Journal of a Sabbatical

December 18, 1998

the wind blows

Three bald eagles were reported over the mouth of the Merrimack earlier this week, along with an Iceland gull and a black-headed gull. Not that I saw them today. Nosirree. I planned on birding after the going away lunch for Dawna at Stripers in Salisbury. I packed my binoculars and scope and notebooks and bird books and so on, but guess what I didn't pack? Gloves. A hat. We've had such a mild December that I've gotten out of the habit of thinking about hat and gloves, never mind keeping extra ones in the car. So after the lunch I headed out in search of birds at the boat ramp.

A few ring billed gulls hovered around the boat ramp in sort of a windblown stasis. They flapped into the wind and didn't go anywhere. Two guys with scopes were scanning the river. I asked what they saw. A bunch of ring billed gulls and some mergansers. I looked anyway. Mostly whitecaps. My fingers started to go numb when I focused the binoculars. One of the guys asked me where to look for the Iceland gull and the black-headed gull. Umm, the boat ramp is the most likely place and they sure aren't here so I suggested the state beach parking lot at Salisbury Beach, always a likely site for exotic gulls. Nope. They said they'd been there already. The only other likely place is the north end of Plum Island by where the fishing boats go out. It's directly across the river from the Salisbury Beach campground, so if the Iceland gull was at Salisbury it might've flown over to Plum Island for variety.

The conversation took all of about 3 minutes and I was chilled to the bone. The wind just blew right through my jeans and my jacket. I considered abandoning this silly project, but figured at least at the refuge I could bird from the car if I got too cold.

It was actually a little warmer at the refuge than at the boat ramp. The dunes blocked some of the wind at some spots. The birding was pretty dull though. Black ducks and Canada geese in large numbers and ring-billed gulls in moderate numbers. I think I saw a loon but couldn't really get a good look as it bobbed in the waves. The wind was blowing a fine spray off the tops of the waves making the waves look huge as well as cutting down visibility of waterfowl. The white spray and the green waves and the deep deep blue sky looked like they should be in one of those tacky paintings people used to hang over their sofas. (Was it Nabokov who described America as a nation of waves crashing over sofas?)

I walked on the beach a little bit with my hands jammed firmly in my pockets and the jacket collar up around my ears. The most amazing thing I saw was one tiny little shrimp or something swimming sideways in a shining rivulet left behind by a retreating wave. I'm not sure how I even spotted anything that small.

When my left ear started to go numb, I left the beach for the bookstore. Nancy had asked me to pick up a copy of A Child's Christmas in Wales at Jabberwocky. Of course, I couldn't just go in, get the book and leave. I had to browse. I came away with two more books to add to my ever growing unread pile: My World is An Island by Elisabeth Ogilvie and North Woods by Peter Marchand. Marchand is the same guy who wrote Life in the Cold, which already graces my pile. I've even read big chunks of it, but it's a little equation-heavy for bedtime reading. Cold weather ecology is one of those subjects that I'd love to find a course in so I could structure my reading. Marchand's book would be great textbook as long as I had a teacher to guide me. So why did I buy another book by the same guy? Don't know. Asked Nancy the same thing tonight. North Woods doesn't have a lot of equations and does deal a lot with forests ecology. It's also shorter. It does have weather maps, so does the history of the Massachusetts forest, explaining the relationships between the northeast forests and the fabled northeast weather. The Ogilvie book is a journal of her time living on an island off the coast of Maine. I have visions of curling up with a pot of tea and several women's journals the next time we have a snowstorm. Not that it's ever going to snow here again... There is ice on the puddles though.