no insight tonight. Anyway, to me it sure looked like those Bonaparte's gulls were stirring up and eating little inter-tidal zone life forms.

Four hours went by really quickly. A final greenhead got me just as I was writing my report so I got quite a bit of blood on the report form. Turning in a bloody report at the height of greenhead season, though not uncommon, struck me as hysterically funny this afternoon. It is the blood you have shed for your piping plovers that makes them so important (with apologies to the Little Prince and his rose).