Journal of a Sabbatical

January 25, 1999

failure to find the lark sparrow

All afternoon it felt like it would snow any minute. That made it a really silly idea to go looking for the lark sparrow. But I did it anyway.

I pulled into the parking lot at Salisbury Beach and immediately saw a sparrow of some kind in a shrub. I made a beeline for it, but in the time it took me to focus my binoculars it took off. I saw which direction it went and attempted to follow it in my car. It vanished into a thicket and I never saw it again. I have no idea what kind of sparrow it was. For all I know it could actually have been the lark sparrow.

I spent the next hour or so checking every shrub and thicket in the place, twice. Then I hung out watching some black ducks dabbling in the marsh, before I made another pass around looking for that darn lark sparrow. I even stood around making spishing sounds in the bushes to try to attract it. Boy am I glad I didn't run into anybody I know.

I drove over to the refuge to see what I could see. No eiders at the southern end of the island. No sparrows at Parking Lot 7 - there are always sparrows at parking lot 7, where were they? It started to get cold suddenly, so I passed on a walk along the beach.

I never found the lark sparrow. It never started snowing.

The black and white pictures I took last week are finally back from the lab. I dropped them off at my usual lab last Wednesday and they claimed they had to send them out and they'd be back Friday. They weren't. Nor were they back Saturday. So today they're back and I finally get to put up Monday's trip to Pt. Judith and Wednesday's walk on the beach. I will never ever catch up with these journal entries. Especially if I indeed have a black and white phase coming on because there's no place in this unit to put a darkroom.

The nieces are selling Girl Scout Cookies. The cookies are due in in mid-March. Lizzy called on Saturday to take my order: one box each of Thin Mints, Peanut Butter Sandwiches, and Five World Cinnamon (the Five World Cinnamon are for Nancy). Andrea didn't want to talk to me so she tried to have Lizzy sell me her cookies too. I refused to order from her unless she talked to me - what a stiff I am! So effing adult! So she got on the phone and took my order reluctantly and monosyllabically, then signed off with "Good-bye, Mister Fat Person!" and hung up. Funny kid. Where does she learn her insults? I hate to laugh because that only encourages her, but it is pretty funny. I waited until she hung up to start laughing.

Tonight Lizzy called requesting stuff on "that bird you watch" (umm, that would be the piping plover) for a school project on endangered species. "E-mail it to me," she says. The brochure I hand out when I'm on duty gives a pretty good overview, and fortunately the US Fish and Wildlife Service has put it online. The major reference work is Johnsgard's The Plovers , Snipes, and Sandpipers of the World, which I bought through bibliofind for the unbelievably cheap price of $14. This is the moldiest used book I have ever bought (except for one volume of Vietnamese poetry that Nancy has 'cause I can't be in the same room with it for very long). I guess I know why it was so cheap. Anyway, I needed sometime to scan it in and hope that TextBridge could do a reasonable approximation of the text so I called Lizzy back and left a message that I hoped she could wait 'til tomorrow. It's a large format hard bound book, making it hard to position on the scanner - and it made my eyes itch the whole time, but 'tis done now.