Journal of a Sabbatical

February 26, 1999

ya shoulda been here yesterday

February 26

Andrews Point
2 great cormorants

Folly Cove
4 harlequin ducks

Plum Island
2 robins
2 horned grebes

It was still snowing a little bit this morning - a few stray flakes.

There were two other birders standing at Andrews Point staring out into the surf. The guy said he had a thick-billed murre "over there" and gestured to a vast expanse of ocean. I scanned with my scope. No thick-billed murre. The guy who had pointed it out had left. I stared out to sea through my scope seeing nothing but green waves. Watching the surf at this high a magnification for very long can make one start to feel seasick. Two great cormorants flew past.

Two guys arrived with scopes asking if I'd seen anything good. Nope, but the guy who just left told me there's a thick-billed murre out there. They told me there were a lot of gannets and murres and stuff yesterday during the storm. I figured anything that got blown in by the storm was long gone by now, including the thick-billed murre. The two guys asked if the harlequin ducks were flying at Folly Cove. I said I had no idea as I hadn't been there yet. I'd gone directly to Andrews Point after (late) breakfast.

By this time the sky had started to clear and the wind started coming in from the northwest. I drove along awhile and saw a flock of ducks flying over Folly Cove. I pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant near the cove and got out of the car to take a look. My jacket was on the seat behind me as I'd taken it off in the car. The wind took the jacket and it flew across the parking lot toward a snow drift as I chased after it. I caught it before it got wet, just a little sand and gravel on it, and put it on as the wind was now chilling me to the bone.

By the time I retrieved my jacket, the large flock of ducks was out of sight. Four harlequin ducks and a scoter of some sort were bouncing around on the waves. Some guy in a car asked what I was looking at. "Harlequin ducks" says I. "Are they migrating?" he replies. Uh, nope. Not yet. They'll head back north in a couple of weeks probably, but today they're just hanging around.

I drove through the quaint tourist cliché areas without stopping until I witnessed a great black-backed gull killing a mourning dove on a beach. The dove got away after the first blow but was evidently wounded because it sat down in the sand. The gull swooped down and snapped its spine with his bill and flew off with the limp dove. It was so unexpected, so brutal, and so not touristy quaint that it stayed in my mind all the way up the coast.