Journal of a Sabbatical

April 19, 1999

horned grebe has horns

Just a brief placeholder type entry to let regular readers know I still exist.

Thursday and Friday of last week were taken up by loud machines working on the parking lot and cement porches - and an immense tree limb that narrowly missed my car, which I was driving down a narrow road at the time.

The weekend was devoted to CD shopping and looking for glossy ibises, which we didn't find. Nancy saw her first blue-winged teal though. We had a great view from the bird blind on the Hellcat Swamp Trail.

Today was a busy plover warden shift. There were two trespassers with an unleashed dog already on the closed area of beach when I came on duty. I had to get law enforcement to go in over the dunes to get them 'cause I couldn't get their attention. I spoke with dozens of visitors, describing the full life cycle of the piping plover to each. And a couple from the Midwest asked me about - of all things- quahogs. They'd heard them mentioned in some news story about a fishing boat sinking or something and didn't know what they were. I had to give them the biology of the northern quahog as best I understood it. I have had questions about greenheads, little skates, great black-backed gulls, cormorants, sand, seaweed, but never before about quahogs.

My notebook is in the car, so bird list devotees will have to wait for a complete list of today's and yesterday's birds. Today's highlight though was a male horned grebe all decked out in his breeding finery. Nancy is always asking me how come the ones we see never have the "horns" described in the book - that's 'cause we usually see them in the winter and they don't have those cool looking tufts on their heads in winter. So it must be spring, 'cause the horned grebe has horns.