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The beach on a clear day for a change - lots of wrack after a really high tide. |
Sea weed on garnet sand
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The tide is really high today. I thought it was already high tide when I got to the beach at 11:30 but the tide kept on coming in higher and higher most of the afternoon. The waves were at least four feet high. I had to move my chair back from the high tide line several times. Over the weekend we had very high tides, high winds, and lots of rain. possibly Mon. storm could be considered a northeaster. According to Debbie, the refuge biologist, the four nests that had already been established were washed over. The plovers are re nesting.
There are 12 pairs total on the refuge and two more at Sandy Point. That is the latest count, taken this afternoon. With all the fog we have had over the past few weeks I am amazed that she could count them that all before. Today's visibility is the best I have seen so far this season. Even in conditions like today, the piping plover is hard to see. How she can count them in the fog is beyond me.
A large group of high school kids is here from Hampton. They were hoping to see the gannets and maybe some sea ducks, not to mention the piping plovers. I pointed out to them where I had seen a black-bellied plover earlier in the shift, but it had already moved on. The whole refuge is crowded with birders in large and small groups today. This is the peak of the warbler migrations. So many birders were looking at a white-eyed vireo near Hellcat that there was a traffic jam on the road. I did not see the white-eyed vireo myself. I encountered its traffic jam though. I found out the cause later from a visitor who came over to speak to me about the piping plovers. He had taken a whole week of off from work to visit the hot spots of warbler migration. He claimed there were not as many warblers at Mount Auburn or here as there were last year. I did not ask him about Swan Point.
I have to admit warblers are hard for me to identify. I get very impatient with myself and get frustrated too easily when I cannot immediately identify it or find it in the book. I am much better at shore birds and ducks. Anyway with all the traffic this morning I did not have time to look for warblers on my way from the gate house to the south beach. I did stop once for what turned out to be a purple finch.
The last visitors of the day were the most bizarre. They were looking for a place where some friend had set up camp on the beach 20 years ago. They wanted to camp right on the sand. I told them about Salisbury beach campground, which is not on the sand but is as close to it as you can get safely. I could not imagine camping on the ocean side of plum island, especially after the really high tides of the past week. There is almost no beach between the dunes and the high tide line. If they insisted on sleeping on the beach, they would be very wet and cold when the tide came back in tonight.
That same herring gull is always around here.
Once I got them situated with directions to Salisbury, they wanted to know why we should bother protecting the piping plover. My usual speech about how this federally threatened species is vulnerable to human uses of the beach such as walking and driving off road vehicles because they are small and the same color as the sand and thus easily stepped on or crushed fell on deaf ears. They reminded me of a little kid who responded to every direction with "why should I?"
Doll's arm in the wrack.
They demanded to know what part the piping plover plays in the grand scheme of things that makes it so valuable. I kind of got the impression that unless we could eat them or their feathers contained a hitherto unknown cure for cancer they should just die out. These people believed that human use of the beach for summer recreation was of paramount importance and that the best beach should be reserved for people. I tried to explain that plovers can't read and don't deliberately choose their nest sites to annoy humans. They kept pressing me for a philosophical explanation of why we should bother to save any endangered species. My shift was already over and it would take me a week of philosophical contemplation to figure out how to respond to that anyway. I have never believed that only animals that are directly useful to people should be preserved. There is plenty of beach for both birds and people.
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