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Butler's Toothpick at the mouth of the Merrimack
I drove Nancy up to Butler's Toothpick to see the seals this morning. There were about 50 of them arrayed on the rocks. It wasn't full low tide so we couldn't get as close as I did with the kids on Tuesday but we could get a good view with my binoculars.
After the seals, we decided to take a bird-seeking trip through the refuge. We stopped every few yards for some new marvel: a snow goose resting between two Canada geese, egrets, ducks, and an otter. Yes, an otter. We got to watch it diving and surfacing and cavorting in its full otterness for a long time. It came fairly close to the road - the car makes a good animal watching blind.
We also discovered Nancy's psychic birdwatching powers. I stopped to look at some ducks on the salt pannes. From a distance they looked vaguely mallard-like but weren't mallards. As I got out of the car with the binoculars, Nancy, who was not looking at the ducks said: gadwall. I peered through the binoculars and saw a male and female pair of - you guessed it - gadwalls. I thought, this can't be true. It's the power of suggestion. So I looked at them again, described them to Nancy, and got out the book to look them up just to be sure. Sure enough, they were gadwalls. I kept asking Nancy how she did that. Did she make the gadwalls appear by saying their name? Does she identify birds by some psychic power hitherto unknown to science? She insists she only said it because it was the first duck name that popped into her head. Coincidence? Synchronicity? Aliens posing as gadwalls?
Later on the way back, a merlin flew in front of the car so low and so close that binoculars were useless. It was like a dessert on top of a fine gourmet meal or something. A nice end to the expedition.
Oh, I just found out yesterday that the place on the Merrimack that I had been calling "the needle" is called Butler's Toothpick. Harold told me that while I was at Priscilla and Harold's waiting for Joan-east yesterday. He told me a story about a friend of his who had requested that his ashes be scattered at Butler's Toothpick when he died. His wife said that was the only way he was going to get a trip to Europe.
There is a potential crisis brewing in my air conditioner. I was awakened at 5:00 AM by really loud birdsong and lots of banging and scratching in addition to my smoke alarm making its "low battery" beeps. I took the battery out of the smoke alarm and looked out the window to see where the birds were. I couldn't see them but I sure could hear them. I got the binoculars and went out in front of the building to see if I could see into the air conditioner slot. Two starlings flew out of it. A small pile of leaves and grasses that looked like it had been dropped from the second floor lay on the top of the first floor air conditioner so I surmised that the starlings are attempting to build a nest in the second floor air conditioner and dropped some of the nest materials. Starlings are really really loud and articulate. They have almost as large a song vocabulary as the mockingbird. Wilbur hears and smells them and is trying to claw his way through the air conditioner to get to them. They don't seem frightened by this.
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