Journal of a Sabbatical

April 19, 2001

the first nice day (with no snipe)

Plover Warden South
11:30 AM - 3:30 PM

Today's Bird Sightings:
Plum Island
white-winged scoter (10)
common eider (1000)
herring gull (30)
great black-backed gull (6)
American crow (4)
double-crested cormorant (10)
brant (18)
northern gannet (6)
ring-billed gull (1)
sanderling (22)
common loon (1)
red-breasted merganser (2)
common goldeneye (7)
great egret (9)
snowy egret (1)
tricolored heron (1)
American bittern (heard twice but not seen)

Coast Guard Assets:
helicopter (1)
boat - medium sized (1)

Visitors Contacted: 18

Today's Reading: Claws and Effect by Rita Mae Brown, Budapest 1900 by John Lukacs

Today's Starting Pitcher:
Pedro Martinez

Finally a nice day! It's the first nice day in a long time and this is April school vacation week so I figured it would be a busy plover warden shift. It was.

The guy I relieved said he'd seen three piping plovers but I didn't see or hear a single one. That's about my usual luck. It's sometimes June before I actually see one of my little charges. He also encountered a visitor trying to walk off with someone else's lobster trap (illegal and just not done) to make into a table. Law enforcement was handling that in the south parking lot when I arrived.

All sorts of other bird life was active though. Gulls squabbling, brant flying back and forth, scoters loafing, gannets diving, gulls harassing an immature bald eagle, crows foraging in the wrack, a long string of eiders barreling straight north at warp speed, sanderlings doing aerobatic displays, even some Coast Guard assets doing a training exercise... everything but piping plovers, and oh yeah, still no snipe.

Two groups of northern gannets, a pair off Emerson Rocks and a foursome off Crane's Beach, put on a lively show of circling and diving. I was hoping to see gannets today and got a big kick out of watching them.

Hordes of visitors of the birding persuasion told me they had seen a single common snipe rocking in the grass next to the road at various locations. I didn't see any such snipe on my way to my post at the south end of the beach. For days, nay, a week or more, people have been reporting snipe and I have failed to find one. One visitor suggested there is only one snipe, a volunteer, who goes from place to place to be seen by serious birders. From what folks described, though, one didn't have to be a serious birder to notice this snipe. All you had to be was not blind, which, since I drove my vehicle down the road myself is to be assumed. Will I see a snipe on the refuge this year? Watch these pages.

The most dramatic event of the day was a major gull fight. A great black-back had a crab in its beak. Three herring gulls and a second great black-back went after it with a vengeance calling at the top of their lungs, pecking at each other, pulling at the crab until they dismembered it. All the gulls managed to get a piece of the crab, including the one the rest of them grabbed it from. These birds were violent. I thought the great black-back was going to become lunch for the herring gulls they were beating on him so badly.

Herring gulls were definitely on the offensive today. I heard a gull commotion to the north (between lot 7 and lot 6) and trained the binoculars in the direction of it. The dustup was taking place just at the limit of the range of my binoculars so I could see the action but not id the victim with absolute certainty, but it was a large raptor type bird about the size of a bald eagle, but not in adult plumage yet. The perpetrators were a bunch of herring gulls. Now I've seen crows harass bald eagles and red-tailed hawks, and mockingbirds harass northern shrikes, but I have never seen gulls mob anything, let alone a bald eagle. It was quite dramatic.

Later on, a guy arrived on the beach with a scope and asked me what good birds were around. I told him about the gannets but by that time they were out of range. He told me he'd been up near the Pines Trail and had seen an immature bald eagle being harassed by herring gulls. He'd gotten a much better look at the victim and his account matched what I'd seen, so I probably had the scenario right. He said that when gulls lost interest, the bald eagle had flown over to the osprey nesting platform and incurred the wrath of an osprey who went after it. That eagle is definitely having a bad day.

There were a lot of lobster traps washed up on the beach, some quite well buried in the sand. Most were the modern metal kind, but a few were the old fashioned wooden ones - along with plenty of yellow plastic rope. What did lobstermen do before yellow plastic rope? So much more practical than good old hempen rope or cotton or whatever. I think the morning shift guy's clue that the visitor was taking a trap that didn't belong to him was that he didn't take the two others that were tangled up with it. Umm, if they're your traps, wouldn't you want all of them?

I got in a lot of exercise walking back and forth to the ever receding water line to intercept people who either just walked into the closed area or were about to walk into the closed area. Altogether I talked with 18 people, three of whom were actually in the closed area when I managed to get their attention. Some people asked good questions about the piping plover life cycle so I got to talk about my favorite subject with start of the season enthusiasm.

It was such a nice day that I couldn't bear to leave when my shift was over so I returned the radio and stuff to the gatehouse and went off in search of snipe. No snipe were in evidence anywhere I looked, but I did see a whole lot of great egrets and one snowy egret at Hellcat and a tricolored heron at the Pines. I heard a bittern making that pumping sound two different times at Hellcat but could not locate it. I kept watching for a stalk of grass to move in the general vicinity of the sound because bitterns do a great imitation of grass, but I had no luck. Bitterns are amazingly loud for a bird that's so hard to locate.

I really would have stayed for every last minute of daylight, except for not having eaten since 10:30 this morning, and needing to be in Cambridge by 7:30 so I finally convinced myself that the first nice day this season is not the last nice day there's ever going to be.