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Journal of a Sabbatical |
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April 11, 2001 |
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fibber mcgee and no snipe |
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Adopt these cats at Merrimack River Feline Rescue Society Check us out at petfinder.com too. Today's
Bird Sightings: National
Poetry Month Link(s) of the Day: Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey by Hayden Carruth Today's Reading: A Visit to India, China, and Japan in the Year 1853 by Bayard Taylor Today's Starting Pitcher: Frank Castillo Plum Island Bird List |
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We have a new mystery not so easily solved. McGee is a new cat who came in as a stray very matted and just generally looking like he'd been on the streets for a good long time. He ain't feral though. He LOVES people. And he has a tattoo in his ear. It starts with a C so we thought he might be one of ours who was tattooed by Coastal Animal Clinic downstairs, but Dawna looked at it and declared it was not Coastal's and it was fairly new and really scabby. How weird. Where did this cat get his tattoo? I f he belongs to someone, why aren't they looking for him?
Sandy got a high dosage of donuts today as Roy brought him part of a plain donut and then Kendra went out for donuts so he got to have pieces of cruller too. He loves crullers. Savannah is into donuts too. And now Re-Re has taken to donut eating. I had taken off my flannel shirt and left it on the cat gym on top of Roy's jacket. When I went to put it back on after I finished the dishes it was littered with donut crumbs. I'm sure a Krispy Kreme franchise would do well in Salisbury with all these donut loving cats to feed. Roy is driving the community litter
boxes across the floor like toy cars again but this time he
has a unique noise for each of them instead of the generic
vroom vroom noise. The big blue one sounds like it needs a
valve job. The cats love having Roy down at their level!
We're off land attack destroyers and naval disasters today and onto the whole governor's mansion thing. Should we or shouldn't we have a governor's mansion now that we have a governor with a 133 mile commute? Roy's position is that Gov. Swift should be governor of New York because she lives closer to Albany. I think he's exaggerating - is Williamstown that close to Albany? People are going in and out of doors like one of those French bedroom farces. The office is way too small. Just thought I'd mention that. I usurped somebody's chair to sit down for a few minutes while I wait for Cindy with whom I have a lunch meeting. This seems like an extraordinarily long day. So, despite a headache and feeling like I've already had a full day, I got enough of a second wind to go look for birds, particularly snipe. Lots of people have been reporting common snipe lately and I have never seen one on Plum Island so want to add it to the Plum Island list. I never did see any snipe but got to watch killdeers in the heat of passion, an amazing phoebe phenomenon, and a flock of ring-necked ducks. Killdeer are very loud birds to begin with. Their cry is piercing in the extreme. I spotted two of them in the field near the North Pool Overlook and duly wrote them in my notebook. Then their cries got much louder, faster, and more compressed. I whipped the binoculars back up and watched the slightly larger one mount the other one. Man were they ever loud! They played leapfrog (leap killdeer?) and mounted and then flew over to the dike and made scrapes in the gravel, which the smaller one, presumably the female, would sit in and then abandon. I didn't count how many nest sites they tested. They're a kind of plover so I was interested to see that this test scrape business that piping plovers do is also a killdeer thing. What makes one scrape in the ground better than another one? How do they choose? A little way further south I began to encounter the phoebe phenomenon. First one phoebe in a tree, then one on a fence, then phoebes all over the place flitting back and forth, perching in plain sight. I had to stop counting them because I couldn't be sure if I was counting the same individuals over again they moved around so much. There sure were a lot of them. Usually I hear phoebes here but don't see them. Today they're in plain view all over the place, but redwinged blackbirds are being heard and not seen. I heard deafening numbers of redwings but could only see four of them. Sort of the inverse of the phoebe phenomenon. I never did see any snipe though I looked in all the likely places. |
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Copyright © 2001, Janet I. Egan |
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Mysteries,
histories, oh, can't think of anything else that rhymes...
By means of an extreme faux pas last night, I got part of
the answer to the mystery that has been plaguing the minds
of cat shelter volunteers with nothing better to think
about: Who is the oldest volunteer? We'd reduced it down to:
Who is older Roy or Marcia? So last night when a couple of
committee members expressed sympathy about my turning 50 and
becoming older than dirt, Marcia said: "You'll get no
sympathy from me..." I blurted out the burning question
(Marcia or Roy) to which Marcia blurted out her age. So this
morning I relayed this info to Roy who announced his age at
his upcoming birthday (next Monday). Turns out he's 5 years
older than Marcia! Mystery solved.
The
other new cats today are Chelsea and Tisha who are both
young and cute. I'll bet they're not here long. I had to get
Kendra to hold Chelsea for her portrait because she kept
trying to play with the camera. It would have been
interesting to get an extreme close-up of her paw, but
somehow I don't think posting that on the web site would
attract an adopter for her.