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Journal of a Sabbatical |
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January 17, 2001 |
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blue-visaged imps, cats, and crab parts |
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Adopt Maggie or one of our other wonderful cats who need homes at Merrimack River Feline Rescue Society Today's Bird
Sightings: Salisbury Beach Today's Reading: John Greenleaf Whittier: Life and Letters by Samuel T. Pickard 2001
Book List
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Maggie's the only cat I photographed today because I missed her last week when I did a slew of new cats, and because I found out last night that another photographer (i.e. a real photographer as opposed to a blind monkey with a camera like me) had overwhelmed the poor web guy with 30 pictures some of which overlap mine. Yikes! Poor web guy. So I only skipped I think one other new cat and a few kittens who will be gone before we can get them onto the web site anyway. So, last night I managed to overcome the cerulean influences enough to go to a meeting of the newsletter team (the real newsletter not my volunteer newsletter) at Cafe di Sienna. I figured if nothing else it would be a chance to chat with Roberta whom I haven't seen in awhile. For once I felt productive and useful and part of some larger community, which I have not been feeling much since the holidays and the onset of the inexplicable malaise. I drank some chai, which lifted my spirits but also kept me awake (reading Whittier). Morning surprised me today. I was having some weird
dreams and suddenly it was time to be on the road to the
litter boxes. In a determined effort to get there before Roy
for once, I skipped breakfast and did not stop at the black
hole of Dunkin Donuts or anyplace else for coffee. Imagine
washing litter boxes without coffee! Roy was late because he stopped to buy crumpets for Louise. Louise is human by the way. A volunteer. A Brit, though not at all like the Brit Named Brit we used to have working there. Anyway, Roy brought her crumpets. He did not bring Sandy a donut. Nobody brought Sandy a donut. Despite the lack of donuts, Sandy was in a good mood today being all lovey-dovey, head-butting me, the whole thing. What a nice cat! Please adopt him. Miss Newburyport on the other hand was in a snit because she had to take a pill. Giving Miss Newburyport a pill is the typical "giving a cat a pill" problem and then some. She is not a compliant patient. Then she sulked in her cage afterward. She also does not like the meowing clock. Some cats react to it and some don't. Savannah was being highly variable today, approaching people and being affectionate then suddenly turning mean, kinda like Sandy usually is. She was cozying up to Roy then suddenly turned and scratched him. Blood streamed off his hand like a river. Roy thought this was pretty funny because earlier in the morning (before he bought the crumpets) he had been trying to do his blood sugar test and was having trouble getting his finger to bleed when he pricked it. We offered to let him take Savannah home to draw the blood from now on :-) There were some brownies left over from the volunteer meeting last night (which I skipped in favor of the newsletter meeting) set out for us Wednesday morning munchers on the table in the conference room. Fortunately they were covered with foil and a plastic bag, because Stormy decided to keep them warm for us. She plunked herself down in the box on top of the brownies. That took away most people's desire for brownies. Even if you didn't mind eating brownies that had been incubated by a cat, there was the not so small problem of getting past Stormy. Her wrath extends to all humans, not just washer and dryer repairpersons. Would you brave Stormy for a brownie? I don't think so. Hmm, new MRFRS diet secret: have Stormy guard all high calorie food. That's it, we'll get a chronic dieter to adopt Stormy. And so, after a full, rich, and happy morning among the feline body fluids, I developed a caffeine-withdrawal headache. Fowle's provided relief and for once the coffee didn't get cold in the time it took to carry it to the car. We must be having the January thaw. Definitely a January thaw. Never have I seen so many birders on the refuge on a Wednesday afternoon in winter without some rarity's having been reported. I guess everybody just felt sprung from the confinement of their cabins after the cold spell. Whatever livened up the birders apparently also livened up the robins. I'd been thinking it strange that the huge crop of winter berries had only attracted a very small flock of robins instead of the huge roosts I usually see at this time of year. Today robins were out in force. I counted at least 10 just in one spot near the Hellcat boardwalk bathing in a puddle. More were flitting around in the trees but they were moving around too much for an accurate count. Yellow rumped warblers and black capped chickadees were all over the place in the underbrush near the same spot. I only counted the ones I could actually get a good look at but there were many many more rustling around just out of clear lines of sight.
I walked along the beach at the water line which was marked by a thin line of crab parts stretching for about a mile of beach. Legs, carapaces, tiny claws... all empty and all meat evidently consumed by gulls. The line of crab parts was punctuated with gull tracks and sometimes a moon snail shell. Five horned larks browsed along the beach at the wrack line. They were surprisingly oblivious to me. I was practically right on top of them before I saw them and I was able to recognize them without binoculars. They didn't fly up when I passed them either. They must have been finding something really good among the wrack. Several birders were scoping the rocks from the platform, which does afford a better vantage point if you have a scope. I told them about the horned larks but they'd missed them. They pointed out a youngish harbor seal basking on a rock, which I hadn't been able to see from my vantage point down on the beach (or on the rocks, which I did climb a little bit) as bigger rocks were in my way. Another scope person showed up and told us he's just had a snowy owl at Salisbury Beach. A sound from some kind of sparrow just off the board walk distracted me from the conversation as I tried to find it in the bushes. One of the scope people joined me and we tried to spish it up (that involves making a little "spishing" noise to get it to answer) without success. She said she thought it was a song sparrow but I'm not good enough on birding by ear to be sure of that and I neither of us ever did see the bird. As I was walking along the boardwalk still sort of looking for the sparrow on the way back to my car, I encountered the gregarious Charlie of Lynnfield, a loyal reader of these pages. He asked me a lot about China because he had been there in the 1980s when people were still wearing those blue suits etc. I told him about the high rises springing up in Beijing and all sorts of modern stuff that makes it almost just like any other major world city (I did say almost.) We chatted for awhile and then I realized that far from having to kill time between washing litter boxes and going to look at a potential new shelter building, I had just enough time to get over to Amesbury to meet the building committee at the property. Time flies when the birds and the birders are out. I ended up being a little early and waiting for the committee to gather and the Realtor to show up. We toured the building, which had narrow hallways and (I thought) too many stairs. When we were done I realized it was still light out, sort of, and I could potentially still check out the snowy owl at Salisbury Beach. The owl was nowhere to be found but the setting sun over the salt marsh and the Merrimack River was stunning. A flock of dark-eyed juncos hopped around on the snow while I watched the sun go down. I got a couple of good sunset photos and headed home to work on updating this year's Plum Island Bird List for loyal readers who have been wondering if I've been birding the island this year or not. And now we return to 19th century Amesbury where John Greenleaf Whittier is engaged in correspondence with Senator Charles Sumner... |
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Copyright © 2001, Janet I. Egan |
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Maggie
is a long-haired former feral girl. She likes being petted
but is a little timid. She gives affection on her own terms.
Maggie must be an indoor cat and would prefer a home without
small children. Adopt her.
A
raft of eiders drifted off Emerson Rocks with a few scoters
among them. I lost count of the eiders at about 120 and
couldn't identify the scoters because every time I'd get the
binoculars on them they'd dive. A youngish couple from
Western Massachusetts set up their scope on the rocks
determined to find a king eider in among the commons.