HomeSeptember 5, 1997
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afternoonLizzy's sick so I have the afternoon off. After a good long sleep, I schmoozed with Tom at Starbucks after his morning class. This semester all his students are Latino: Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and one Ecuadorean. Not a Russian or a Vietnamese among them. That's a change from the past few semesters. We laughed about watching Ned teach right wing Anne's kids, JoJo and Alexander, to spin like James Brown the other day. JoJo was spinning around the room and Alexander would do one spin and then go back to his magic trick - making the same straw appear and disappear over and over and over again. No sign of Ned or Anne and her kids today though. The place is empty except for me and Tom and the guy with the laptop who teaches at the Voc Tech, until a huge crowd of kids from Phillips Academy streams in. Tom has to leave for a dentist appointment and my parking meter has run out. Perfect timing. I headed to Newburyport, ostensibly to put up the posters for Purrfect Companions, but really to look for the pelican at the refuge. in search ofApparently the pelican is gone. He was last seen Tuesday, according to the Audubon Society's rare bird alert. So maybe now Roberta can stop worrying about it. I stopped at every bird hot spot on the refuge, managing to spend the entire afternoon and part of the early evening birding and totally forgetting about putting up the Purrfect Companions posters in Newburyport. The shorebird migration is in full swing and I saw a flock of greater and lesser yellowlegs arrive at the pool near the dike at Hellcat. Lots of other shorebirds I couldn't identify milled around in the muck. I saw 2 great egrets this time along with more snowies. There was one cedar waxwing in a tree next to the trail. Don't they usually travel in flocks? snow gooseAnyway, the most interesting thing I saw was a snow goose. Nobody else was paying any attention to it, so I started to doubt my identification but I have seen snow geese before and this was definitely one. The snow goose acts like it's a Canada goose. It forages along the top of the dike with them and when they all take off, it takes flight following their leader in the vee formation over my head. They land again on the other side of the marsh and forage there, near but not too close to three snowy egrets and a great blue heron. I figure the snow goose somehow imprinted on the Canada geese and thinks it's one of them. That's not as weird as the Canada goose at Watchemocket Cove who is imprinted on Atlantic Mute swans, but it still odd. Are geese really dumb? |
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